Thought Leaders in Financial Technology: Levi King, CEO of Nav (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: These hundreds of thousands of customers that you have through the channels, do you directly touch them or do you deliver your software through those channels?

Levi King: We do directly touch them, but they may or may not know that because it can be white-labelled or a co-brand. If it’s a co-brand, they know that it’s us powering the solution. In a white-label scenario, they probably attribute the value to the partner that’s offering it up.

Sramana Mitra: What is your business model?

Levi King: The business model is relatively straightforward. There’s a free version of our product that contains all of the software content value. 90% of our customers are on the free product at any given time. They can upgrade to a premium content, which gives them a much deeper view into certain datasets as well as allows them to check the credit of a few of their customers, suppliers, or their competitors. That’s business model one.

On average, our customers that are on that model pay us $25 a month. They can toggle back to the free version at any time. Then, as we make recommendations about a business loan, we make that referral. If we say, “You’re 97% likely to be approved for this card.” If you accept that, then we get paid by the financial institution.

We try to align our incentives with the customer and the partner. We don’t sell their data. It’s only something that we get paid for if they opt in and they like what they see. Those are the two revenue legs to the business.

Sramana Mitra: From a trend point of view, can you talk a bit about what kinds of small businesses are adopting your solution? Is there correlation between the technology type of businesses? There are lots of online businesses these days. Is that the category of businesses who are mostly using your product or is it more broadly adopted?

Levi King: It’s more broadly adopted. When we look at distribution in the US against industry, time in business, geography, or credit quality, we’re pretty evenly distributed. Because the communication is dynamic, it’s something that appeals to everyone. We see very even distribution, which is exciting for us.

Sramana Mitra: What do you attribute that distribution to? It sounds like that kind of distribution is happening through your channels. Is that a correct observation?

Levi King: Yes, it’s even across all our distribution channels. That’s exciting for us because it means that there’s very broad application.

Sramana Mitra: What are the trends of this industry?

Levi King: The trends right now mirror what we saw in the consumer space 10 years ago. Ten years ago, less than half of the population knew what their personal score was. Thanks to companies like Credit Karma, now everybody knows. Lots of them are watching that score for free.

We’re still in the early years of the same trend in small business. Small business owners are becoming increasingly aware that they have business credit, but there’re other financial datasets that matter just as much as the business credit. Regardless whether they’re tech savvy or not, they’re going online to find answers.

Because we have a high-quality content machine, we typically win most of the organic traffic. There’s a trend towards small business owners craving answers and wanting some transparency around these datasets that are used for or against them based on what the dataset contains.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Thought Leaders in Financial Technology: Levi King, CEO of Nav
1 2 3