Fintech
Turning Businesses into Funding Warriors
July 27, 2022
The downside to offering any small business a loan to grow is that they might not necessarily know how to do the growing part. And so for years, that’s what a Tempe, AZ headquartered company called Business Warrior had been focused on, helping small businesses grow and become more profitable. If businesses needed funding, Business Warrior could certainly provide that too, but the key was in maximizing the value of that.
It all seemed a swell fit until the company became further intrigued by the value proposition of one of its vendors, Alchemy, an “embedded finance” company headquartered in nearby California. deBanked had interviewed Alchemy CEO Timothy Li via Zoom back in August 2020 and the tech company had only grown since then. After reconnecting in April of this year, Li described Alchemy as the “Salesforce of embedded finance.”
Embedded Finance sounds altogether buzz-wordy, but Business Warrior smelled opportunity. In June, Business Warrior announced that it had acquired Alchemy. Since then, Alchemy’s Li has become a warrior and he is working hard to roll out Business Warrior’s next generation of products.
Among the first on the horizon is an Alchemy specialty, giving small businesses the tools to become lenders themselves. It sounds like Buy-Now-Pay-Later, and to an extent it is, but the difference is that a furniture store, doctor’s office, or repair shop would be the one extending the credit, not a faceless third party on Wall Street hoping to win big.
Li explained the advantage of this by using a doctor’s office as an example. “So the creditors, the banks, don’t understand [the customer] just from reading the credit report, but the doctors understand them, they’re local people, they might have seen this patient before,” said Li. “Now [that patient] wants to do a $10,000 procedure and nobody under the sun will underwrite them.” When this happens, the doctor’s office might try to arrange some type of private financing arrangement, “but they don’t have the software to do it,” Li stated.
Business Warrior’s software solves this. The platform will be free for the business and Business Warrior will process the customer payments, which is where they’ll earn their revenue, on transactions fees.
In one respect it reduces two risks for the business: (a) A third party BNPL lender dictating future approval, supply, and cost of financing, and (b) credit card companies cutting the lines of their customers that they would otherwise normally use to pay for services. The downside, so to speak, is that the business itself is tasked with being its customers’ creditor.
But ultimately, just like BNPL, such a service is likely to lead to a boost in sales, which is what Business Warrior’s mission had always been from the start.
“This tool is a tool for the small business to do more business,” Li said.
The Alchemy name will remain as far as Li knows, because they still have a lot of customers using its original products. Day to day now, Alchemy is also working with Helix House, an online marketing company that Business Warrior also acquired. They’re all leveraging each other’s resources.
Li concluded the interview by sharing a recent real world experience, he himself going to a dental office to get some work done.
“They have every single imaginable technology, schedule appointments, all the tech,” he said. “They don’t have something that manages payments. It’s either a credit card, cash, or it’s nothing.”
Referring to the financing capabilities that Business Warrior can bring to the table in those very circumstances, “I feel like it should have been there already.”
Merchant Loses Whole EIDL After Attempting to Earn High Yield On It
July 25, 2022
It’s a tale of Covid EIDL relief gone wrong. A small business owner in Colorado Springs, CO is begging for his funds back after taking the entire lump sum of his EIDL funds ($525,000) and depositing them with a high-yield non-FDIC insured cryptocurrency tech company. The tech company, Celsius, declared bankruptcy less than two months later, yanking the merchant’s EIDL funds with it. Celsius was not a bank, the arrangement not a true deposit account, and the funds not FDIC-insured.
In a letter submitted by the merchant to the bankruptcy court, he says that he deposited the funds there to “earn an APY to help pay back the 3.9% on the loan…” He further added that he believed his account to be safe because of the site’s Terms of Use.
“The funds in my Celsius Custodial account are not mine, they are the US Governments and I my entire business is secured and backed by these funds,” he wrote. “If they are not returned, my business would go bankrupt, my 15 employees would be let go, and 14 years of my life’s work lost and at the age of 49 years old, I would have to start over with nothing.”
Prior to the bankruptcy, Alex Mashinsky, Celsius’ CEO, oft touted the phrase: “banks are not your friend.”
