Fintech
Prashant Fuloria Explains Why Fundbox Has Been Successful in 2020
September 28, 2020
When Prashant Fuloria joined Fundbox as Chief Operations Officer in 2016, the San Franciscan firm was a three-year-old startup with less than eighty employees. By the time Fuloria moved into the office of CEO this July, the small business credit and invoice financing company had grown exponentially, with more than $430 million in raised capital to date and triple the number of employees.
At the height of the pandemic, many firms halted funding or shuttered their doors for good. Meanwhile Fundbox kept lending, and outperformed the market, Fuloria said.
“It’s become very clear to us that we have greatly outperformed the market,” Fuloria said. “In terms of delivering value to customers, and also in terms of our business performance.”
In the toughest weeks of the pandemic, he said that Fundbox’s loan delinquency rose to 8-9%, up from a “low single-digit number” pre-pandemic. In comparison, the industry standard according to Fuloria, was a delinquency rate of 30-40%, including from larger firms and more traditional lenders like big banks.
“I think we’ve performed extremely well during COVID; the numbers just validate the investment we’ve made, especially in data,” Fuloria said. “That puts us in a very good position because a number of folks have exited the market and the need, the demand has not gone away.”
The number one thing you can do to perform well in a recession is to have a strong business going into it, Fuloria explained. Fundbox attributes part of its strength to its data. Nearly a fourth of Fundbox’s capital goes toward data assets, Fuloria said.
“If you add it all up, we’ve invested a little over $100 million in our data asset,” Fuloria said. “It’s a big investment for anybody- particularly a big investment for a mid-sized company.”
Fuloria said this money goes toward collecting customer information, which is processed by in-house tech and a talented team of engineers who can turn data into valuable information for serving SMBs.
“Small businesses,” Fuloria said, “they have the complexity of enterprises but the scale of consumers.”
Coming from twenty years of tech and product managerial experience at firms like Google, Facebook, and Yahoo, Fuloria knows a thing or two about scale. He said he found his roots at Google, working when it was just a small team- by the time he left six and a half years later, Google had 35,000 employees.
When it came to joining Fundbox in 2016, Fuloria said he was attracted by the company’s mission, the talented team there, and how in just three years, the small firm had demonstrated how it could help SMBs.
“Fundbox as a company said ‘We are a financial services platform that is powering the small business economy with new credit and payment solutions,'” Fuloria said. “And that mission was very strong: it made sense to me, and it resonated with me.”
Nav CEO Talks About Platform Enhancements
September 28, 2020
“Our news is really about improving and enhancing our platform to use real-time business data to uncover and align qualifications for small business owners to the best financing options available to them,” said Nav CEO Greg Ott about a recent announcement.
Nav is a small business information service that connects borrowers to lenders across the entire finance industry, from SBA loans, major credit cards, to nonbank lenders, and more. This new enhancement streamlines the finance process for both sides of the transaction, Ott explained.
“Historically, the model is inverted disproportionately against the small business owner, in that they can’t see what they’re qualified for until after they apply,” Ott said. “By using real-time business analysis and dynamic financing profiles, Nav is the only place that can show them what they can qualify for before they apply.”
Nav is also adding a new service team that connects to small businesses through the digital platform, offering a more personalized experience; someone will be on the line to help borrowers find their way. The platform uses cash flow, revenue, credit, and behavioral data to match SMBs with loan offers.
Nav is expanding its service because Ott said this year, many businesses could not find financing at all. Nav began helping customers find lenders for PPP loans, facilitating 70k applications in all and built an online community of 18k businesses going through the process this year alone.
Ott said it became clear during the rounds of PPP and government stimulus that banks gave preferential treatment to some of their customers and left out small businesses.
“Many banking options aren’t available to the vast majority of small businesses,” Ott said. “The traditional financial system is not always available or not the best option for a small business owner. Small business owners know this in spades, It’s just now that in the growth of this fintech ecosystem that it’s becoming clear how big that addressable market is.”
As Fintech Accelerates in Canada, Smarter Loans Expands
September 22, 2020
Smarter Loans, a Canadian loan comparison site, announced they are expanding their services to new categories- including “Everyday Banking, Insurance, Investing Money Transfers, and Debt relief.”
The additions are part of the Smarter Loans’ mission to become the go-to place for Canada’s online financial options. Founders Vlad Sherbatov and Rafael Rositsan founded the company to bring together information on the top financial companies all in one place. They started with information on personal and business financing but have expanded to auto loans, mortgages, equipment financing, and information on all kinds of financial products.
“We wanted to bring additional financial services and products that people can now access online,” Vlad Sherbatov, the president said. “And to do that, we partnered with some of the leading companies that offer these financial services.”
