Thought Leaders in Financial Technology: Terrence McCrossan, CEO of Oversight Systems (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: When you look at Fortune 500 or Global 2000 customer base, what is the percentage of penetration of this kind of technology?

Terrence McCrossan: Gartner’s data is probably the best proxy for market penetration. They estimate that just 5% of large organizations are using automated analysis tools as part of their audit process. It’s a marketplace that has significant growth.

Thought Leaders in Financial Technology: Terrence McCrossan, CEO of Oversight Systems (Part 1)

The audit function at enterprises is ripe for automation. Read on to learn what’s happening.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning by introducing yourself as well as Oversight Systems.

Terrence McCrossan: I’m the CEO of Oversight Systems. Oversight is an Atlanta, Georgia-based company that is a leader in AI-based process automation and transaction analysis.

Thought Leaders in Financial Technology: Brock Blake, CEO of Lendio (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: I’ll tell you from my point of view because in 1Mby1M, we’re trying to get entrepreneurs to be disciplined, scalable, and be able to do more things. If you’re going to go apply for a loan, keeping your QuickBooks up to date is an important piece of the housekeeping.

Brock Blake: Yes, no question. I think everyone knows that. I, 100%, agree with you. I think a business wants to keep their housekeeping in their QuickBooks up to date. But I think that it slips and it’s not always up to date. People at home in their personal life, they want to have their own budget and they want to be able to have it where they’re keeping track of their daily expenses and things like that but it sometimes slips. >>>

Thought Leaders in Financial Technology: Brock Blake, CEO of Lendio (Part 5)

Brock Blake: We have a partnership with Comcast. In Comcast, we have access to proprietary data around how long have they been a customer, how many employees do they have, what’s their track record of payment, etc. Everyone is looking for a unique source of data that they can access to that others can’t. It’s in high demand.

I think a year ago or 18 months ago, lenders were talking about how they were leveraging online data like Yelp and other social profile data points as part of their underwriting. I think that was a hyperbole – a little bit of trying to make it sound sexier than it was. I think that lenders can use social profile data like Yelp to understand. >>>

Thought Leaders in Financial Technology: Brock Blake, CEO of Lendio (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: What are the trends in the industry? One of the trends that I’m starting to see is that what started more as a FinTech phenomenon is starting to come into the mainstream. One of the companies you’ve mentioned earlier is American Express.

I actually did a story last year with American Express’ FinTech offerings for small business lending. They basically said that they’ve been observing all these companies like OnDeck. They’ve just brought that whole functionality of lending against what they see in their data as a lending practice.

To what extent is that a trend that you’re seeing – that mainstream banks are starting to bring in FinTech capabilities into small business lending? >>>

Thought Leaders in Financial Technology: Brock Blake, CEO of Lendio (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Talk to us about those different categories of financing that apply to our audience. What kind of metrics are people looking for?

Brock Blake: I’m going to talk about this generally for a second and then I’ll get down a little bit more specifically to that industry. Generally, lenders are going to underwrite based off of three things. They’re going to, one, look at the cash flow. There are a bunch of ways to determine whether you have cash flow. Cash flow might involve looking inside your bank account, the amount of credit cards that you’re swiping, any recurring revenue, or accounts receivable. So first is cash flow. >>>

Thought Leaders in Financial Technology: Rob Reid, EVP of Sage Intacct (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: When you look around at the trends in your space, could you identify some open problems? If you were starting a company today, which problems would you go and solve and build a new company around?

Rob Reid: First of all, all the easy problems in business have been solved. Reflecting a little bit on what we just went through, now is the time to use artificial intelligence to find diamonds in the rough and drill into information that humans couldn’t do on their own. Let me give you an example. >>>

Thought Leaders in Financial Technology: Rob Reid, EVP of Sage Intacct (Part 5)

Rob Reid: I’m going to start with a very mundane area, and then we’ll go all the way to the incredible. Today, a lot of our customers still do some things the old way. If you’re an accounts payable accountant, you’ll probably divide up all the people you’re going to pay alphabetically. You’re going to pay A through M on Wednesdays and N through Z on Thursdays. It’s a very common practice.

We try to inject new thoughts, but that’s what a lot of people still do. With artificial intelligence, the system will be looking at, “With this particular invoice, we can get an additional 10% discount off of the invoice if we pay within 30 days. We’ll be going to that accounts payable clerk on a Monday and say, “Today is the 29^th day. If we go ahead and pay this invoice today, we can save 10%. I’ve >>>