PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION SESSION NO. 177/RANIA SUCCAR

Welcome to the Lend Academy Podcast, Episode No. 177. This is your host, Peter Renton, Founder of Lend Academy and Co-Founder of LendIt Fintech.

Today’s show is sponsored by LendIt Fintech USA 2019, the world’s leading event in financial services innovation. It’s coming up on April 8th and 9th, 2019, at Moscone West in San Francisco. We’ve recently opened registration as well as speaker applications. You can find out more by going to lendit.com/usa

Peter Renton: Today on the show, I am delighted to welcome Rania Succar. Her official title is Business Leader, QuickBooks Capital and Payments and that’s part of the Intuit organization. Now most people know about QuickBooks, it’s an accounting software that’s been around for many, many years; I’ve used it myself extensively.

Rania has come in to run their…originally, she came in just to run their lending operation, it’s a relatively new business for them, they launched it not that long ago and she was brought in to really build that up and make it a core piece of the Intuit business. So in this interview, we talk a lot about why she decided to come to Intuit from Google, is where she came from, what she saw was the opportunity, we talk about their approach to underwriting, how they’re able to underwrite these loans very quickly and efficiently, we talk about data and obviously the rich data sources that they have at Intuit.

We talk about funding of the loans, we talk about their new entry into…well their new addition of payments into the QuickBooks Capital umbrella and the thinking behind that. It was a fascinating interview, I hope you enjoy the show.

Welcome to the podcast, Rania!

Rania Succar: Thank you, thanks for having me, Peter.

Peter: My pleasure. Okay, so I like to get these things started by giving the listeners a little bit of background about yourself. You have had a very interesting career to date so maybe you could just give us some of the highlights.

Rania: Absolutely. Well I joined Intuit three years ago to lead our QuickBooks Capital business and I’ve long been interested in economic development and creating jobs and driving economic productivity. I got to do a ton of that when I was at McKinsey early on in my career doing work with various governments. We did some labor market reforms, spent a lot of time thinking about the productivity of different sectors and became fascinated by all of that.

And then I got to spend some time in Silicon Valley with Google and saw the power of technology driven innovation and learned all about the concept of 10x change. If you weren’t driving 10x change with something it wasn’t big enough. And so about three years ago when I was looking for the next thing to do when I heard about the vision of Intuit and the work we wanted to do around small business lending and the leadership role that Intuit had when it came to powering the prosperity of small businesses, I was just blown away by the potential and the opportunity.

So to be able to come over here and play a really unique role in super charging the economy with products like QuickBooks Capital and do it by harnessing data-driven innovation and technology, that was super exciting to me. So those have been some of the themes that I’ve been involved in before Intuit. As I mentioned, I spent time at Google, I spent time at McKinsey and I started my career at Merrill Lynch on the investment banking side.

Peter: Okay, it’s certainly an interesting journey you’ve had so far. So then, you mentioned the potential of QuickBooks Capital, maybe we can just get started by talking a little about the product itself like what is QuickBooks Capital?

Rania: Yeah, QuickBooks Capital is focused on solving one of the biggest challenges that small businesses have and that’s access to capital. So at QuickBooks we are obsessed and we’re constantly thinking about how we change the trajectory of success for small businesses. We all know the statistics that more than 50% of small businesses go out of business in their first five years and most often that’s driven by cash flow challenges.

In fact, I think this week we’re about to release a study that we just did that shows some of the challenges that small businesses face when it comes to cash flow, but close to 70% of small businesses lose sleep at night because of cash flow problems and over 50% are leaving opportunities on the table because they can’t access cash flow and so cash flow is a huge problem.

Access to capital is a big driver of that and we’ve all read about it and understand that there’s a lot of market failures when it comes to small business lending because if you’ve been in business for less than two years, you have less than $100,000 of revenue, it’s nearly impossible for a traditional lender to underwrite a small business efficiently and profitably in a way that can actually get capital to the small businesses.

It’s even a challenge for alternative lenders who’ve been out there tapping into so much advanced data to do this. So despite all the innovation in the industry, especially with alternative lenders over the last ten years, there was still a huge problem that has left small businesses underserved and that’s the problem that QuickBooks Capital came in to work to solve.

Peter: Right, and so it’s primarily or I imagine it’s completely focused on QuickBooks customers, is that correct, the QuickBooks accounting software?

Rania: Today, yes, that’s what the offering is focused on today.

Peter: Right.

Rania: And so basically the way it works is small businesses who use QuickBooks are able to apply for a loan and tap into all the data that sits in QuickBooks. As you can imagine, there’s more financial data in QuickBooks that small businesses can use to apply for a loan than they could anywhere else. So it includes all of their transactional historical data, which is very interesting, but also all of the future forward looking data.

As you may know, over 240 million invoices are sent a year through QuickBooks and so when you can understand future profitability, historical profitability, when it can all be put in context to so many other small businesses because QuickBooks is the largest ecosystem for small businesses out there, that’s translated into being able to offer capital to small businesses who otherwise would never have the opportunity to get a loan. And if they did, the terms they can get through QuickBooks Capital are much better.

Peter: Yeah, right, that makes sense. You know, it’s interesting because….obviously, I’ve been following you guys for a while, I’ve used the QuickBooks Online product. In my old business I used it exclusively so I know the product from multiple perspectives, but it’s interesting because I actually went to visit the Intuit…I think it’s the headquarters in Mountain View, California back in 2015, really we were doing sort of a fact finding trip for LendIt, wanted to meet with some of the people there.

Back then, you had a partnership with OnDeck and a couple of others I think for lending, but I remember being in that meeting and coming out of it talking to my partner, Jason, who I was in the meeting with saying, wow, this company has so much potential and yet they weren’t really leveraging pretty much any of that potential. It seems like now…I mean, you started it seems like a few months or a year after when we had that meeting, but what we talked about is data.

I mean, QuickBooks has the richest database of I think just about anybody because you’ve got granular transactional level data, you see every single expense, every single receipt that comes in so I guess…I’m curious about, like when you started, because this didn’t exist, I mean, QuickBooks Capital wasn’t there when you started. Was that really part of what sort of attracted you? You saw what was there and what it could be because it’s certainly…I see where you are now from the way you were three and a half years ago when I was sitting in your offices in Mountain View and it’s dramatically different.