The addition is the latest resource for their 40,000 monthly user base, who access a database of top banks, credit unions, and innovative fintech leaders. Rafael Rositsan, the CEO, said as a trusted industry voice, the firm is adding this new info to update consumers on new opportunities firms provide.
“There’s a rise of companies that are now offering innovative products online,” Rositsan said. “Canadians might not be aware of some of the services that are out there.”
Sherbatov said that Canadians have been gravitating toward conducting business on the go at an accelerated rate this year. The firm listened to the customer base and learned they’re not going online for just financing.
“Entrepreneurs are running their businesses online,” Sherbatov said. “People that used to just shop for household items online are now looking for ways to handle investments and everyday financial errands because the old way of doing things is not available.”
He said that many areas of the financial space have evolved. Customers can obtain life insurance, get a line of credit, and a bank account funded in less than 24 hours, all from the comfort of their home.
“This move is to both bring more services relevant to our existing user base that use Smarter Loans,” Sherbatov said. “But also for all Canadians that are looking for these types of products. We want Smarter Loans to be the go-to place for them to learn about [these offerings], and to learn about the companies behind these products.”
Stavvy Co-Founder Kosta Ligris on Navigating Real Estate Loans in a Contact-less world
September 18, 2020
How does real estate loan signing work in a contactless world? One company offers a solution.
Stavvy, a platform that empowers businesses and lenders to close real estate loans digitally, has seen a dramatic change in their business landscape since the launch of their E-signing platform in March.
“Over the course of literally a couple of weeks, [states] realized that they had to empower people to be able to do business as usual, despite what was going on,” Co-Founder Kosta Ligris said. “We were able to put all the necessary tools in one platform to empower these title companies, law firms, notaries to have identity solutions when we went live in March.”
Right when the platform came live, contactless signing became a necessity. Kosta Ligris, a co-founder of Stavvy, said his team worked hard to include emergency digital notarization options in states that had not allowed it yet before. The market went from about 20 states with legalized digital signing to 48 that had legalized or created a temporary law.
Stavvy also reached out to engineers and employees who were losing their jobs during the first wave and picked up new hires while many firms were downsizing.
“The pandemic is a once in a lifecycle opportunity,” Kosta said. “I hope that we don’t see anything that resembles COVID again. But this opportunity has given us the chance to get in front of people that we otherwise would not have been able to hire.”
Unlike competitors, Stavvy does not get involved in signing or notarizing themselves, but instead offer a digital platform for both lenders, signers, and state compliance checking. The platform is somewhat like the Uber app Ligris said- they don’t bring a car to you, but they give you a digital way to connect to people who can pick you up.
In many states, especially in New York and New Jersey, complete digital signing is still not allowed. Instead, Stavvy encrypts film of the “wet signing” -ink pen on a document- and sends the encrypted data and other identification guarantees in a live “Zoom-like experience” to the county registry.
Ligris said Stavvy is very passionate about empowering both lenders and signers. As an MIT entrepreneurship resident who looks at student companies and ideas every year, he knows about barriers to entry. He said one such barrier to digitalized innovation is a simple fear of change.
“Change in and of itself is always frustrating and scary, but it doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s bad,” Ligris said. “In so many industries where people regard technology, they look at it as this is the next thing that’s going to take my job away from me.”
That’s the concept Stavvy is fighting- that digital innovation is not automating away livelihood, but further connecting people. Ligris said that the one thing technology could not replace: broker buyer relationships.
“When it comes down to making one of the largest financial decisions of their life, they want a trusted professional,” Ligris said. “If we’re going to provide the technology, we want to empower the stakeholders that know best to be more efficient and better at what they do.”
Upstart Welcomes Policy Head Nat Hoopes
September 15, 2020
Upstart, an AI lending platform, welcomed longtime industry advocate Nat Hoopes to the team this week, to lead as Head of Government Policy and Regulatory affairs. Hoopes previously served as the Marketplace Lending Association executive director (MLA), where he grew the trade group and advocated on behalf of its members.
“My hope is to bring the energy that I did in growing the organization [MLA] and also just in tackling a lot of different workstreams to Upstart,” Hoopes said. “But also, deepen their ties with the DC policy community.”
Hoopes is excited to join the Upstart team and advocate for the company to state and federal legislators. Hoopes intends to address the development of two main issues as he enters his new office: facilitating better credit reporting with the help of AI, and using better credit to bring financing options to disenfranchised minority communities.
Upstart uses non-traditional data like a college education, job history, and residency to evaluate borrowers for personal loans. The company recently introduced an AI-powered Credit Decision API to deliver instant credit decisions. Upstart added auto loans to the platform in June, so the new API works with personal, student, and auto loans.
Hoopes said he and Upstart shared a similar motivation: to provide credit to people and improve financial futures, especially to people unfairly blocked from receiving credit.
