Thought Leaders in Financial Technology: Splitit CEO Brad Paterson (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What is your largest retailer that uses this functionality?

Brad Paterson: There is a number and not all of them are public, so I can’t share their size. We have Purple for example. 

Sramana Mitra: Is that the mattress company?

Thought Leaders in Financial Technology: Splitit CEO Brad Paterson (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What do you charge the retailers for this facility?

Brad Paterson: It depends. Cash flow is king, especially today. The pricing starts from 3% for three installments. If the retailer wants to offer 6 or 12 installments, then that pricing increases. 

Sramana Mitra: You are basically factoring the retailers’ installment payments?

Thought Leaders in Financial Technology: Splitit CEO Brad Paterson (Part 1)

Brad discusses FinTech in the context of high ticket e-commerce.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s introduce our audience to you as well as Splitit. 

Brad Paterson: We are a global installment payment company. We are the only installment payment company that allows consumers with a credit card to split a payment into installments and pay over time. We allow you to use your credit versus obtaining a new credit.

Thought Leaders in Financial Technology: Sashi Narahari, CEO of HighRadius (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Your business model is a SaaS business model, right?

Sashi Narahari: Yes, but we charge based on transactions.

Sramana Mitra: So it’s not a subscription fee model; it’s a transaction fee model.

Thought Leaders in Financial Technology: Sashi Narahari, CEO of HighRadius (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Go down one level further. What kind of heuristics are we talking about here?

Sashi Narahari: Let’s take a simple example. You are a company and you bill High Radius. We would transfer $3,400 to the bank. Let’s say you use Bank of America. Then there’s an email about the payment.

Thought Leaders in Financial Technology: Sashi Narahari, CEO of HighRadius (Part 1)

Companies like Blackline, Bill.com, Anaplan all automate various CFO office functions. HighRadius is yet another excellent company automating a piece of the finance function.

Thought Leaders in Financial Technology: Jeff Zhou, CEO of Fig (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Given the situation that there’s 30 million people unemployed in America, it will take them a while to find their way back into the workforce. What would your risk model do when you apply that to this category of people? Are they not going to qualify for credit or is there a way?

Jeff Zhou: There’s a piece of this that is really important. It’s that contextual information. Nonprofits are on the ground. They have all sorts of services – immigration assistance, housing assistance, job training, etc. You name it, there is a nonprofit that has services like that.

Thought Leaders in Financial Technology: Jeff Zhou, CEO of Fig (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Tell me a bit about what kind of heuristics you are using in doing the credit scoring for subprime.

Jeff Zhou: One area that people are interested in is alternative data sources like social media. This is an area that I think is very difficult to tie to credit behavior when you’re comparing it to actual credit behavior.