Aiming to Disrupt Consumer Credit: Al Goldstein, CEO of AvantCredit (Part 5)

Al Goldstein: We just focused on the things that are most critical to the business. In our case, it was building out the regulatory infrastructure from day one, and building data reporting and analytics infrastructure. There was demand because there are a lot of customers looking for lending products. As we’ve grown our business, we continue to refine. We continue to make sure that we operate within our various constraints including capital constraints. As an example on the regulatory side alone, we have 20 full-time people who are focused on regulatory compliance. That’s just massive for a business that is less than two years old.

Sramana Mitra: Between starting the service to when you got your first institutional lending partner, what was the time window? >>>

Aiming to Disrupt Consumer Credit: Al Goldstein, CEO of AvantCredit (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: When you went to market, what about the institutional partner side? Did you go to market with a set of institutional partners pre-negotiated?

Al Goldstein: No, we didn’t. In these marketplaces, you have to match both sides. To get started, we lent only our own capital. We raised equity capital. We have raised over $100 million of equity capital today. We took the risk ourselves and lent our capital plus a combination of debt capital on top of that until we built up on our portfolio to show the performance of the loans over time – to show that our models were, in fact, very predictive. As we got more and more performance, the institutions became more and more interested.

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Aiming to Disrupt Consumer Credit: Al Goldstein, CEO of AvantCredit (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Is your offering for any kind of credit or is this for a specific kind of credit?

Al Goldstein: We provide two products today in two markets where we operate in the US and the UK. Our first product is an installment loan product. This type of loan ranges from $1,000 to $20,000 for a period of one to four years. This is a fully amortizing monthly pay product. So customers will borrow, on average, $5,000 and pay it back in monthly equal installments to zero over the term of the loan. These loans have no origination fees or late payment penalties.

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Aiming to Disrupt Consumer Credit: Al Goldstein, CEO of AvantCredit (Part 2)

Al Goldstein: The real estate business was a lot more competitive and a lot more difficult. What we saw was a huge opportunity in providing credit alternatives to near-prime or mid-prime borrowers. Half of the credit spectrum are all customers making about $50,000 to $60,000 a year and with credit scores between 600 and 700. However, they are not provided with access to credit by companies that are taking advantage of technology and analytics at the forefront. Our vision for the company is that we want to build an online capital line. We started this business about two years ago and it has worked out great because my two co-founders were my former interns in my first company. One is from a technology background and one from a data and analytics background. I’ve spent four years or so in my first business and then went out to the Valley and participated in Y Combinator. We’ve had a great run so far. >>>

Aiming to Disrupt Consumer Credit: Al Goldstein, CEO of AvantCredit (Part 1)

Consumer Credit is a $10 trillion dollar industry that Al and his team are trying to turn on its head. Aided by Big Data and machine learning, they are creating a direct to consumer lending model that may have far reaching impact on the financial services industry.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the beginning of your journey. We can talk about your co-founders, but let’s start with your background a bit and share with the audience where you’re from and where your personal journey started.

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Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Rick Wilson, President of Miva Merchant (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: You were working as Head of North America Sales and the game plan was to orient the product to be sold by the hosting providers.

Rick Wilson: That is correct. We were very successful with that. Between 1998 and 2004, which was when we stopped that process, we signed up 3,500 hosting providers. During that window, we sold about 300,000 active licenses. We were very dominant from a market share standpoint. There was one fundamental problem during that whole time. >>>

Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Rick Wilson, President of Miva Merchant (Part 1)

Miva caters to 20,000 e-commerce merchants and Rick Wilson discusses the trends he sees in their customer base, as well as the industry in general.

Sramana Mitra: Welcome to the Thought Leaders in E-Commerce Series. Tell us a bit about yourself as well as Miva Merchant. Tell us what you do and how did you get to where you’ve gotten to.

Rick Wilson: Thank you for having me. I’m the President of Miva Merchant. From the way most companies are structured, I take what we would normally consider as the CEO role. We’re an SMB e-commerce platform. In the scheme of the market, our customers are larger than what you might see on a Shopify or a Bicommerce revolution. >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Larry Augustin, CEO of SugarCRM (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: However, right now it’s very inadequate. We only actually do content marketing. Our strategy, in terms of marketing, does not consist of advertising. However, the infrastructure around that content marketing in terms of analytics and being able to tie those pieces together is absolutely and terribly difficult.

Larry Augustin: That’s an interesting comment on your part. This is a digression for our discussion today. I see content marketing as incredibly valuable. I agree with you that we’re just at the beginning of an industry of the right tools to really help and enable content marketing in a significant way. That said, I think content marketing is a piece of an overall strategy. We have to understand sometimes that a tool like content marketing, which is still early, is one of the set of tools in the toolbox. I have in fact >>>