“I think because of the structural inequality that we have in our society, a lot of minority groups get really left behind and stuck in a low credit score environment,” Hoopes said. “By using more data, and using it in new ways with artificial intelligence we can really level the playing field.”
Hoopes said that he has already seen Federal regulators in the FDIC and the OCC, and the CFPB working on using AI learning in credit underwriting. He said the Fed is planning out how to help banks adopt more of these models to approve more people.
“I think that’s a key initiative,” Hoopes said. “A key area where I’ll be working for Upstart: Engaging with regulators on how to help banks get more comfortable in serving more customers,”
While advocating for banks to use the credit capabilities of partners like Upstart, Hoopes said he would be devoted to ensuring decisions are made with equality and inclusion in mind. Hoopes will stay on as a member of the MLA board, and working in concert with his responsibilities advocating at Upstart.
“At MLA, I helped develop the diversity and inclusion strategies for our part of the fintech industry,” Hoopes said. “I’ll remain active on those issues at Upstart both collectively with other members of the industry as a member of the MLA.”
Hoopes referred to the Diversity and Inclusion strategy released by MLA last month. Board members signed off on the paper, written with the help of the National Urban Leauge. League president and CEO Marc Morial and Representative Gregory Meeks (D-NY) to create a vision of an inclusive fintech industry.
Hoopes addressed what he said was the failure of the American credit scoring system. For instance, according to Upstart’s study in 2019, 80% of Americans have never defaulted, yet only half have a prime credit score. It’s a problem he says disproportionately affects minority borrowers.
According to a Federal Reserve study, more than three times as many Black consumers (53%) and nearly two times as many Hispanic consumers (30%) as White consumers (16%) are in the lowest percentiles of credit scores.
Hoopes said Upstart does not collect racial data from applicants but cites a CFPB test that found Upstart’s platform increased access to credit across race and ethnicity by 23-29% while decreasing annual interest rates by 15%-17%.
University of Delaware, Other Universities Going Long on Fintech
September 15, 2020The University of Delaware recently received a $9 million tax incentive to construct a new Fintech Center on its premier Science, Technology, and Advanced Research (STAR) campus, with help from a community-building company Cinnaire. Slated for completion in 2021, the building marks yet another fintech-focused resource for higher education.
Financial technology programs have long been offered at prominent business schools such as Harvard, Stanford, and Columbia, international schools such as Oxford, and research institutions like MIT since the late 2000s.
Now that fintech has become a long term value creator in the financial world, other institutions such as the University of Michigan, Fordham, and Delaware are excited to implement fintech opportunities on campus for undergraduate and graduate students alike.
Discover Bank and Cinnaire jointly funded the building, a $39 million project. According to Delaware plans, it will create a space on the Delaware STAR campus to host a new Financial Services Incubator to encourage research and collaboration between students and industry leaders.
“The FinTech building will bring together computer science, engineering and business experts in cybersecurity, human-machine learning, data analysis, and other emerging financial technologies,” said Levi Thompson, Dean of the College of Engineering. “These collaborations will allow us to provide our students with a very unique experience that prepares them to excel in the workforce. Furthermore, our Fintech discoveries will benefit people throughout Delaware and the world.”
Cinnaire is a national nonprofit that focuses on improving communities’ financial health by creating capital solutions to revitalization projects: lending funds, managing, and building housing structures.
Funding communities is what Cinnaire does best: in this case, utilizing a New Markets Tax Credit to fund an addition to the Delaware campus.
The nearby University of Fordham at Lincoln Center has also been trending toward preparing students for a fintech world. Undergrad and graduate students pursuing an MBA through the Gabelli School have the option of a fintech concentration.
The course work not only incorporates data science and machine learning skills into the worlds of credit lending and risk management but facilitates relationships between students and a wealth of industry partners.
Sudip Gupta, professor, and Director of the MS Quantitative Finance program, spoke about the courses’ popularity there. The program is ranked in the top 20 of its kind in the world by Risk Magazine.
He has seen a revolution in fintech in the past few years that has recently received a big push by pandemic forces, introducing the wholesale adoption of fintech techniques into traditional financial institutions.
“The fintech revolution in the industry- big data, machine learning techniques, storage capacity, and cloud computing has been going on for the last couple of years,” Gupta said. “The pandemic provided the big push to move toward that direction.”
Gupta has been following the development of alternative credit closely, recently publishing an award-winning paper studying machine learning to create alternative consumer credit scores using mobile phone and social media data.
“The idea of my research- let’s look at people who do not have a credit history or enough traditional credit you could get from a FICO score,” Gupta said. “Using this data, it turns out they are better predictors, and better to judge than FICO, and can reach out to more people.”
Gupta is excited for the adoption of big data techniques into alternative and traditional consumer loans because it offers a win-win for consumers and institutions alike, he said. Echoing the findings of many successful alternative finance companies, Gupta said his research showed that collected data could offer better insight for lending than “stale FICO scores.”
