During this week’s roundtable, our guest was Fred Guelen, CFO and President of North America for Planon Group. Fred and his brother have built Planon to over $100M in revenue from the Netherlands. It was a very encouraging discussion for our global entrepreneurs. Survaider As for the pitches, first up, Madhulika Mukherjee from Bangalore, India,
Sramana Mitra: One thing that I find curious is that you have 85 customers and they are all online lenders. How many online lenders are there right now? Snehal Fulzele: We are a global company. Half of our customers are in the US. It started in the UK and US, and we are seeing a
Sramana Mitra: The value proposition is still password management? Jonathan Cogley: It’s a password vault but it’s really to prevent external or insider threats. Sramana Mitra: Talk to me about what is the competitive landscape. This is a crowded space. What is the competitive landscape that you see around your product? Jonathan Cogley: The space
Sramana Mitra: How did the revenue move from a million dollars in ’87. Where are you now? Paula Tompkins: We have been through three major downturns. The first in the 1990’s where we had to reinvent ourselves. Then there was the 2001 dot-com collapse where one of my major clients came to me and said,
Snehal Fulzele: Let’s take a use case. Many of our customers are online lenders or online fintech lenders. If I were to give you a simplified use case, we have a bunch of customers who do online small business lending. As a small business owner, you go to a website perhaps on a mobile phone
Sramana Mitra: What was that product that was the beginning of your transition from services to a product company? Jonathan Cogley: The product’s name is called Secret Server. The simplest way to think about it is, if you think as an individual, all the passwords that you have are so many. They’re difficult to manage.
Sramana Mitra: When you moved to create this platform, what year was it and what was the competitive landscape into which you were coming with this platform? Paula Tompkins: It was non-existent at that point. Sramana Mitra: What year was it? Paula Tompkins: 1999. What you really have to understand is, we have always done
You’ve read our coverage of online lending vendors like Kabbage, OnDeck, Lending Club, etc. Here, we cover a story of how ALL online lending vendors (including banks) will soon become much more customer-centric, equipped with technology for fast decision-making and rapid processing of loan applications. Important trends in the industry.