Thought Leaders in Financial Technology: FundThrough CEO Steven Uster (Part 1)

This interview talks about the FinTech trends in invoice factoring.

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

Steven Uster: I’m the Co-Founder and CEO of FundThrough. We are an invoice funding platform that bridges cash flow gaps for small businesses that invoice large customers and have to wait 30 to 90 days for those customers to pay them.

Thought Leaders in Financial Technology: EarnUp CEO Matthew Cooper and President Nadim Homsany (Part 4)

Matthew Cooper: Easing that burden to keep you compliant is big. There are some new regulations like the California privacy regulations which will make everybody’s lives much more painful.

Thought Leaders in Financial Technology: EarnUp CEO Matthew Cooper and President Nadim Homsany (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: People who are paying their loans online is one type of usage. Do you have a sense of how many of these are using a consolidation app to manage their debt?

Matthew Cooper: To our knowledge, we are not familiar outside of the ones that Mint built. It’s a very small number. The only other application in this space was Prism. It was more generally focused on bills payment. That’s part of why we see a huge potential for changing where Americans interact with their loan. 

Thought Leaders in Financial Technology: EarnUp CEO Matthew Cooper and President Nadim Homsany (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: It’s a bit misleading to say that you are helping consumers get out of debt. It sounds like you are paying off their debt. Now that I understand what you’re doing, you’re basically managing the payments in a software environment.

Matthew Cooper: That’s the whole point of the application. Today, we have over $10 billion in loans that are managed on the platform. What we have been excited to see is that over 30% of consumers show reduction in missed payments.

Thought Leaders in Financial Technology: EarnUp CEO Matthew Cooper and President Nadim Homsany (Part 1)

100 million consumers live paycheck to paycheck and are loaded with debt. EarnUp offers a solution to help them ease their debt burden.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing yourselves as well as EarnUp.

Matthew Cooper: Nadim and I are the two co-founders of EarnUp. I’m currently the CEO and Nadim is the CFO. EarnUp is an award-winning platform that intelligently automates loan payments for the 200 million indebted Americans. We make it easy for consumers to stay on track with their payments.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Doug Atkin of Communitas Capital Partners (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: You said you’ve invested in 10 companies from this vehicle. Could you talk about some examples? Specifically, talk about in what stage did you encounter them and what was it about what they had that called you to make the investment. I’m trying to understand how you evaluate investments.

Doug Atkin: Let me give you a couple of examples – one late stage and one very early stage. Because we’ve been in the business for so long, we’re inundated with deal flows.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Doug Atkin of Communitas Capital Partners (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: B2B need less money, I think.

Doug Atkin: It all depends. If you’re building a business like an analytics package which you’re selling to the big banks, you need a decent amount of money to build something of industrial quality. A lot of these things take a bit more money.

Sramana Mitra: The comment I would make is that customer acquisition in B2C is hard to do in a lean way, which is what has drawn so much capital to the B2C side of the business.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Doug Atkin of Communitas Capital Partners (Part 1)

Responding to a popular request, we are now sharing transcripts of our investor podcast interviews in this new series. The following interview with Doug Atkin was recorded in July 2019.

Doug Atkin, Managing Partner at Communitas Capital Partners, has extensive experience in FinTech and this conversation explores the nuances of that sector.