Thought Leaders in Financial Technology: Gina Taylor Cotter, SVP & GM, Global Commercial Financing, American Express (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s double-click again one more layer into that. I’m going to give you a proxy of what we learned from our coverage of Kabbage and OnDeck. I would like to hear you describe the heuristics based on which you are evaluating these loans.

In the case of OnDeck or Kabbage, in the segment of e-commerce transactions for example, they would look for a certain number of transactions and a certain number of months of being in business. These are some of the heuristics that they use to approve a loan. What are the heuristics that you use to evaluate your loan applicants? >>>

Thought Leaders in Financial Technology: Gina Taylor Cotter, SVP & GM, Global Commercial Financing, American Express (Part 1)

Innovations in Financial Technology are flowing from the startup world into the large companies. This excellent conversation gives us a window into how Amex is bringing some of these innovations into their offerings.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing our audience to yourself as well as American Express’ activity in the financial technology area.

Gina Taylor Cotter: I work in American Express in the division that focuses on serving businesses with commercial payments. I dedicate my time to helping businesses be successful in building solutions that provide them access to capital, which is very important for small businesses. >>>

Thought Leaders in Financial Technology: Currencycloud CEO Mike Laven (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Very good. In your space, what are the trends and what are some open problems that you would point new entrepreneurs to look into?

Mike Laven: If you send a million dollars from San Francisco to New York, it’s a far simpler exercise than sending a thousand dollars from San Francisco to France. The world of moving money around the world is massively compliance and regulation intensive. There are rules about the kinds of information we have to collect about who’s sending the money and who’s receiving the funds and report it to authorities. >>>

Thought Leaders in Financial Technology: Currencycloud CEO Mike Laven (Part 2)

Mike Laven: We effectively provide our customers a one-stop connection to a global banking world. It’s very difficult to find a single bank that optimizes everything for you. Different banks and different payment providers have different strengths. Some are good in Asia. Some are good in Latin America.

Different currency providers have different strengths based on the volume of what they do. Effectively, you connect to us and we handle all of that for you. From the perspective of your business, you’re making your international payments at roughly the same level of difficulty as your domestic payments. >>>

Thought Leaders in Financial Technology: Currencycloud CEO Mike Laven (Part 1)

This interview discusses opportunities surrounding the emerging trends in RegTech.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing our audience to yourself as well as to Currencycloud.

Mike Laven: I’m the CEO of Currencycloud, which is based in London. For quite some time, I’ve lived and worked back and forth between the Valley and London in the field of financial technology. Currencycloud was started five years ago in 2012. The initial vision was that businesses paid much too much for international payments. There are very good companies in the consumer space on international payments. >>>

Thought Leaders in Financial Technology: Tracy Metzger, COO of Vesta (Part 3)

Tracy Metzger: Vesta processes anywhere from 300,000 to 500,000 transactions a day and up towards $18 billion in payments a year. We carry elements like their mobile devices and desktop devices. We know the operating systems, screen dimensions, their page viewing history on certain e-commerce websites, and their social reputation information where it’s applicable. There are so many different elements that we use to make a risk screen decision in a split second. If you think about it, Vesta started off focusing on prepaid cellular business 22 years ago. >>>