This week’s Finovate Podcast episodes are both focused on small and medium sized businesses, and the opportunities that fintech is creating for bankers, innovators, and small business owners themselves.

Our first guest is Karen Mills, former Small Business Administrator for the Obama Administration, and author of the book Fintech, Small Business & the American Dream. Greg caught up with Karen to talk about how the Great Recession hurt small businesses in particular, and how fintech has been able to step in and help.

Our second episode features Jeremy Berger of Arival Bank, a Best of Show winning demoer from FinovateAsia 2018. Arival is a challenger bank reaching out to unbanked/underbanked small businesses all over the world. The company is expanding from Asia into the United States and Europe, and Greg spoke with Jeremy about the company’s fintech-first solution to the challenges facing SMB banking.

Next week Greg will be speaking with Wayne Miller of The Venture Center, a fintech accelerator with ties to FIS and the ICBA.

Subscribe, download, and listen today!

September 12, 2019 | 2pm Eastern Daylight Time | Register now

Each year billions of documents are produced by the banking industry in the US and Europe. These documents include statements, notices, correspondence, and bills that are essential to managing relationships with customers. However, many banks still rely on legacy print management solutions that cost millions of dollars in maintenance every year, haven’t been updated in over 2 decades, don’t support modern digital access methods like mobile, and most importantly, they don’t conform to modern privacy and security regulations.

Join this #FinovateWebinar with Nuxeo to learn how your peers are modernizing print management in today’s age of privacy. We will cover how to: 

• Replace expensive printing and posting with digital delivery and a “mobile first” strategy
• Modernize antiquated and expensive legacy print management solutions
• Manage and maintain compliance with regulatory requirements, such as GDPR and the California Privacy Act
• Delivers consistent customer service for the print impaired ensuring compliance with Section 508, AMA, AODA, the UK Equality Act

Featuring

• Chris McLaughlin, Chief Marketing Officer, Nuxeo
• Tim Nelms, Vice President International, Crawford Technologies

Register now >>

To help support its rapid growth, online SME lender Kabbage has closed a $200 million revolving credit facility. The financing comes courtesy of an unnamed subsidiary of a life insurance firm, and was managed and administered by 20 Gates Management and Atalaya Capital Management. The funding adds to the $700 million securitization Kabbage announced earlier this year, and marks the longest period of committed debt funding for the company.

“This transaction further diversifies Kabbage’s committed sources of funding and prepares us to meet the escalating demand for capital access among small businesses,” Kabbage Head of Capital Markets Deepesh Jain said. He called 2019 a “tide-shifting year,” citing the more than $670 million customers accessed via Kabbage in the second quarter.

Kabbage provides SMEs with a line of credit of up to $250,000 with six-, 12-, and 18-month term options available. Businesses can apply for funding online via Kabbage’s mobile app and get a decision in as little as ten minutes. Since it was founded in 2009, the company has provided more than 185,000 U.S. small businesses access to more than $7 billion in capital.

Atlanta, Georgia-based Kabbage demonstrated its Kabbage Card at FinovateSpring 2015. The card enables small business owners to take their Kabbage line of credit with them to make purchases for inventory or supplies wherever they are. The company is also a veteran of our developers conference, presenting its automated lending platform at FinDEVr Silicon Valley 2015.

Featured last month in CEO World’s look at companies that are fighting for fair lending, Kabbage teamed up with online banking platform Azlo in May to launch a new financing program for SMEs called Mission Street Capital. Also in May, the company announced a partnership with the Building Trades Employers’ Association to help provide funding to female and minority-owned business contractors.

Mary Meeker, general partner at Bond Capital, a VC firm she founded, released her Internet Trends Report this week at Recode’s Code conference. The report, which aims to deconstruct the future of the internet, has come to be a yearly highlight for techies since 1995, as it contains data and insights on nearly every aspect of the internet.

At 333 pages long, the report contains a wealth of information relevant to a range of industries, so we’ve dissected a quick look at some of the details that are relevant and useful specifically for banking and fintech.

• The number of internet users is at 50% global penetration but growth is slowing.
• The Asia Pacific opportunity persists: Asia Pacific claims 21% of global internet users. The U.S. trails at 8%.
• Ecommerce growth is “solid” and up from last year.
• Customer acquisition costs are rising and have been steadily increasing over time.
• Customers try a new service if they see a positive product recommendation or if they can first use a freemium version. In fact, Meeker said the freemium strategy as a business model is “just getting started.”
• Investment from VCs, public stock exchanges, and IPOs remains high.
• The best ways to engage with audiences are through short form video or voice engagement, such as podcasts or Amazon Echo, which now has 4.7 million users (up 2x since last year).
• Cyber attacks are on the rise but the time it takes to detect them is falling.
• Digital payments account for more than 50% of daily transactions.

In the report, Meeker also mentioned specific fintechs and their growth. Including:

• China’s Alipay has 1 billion users, up 2x in two years.
• South Korea’s Toss has 12 million users, up 2x in one year.
• Revolut has 4 million users, up 2x in 10 months.
• Brazil’s NuBank has 9 million customers, up 2x in one year.
• Latin America’s Mercado Libre has had 389 million transactions, up 2x in two years.