Rania: Yeah it is exciting, the trajectory we’re on has been incredible. I came from Google, as I mentioned, which was full of innovation and the things that we were pursuing were just beyond exciting. To come here, I have to say, I’m even more excited coming to work every day by what we’re working on and the potential of what we’re working on and so as a company, we have renewed our vision for what QuickBooks is over the past few years and QuickBooks Capital is at the heart of it, but it’s only one of the many things that we’re doing.

So we talk about smart money, smart decisions and smart connections and it’s all powered by data so a small business doesn’t use QuickBooks anymore just for accounting. QuickBooks is meant to help them become a smarter business owner to tip the odds in favor of small businesses, you know, to take away that lonely journey and to tap into all the data that sits in QuickBooks to help them, as I mentioned, with smarter money, smarter decisions, smarter connections.

So on smarter money, we’re tapping into big data, machine learning, artificial intelligence to do things for small businesses based on that data in the ecosystem that couldn’t happen elsewhere. So of course, it’s access to capital, but it’s also help getting paid faster, solving some of those accounts receivable challenges, again, through the power of big data and we can talk about some of the ways we’re doing that.

We’re also working on things on the smart money to help alleviate some of the major challenges when it comes to payroll. Within QuickBooks, we run payrolls for one in twelve employees in the country, we’re a top two payroll provider across the country. And so we’re in a position to launch things like same day payroll and next day payroll to not have small businesses…to allow them to hold on to their money longer as they do payroll. So that’s the smart money side of things.

The smart decision side of things is to tap into all of that data so that small businesses are powered with the insights that they need. We’re able for example to say, it looks like this is about to be a very busy seasonal period for you and we can see that down to the industry, down to the narrow geography and say, have you invested in the additional inventory you’re going to need to make that season a success? And we’re doing that through QuickBooks Assistant, for example, we’re using voice-powered artificial intelligence, etc.

On smart connections, we’re helping create the connections that small businesses need to be successful, whether it’s connecting accountants to small businesses, or small businesses to each other, or small businesses to the self-employed when they need to find work. So there’s many, many things involved in that vision. Some of those exist today, some of them will come online over time, but the opportunity that we see to transform the trajectory for small businesses is really exciting and compelling.

Peter: Sure, as a small business owner my entire career, it’s exciting now that…I feel like it’s a good time to be a small business owner because you have a lot more tools at your disposal and you obviously have access to capital in more efficient ways as well. So I want to go back to just talk about the actual product itself and maybe you can sort of give us some sense just of the type of loans these are, the lengths, how’s the repayment, and what’s the typical interest rate; just give us a range on the loans themselves.

Rania: The loans range anywhere from $1,500 term loan up to $100,000 and so we’re really focused, as I mentioned, on giving capital to the underserved small businesses. So we realized…you know, we started at a $5,000 amount, but we realized that sometimes even smaller amounts can make a big difference to small businesses so we’ve gone down and gone up. These are short-term working capital loans, they range from 3 to 12-month loan paybacks and we also have weekly and monthly payback.

The interest rates are extremely competitive. The important thing about the interest rate here is that we believe with the precision of our data, we’re able to understand risk better than other lenders out there. Again, we’ve talked about the extreme precision and the ability to price based on that and so small businesses will typically…we hear that they feel great about the interest rates, but the APRs range from 8% all the way up, you know, they’ll go into the mid-20’s, for example.

Peter: Right, right, okay, got it. I know you’ve got a massive customer base, what is the profile of a typical QuickBooks Capital customer when they’re taking out a loan?

Rania: It’s really exciting. One thing we’ve seen is that 46% of small businesses who are taking out these loans never applied for a loan before and we are incredibly excited by that statistic because it means that historically, these businesses that have needed capital had felt intimidated or daunted by the process of applying for capital. Whereas in QuickBooks, it’s so simple, it’s just there for them. They have a historical relationship, there’s deep trust with the brand that they go for it so that’s one thing that’s extremely positive for us.

And then the other statistic that’s very exciting is that 90% of people who’ve taken a loan from QuickBooks have used it for growth. So we featured a story of a small business at QuickBooks Connect last week where a business had one floor that they were using for the business, it was for various vendors to come in and sell their goods, like a market. They had one floor built out and they wanted to expand to the second floor, but to do that they needed to retrofit the second floor to fix all the HVAC and the heating and everything and the electrical work and they needed the funding to do that and they weren’t able to get a loan anywhere else.

Through QuickBooks they did it and they were able to double their business and grow their revenue substantially. We also have other businesses who’ve used the capital to expand into other parts of their business that helps them solve their seasonality problems so we’ve had businesses that…for example, there was a ski manufacturer that had just a winter business and with QuickBooks Capital was able to add a beer garden onto their shop and expand into a summer business and solve their seasonality problem.

So whether it’s to buy inventory for an upcoming season, or to buy inventory in bulk and get better rates, or to expand their business with some construction opportunities, we’ve seen these loans power different opportunities for small businesses and that gets us really excited.

Peter: Yeah, for sure. So then do you still have that marketplace…I know it was in existence back in 2015, partnering with companies like OnDeck and Fundbox, is that still in operation, or is everything done through QuickBooks Capital?

Rania: That’s still in operation. QuickBooks is an open platform and that’s core to our strategy. We believe that small businesses come to QuickBooks to run their business, for it to be the hub and center of their business and they connect several different apps and experiences that compliment their business end-to-end. So there’s many different reasons that a small business may need a loan.

QuickBooks Capital, our direct lending offering provides those short term working capital loans, but then they may need a secured loan or a longer term loan and so we believe that the marketplace can add quite an important compliment to what we’re doing and help small businesses solve all of their financing needs. So it still exists and it’s growing quite nicely and we’re excited to see the progress there as well.

Peter: Okay, so let’s talk about data for a little bit, we’ve already touched on it, but obviously you have the transaction level data from all of your customers, but can you tell us your approach when it comes making an underwriting decision? I mean, how do you process all that data and what about other data sources as well; maybe you can just run us through your approach to underwriting.

Rania: Absolutely. We have invested quite a bit in our underwriting models, our credit models, our real-time decision engines, all the infrastructure that can crunch so much of this data very rapidly for small businesses. We built our credit model on top of 27 billion data points and it’s growing constantly so when a small business applies, we’ll take into account all of the data we see in the ecosystem so certainly there is QuickBooks transactional data, their connected bank account data, we look at third party data as well and the richness of the QuickBooks data to give you a sense…

As you may know, we purchased TSheets last year so we can see all the time tracking data or we can see the payroll data which is of course one of the biggest expenses. Small businesses connect Bill Pay through QuickBooks, they’ve got payments providers and processors and of course we’ve got QuickBooks Payments which is one of the largest payments providers in the country. So we have all of that data and then we see future looking data from invoices and all of that so all of that is taken into account in the decision making.