A Code “Quiltt” for Fintechs
July 18, 2022
It’s called Quillt, a low-code tool that allows companies to integrate with several third-party services to either pull in datasets or act on data.
Quiltt says their tool detracts the need for companies to hire costly engineers to integrate their services one at a time. In doing this it allows for data to be accessed instantly by “abstracting away” the need for any organization to integrate with services one at a time and “right the business logic” required to each individual service into a single integration.
“So, with us, regardless of who’s in your data stack, we can essentially have a backend that processes all that information so you can focus on whatever your core focus is at the end of the day, as opposed to repetitive data, plumbing, and infrastructure,” said Mark Bechhofer, Cofounder & COO.
The low code aspect of it is modules with just a couple lines of code that anyone can paste into their application and embed a frontend experience. Startup companies that are looking to build in fintech with small teams and little funding could also seek assistance through Quiltt, according to Bechhofer. It could even be a bank or a credit union that wants to focus on their core competency and not worry about adding commoditized feature sets that their competitors already have.
“We are issuing cards and processing transactions, we are really doing the data intelligence around money,” said Bechhofer.
Before Covid, Bechhofer and business partner Ruben Izmailyan were selling a white label suite of DFM apps to banks and credit unions. The two business partners were often asked how they had built this backend infrastructure to take in data from “disparate sources” and combine it, analyze it, standardize it and make sense of it.
“We realized that was actually a much larger market with potentially a much larger play. And so we kind of ripped apart our old application into what I call like a Lego box and fintech infrastructure, and pivoted the company into what it is today,” said Bechhofer.
Driven by the mission of bringing financial wellness to as many people as possible, the team at Quiltt is excited about the possibilities ahead.
“We think that providing this new abstraction layer of technology will empower many new types of fintech builders and essentially give license to folks who maybe aren’t full time data scientists or engineers without worrying about hiring expensive teams. We’re really excited about what people might build on our platform that we haven’t even envisioned,” Bechhofer said.
Fintech Lender Signals That Capital Markets Are Worried
July 11, 2022
Concern about the economy is real. Upstart, the publicly traded online consumer lending marketplace, is noticing such a shift that it felt compelled to publish a sneak peek of its Q2 earnings. And it’s not good.
“Inflation and recession fears have driven interest rates up and put banks and capital markets on cautious footing,” said Dave Girouard, co-founder and CEO of Upstart. Girouard followed that by saying that its marketplace is “funding constrained,” a challenge “largely driven by concerns about the macroeconomy among lenders and capital market participants.”
Originations in Q2 were down as a result.
Though the company is still optimistic that its risk models will perform, the economic headwinds come just as it was beginning to roll out its new small business lending product.
In May, Girouard said that their small business loan pricing model would include more than 500 variables about both the applicant and business.
“It will also feature our loan month modeling framework, which is one of the most impactful innovations added to our personal loan product a few years back,” Girouard said. “Our initial testing suggests that version 1 of our SMB model will deliver higher accuracy, as measured by Area Under the Curve, or AUC, than peer models that have been in the market for years.”
Upstart plans to publish its official Q2 earnings on August 8th. The price of its stock is down 93% since its all time high reached last October.
Senior Business Lending Exec of Square Has Moved to Coinbase
May 16, 2022
Ronak Daya, who spearheaded several of Square Capital’s lending divisions, including “head of product for business lending” and “head of product for external lending and partnerships,” announced on twitter that he had moved on from the company. He had been involved in SMB lending for 7 straight years. His new role? Head of Financing Products at Coinbase.
If you thought Coinbase was just about buying Bitcoin, you’re wrong. Daya announced that he’ll be leading a team “to build lending and financing products both for consumers and institutional clients.”
“As I explored what came after Square, my primary focus was on challenging myself to go in a fundamentally new domain/area, and build for a new customer,” Daya wrote. “The priority was learning. Learning by building in domains that I am passionate about, but know little about.”
Convinced that the world is moving towards becoming a crypto-native economy, Daya added that he wants to “play a part in using trust, ease and education to onboard the next billion customers to a new financial system.”
