Codat with Peter Lord | E188

Making diverse small business data accessible on one platform.

In today’s episode, Jason Pereira talks to Peter Lord - CEO of Codat. It is a platform that is building next-generation products and services for SMEs with easy, real-time data connectivity to their financial software. The company is building smart solutions that save time, money and enhance the customer experience in a matter of hours.

Episode Highlights:

  • 00.30: Peter explains, “We help our clients who are large financial companies connected to the software used by their small business customers. We connect to accounting software things like Xero, Sage, QuickBooks E-commerce software, payments and marketplaces like Amazon, eBay, etc.” 

  • 00.50 Jason affirms, “You are a savior for financial institutions because you built the integration pieces yourself. It’s not a make your integration, but essentially, you’re making it easier for people to access all that through one portal versus multiple different API instances.” 

  • 01.50: Peter studied at Southampton University as a software engineer and moved into a product role. Through that personal experience, he saw the need to automate processes.

  • 02.10: They built their business where small businesses applying for a loan had to submit financial statements and ledgers in PDF agreements. Peter and his company replaced the manual process of Xero, QuickBooks, and Sage accounting.

  • 03.41 Jason inquires,” How many different integrations have you built for different technology?” 

  • 04.00 Jason: asks, “Talk to me about some of the challenges of the amount of data you have got to basically make accessible on one platform. Give me one example in accounting software.” 

  • 04.18: Peter replies, “We cover everything from high-level financials, digital Ledger, that property loss or balance sheet reports examples right down to the transaction level detail is in the journal.” 

  • 07.45 Peter says, “There is a new client finding, new spaces for technology every week.”

  • 09.33 Jason inquires, “Codat is just an open API at this point, or are you moving data between different systems; is that something that the end consumer is doing? or is that something that you have actually built; a bunch about the shelf integrations form?”

  • 10.35: Peter shares his mission is to make life easier for small businesses, and that’s what drives in right movement.

  • 11.54: Jason asks, “Overall, this is not a small piece of work that I am curious about; any statistics on how much data you are actually parsing for people at this point?”

  • 12.40 Peter explains they are now introducing elements of lending or capital financing.

  • 13.30 Jason reiterates, “You know the value of data, right. I’m sure you thought of the number of ways that you can move it around and basically collected for these people. But small businesses are going to find ways to solve their problems with your solution that you never dreamt of so, that makes a lot of sense.” 

  • 17.00 Jason asks Peter, “What’s been the biggest challenge in the company to where it is today?” 

  • 17.07: Peter shares the biggest challenge faced by them was to hire the right people.

  • 18.05: Peter explains that they are making products, so it’s building something, building our products, continuing to see expanding and budget in the hands of more users and more users for us. 

3 Key Points:

  1. Peter talks about the creation of Codat. “What leads to its founding, and what problem are they trying to address?” 

  2. Jason asks Peter, “Talk to me about the different verticals that you are basically involved in. You have over 100 clients at this point around the world. What are the different use cases they have used before?”

  3. Peter shares, “What’s the feedback they are getting from the companies that choose to partner with Codat. What are they saying in terms of the amount of time and effort, and development costs? 

Tweetable Quotes:

  • “For our clients, it’s not just the extraction or pulling of that data, but we also take the push of data back into the software packages to help our clients reconcile what’s going on in their products with business customers and other systems of record.” - Peter Lord

  • “There are all sorts of different ways that small businesses use their accounting software running on.” - Peter Lord

  • “People are so important, and the company is our team, and so we make sure that we have been hiring the best people.” - Peter Lord


Resources Mentioned:

Fintech ImpactJason PereiraFintech