Thought Leaders in Financial Technology: Jeff Zhou, CEO of Fig (Part 1)

Jeff discusses subprime lending as the number of consumers needing loans escalate exponentially in this post-COVID world.

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

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Matt Carbonara of Citi Ventures (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Just broadening the line of questioning, could you talk a bit about what your analysis of the current FinTech market? Where are the key opportunities?

Matt Carbonara: Payments moving into different parts of the ecosystem is one trend. You can think about verticalized SaaS companies with an element of payments becoming part of them.

Thought Leaders in Financial Technology: FundThrough CEO Steven Uster (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Can you talk more broadly about the space of invoice financing? What’s happening from a FinTech point of view?

Steven Uster: I’ll take a step back even before FinTech. When my grandfather used to sell coats, he would sell you a coat. You would give him a dollar and you’d walk away with the coat. Then over time, it would become, “Give me the coat, and I’ll give you the dollar in 10 days.”

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.