Up north at the Univerisity of Michigan, Professor Robert Dittmar at the Ross School of Business heads the Fintech Initiative. He is working on adding even more fintech classes. Recently, through a partnership with PEAK, a Chicago fintech lending company, Michigan launched a fintech initiative that incorporates undergrad and grad classes, faculty research, and a fintech entrepreneurial club that connects students to industry leaders.
Michigan Ross is adding fintech classes for a variety of reasons.
“The simplest reason: students are interested in learning more about this kind of space,” Dittmar said. “And we’re seeing more demand from the industry side for students that know more.”
For years Dittmar said tech companies and startups in silicon valley were pioneering innovations in the industry. Through talking with alumni and contacts in the industry, Michigan found that fintech has gotten to the place where there is an excellent supply of data engineers. Still, there is a demand for professionals with the financial business expertise to implement these technologies.
“What we are trying to do at Ross is fill in that gap,” Dittmar said. “what we’d like is for [students] to know enough about the technology that they can provide the insights of finance and business to the people that are doing that technical work.”
At Ross, they are organizing what will one day be like a fellowship program. The program will feature a combined learning experience: students will learn data analytic finance, apply their computing skills in credit decision making classes, and then connect with the industry in experiential learning classes.
“In the last couple of years, I have been taking students to London to work at fintech startups in the UK,” Dittmar said. “And we are hoping to expand that program so that most or all graduate students have the opportunity to participate in something like that.”
Last year Ross hosted a “Fintech Challenge” competition to design a banking service to reach customers in a “banking desert” in rural Michigan. The program is hoping to host another challenge this year, despite complications of COVID-19.
What is ‘Lending as a Service?’
September 3, 2020I‘ve heard of SaaS, but now there’s LaaS, Lending as a Service. I recently spoke with Timothy Li, CEO of Alchemy, a fintech infrastructure company that offers that and more. You can check it out below!
Ocrolus Named #1 Fastest Growing Fintech By Inc.
September 1, 2020
Ocrolus, a document analytics company, was recently named Inc.’s #1 fastest growing fintech company in the US and #1 fastest growing software company in NYC. The rating is based on percentage revenue growth between 2016 and 2019. Ocrolus placed as the #30 fastest-growing private company in America overall.
Ocrolus was founded in 2014 and has grown by 8,000% to become an industry-leading document scanning platform. Automating document applications for partners like BlueVine, Cross River, and Square, Ocrolus recently facilitated 761,455 small business applications for PPP loans.
So what sets Ocrolus apart? CEO and Co-Founder Sam Bobley credits the growth factor on just how fast and accurate the Ocrous API is.
“Lenders who were not using Ocrolus were not able to get to underwriting decisions as fast as lenders that were using Ocrolus- we saw a domino effect,” Bobley said. “Once we got a few big consumers on the platform, we were able to quickly onboard more and more funders and help them increase speed in their underwriting process.”
Bobley also said that while competitor document applications struggle with the accuracy at which they can read documents, landing somewhere in the 70-85% accuracy area, Ocrolus boasts more than 99% accuracy.
Success snowballed, and Ocrolus was helping grow businesses. The API directly addresses many financial institutions’ problems with scale- typically, more applications require more manpower to sift through paperwork.
“Typically, when a customer starts using our platform, within one year of using our platform, they double their volume, and within two years they quadruple,” Bobley said. “One of the reasons for that is they no longer have to staff up and deal with the operational complexities of handling the fluctuating volume of loans.”
With Ocrolus plugged in, customers were free from a major operating cost, and could go all out taking on new clients- which would mean more paperwork to process with Ocrolus.
Today, the company employs more than 900 team members across four offices but was founded in New York City. And like Seinfeld, Bobley loves the city, especially as a thriving hub for fintech activity.
“There’s no better place to do it than in the heart of the financial center of the US here in New York City,” Bobley said. “We’re right near where a lot of our lender customers are operating.”
On the news of recent acquisitions and reports that companies like PayPal and Intuit are ramping up their involvement in small business lending, Bobley said he sees larger entities in fintech as an opportunity for pricing transparency and better access to capital.
“I think the headline here is that financial services firms are recognizing that there’s a significant amount of businesses that used to be underserved,” Bobley said. “The bigger players are raising their eyebrows and want to get more involved, which in my opinion will be ultimately good for small business.”
And when it came time for Ocrolus to do its part for small business, Bobley said that more than 430,000 PPP applications of the 761,455 that were made using their partner network got approved, saving an estimated 1.5 million jobs.
“It’s always great when you know you can connect your work to a greater purpose for the community, so it’s really just a cool rewarding experience,” Bobley said. “It’s been fantastic, but we think we’re still in the early innings in terms of what we can do as a company- not just in small business lending but also in consumer mortgage and auto.”