Currently, Coinbase already offers a lending product, loans up to $1 million at 8% APR with monthly payments and no credit check. Though Bitcoin is used as collateral, payments are made by monthly ACH debit or through a linked USD wallet.
Register for The 4th Annual Alternative Finance Bar Association Conference
May 12, 2022
The fourth annual Alternative Finance Bar Association conference is BACK IN PERSON. This is the go-to event for and with the industry’s leading attorneys.
Mark your calendars for June 15th and June 16th in New York City and register by emailing Lindsey Rohan at lindsey@lrohanlaw.com. Registration is subject to approval and space availability.
Two-day program includes the following panels:
The State of the Industry: Industry experts discuss pending legislation, case law and market hurdles. They have both a regulatory panel ready to discuss what’s new in Virginia, Utah, NY and California as well as a Courtroom panel ready to discuss the winning and losing case law that has come out in the past year.
Bankruptcy: The aftermath of Chicago v. Fulton, In re Shoot the Moon and other pivotal bankruptcy cases that shape industry practices.
Ethics: Challenges faced by internal counsel and ways to navigate those pressures.
Collections: Trends in the post-COJ, post-COVID era.
Employment/Labor Law: The rise of labor use outside the U.S. What challenges arise from having call centers outside the U.S. Tax implications, oversight and practical benefits/detriments. Post-COVID remote work implications. What you need to be aware of to avoid creating liabilities.
The Art of Arbitration: The importance of a carefully drafted Arbitration Clause and the pro/cons of this venue.
Thinking Ahead: What technologies and market conditions will shape the future of the industry. Broad discussion of Blockchain technology, CRM systems, cannabis and what we can imagine will shape the future of Alternative finance.
WEDNESDAY KEYNOTE: David Picon, Esq. – It is with great pride that David Picon of Proskauer Rose will be the Keynote speaker. For years the AFBA has admired his work from afar. Attendees now have an opportunity to learn directly from David what makes for an unstoppable litigator.
THURSDAY SPECIAL EVENT: AFBA Game Show Mash-Up with the Industry’s Legendary Attorneys. Special Guests you will not want to miss!
Speakers:
- Andrew Smith, Covington & Burlington LLP
- Brian Simon, Hollis Public Affairs
- Jamie Polon, Mavrides Moyal Packman & Sadkin, LLP
- Patrick Siegfried, Rapid Finance
- Natalie Pappas, Rapid Finance
- Keith Ellis, Expansion Capital Group
- Kate Fisher, Hudson Cook LLP
- Cathy Brennan, Hudson Cook LLP
- Blake Sims, Hudson Cook LLP
- Steve Denis, Small Business Finance Association
- Christopher R. Murray, Murray Legal PLLC
- Mark Stout, Padfield & Stout
- Shanna Kaminski, Kaminski Law Group
- Michael W. Davis, DTO Law
- John Viskocil, Fora Financial
- Gabriel Mendelberg, Mendelberg P.C.
- Anthony F. Giuliano, Giuliano Law P.C.
- Jeffrey S. Cianciulli, Weir Greenblatt Pierce LLP
- David Picon, Proskauer Rose
- Jonathan Nelson, Dedicated Financial GBC
- Lindsey Rohan, BasePoint Capital LLC
- Christina Grigorian, Katten; Zach Miller, Burr & Foreman
- Renata Buhkman, Delta Bridge Funding
- Vanessa Petty, Settle
- Alexis Shapiro, Forward Financing
- Jan Owens, Manatt Phelps
- Scott Pearson, Manatt Phelps
- Jesse Michael Carlson, Kapitus
- Robert Zadek, Buchalter
When:
Day 1 – June 15
9:00am – 4:30pm: Offices of Proskauer Rose (includes light breakfast and lunch)
5:30pm – 7:30pm: Cocktails at Dear Irving
Day 2 – June 16
9:30am – 6:00pm: 15 W. 38th Street, 2nd Fl, Sinatra Room (includes light breakfast and lunch)
4:00pm: Wine & Cheese
Register soon, SPACE IS LIMITED!
deBanked is a sponsor of the event. Industry attorneys are highly encouraged to attend.
