Thought Leaders in Financial Technology: Terrence McCrossan, CEO of Oversight Systems (Part 1)

The audit function at enterprises is ripe for automation. Read on to learn what’s happening.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning by introducing yourself as well as Oversight Systems.

Terrence McCrossan: I’m the CEO of Oversight Systems. Oversight is an Atlanta, Georgia-based company that is a leader in AI-based process automation and transaction analysis.

Thought Leaders in Financial Technology: Brock Blake, CEO of Lendio (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: I’ll tell you from my point of view because in 1Mby1M, we’re trying to get entrepreneurs to be disciplined, scalable, and be able to do more things. If you’re going to go apply for a loan, keeping your QuickBooks up to date is an important piece of the housekeeping.

Brock Blake: Yes, no question. I think everyone knows that. I, 100%, agree with you. I think a business wants to keep their housekeeping in their QuickBooks up to date. But I think that it slips and it’s not always up to date. People at home in their personal life, they want to have their own budget and they want to be able to have it where they’re keeping track of their daily expenses and things like that but it sometimes slips. >>>

Thought Leaders in Financial Technology: Brock Blake, CEO of Lendio (Part 5)

Brock Blake: We have a partnership with Comcast. In Comcast, we have access to proprietary data around how long have they been a customer, how many employees do they have, what’s their track record of payment, etc. Everyone is looking for a unique source of data that they can access to that others can’t. It’s in high demand.

I think a year ago or 18 months ago, lenders were talking about how they were leveraging online data like Yelp and other social profile data points as part of their underwriting. I think that was a hyperbole – a little bit of trying to make it sound sexier than it was. I think that lenders can use social profile data like Yelp to understand. >>>

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. >>>