Thought Leaders in Financial Technology: Brock Blake, CEO of Lendio (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: What are the trends in the industry? One of the trends that I’m starting to see is that what started more as a FinTech phenomenon is starting to come into the mainstream. One of the companies you’ve mentioned earlier is American Express.

I actually did a story last year with American Express’ FinTech offerings for small business lending. They basically said that they’ve been observing all these companies like OnDeck. They’ve just brought that whole functionality of lending against what they see in their data as a lending practice.

To what extent is that a trend that you’re seeing – that mainstream banks are starting to bring in FinTech capabilities into small business lending? >>>

Thought Leaders in Financial Technology: Brock Blake, CEO of Lendio (Part 2)

Brock Blake: You asked about lenders. As I mentioned, we have 75 lenders on our platform. We have some of the big ones like Bank of America and American Express. We also have traditional banks. We have non-banks on our platform like OnDeck Capital, Kabbage, Funding Circle, and a bunch of those players that are non-bank lenders.

We have, I think, every type of business loan product out there on our platform. Let me explain that a little bit. You’re running a restaurant, landscaping, or a dry cleaner business. You go to your bank and apply for a loan and think “All banks are the same. They’re all going to have the same loan products. I’ve been with this bank for 10 years. If anyone’s going to give me a loan, it’s going to be this bank.” You go sit down and have a conversation. >>>

Thought Leaders in Financial Technology: Brock Blake, CEO of Lendio (Part 1)

Small business lending is an extremely important finance function that is full of sand in the gear.

Lendio is working on smoothening the process and adding velocity into the ecosystem. We discuss the future of this corner of FinTech in this fascinating conversation.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing our audience to yourself and to Lendio.

Brock Blake: I’m the founder and CEO of Lendio. Lendio is a small business loan marketplace. We are helping small business owners across the United States get access to capital. We’re like the Expedia or the Kayak for business loans, which means we’re not a lender ourselves. We have 75 lenders on our platform. We’ve created an opportunity for a business owner to go and come to one place so that one application can get access to many loan options. >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Alexander Ross of Illuminate Financial (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: These are banks in the UK? What kind of banks are we talking about?

Alexander Ross: These are tier-one and tier-two European and US banks. What we find is that given that every company that speaks to us will likely get an introduction to one of our bank partners if they’re relevant or one of our strategic investors, an increasing number of companies want to remain engaged with us and refer companies to us. About 70% to 80% of our pipeline is inbound at the moment across our strategic investors and strategic bank partners. The rest comes from conferences, outbound-themed outreach.

Sramana Mitra: What do you see as the trends emerging from the B2B FinTech space? How would you synthesize that?

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1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Alexander Ross of Illuminate Financial (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Can we do some examples?

Alexander Ross: Cloud Margin is a cloud-based capital management solution that I mentioned. It focuses on compliance, clearly, because it enables the end users to monitor transactions. Cost is also a factor. This solution is a multi-tenanted SaaS-based solution. It’s much cheaper to adopt as an organization and much cheaper to manage.

The cost comparison we see to the incumbents that are all deployed is a tenth of the price, which is significant. Compliance, cost, and capital are the three components that that particular solution touches on. Another example would be Privota. That’s a business that sits at the intersection of big data and cybersecurity. It sits on top of the new generation of data infrastructure. It enables differential privacy to the end user. >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Alexander Ross of Illuminate Financial (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 Alexander Ross was recorded in July 2018.

Alexander Ross, Founder at Illuminate Financial, talks about his firm’s FinTech investment thesis.

Sramana Mitra: Tell us a little bit about your fund and your investing focus. Let’s get to know one another. Let’s introduce you to our audience.

Alexander Ross: Our fund is called Illuminate Financial. We are a financial market technology-focused venture capital fund. We saw a space in >>>

Thought Leaders in Financial Technology: Rob Reid, EVP of Sage Intacct (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: When you look around at the trends in your space, could you identify some open problems? If you were starting a company today, which problems would you go and solve and build a new company around?

Rob Reid: First of all, all the easy problems in business have been solved. Reflecting a little bit on what we just went through, now is the time to use artificial intelligence to find diamonds in the rough and drill into information that humans couldn’t do on their own. Let me give you an example. >>>

Thought Leaders in Financial Technology: Rob Reid, EVP of Sage Intacct (Part 5)

Rob Reid: I’m going to start with a very mundane area, and then we’ll go all the way to the incredible. Today, a lot of our customers still do some things the old way. If you’re an accounts payable accountant, you’ll probably divide up all the people you’re going to pay alphabetically. You’re going to pay A through M on Wednesdays and N through Z on Thursdays. It’s a very common practice.

We try to inject new thoughts, but that’s what a lot of people still do. With artificial intelligence, the system will be looking at, “With this particular invoice, we can get an additional 10% discount off of the invoice if we pay within 30 days. We’ll be going to that accounts payable clerk on a Monday and say, “Today is the 29^th day. If we go ahead and pay this invoice today, we can save 10%. I’ve >>>