Then of course we’ve built quite a bit of advanced machine learning to understand things like, as I described earlier, what does the seasonality look like of this business, is this business seeing low cash flow today but about to see really strong cash flow because they’re about to hit their strong seasonal period? That took quite a bit of advanced machine learning and modeling work, but that is a great way to look into the future cash flow of a small business.

And then we have done other things like understanding how likely is that invoice to be paid back, not only do we see future revenue, but because we see so much invoice data and understand the payers, how likely is that payer to pay back at all and if they are to pay back, when do we expect them to pay back. So this is very much based on what is the ability of that small business to pay back?

It’s not just a revenue-based model, we do really look at debt service coverage ratios, all of this in real-time to understand, can this business pay back that loan which is extremely important to us given the role we play with small businesses. We want to make sure that these loans are empowering small businesses to grow in strength and to succeed and so we work on pricing it right, making sure we’re lending that small business the amount that their business can sustain.

Peter: Is this a fully automated process? When a business is applying for a loan, obviously you’ve got all the analysis going on for the underwriting, but does a human sort of take a look at every loan, or is it fully automated?

Rania: It’s a mix. We are working to automate more and more and more of the process. When we started much of it was manual and we were reviewing everything so we could learn and make our models better and over time, more and more of it has become automated and different loans, different types of loans and different loan limits will have more automation versus more manual intervention, but as I mentioned, it’s a mix. But it’s very important to us to help small businesses get decisions in real-time and so the automation component is quite critical.

Peter: Right, right. So then, I think you launched…was it 2016 you actually launched? Maybe you could tell us when you launched and sort of what is the scale you’re at today, as far as loan volume goes.

Rania: We officially launched a year ago, we announced it last year at QuickBooks Connect, we were doing a small pilot before that, but the real launch was a year ago. At the end of our fiscal year, which was in July, we announced we’ve done $140 million of loan volume. We believe that that’s one of the fastest ramps of a small business lender out there and we’re continuing to see really strong growth, but that’s the timeline of when we launched and what’s been happening and it’s been fun.

There’s been so much innovation, it’s been incredibly fun to be part of this team to get, you know, all of the…Intuit does this quite well, but all the principles of fast and rapid developments and minimum viable product. We launched early, we saw how our customers reacted, we learned quickly from our customers and there’s been almost a new launch or a new innovation or a new feature that’s material every few weeks and every month. Rapidly innovating on the data and the background, pulling new sources of data constantly, innovating on the product itself, innovating on the customer experience so we really believe we’re just getting started and there’s so much more we’re doing and bringing to our customers.

Peter: And given these are fairly short term loans…I know you haven’t launched that long ago, you would have had some insight into your loan performance I imagine by now given the short term nature, what can you…I know you’re a public company and everything, what can you tell us about loan performance, so far?

Rania: What I can tell you is it’s doing better than we expected. We’ve been able to grow the base so much because our data has proven even more powerful than we expected in predicting risk. And so when we started, we hadn’t opened it up to businesses that were younger than two years and now we require something like six months of transactional data to be able to lend to a small business. And so that’s just demonstrating the power of the data and that the data is able to help us go into younger and younger populations and still see loan performance that we are seeing as better than peers in the industry so the data has been quite powerful.

Peter: Right, and obviously…I believe there is…maybe you can tell me a sense of like how many QuickBooks Online customers are there? I believe this is only available to the QuickBooks Online customer, you can correct me if I’m wrong, because when I did QuickBooks I started off actually on the offline product and I migrated to an online product, but I imagine there’s still people running the offline product.

Rania: That’s right.

Peter: Can you tell us, what are some of the metrics or the numbers on the different types of customers you have?

Rania: Yeah, there’s 3.4 million QuickBooks customers today and the growth is just tremendous, I mean, it’s pretty incredible to see this, but we added a million incremental QuickBooks customers just in the last year. I think the first ten years of QuickBooks, we added a million and in the last year, we added a million and we’re just seeing growth continue at the same pace if not accelerate. So there’s quite a big base of QuickBooks customers and as I mentioned, the ecosystem of everything else that small businesses are doing in QuickBooks makes this central to them.

So there’s the payroll side of the business, there’s the payment side of the business, there’s time tracking, there’s automated sales tax and then of course, there’s the apps ecosystem where small businesses are coming in and connecting up to 15 and sometimes more apps to their ecosystem, and then of course, the accountant community so all of that builds on itself, and then we have the self-employed side of the world.

QuickBooks made a big investment and a big bet around the self-employed four/five years ago and that’s been growing tremendously and we’re really innovating in that space for the self-employed and providing more value than perhaps any other player out there. Just a few weeks ago we announced that we’ve moved into the mid-market segment as well which we’re calling the QuickBooks Advanced Offering.

And so a small business can come in from the earliest days and they can stick with QuickBooks and grow over time. And that’s our vision for the lending side of things too; that they come in when they’re youngest and they can’t tap opportunities anywhere else and then QuickBooks Capital can grow with them and be a constant source of credit to tap into as they need to take advantage of the next opportunity they have in front of them.

Peter: Yeah that’s a really good idea because when we first started LendIt, we actually were on QuickBooks and then we hired a finance person and they said oh no, we’re too big for QuickBooks now, we need to move on to something else. Obviously, we let them run with it, but that’s good that you can see that a small business as it grows can stay with you.

Rania: Absolutely.

Peter: Okay. Then let’s talk about the funding of these loans. From my understanding, you are funding everything from your own balance sheet, obviously you can confirm if that’s correct and are you going to start looking for outside investors to fund these loans, or what’s your plans?

Rania: Absolutely. We did start funding all of these internally on our own balance sheet just to get things going and to start and make the R&D cycle very fast and rapid, and as we’ve mentioned, there is the intention to partner over time with other investors and that’s certainly the direction we plan to take.

Peter: Okay, but as of right now everything is being funded from your own balance sheet?

Rania: Yes.

Peter: Okay.

Rania: Again, with the intention of working with partners.

Peter: Right, right.

Rania: But in the early days, it was very important to move very quickly in this space.

Peter: Yeah, yeah, I understand. And you’re making money…I was just on your website before we started this call and the way you make money, it seems like…there is no origination fee, it looks like. There’s just…on your website you say, no origination fees, no pre-payment penalties, no surprises and it’s just interest that the company pays. Is that correct?

