Fintech Power50 Coronavirus Survey: Boss Insights

The Covid-19 pandemic has been an unprecedented time for many. Despite this, and that many businesses are struggling to get by, the fintech industry has proved itself to be particularly resilient this year, taking advantage of the opportunity to grow and prove itself as a vital sector. In light of this, The Fintech Power50 has conducted a survey of its members earlier in the year asking how their business was fairing during the pandemic to help support a community sentiment.

Boss Insights opens the door to customer arbitrage enabling FIs to acquire new business borrowers without taking additional risk. By developing a universal API platform, Boss Insights provides 360⁰ insights on business borrowers, integrating all of their data and streamlining the borrower and lender journey. Here CEO and Co-founder Keren Moynihan tells the Power50 about their 2020 experience. 

What was the main challenge as a result of the pandemic for your company, and how did you work to overcome this?
Throughout the pandemic, Boss Insights went through four stages: reaction, listening, partnering and collaboration. The first thing we did was react, ensuring our employees were financially secure. We then started listening. Early on we predicted a large surge in business loan applications. We offered part of our technology for free as we wanted to support the businesses being affected by Covid.  We were featured in a Forbes article by Ron Shevlin at Cornerstone Advisors.  On April 3rd, The SBA released the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) that grew to $659B. In 14 days, 14 years’ worth of loan applications flooded the system. We moved quickly to adapt our platform to the US PPP program and in collaboration with Oracle approached the market.  

Boss Insights has provided the latest in digitsation for business banking units. We offer real time access to business customer information automating all parts of the business lending circle including application, decisioning, onboarding, monitoring, renewals, cross selling and risk monitoring. Banks and credit unions who adopted API based technology not only saw huge wins during these past few quarters, but truly supported their business clients.  The dust is slowly settling, but will banks and credit unions take the lessons learned and make real changes moving forward? 

What measures have you put in place to ensure the safety of your staff?

Since March 16th, Boss Insights has gone 100% virtual to ensure the safety of our staff. We also guaranteed our employees financial security.  We continue to hire for add, not for fit as we are growing in market.  

What was your main focus when navigating through these uncertain times? 

At the start of 2020, the world was uncertain.  Given the slowing of the economy, Boss Insights focused on offering an easy and cost effective way for banks and credit unions to support their business customers. Our vision is to empower lenders to measure businesses on their merit in addition to their collateral. 

 Pre- Covid, we were in market for a number of years increasing automation in business lending by 90% in qualifying, decisioning, onboarding, monitoring, cross selling and renewals.  Our API hub covers the greatest number of business cloud based systems: accounting software and extending past that to other parts of the business: payments, billing, marketing, sales and operations.   That means that we can support banks with SMB and commercial books.

 In 2020, where other providers solved PPP by gathering PDFs, we used APIs in accounting and payroll to automate forgiveness calculation, getting loans off the books and minimising the human lift to do so.   Traditionally, it takes up to 2 years to solidify a client relationship and we were able to grow our customer base in under 2 weeks. 

What are your plans moving forward to ensure a successful operation as the pandemic continues?

We will work with business banking units at banks and credit unions – both SMB and commercial.  We support them with real time actionable information on their business clients.  With an uncertain economic future, real time information is of the utmost importance.  

 It’s what I wished for when I was a commercial banker.  My mandate was to bring in businesses and manage the loans, and the manual parts of the job made it impossible. Removing manual work, lets business bankers focus on relationships. That has real financial outcomes for FIs and businesses. The business and the bank both win. When I was a banker, I felt like I was fighting for my clients every day – a decade later, I still hear the echoes of what that sounded like, and there was no pandemic happening at that time. That experience informs everything that Boss Insights does.  We are here to listen and then provide solutions easily and cost effectively.  With PPP Forgiveness we automated calculations in 3 days.  With digital business banking, it’s 8 weeks.  That’s all that stands between a cumbersome manual process and an automated one.  We’ve been so fortunate to work with such collaborative FIs to date and intend to continue to support them.  This way, by collaborating, we will support the economic engine of the future: businesses.

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