Thought Leaders in Financial Technology: Rich Longo, President of NXTSoft (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: The example that you gave of Neilsoft versus Salesforce is not the right example for you. The right example is Salesforce itself and its Force.com platform where a lot of people have built a lot of applications. 

Rich Longo: Yes, Force.com is a perfect example. You could look at others that built their solutions on Force.com. They recently went into an IPO situation and they have been successful.

Thought Leaders in Financial Technology: Rich Longo, President of NXTSoft (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Let me ask a bit of a 30,000-foot level question to synthesize what you have said so far. Is your company set up as a platform and you have all these different use cases that you build on top of that? Or is it a product company? How is it structured?

Rich Longo: It is a platform company. We have what we call the Omni platform which represents all of our data components. Within the platform, we have the connectivity component OmniConnect, conversion piece OmniData, and our data analytics and risk management component Omnilytics. 

Thought Leaders in Financial Technology: Rich Longo, President of NXTSoft (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: The pain point that you are solving is speeding up the loan appraisal and processing process. Is that an accurate synthesis?

Rich Longo: We cover the entire life cycle of the origination process – from the beginning with a customer entering a loan application to the loan getting serviced and the closing of the loan application.

Thought Leaders in Financial Technology: Rich Longo, President of NXTSoft (Part 1)

NXTSoft is the Mulesoft for FinTech. Read on to understand the positioning better.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by having you introduce yourself as well as NXTSoft.

Rich Longo: I’m the Chief Strategy Officer and Division President of our data and connectivity business. NXTSoft is a data, connectivity, and cyber security business that is focused on protecting, connecting, aggregating, monetizing, and automating the data. Our solution is focused on those four areas. 

Thought Leaders in Financial Technology: Expensify CEO David Barrett (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: I just talked to an entrepreneur in Romania. 30% of his business is tying in with another e-commerce platform called Wix. I can tell you that if you talk to that guy, he’s going to give you a completely different point of view than the one that you are pushing which is people shouldn’t depend on Wix or partners.

If you’re getting 30% of your business through Wix, why wouldn’t you leverage that? This is a strategy. If you test a strategy and it works, go with it. What’s wrong with that?

Thought Leaders in Financial Technology: Expensify CEO David Barrett (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: From a strategic planning point of view, you have to look at where you are, where your market is, where the competition is, and figure out the priorities and market drivers. It’s true that everything works and everything doesn’t; but you have to make choices and decisions, and those other factors drive decision making.

David Barrett: If you are advising a brand new entrepreneur, what would you suggest? You can’t start an ecosystem from day one. You said that around the $100 million mark is where an ecosystem starts to make friends. 

Thought Leaders in Financial Technology: Expensify CEO David Barrett (Part 5)

David Barrett: When it comes to the platforms, I’d be curious to see if a major value of one the platforms is reaching existing customers. One of the major ways of starting a new business is to reach new customers that are currently underserved.

Can you use the Salesforce platform to go after a market that is one tenth of the price point? It feels like they wouldn’t be in that environment and they couldn’t afford that platform.

Thought Leaders in Financial Technology: Expensify CEO David Barrett (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: I work with formation-stage companies all the time. Two guys or one person and an outsourced team of developers build these formation stage companies where they would want to spend their resources. The best place to spend your resources is what is differentiated.

Going in and competing against AWS is not a differentiated strategy if you are trying to build a B2B SaaS company in a mixed domain of, let’s say, supply chain logistics. It’s better to have to strike out the other layers and focus your attention on building the logic that is going to give you the differentiated advantage on that layer.