Rania: That’s right and the entire QuickBooks Capital offering is very much founded on transparency and being a white knight for small businesses and leading the way when it comes to regulatory matters and compliance, but really putting the customer first. And so this lack of surprises is a critical thing.

It’s amazing that most existing alternative lending offerings today have a pre-payment penalty. If you pay it early, or you keep it the entire time, you’re still going to pay that interest amount, you know, if the cost is 10% of the loan, that’s what you’re going to pay if you pay it back in one month or nine months and that’s an unfair burden for small businesses to have to shoulder, and so that was very important for us as we launched this.

One of the interesting statistics is that, and this is from the Federal Reserve, more than 50% of small businesses who take a loan, around 50% of small businesses who take a loan with an alternative lender today are dissatisfied with the experience and that’s often because of the incredibly high interest rates and often these surprises and pre-payment penalties. And so as we designed this putting our small businesses first, it was very important that we set QuickBooks Capital up differently.

Another thing is that we always disclose the APR and that is very rare too, you often don’t find that with some of these other offerings. They might say the cost to borrowing is 10%, but the APR could be well into the 30’s and as we all know, even in the high, well above 50%, and so that was a very important thing for us too that we would always show the APR on our website and always lead with that for the small business so their cost of borrowing might be less than 5%, for example, hypothetically, but the APR, we will always be very clear about that.

Peter: Right, I think we’re moving in that direction, I mean obviously there was the State of California, I believe, passed something for more transparency in small business lending.

Rania: Yeah.

Peter: There’s the Business Borrowers’ Bill of Rights and there’s other initiatives that…I mean, we have it in consumer lending where we have The Truth in Lending that really has been around now for decades and is sort of the bedrock of the consumer lending space whether you take a car loan, a student loan, a mortgage loan, you’ve got this one document that is consistent that shows everything pretty clearly and you don’t have that in small business so it’s a little crazy, I think, that there isn’t that same regulatory requirement for a small business owner.

Rania: That’s right, that’s right. We feel that way too.

Peter: And just on regulatory, you mentioned it, I know that you are a partner with Financial Innovation Now, you’ve got some of the biggest hitters in the country, it’s Amazon, Apple, Google, Intuit, PayPal and I even see Stripe is now a member, so tell us a little bit about why you are a founding member of this organization and talk about your engagement in Washington and what you’re trying to achieve with that engagement.

Rania: It builds on some of the discussion we were just having which is that there’s tremendous potential for technology and some of these fintech companies to add tremendous innovation and benefit to small businesses and to open up credit and capital to small businesses in a way that can change the trajectory and yet there’s opportunity for regulation and improved standards for the industry.

And so we were a founding member of FIN, Financial Innovation Now, in order to help educate and inform the DC community about the potential benefits of data-driven innovation for small businesses, but also to share more about our perspective on standards we could set to ensure that we were protecting small businesses in all of this. So it’s to help create clarity about the potential benefits, but also to, you know as I mentioned, inform on some of the opportunities to improve the regulatory environment and to strengthen it.

Peter: Right, okay. Briefly, we are running out of time, but I wanted to just ask about payments because when we first chatted which was about a year ago now, it was just QuickBooks Capital. Now I see when you go to your LinkedIn profile you’ll see it’s QuickBooks Capital and Payments so it seems like you guys have brought payments under your roof. So tell us what was the thinking behind that and tell us how the payments and the capital pieces are connected.

Rania: Great. Well first just context on QuickBooks Payments. Not many people know this, but QuickBooks Payments is one of the largest payments facilitators in the country. We do about $50 billion annually of payments processing for small businesses across credit card and ACH and so it’s a key solution for small businesses who are looking to get paid.

But we thought it would be wonderful to bring the businesses together, QuickBooks Capital and Payments because it would help us solve the true big challenge of small businesses when it comes to both these areas which is cash flow, as we started talking about at the beginning of this discussion.

So our vision is, you know, if you’re a small business and many of the small businesses who are using QuickBooks are invoicers so they get paid later. More than 50% of small businesses get future payments rather than payments here and now and so for them they tend to have a big receivables challenge and that can be…you know, the typical business has over $55,000 of open receivables, and so that can be a big challenge for small businesses. So by bringing these pieces together, payments and capital, we can create a world where whenever you send out your invoices, you’ve got capital available there for you that you can tap into.

And so by bringing these together we can push product innovation that help small businesses no longer chase getting paid, no longer worry about cash so we are just beginning the journey on our side to create whole new categories of products here that can solve some of these challenges for small businesses and you’ll see more and more of that innovation on our part in the coming months and years.

Peter: Right, right, got it. So then speaking of the future, what is your vision? It feels like you’ve got a lot of open fields in front of you. You’re really expanding this space and you’re only just gotten started, I mean, what is your vision for the future of QuickBooks Capital and QuickBooks Payments?

Rania: Several things. There’s quite a bit that we’re innovating on. One thing that we didn’t spend a lot of time talking about is the work we’ve done on QuickBooks Capital around business credit scores. And so that’s one of the areas we’ve just announced this year and that we’ll continue to innovate on, but you know, more than 50% of small businesses don’t have a business credit score and we found a lot of hunger as we launched QuickBooks Capital for small businesses to take a loan just to start building credit because the capital product definitely helps them build credit by reporting back to commercial credit bureaus.

And so what we did, building on that insight, is we recently introduced a new credit score in QuickBooks with Dun & Bradstreet. So it’s the D&B credit score in QuickBooks that we’re offering for free for all small businesses which isn’t available in other places that they’re able to get so we’re working on strengthening education around business credit scores and helping small businesses build those out. That’s one area that we’ll continue to lean into over time.

You can also imagine a world where the QuickBooks Capital credit score becomes stronger and stronger and small businesses can take that with them so small businesses join QuickBooks can take that with them and use it to tap into new funding sources in other places as well so that’s one big theme.

Another theme is certainly around the cash flow side of things. We want to eliminate some of the pain that small businesses feel around cash flow so how do they tap into QuickBooks, see their available QuickBooks Capital balance, have it grow with them over time, just have it to draw down from anytime they need it for the various work that they do.

Also on the cash flow theme, we’re working to build out a cash flow forecaster that helps small businesses understand when it’s safe to spend and to help them make informed decisions around, you know, the season really looks good this season, make that extra investment in inventory, for example, or hire this extra worker. So there’s that piece, for sure.

