Transcript

Hello. Hello everybody. Welcome to See Your Insides. My name is Vitale, with me Ricardo Dopiero from seller SFI, the financial platform for SMEs. Ricardo, first welcome. Thank you. Thank you for having me here. It's a real pleasure and if you don't mind, just give us an idea of what the company does. So Satisfy is a financial platform we that leverage machine learning and AI to develop credit scoring for ecommerce merchants. We've been in business for almost 9 years now. We have collected data and we have data supporting our credit models. With about. 12,000 companies now. We disburse alone the last nine 8 1/2 years, $1.4 billion in small business loans. To to ecommerce companies. We have developed embedded solutions with Amazon, we have connections with, with other ecommerce platforms and it's quite exciting news. I mean the company has been in, in a, in a very hot segment of the market, a lot of changes in in the lending space and. Love to talk more about this. Ohh, thank you. Thank you. Yes, OK. I think I understand it's kind of like Equifax or whatever for for the small business, but but with lending capability not just credit score lending, correct. Yeah, Yeah, I remember when I started the business that was always about, you know you have the credit scoring, but you haven't proved that the credit scoring works. So we start lending to prove that the credit card works and now that we are $1.4 billion. Come out this person nine years down the road, I think we can we can say that the credit scoring works. Excellent. Next, I also remember on gentlemen's set up a whole business just because he most private business owners, they put they put everything on their credit card because they saw how difficult to go to the bank. It's much easier to get money on that. And and so the whole business, small business, micro businesses that carry everything on the personal name rather than the business. And this guy said, no, you got to build business credit. They'll go yeah, sure. Right. So the theory was just teaching him how to build business credit. And then of course he discovered all of his teachers might as well lend them the money. Yeah, I, I think one of the biggest challenges for us is to. Change the perception that we are lender. We are more than a lender. We we would like to be a financial advisor, a financial partner to the companies that we work with. And we try to have a high tech, high touch approach. Where we we have a team that has deep expertise in the industry, but also. Uses and leverage technology to make faster and better decisions not only for us, but also for our points. That makes sense and and tell me just on that view. So your vision is to become more trusted advisor, right? High tech trusted advisor. What what's you typically gets in the way from from? Reaching their vision fast, you know, like why can't you that be on next Monday? What is it that that's holding you back? Usually back? Yeah. Like I said, we we, we started with this idea of being an online lending platform and then we expanded the idea to to branch out to different avenues. This is pre AI. Now what we are, what I'm seeking is to develop and go to market strategy that focuses more on financial inclusion for SMEs. Umm, not necessarily focusing on the lending aspect, but more on how. Other companies, other lenders can. Captured the data, can manage that data and. Promote that financial inclusion. So we are working with satisfied to we're going to have we're spinning off the company to satisfy remains with the online lending business. We're gonna have a we're gonna license and we're gonna develop further to further more technology tools. To the same innate the work that we did in the last nine years and expand to other industries and offered that same expertise to other lenders that want to automate. Their their onboarding process, the way they manage their relationships with their SME clients. Ohh, OK, OK, so it sounds like what you decided. So hey, just leave the cash cow alone. Leave the they wanna landing that we have nice branding. They trust us. Why change it and go and create another company that's a high tech company that basically, you know, tech advisor for fintech. It's like a fintech company, right? Much easier than trying to be both at the same time. Correct. The new company. The brand, well, this is the first time that I'm talking about the the the new brand, it's gonna call Phenax. It's gonna be called Phenax Sis. We're going to expand this to other industries. This is something that is is a passion of mine. When I look at the US, I still see so many opportunities for financial inclusion of assemblies regardless of of their industry. I think we we started with ecommerce because ecommerce was somehow easier to. To work with. Most ecommerce entrepreneurs are tech savvy. They they are part of the industry that is growing and has a structural. That we win for them and and then we can replicate that same methodology, but with other industries leveraging the data and so on. the US unfortunately is behind some some other countries in terms of how they deal with SME's. Nowadays, if you look at some countries in our town countries in Europe, they have open banking. Information is. And the access to information is easier for financial institutions to work with the data and and promote that inclusion. the US is still behind that. And this is something that we we believe it's an amazing opportunity for us. To apply the technology, apply the expertise and and and. Try to to make a meaningful change. Yeah, that's wonderful. Tell me before we go. I want to, I want to ask you one last question. Do you know so you're both you're lending company risk, credit assessment. That's your banking background, right? But you're a tech company, right? And what's the biggest challenge of this new of the fintech company, do you think? Because a lot of CEOs are going yeah, I wanna do that too, but like, Oh my God, I don't know what I'm in for here. We we're we're we're a bank, we're insurance company, we're a manufacturer. Like really. You're gonna be a fintech company. Like what? What's that? Breathtaking. The cross. I've been using machine learning since I started the business. The first two hires that I had for Salafi Word data scientists. Now there's a lot of hype about AI. We're still trying to figure out what does that mean for our business. There is a lot of uh, when you, when you see the I forums, they, we all talk about how risk rating should leverage AI to, to make things better, more transparent. It's not an easy answer. I would say it's, uh, we are, we are devoting a lot of time to understand. How we can make this work for us? I would say that's. One of the biggest challenges and, and there is one I'll say. Not a challenge, but an inefficiency. That we see specifically in the US, you still have a highly fragmented regulatory environment. If you look at the middle ending, if you look at money transmitter. Business, you still need to, you don't have a federal regulation step by step. Yeah, you you need to go state by state. It's like when I was at Harvard. An event organized by Endeavor a few weeks ago, and I was this, this guy that. Started in the Ukraine, his business is a digital banking business and he was talking about, you know how his digitalizing banking and Eastern Europe, Africa and Asia. No, this is all fragmented. Each country is a different country and they said well I have the same here. Ohh, wonderful. Well, listen, thank you so much, Ricardo. Really a pleasure. I mean, obviously we we just begun this topic. We haven't and and I'll have you back because I think Fintech and financial inclusion is a big, big topic to an AI. All of that. We'll come back, we'll come back to it with with more depth. But thank you so much for today. Thank you. It's been a great pleasure.