Thought Leaders in Financial Technology: Don Mal, CEO of Vena Solutions (Part 1)

Don Mal discusses the trends in budgeting and forecasting software.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by giving our audience a little bit of context. We have talked to you before, so we’ll just link to the previous interview. People can catch-up from there.

Don Mal: I’m the CEO and Founder of Vena Solutions. We are a SaaS company that serves the office of finance with solutions for financial planning and analysis. These are things like budgeting, planning, forecasting, and reporting. We have been doing this for eight years. It’s still growing very quickly. 

Sramana Mitra: Where are you now revenue-wise?

Don Mal: I can only give you figures in terms of customers. we have over 600 customers and are approaching well over 700 this year, and into a thousand early next year.

Sramana Mitra: Is there a segmentation or category where you’re getting that traction? This is not a market that doesn’t have competition.

Don Mal: That’s right. It’s a competitive marketplace. We are focused more on the mid-market. That mid-market could be anywhere from $25 million up to $1 billion. It’s really that big swath of the mid-market that we serve. I would say that most of our new clients are coming from companies under $500 million in revenue.

Sramana Mitra: What are the trends that you’re seeing in your market?

Don Mal: We’re seeing a trend of usability expectations. Business users and consumers alike are now getting used to having apps on their phones and WiFi everywhere. It’s all about availability and accessibility in a very user-friendly way.

We talk about things like the consumerization of business applications as being a really major trend in the industry. In a user conference held in May this year, we announced lots of features and functionalities that makes it much more easier for users to interact with our B2B offers. That’s a major trend that we’re seeing.

Sramana Mitra: How do you deal with that? I’m hearing this in a lot of places. There are still a lot of very clunky B2B software out there. How are you and your compatriots building business software and dealing with this expectation of user friendliness? People are used to various types of consumer software. How are you catering to that expectation?

Don Mal: The good news is, we’ve always had a design mantra around making our software as easy to use as possible, certainly, much easier than what our competitors have in the market.

As an example, we leverage native Microsoft Excel and Office 365 in our application to allow users to work in a familiar environment while adding features and functionalities that don’t exist within the Microsoft suite. That, just right off, has been our go-to market.

Taking that a step further, we have built more features and functionalities in our own application to make it a much easier and better experience for customers. When you first log into our software to add users, rather than going into a convoluted screen, we have an invite feature where you are inviting people to join the user base.

It’s a much better experience where someone will get a message to be added as part of the user community. That’s a much better experience than having some IT person going to a backend and adding the users. It’s just having access on mobile devices through an app experience versus an enterprise software experience.

This segment is part 1 in the series : Thought Leaders in Financial Technology: Don Mal, CEO of Vena Solutions
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