And then, of course, continuing all the work that we’re doing around data innovation to continue to be able to offer more capital to small businesses and continue to offer better terms so there’s quite a bit of work around data innovation. Despite everything we’ve done in the past year, we know that we’re just getting started there.

Peter: Right, well, it’s exciting times and I really appreciate you coming on the show today, Rania.

Rania: Thanks for having me, Peter.

Peter: Okay, see you

Rania: Alright, bye.

Peter: As I said earlier, this is a really good time to be a small business owner. You have access to tools that simply weren’t available just a few years ago and it’s really interesting to me that there’s many companies competing to be that financial hub for the small business owner. Obviously, QuickBooks have a massive leg up because they have a relationship with millions and millions of small business owners already, interesting that they’re back growing fast again adding new customers, but the thing is, most small business owners don’t really want to sit around managing finances.

They want to run their business, they often have a passion for the industry that they’re in and they don’t want to sit around thinking about money and payments and getting a loan and that sort of thing. I feel like just like in the consumer space, I feel like in the small business space we’re not far away from really having tools that can anticipate your needs, that can really provide intelligence that is actionable, that is useful and business owners will be able to spend less time on the financial side of their business. It’s exciting times and I think we’re going to see it become ever more useful as time goes on.

Anyway on that note, I will sign off. I very much appreciate you listening and I’ll catch you next time. Bye.

Today’s show was sponsored by LendIt Fintech USA 2019, the world’s leading event in financial services innovation. It’s coming up on April 8th through 9th, 2019, at Moscone West in San Francisco. Registration is now open and we are also taking speaker applications. You can find out more by going to lendit.com/usa.

PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION SESSION NO. 176/ANIL STOCKER

Welcome to the Lend Academy Podcast, Episode No. 176. This is your host, Peter Renton, Founder of Lend Academy and Co-Founder of LendIt Fintech.

Today’s show is sponsored by LendIt Fintech Europe 2018, Europe’s leading event for innovation in financial services. It’s coming up very shortly on the 19th and 20th of November in London at the Business Design Centre. It’s not too late a get a ticket as we’re recording this. You can go to lendit.com to find out more.

Peter Renton: Today on the show, I’m delighted to welcome Anil Stocker, he is the CEO and Co-Founder of MarketInvoice. Now MarketInvoice has been around for quite a few years, they have really become the leader certainly in the UK, and potentially even globally, in online invoice finance space, but they certainly have aspirations far beyond that.

We get into that in some detail on the show, we talk about their approach to underwriting and we spend quite a bit of time going in depth on their new partnership with Barclays, fascinating conversation there about that, where they’ve got quite a deep partnership with Barclays providing invoice finance to the million small business customers that Barclays retail bank has in the UK. It was a fascinating conversation, I hope you enjoy the show.

Welcome to the podcast, Anil!

Anil Stocker: Hi, Peter.

Peter: Okay, so I like to get these things started by giving the listeners a little bit of background about yourself and sort of what you did before you started MarketInvoice.

Anil: Sure, so my name is Anil, and I came over to the UK, went to school and studied economics and actually met my future co-founders at university. I first started working in a big investment bank, I joined Lehman Brothers back in 2006 working in a private equity fund, investing in companies and that’s where I kind of got to grips a little bit with cash flow and financial requirements from growing businesses and then went to another kind of smaller private equity shop. Started in 2010, to kind of looked around and wanted to start a business and that’s when I kind of started to think about fintech and what I could do as an entrepreneur.

Peter: Okay, so what was sort of the catalyst, what was the idea that led to the founding of MarketInvoice?

Anil: Yeah, look it really came from spending a lot of time with small businesses. I think I had a bunch a ideas. One of them was to kind of start investing in small businesses in particular sectors here and I probably met about 50 businesses and they all kind of were telling me a little bit about their troubles of scaling, the need for cash, the difficulty of doing business with the banks if you were a small business.

So it was really kind of born out of that experience of talking to them and probing around what the problems were that I started to think about what I could do. What’s interesting is many of the businesses wanted access to capital, not necessarily equity investment. They wanted debt finance, they were struggling to understand invoice finance. They had ambitious plans and they wanted to grow, but they just felt frustrated that the lack of funding was holding them back.

At a kind of macro level finance I felt was on the precipice of change, the big banks were being distracted by other regulatory issues, and fixing themselves inside and I felt that technology would change finance just like it has changed many other sectors so that’s when we started writing the business plan of MarketInvoice and trying to make a difference.

Peter: So why specifically invoice finance, why did you start with that? I mean, you could have done…obviously, Funding Circle was already I think just getting going around that time. Why invoice financing, and why not just do regular loans or what was the reason?

Anil: Yeah, look invoice finance was a slightly less well understood segment of the market, it was very manual, there was a lot of paperwork that was quite complex to get set up so we just felt like the pain was being felt a lot by small businesses. We also figured that if we could make this easier to use, a lot of small businesses would find invoice finance extremely powerful because for many businesses their only assets that they have are their invoices, the work that they’ve completed and waiting to collect cash on.

And then from an investor perspective, because, you know, we wanted to do a marketplace where high net worth would fund these invoices, we felt that from an investor perspective it was quite nice to have knowledge that this company was going to receive cash in the future against an invoice so it is secured lending. So that enabled us to de-risk it somewhat from just an unsecured loan so we thought that could be a unique way for us to make a name for ourselves in this space.

Peter: Right. So when you sort of did your due diligence and looked around at the invoice finance space in the UK, I mean, what did see…I mean, who are the major players? Like in the US it’s a very fragmented market, what’s it like in the UK?

Anil: So in the UK, the big banks control the majority of the market, they have 60 to 70%, there  are also independent factoring companies that account for the rest. The big banks tend to focus more on the larger end of the market which leaves a little bit of a hole at the smaller end and some of the independent factoring companies approach that segment. That’s why we wanted to start at the smaller end and figure out a product that could be used by the smallest of businesses. We felt that if we helped the smallest of businesses as they grow they would come back to us and feel allegiance to us.

Peter: Right, right. And so maybe you can take us through the offerings. I see on your website here you can actually finance individual invoices, you can finance like all of your invoices, you can get funding against contracts, what have you. So tell us what you started with, what was the very first product and how has that evolved over time?