Large Fintech Companies Helping to Normalize Revenue Based Financing
May 6, 2022
With business increasing for wide-reaching financial technology companies like Square, Paypal, and Shopify, this has brought more attention to revenue-based financing products like the ones they offer. Henry Abenaim, Founder and CEO of Fundingo, said that it brings more businesses to the table.
“…you sometimes think it’s a small world or small group of merchants, and you really come to realize that it’s huge,” he told deBanked. “And the more they’re serviced, the more they need, the more they grow. So it just feels like there’s just more awareness of the product, and then more merchants that are going to come in demand and ask for it, as well as these bigger players are always going to service only a subset of the businesses.”
At the same time, a greater public awareness of options could tighten margins for certain funding providers. “I think it’s going to make the merchants that are way more bankable… get lower price deals, so it’s going to hurt the margins, it’s going to hurt the profits,” Abenaim commented.
John Bulnes, Vice President of Business Development at Fenix Capital Funding, expressed how it is not yet determined what kind of effect the larger mainstream companies will have on the industry. “I do think it’s something that the larger first position MCA companies may feel the effects of first, because they’re going to be competing more or so with taking away clients from those companies first, as opposed to the companies that are smaller that are doing shorter term deals.”
As these big companies operate with larger capital bases, it may indeed become more difficult for smaller companies to compete.
“… it’s going to be something that’s going to constantly adapt and fluctuate as time goes, but I do see it as an expanding industry… it’s kind of a sign that when you see more commercials and we see these bigger companies jumping into the space, that it is something that’s going to continue to grow,” said Bulnes.
And commercials and ads are definitely increasing. One of the largest online small business lenders in the country was asked about their TV and radio campaigns during their recent quarterly earnings call.
“We’ve definitely been ramping [commercials up] hopefully with a little bit more diligence than OnDeck was running ads three or four years ago,” said David Fisher, CEO of Enova. “But we’ve definitely jump back into kind of broader base advertising in that business and it’s been working really well.”
NovoPayment, Latina-founded BaaS Plans to Expand
April 21, 2022
Novopayment has raised $19 million in Series A financing, led by Fuel Venture Capital and IDC Ventures. The company, which offers digital banking, payment, and card solutions, is planning to grow and expand within current and further US markets while focusing on countries in Latin America and the Caribbean.
CEO and Co-founder Anabel Perez stated, “We define a digital payment as the simple transfer of value from one payment account to another using a digital service such as a mobile device, POS, or computer.”
With the new funding, NovoPayment plans to continue increasing capabilities, introduce new features and functionalities, heighten security, and capitalize on US market opportunities. To accelerate their expansion of current offices in Mexico, Colombia, Peru, Ecuador, and headquarters in Miami, they are adding over 100 new engineers, business development, and product experts to their team. Austin and San Francisco are the first two spots where the branching out will begin.
“Austin and San Francisco are huge hubs for tech innovation and we want to expand there to ensure we attract the best talent for our operations,” Perez discussed. “As we grow in those markets, we’ll assess if we need more boots on the ground in additional states.”
NovoPayment currently holds a strong placement in the LAC region and works with several US clients and partners. This places the company in the right position to broaden in these markets they already have successful track records in.
“Based on our ongoing discussions with clients, we have special insight into the challenges and technology gaps these markets face, and realize the potential to further connect the Americas with a common banking infrastructure. We will be growing our product offerings to enable new data and money flow solutions to account for the increasingly globalized, cloud-based world of financial services,” Perez explained.
As Miami is the “Latin America capital of the US,” NovoPayment holds an advantage as a native of South Florida with the tech scene gravitating towards this region. Miami has served as a gateway to other markets.
“Unlike other companies that are now playing catch up and rushing to the LatAm market, we have a strong foothold and reputation in 14 markets across the Americas,” said Perez. “Establishing those relationships, and understanding the nuances of each market, requires regional expertise that takes time to build.”
