Thought Leaders in Financial Technology: Rob Reid, EVP of Sage Intacct (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: One of the trends in your industry is, cloud software companies are starting to offer FinTech solutions. I wrote an article about Intuit very recently. It was a few days ago. It’s called “What is Intuit’s most promising long-term opportunity?” This was an analysis of how they’re offering this QuickBooks financing product whereby they’re basically lending money to their constituency of businesses who qualify.

They’re measuring the qualification by looking at the data that they have. It’s a very well thought through strategy. I really like it. I actually think that that could be an enormous business for Intuit going forward. I’ve had conversations with Brad and Alex over there. What is the thinking around this in your shop?

Rob Reid: I agree with you. That is a great opportunity for them since they’re dealing with very small businesses. To get any kind of additional financing, they have to go to banks or credit unions. It’s not as easy for them to get funds. That provides them a great opportunity.

We typically are working with more established firms. They have enough of a revenue stream and balance sheet so that it’s pretty easy for them to get bank loans from the likes of Silicon Valley. We could be dealing with public companies that have gotten funding from an IPO. That, for us, is not as great of an opportunity as it is for somebody like Intuit. It’s not high on our initiative list. We’d be going up against very established relationships.

In Northern California, Silicon Valley Bank really understands software companies and what it takes to finance them. For us to go and try and compete with them would be pulling us away from what we know best. It would start to draw away from the opportunity that we have in front of us. We’re going through a new change.

Nineteen years ago, we went through the client server to cloud trend. Today, we’re going through the same kind of incredible change as we’re going toward machine learning and artificial intelligence. That’s going to provide exponential improvements over the next few years. We’re making heavy investments in how to take our customers to a whole other level of being able to do financial planning. That’s where our focus is for the future.

Sramana Mitra: Can you walk us through a couple of use cases of what kinds of things you’re doing with AI and machine learning in the space?

Rob Reid: We have talked to our customers about where we’re going. We’re still in the development with some of these things, but I will reflect on the kind of direction we’re moving in to be able to exemplify the power of machine learning and AI.

Thought Leaders in Financial Technology: Rob Reid, EVP of Sage Intacct (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Let me take that thought process a bit further. Let’s focus on the software vertical which is the most tuned to our audience. How many companies do you cater to? What are the specific trends in that vertical? For example, people are mostly in the software industry doing SaaS companies. There are all these subscription management software companies. How do you play in that space?

Rob Reid: We have over 12,000 customers. We are now part of Sage. We don’t break out our verticals. I can’t answer your specific question there. There are about 18,000 software companies. We do target all of those. What we’ve done from a financial management perspective is look at all the needs of a software company and how we can be the best. >>>

Thought Leaders in Financial Technology: Rob Reid, EVP of Sage Intacct (Part 2)

Rob Reid: At the enterprise level, what you have is Oracle with their enterprise ERP solution, SAP, and Workday. What’s really interesting is that from an overall targeted addressable market, Intuit is going after the largest segment. If you break out Intuit’s overall P&L, they are the market leader from a revenue perspective.

A very small business generates more money than an enterprise. The midmarket also has a vast opportunity from a targeted perspective. In actuality, it’s actually Intuit, NetSuite, and Intacct that have the big opportunity going forward. We’re providing solutions that only big companies used to be able to afford. Now with cloud solutions, what we’re seeing is the deployment of this technology to millions of companies as opposed to the top 5,000. >>>

Thought Leaders in Financial Technology: Rob Reid, EVP of Sage Intacct (Part 1)

Rob was the CEO of Intacct, which Sage has acquired. Intacct is a leader in small business ERP. Read on to learn more about the trends in that space.

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

Rob Reid: Sage Intacct is an ERP solution provider for the midmarket. We have been an innovation leader for the last 10 years and also a customer satisfaction leader in the industry eclipsing all others. It’s pretty interesting. We moved to being a cloud solution as an industry. The industry used to be called SaaS.

We deliver the best technology we possibly can as well as provide white-glove service so that your customers maximize their success >>>

Thought Leaders in Financial Technology: Erich Litch, Chief Revenue Officer, 2Checkout (Part 3)

Erich Litch: As you get to smaller companies, they tend to make company-wide decisions and want simplification. They want something that’s cheap, quick, and easy and doesn’t over complicate their lives so that they can spend most of their time focused on the business. They don’t have the liberty of hiring teams of people to do specific functions. They need a lean operation. They’re right for something like an all-in-one monetization platform.

If you’re doing anywhere from a $100,000 in sales all the way up to $200 million, you might be one of those kinds of businesses which we call small to medium. Then there’s the microsegment. If you have an antivirus solution or some kind of endpoint security product that is applicable >>>

Thought Leaders in Financial Technology: Erich Litch, Chief Revenue Officer, 2Checkout (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Can we talk a bit about the competitive map around this ecosystem? The direct competitors are Chargify and Zuora, right?

Erich Litch: Since we operate in so many parts of the ecosystem, we compete with a number of different companies. In the subscription billing space, we compete against Zuora or Chargify. If you do choose one of those providers, then you also have to choose a payment processor. You may have to choose somebody that handles other elements of your e-commerce system.

We compete with those just for subscription billing whereas we provide much, much more. They don’t really handle any of the regulatory or tax >>>

Thought Leaders in Financial Technology: Erich Litch, Chief Revenue Officer, 2Checkout (Part 1)

The payment industry is going aggressively digital. This discussion takes stock of the ecosystem and its trends.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing our audience to 2Checkout and yourself.

Erich Litch: I’m Erich Litch. I’m the Chief Revenue Officer for 2Checkout. 2Checkout is a leading payment and e-commerce company. We do business all over the world supporting over 10,000 merchants in every part of the world and handle payment processing, e-commerce management, subscription billing and management, and all kinds of things that enable businesses to seamlessly and easily sell all over the world.

Sramana Mitra: Can you double-click down a little bit and talk about what kind of customers are the ones that you are going >>>

Thought Leaders in Financial Technology: Jeremy Almond, CEO of PayStand (Part 3)

Jeremy Almond: We have another product where most of the time when a payment that needs to be authorized goes beyond a certain amount, there are controls in place. Maybe your accounts payable clerk can pay bills under $10,000. For over $10,000, it needs to go to the controller.

Over $50,000, it needs to go to the treasury and CFO. One of the areas that we use Blockchain is for the sign off and approvals. We can keep track of all of the sign off records. Blockchain ensures that the person who’s signing off on the approval has not been tampered with. Those are two of the several ways that we use Blockchain in internal operations to improve our payment network. >>>