Anil: Our first product was the single invoice finance product. So let’s say you’re a media company, you’re doing work with Sony, you have a hundred thousand pound invoice, you’re waiting 90 days for it to get paid, the business could bring that invoice to MarketInvoice, you could apply online, get a decision within 24 hours and borrow let’s say 80% of that invoice face value up front. They still get the remaining payment at the end when they get paid so this kind of on demand, pay as we go, single invoice product was really perfect for small businesses that were looking to grow, that didn’t have a big enough overdraft, that couldn’t get any debt finance and this was a neat tool for them to top up the amount of money that they could loan with us.

What we found was that when a company starts to use us once, they would then use us repeatedly. So from there, we saw that many businesses were starting to use us repeatedly were growing, were getting larger, they started to have the need for a more permanent solution and that’s when we introduced the invoice finance subscription.

So we built some technology that integrates with a company’s accountancy platform, pulls data and gives them a permanent balance so they can download a certain amount of money against total stock and invoices. That also makes it more secure, makes it a lower APR product so it’s quite nice for businesses to start with single invoice and then graduate on to the subscription.

As we’ve been working and funding companies in different sectors, we also identified that some of the more newer industries like software companies, they had these contracts that were one year/two years in duration that would get a monthly payment so that’s when we developed our contract finance offering where they could accelerate payments of that contract up into one upfront payment. So let’s say you’re a company and you’ve got a database and you’re getting paid every month, you can take 12 months of those payments and get financed against that and that lends itself well to technology businesses.

Peter: So those three products…I mean, what is sort of the volume that you do…how is it sort of split between those three products?

Anil: So we’ve obviously had a lot more years of track record with the single invoice finance product so we’re probably about 60% still single invoice, about 40% subscription and we would count the contract finance within the subscription, but we expect the real vector of growth to come from the subscription finance product because those tend to be larger businesses that have a more permanent need for capital. So what it’s evolving into is that the single invoice is kind of the entry product and then companies graduate on to subscription.

Peter: Right, right, got it. So you must sort of have a pretty tight kind of connection to the accounting software for these small businesses, I expect, because I’m just wondering about… you can’t sort of email in a PDF of an invoice or maybe you can, I don’t know, you tell me, but it’s pretty easy obviously to create a fake invoice. How do you work with that, I mean, how do you sort of verify that everything is correct, do you have to interface into the accounting software for everybody even if it’s just a single invoice?

Anil: No, so if you’re using single invoice you can manually upload invoices and many companies do that. We are doing extensive checks on the borrowers as they apply to us so we look at the business, we calculate the credit score of the business, of the borrower, we take public information as well as financial information, we do fraud checks, we approve the borrower, we’re then performing the verification of invoices through various means. We’re able to verify that invoices have been received by end customers, we look at the quality of the end customers and we are then able to release funding on a risk-based approach so every transaction is placed into a different risk category and we have different advance rates and different fees. Now if you’re using the subscription product, you do need to integrate your accountancy package because that’s a tighter relationship…

Peter: Right.

Anil: These companies are drawing down funding, sometimes every day, every week, so one way that we monitor the business’s performance is through their banking data and their accountancy platform so that enables us to automate a lot of the work that was being done manually with manual reconciliations by banks.

Peter: Right, you’ve got an interesting product, it’s not like….with a small business loan you’re underwriting the borrower. Here, you underwrite the borrower, the vendor and the actual transaction itself because, obviously, there could be…someone could say that it’s…there could be a real invoice out there, but the amounts might be different. So you mentioned just briefly that you validate the transaction, but like how do you do that?

Anil: There’s a number of different ways. Obviously the first transaction is the riskiest one because the company doesn’t have a track record.

Peter: Right.

Anil: So we have various e-mail based ways, online…you know, some companies have online portals that they log into. For large transactions we might even do a telephone based verification as well so the first transaction is the riskiest, then as the company starts to build track record we see payments flowing into their bank account. We’re able to sort of derive patterns and understand what’s the funding need of this company and if there’s anything out of the ordinary we might re-verify so it’s really a risk-based approach we take.

Peter: Okay, fair enough. I know you guys have been around for a while now and you really are one of the leaders in this space, certainly in the online area. How are you finding new deals? Are you finding that you have…you get a lot of referrals, what are the typical sources to find new customers?

Anil: Businesses find us directly so we get a lot of organic referrals from entrepreneurs that have used us and talk about us, we’ve built a little bit of a brand here in the UK, we’ve done some advertising, we go to relevant events and kind of do customer case studies so companies hear about us and apply. We work with other referrals so we work with the accounting community, we work with financial brokers who pass us opportunities to look at to be funded. And now, we’re really trying to start to make deeper connections in certain industries where we know that the underlying customer base is very well suited to our product. And finally, strategic partnerships are a big area of interest for us right now, you know, partnering with banks, partnering with financial institutions, partnering with accountancy, software providers, that’s perhaps the next phase of how we can really scale this.

Peter: Right, right. And then what about moving on to the other side of the equation here on the investors. I know you guys are members of the P2PFA, you have a peer-to-peer element, I’m curious about…you said you started off with high net worth individuals, I presume you have institutions as well, I mean, how’s that mix? Tell us a little bit about the investor side.

Anil: Yes, we started off with high net worth investors, but as we’ve developed, we have moved that funding mix to be more coming from institutions and within those institutions we now have banks deploying funding on the platform, so we have three/four banks, they understand the asset class, they can give us more scalable lines, they have lower return expectations than the high net worth community. So we’ve now pivoted more to having 70% from institutions and 30% from high net worths so yeah, we see the future really coming and scaling through institutional arrangements.

Peter: Right, right, that makes sense. So then what are the interest rates here, like tell us a little bit about the interest rates you’re charging. Obviously, these are pretty short term, the durations, I imagine, 30, 45 days or something. What are the returns that you’re providing and what is the sort of the cost to the customer?

Anil: Yes, so as you say, it’s a great asset class for investors, it’s short durations, it’s secured and it’s yielding, blended across all of the products, probably 5 to 6%, between 4 and 6%, in terms of annual return. It depends a little bit on your mix so if you’re funding single invoices you might get slightly higher yield and if you’re funding the subscriptions which are a lower risk product then you will get slightly less than the range that I mentioned.

So you know, blended, we’re trying to get out 4 to 5% or so for investors which is really quite a good return given the short duration nature of the asset class. You know, funds are not locked up for many years, you know, investors can scale in and out, they can tweak their mandate to exclude certain sectors or certain geographies or they could put limits on total amounts that they would like to have deployed against a single borrower or even against a debtor, right, so if you want a max exposure to Amazon. It makes you not reach that, our system makes it very easy for you to control that. So it’s a pretty attractive proposition for investors.