Read the full report or check out Recode’s bullet point breakdown to get a gist of the fuller picture.

This is a guest post written by Dave Jones, VP of Product Marketing at Nuxeo, a Silver Sponsor of FinovateSpring. Jones is a strategic marketing leader and information management expert with 20+ years of experience in the technology space.

Today, consumers embrace a willingness to experiment with new ways of doing things. This, in turn, is driving the need for financial services companies to accelerate their digital transformation initiatives in order to compete and remain relevant to customers.

But digital transformation should not mean customers never talk to a human being. A digital business should look to exploit technology to create new sources of value for customers above and beyond their products and services. They should also look to increase operational agility in the service of those customers—and that service does not always have to be digital. It can, and often should, be a human interaction.

Many describe this human element within an organization as the culture – but what is culture?

It’s a shared set of values and beliefs that drive behavior. It’s not what you say, it’s what you do. It’s how people behave when no one is looking and when no one is telling them what to do that will pave the way for great innovation.

At Nuxeo, we believe that a digital culture is critical to the success of a digital transformation project. Below are four ways that culture can play a pivotal role in digital transformation projects:

1. To drive digital experiences, strive for a culture that fosters customer empathy and that values a deep understanding of customers’ needs and ecosystems.
2. To drive digital operations, focus on things that customers value, and reward digital experimentation and collaboration. Nurture a culture that embeds metrics (customer metrics) into the scorecard of every employee. And foster customer empathy and customer-led decision making.
3. To leverage digital ecosystems for broadening platforms and partnerships, nurture a culture that promotes internal and external collaboration.
4. To place digital innovation at the intersection of experiences and operations, support a culture that encourages speed instead of perfection. Develop a healthy tolerance for risk, and a willingness to fail fast and learn from failures.

In order to become a digital business and move up the digital maturity curve, no financial institute can ignore culture because it impacts everything. The traits found in strong digital and customer-focused cultures include:

• Customer Obsession

• Empathy

• Speed & Agility

• Collaboration

• Experimentation

These are the traits that successful digital businesses have in common, and they’re the traits that allow organizations to drive their digital transformation to the highest level. However, these traits are missing from many digital transformation programs, despite assertions by many who say “Yeah, we’re doing that.” This is a problem.

Most organizations are still addressing digital transformation as a tactical, short-term savings focused exercise. Some are getting some cost savings and functional agility, but very few are creating end-to-end digital businesses with a sustainable and long-term competitive advantage. What we have are organizations that think they are done with digital transformation who were never truly on the journey, and never addressed the human and cultural piece of the puzzle.

To those organizations, we implore you to rethink your strategy and to factor culture into your digital transformation journey. But to those organizations who are using empathy, collaboration, and the natural human instinct to help others as a way to deliver a stronger and more sustainable offering to their customers – bravo. You are in the enviable position of having all the right pieces in place for your digital transformation journey – all that remains is for you to push ahead, build on the strength of your new human-digital culture and enjoy the trip.

To learn more about the trends driving digital transformation and strategies for success, download this complimentary Digital Business Playbook for Financial Services. Nuxeo is a Silver Sponsor of FinovateSpring, coming to San Francisco in less than one month! Find out how you can get involved with FinovateSpring here >>

PayTech Awards, brought to you by FinTech Futures, are exciting awards in their second year that recognize excellence and innovation in the use of IT in the finance and payment industry worldwide, and the people who make it happen.

The 2019 Awards are now open for entries in the following categories:

Judged awards

• Best Consumer Payments Initiative
• Best Corporate Payments Initiative
• Best Mobile Payments Initiative
• Best Use of Biometrics in Payments
• Best Prepaid Initiative
• Best Cards Initiative
• Top Paytech Innovation
• Best E-commerce Initiative
• Best Paytech Partnership
• Paytech for Good

Leadership awards

• Rising Paytech Star Award – free to enter
• Woman in Paytech Award – free to enter
• Paytech Leadership Award – free to enter
• Paytech Team of the Year

OVUM Payments Innovation awards

• Best Real-Time Payments Solution Provider
• Best Open Banking Solution Provider
• Best Solution Provider for Payment Systems in the Cloud

Think your project deserves to win this year? Or do you know someone that should receive special recognition? The deadline has now been extended to the 19th April, so get nominating >> 

Last year attendees of the PayTech Awards enjoyed the hospitality of a luxurious Silver Sturgeon yacht as it cruised along the river Thames. This year the awards will be announced on 5 July, and will be hosted at the HAC (Honourable Artillery Company), a historic 18th Century mansion accompanied by a six acre garden in London’s Moorgate. Check out last year’s highlights and see what’s in-store:

For more information or to enquire about sponsorship opportunities, please visit the PayTech Awards website or get in touch with Jon Robson via email jon.robson@knect365.com.