Peter: Right, right. One of the great things about the UK platforms is you guys put a lot of information online for investors and I’m just on your statistics page right now and I see you’re just under 3 billion pounds of total originations as of this recording. I’m looking through and you’ve really had…2018, you’ve had a great year, so far, as far as loan volume goes, looks like you’re going to be close to double, probably more than double by the end of the year it looks like, so you’ve really ramped things up. I mean, what’s driving your growth this year?

Anil: So that’s really coming from our subscription product so, you know, companies that get on to the subscriptions, they really tend to stick around. When we look at the data from the banks,  invoice finance users stay for on average five years using this product. So when we get a customer and they start to use our subscription, start to download cash every month then it starts to layer. As we get more customers, we get more volume building so that’s why we’re quite excited at the moment that we can really scale this out and become a very big player in this market in the UK which is large. There’s like 20/25 billion outstanding in invoice finance in the UK, it’s one of the biggest markets in the world.

I guess the other reason is that people are gaining more awareness of invoice finance as a product. It used to be viewed as a kind of a niche product, it used to be viewed as like a funding product of last resort, but business owners now, especially the younger generation, really understand that they can unlock this cash on their invoices.

In a recessionary environment or in an uncertain environment, banks and other financial institutions are telling their customers more about asset-backed lending because they don’t want to be in the unsecured space, they want to be lending against assets such as invoices so there’s great awareness, the market is generally growing as well which is adding to it. When people start to shop around they will usually find us and so we’re getting a lot of interest right now.

Peter: Right, right, okay, makes sense. So I want to switch gears and talk a little bit about the big deal that you announced here with Barclays just a couple of months ago so the first question on it is when did you start talking to Barclays? It sounds like from what I’ve read, they approached you so tell us sort of how this all began.

Anil: Yes, so it’s interesting because Barclays here in the UK ring fenced part of their bank, so they separated out their corporate bank from their small business and retail bank. This retail bank called Barclays UK has about 1 million business customers that have bank accounts with them and their product team at Barclays reviewed their product set, reviewed the applications that they were getting and they did not have an invoice financing solution that was fit for purpose. They had an invoice finance product that was very well suited to large corporates, but nothing that really met the mark in terms of experience, speed and support for small businesses like businesses turning over less than 10 million.

And then they went on, I guess, this soul searching, should we build it ourselves, should we partner and I think they kind of realized that, hey, actually, we’re not just looking for bits of software, we’re actually looking for culture, DNA and innovation of trying to make our products more digital and that’s when they did a review of the market and they approached us and we sat down and spoke with them and it was one of these great meetings where we really had a meeting of the minds.

They liked our approach, we said that not only do we have technology, we also have great people who are on the phone helping customers, we have a great brand and so they were not looking…important, they were not just looking for like a software provider, they were looking for a true company they could partner with and for us to be a catalyst for change within their finance products which is why this is such an exciting partnership and they worked extremely fast for a bank.

I think we had an initial meeting, we had two or three months sizing up the opportunity and then when they said they want to go…it took about seven months from beginning to end to get the agreement signed and then we’ve already launched a pilot, already getting leads through the door and I’ve been really impressed with how they work.

I don’t think it’s just Barclays, I think many banks right now are thinking about their future, they’re thinking about their product set, how they’re going to compete, how they’re going to retain customers and it’s a very good time for fintech and banks to be talking.

Peter: Right, right. We’re seeing that globally, certainly in the US there’s a lot of activity between fintechs and banks and I think it’s only going to become more so. So that sounds like it was less than 12 months from first conversation to launch of the pilot, it sounds like.

Anil: Yeah, well I guess from first conversation to launch the pilot was about 12 months.

Peter: Okay.

Anil: From the time that they actually decided we want to do this, it was less than 12 months.

Peter: Right, so then just describe how it works exactly because I read that they’ve taken an equity piece in your company so I presume that’s like a separate piece because what you’re doing, it sounds like, is providing these million small business customers with an opportunity for them to finance their invoices, but did you create like a white label site that sits on Barclays.com, just tell us how it works.

Anil: So the proposition is completely co-branded so it’s not white labeled, it’s a partnership and how the partnership works is that Barclays has thousands of relationship managers and staff that handle queries around finance from their customers and we have been embarking on a program of training around how these relationship managers and call center staff can qualify opportunities for invoice finance.

They then push them into our system, they do this online through a portal and that comes into our system and our sales team or our business specialists get on the phone and explain our product in a little bit more detail and then they come through on to the online application form. So it’s kind of a hand-off from the Barclays point person to a MarketInvoice point person. That’s kind of stage one, that’s kind of the phase that we’re in, we’re also starting to do joint marketing in the next year to kind of educate the base on invoice finance and that this is now an option at Barclays.

We’re also going to be working on a digital journey so as businesses log into their business banking dashboard, they’ll see certain widgets and they’ll see a MarketInvoice widget which should outline how much funding they could potentially unlock by using MarketInvoice and then they would come through an entirely digital journey as well. So these things are all phased right because you want to get to market quickly…

Peter: Sure.

Anil: …you want to test and learn.

The second important piece of the partnership is next year that Barclays are doing a lot of work to rely on our credit models for underwriting. It’s the first time that they would ever do this, that they would rely on a third party credit model and then they would start to fund their customers coming through this origination channel so they would start to fund their own customers on the platform so it would turn into an origination and funding partnership with Barclays.

Peter: Interesting.

Anil: So it’s quite exciting.

Peter: Sure, that’s really interesting. So then when do you actually launch….you said you’re in pilot mode right now, is there going to be like an actual launch where you basically have…it’s all out there to….like is there going to be a big public launch when you sort of move on from the pilot phase?

Anil: Yes, so we announced the partnership in August in the Barclays quarterly results call. It was mentioned by Jes Staley, the CEO of Barclays, and we will then do another big push on the national launch so the pilot is a subset. There’s about 120 people that have been trained up in the pilot, they’re gathering great data, we’re getting our first customers through and then sometime in Q1, date to be confirmed we will do the national launch which we’ll scale up by ten times.

As you can imagine, there’s quite a lot of preparation work that needs to be done both on our side and their side so as soon as we can launch it we will, we’ll kind of do a big splash and tell the world that we’re now going to the national launch.

Peter: It sounds like from the way you’re talking, it really sounds like, you found this to be a good relationship where, as you said, there was a meeting of the minds and I’m just curious because there’s always talk about the culture clash between large banks and fintech companies that have been used to moving fast and being nimble. You can just walk into Canary Wharf and it’s a different feel than it is like walking into your offices so how has that been culturally? It sounds like…just tell me what’s it like, do you feel like you’ve had to really work to fit these cultures or has it been more natural?

Anil: That’s a great question, it’s something that we’ve been aware of and debated openly with Barclays since the beginning and the last thing they want to do is stifle us. They want us to challenge them, they want us to come up with ideas, they want us to kind of push the boundaries, but I think that this is only possible if really the senior people at the bank buy into that and really believe in the strategy of embracing partnering with fintechs and making things digital and improving the experience.

What’s quite unique, I think, at Barclays is that they’ve always been a brand that has wanted to adopt technology fast and be at the forefront of the tech revolution. I think they were the bank that rolled out the first ATM, the first credit card so, you know, they have right from the top great engagement from the top of Barclays, from the CEO of Barclays UK down and the core business people are all on top of it and know there will be bumps in the road, there’ll be instances where people at the bank will say that’s not possible, but so far they’ve been really good at like then saying, we have to make it work. Our experience so far has been great, they’re really putting actions behind their words and we’re making really fast progress.

So I’m not going to say that every bank will be like this, but if at the top the culture is one of, we want to embrace the change and we want to work with fintech partners as true equals and really do something new then I think a huge potential is possible. But I think, it’s also important for fintechs to realize that when they might be working on a project and if it is slowing down and the appetite is not there sometimes it’s better to disengage and not continue it because you don’t want to get bogged down in a relationship that’s not working.

Even though Barclays might well have an equity stake in MarketInvoice, it will not be a controlling stake, you know, we are an independent company, we have our own business, we have our own brand, we’re free to partner with lots of other strategic partners in the future. So we’re still going fast, we’re still nimble and we have a great partner with Barclays.

Peter: Right, so then I can imagine you’ve got a million customers, I mean a million potential customers there and I can see you will do like a billion pounds roughly in 2018. It doesn’t take long to sort of see how that could scale pretty dramatically with Barclays, but you don’t want to have like 75% of your business there so how are you managing that as you scale that up? I’m sure you’re very cognizant of the fact that you can’t have all your eggs in one basket, but just tell us how you’re thinking about that for 2019 and beyond.

Anil: Absolutely, we’re very excited about the work we’re doing with Barclays, but they’re not the only partner, right, we have lots of other types of partners that we can work with, be it accountancy or other software companies, other fintechs, other people who are coming on to the market and we also have our standalone business so we have to work hard on all aspects of our business.

Peter: Right.

Anil: It’s not just one partnership that we’re working on and that’s very much our focus in the next few years.

Peter: Sure, sure. So we’re almost out of time, but before I let you go I’ve got to ask you about…it’s on your website so clearly you’re not being coy about it, but there’s business loans it says available soon and funding up to 100,000 pounds, 12-month term. Obviously, you’ve put in our website so what is deal with business loans, are you launching that soon, or why have you got it there?

Anil: We’re currently testing out a loan proposition and again this is coming from our customers who….many of them have been using invoice finance, but also would like a loan and it really just makes a lot of sense for us to…you know, we know these companies very well, they have a long track record with us, we’re seeing their monthly payments in and out, we’re really the best place to offer them a loan.

Whereas in the past, we’ve had to coexist with other banks who might be giving them a loan or an overdraft, we’d like to more and more become a one-stop shop in trying to offer them all the products that they need to run their working capital.

You know, it’s not just loans that we’re interested in, we’re also potentially interested in trade finance, in asset finance; the products that companies need to grow as they evolve their businesses. So we’re gathering some data, we’re testing it out in 2018. In 2019, we’ll probably do a bit more of a sizable push on it and see how it gets taken up by the market.

Peter: It looks like you’re not going head-to-head necessarily with Funding Circle because these are shorter term loans. Is that the plan?

Anil: Yes, yes, obviously, there’s lots of providers out there, it’s not just Funding Circle, I mean there’s banks. We want to compete in the same space as banks and we’re very much focused on B2B businesses and trading business that get paid on terms so we know the verticals that we like, the companies that use invoice finance and it’s really a cross sell and a way of retaining customers for longer and helping them more on their journey.

Peter: Right, right. Okay, you’ve got a lot on your plate, but when you look to 2019, what are some of the things you’re excited about beyond sort of the Barclays partnership, obviously it’s going to take up a lot of your time personally, I imagine, but what else are you looking at for 2019?

Anil: 2019 is all about scaling up partnerships, working on some more, looking at our product mix and then behind the scene, a lot of tech and automation and data work to make our processes really tech-driven, really smooth, frictionless and automating some of the back end so it’s going to be a very busy year and we’re growing the team as well so we’re hiring and trying to bring in the best talent so, yes, we’ve got a lot of things on our plate.

Peter: Okay, well we’ll have to leave it there. Best of luck to you, Anil, I really appreciate you coming on the show today.

Anil: Thank you very much, Peter, thank you.

Peter: Okay, see you.

Anil: Bye.

Peter: You know, I think there have been so many important partnerships announced between banks and fintech platforms this year, really in the second half of this year it feels like, There’s been a real acceleration of that and I don’t know if any are more important than the ones between Barclays and MarketInvoice, Barclays have taken an equity stake.

Clearly they’re all in and I really appreciated Anil’s comments saying that this is coming from the top down at Barclays, you need to have that buy-in for these partnerships to be successful. They certainly have all of the ingredients to make this a really successful, long term partnership and could be very much something that the whole industry can learn from about how they’ve put this deal together.

Anyway on that note, I will sign off. The Lend Academy podcast is taking next week off for Thanksgiving, we’ll be back in two weeks. I very much appreciate your listening. And I’ll catch you next time. Bye.

Today’s show was sponsored by LendIt Fintech Europe 2018, Europe’s leading event for innovation in financial services. It’s happening November 19th and 20th, just a few days away as we record this, at the Business Design Centre in London. Tickets are available at lendit.com/europe and you can also buy tickets at the door.

Anil will be on stage with the Head of Barclays Business Bank, Ian Rand, talking much more about this partnership. If you’re listening to this after November 20th, you can actually go to lendit.com/europe, click on the videos, the videos are uploaded within a week or two of the event and you’ll be able to watch the video of the conversation between Anil and Ian Rand from Barclays.