Integrated Finance with Daniel Cronin | E280
Payments infrastructure as a service.
On today's Fintech Impact episode, Jason will talk to Daniel Cronin, CEO and Co-Founder of Integrated Finance. It is a platform that helps Fintech's launch with their payment systems all ready to go.
Episode Highlights:
00:31: Integrated finance is a platform that helps fintech's to launch or incumbents or add new offerings to their existing customer base.
02:00: The APIs that work with Bank A are entirely different to the APIs that work with Bank B compounded times the number of banks you are working, says Daniel.
03:00: Integrated finance has set out to solve the problems Daniel faced at their previous venture from day one, rather than what they did last time, where they built something as fast as humanly possible and suffered the burden of rush decisions for more.
08:16: If you are a merchant using Skype or someone else to acquire funds, you are much more likely to continue to do other things with that provider of services if they are holding your funds or if they are banking you as well and Daniel wants to make it easy for any fintech to install that level of loyalty into their existing customer base without having to handle the complexity of everything.
09:09: It is important for the client that wants to work with Daniel to understand what their customers experience will be and all other things starts from there.
10:00: Businesses have very quirky needs of bank accounts and many of them need way more than one bank account. In some cases, they need thousands of bank accounts and while the underlying functionality of every bank is same, they simply can't issue more than one account to a single user.
11:45: The four letters that scare at every American when looking to do business with Europeans are GDPR, and Daniel has built our platform from a security perspective and data protection perspective here in the UK and Europe and it just conforms to GDPR.
13:03: When you board a customer with integrated finance software, the first thing our software will do is it will look up the country the business or individual's resident and it will route the account generation logic based on what's going to get me sent to jail for breaching regulation, says Daniel.
15:52: There is a stranglehold on innovation because over half of the Fintech that wanted to launch with product X, either never launched or ended up launching with product Y because it was 10 times harder.
18:03: It's kind of crazy to think of the simple fact that at the end of the day, it wasn't innovation or idea, it was the fact that it was going to take X $1,000,000 to get from point A to even launching your website, says Jason.
19:17: Holistically what we do is make the entrepreneur care less about how to work with their chosen bank because we are fairly strategic and have got own bandwidth constraints on how we add banks to our network, says Daniel.
23:32: If we don't make the cost of entry low or be as lowest as possible then any number of constrained, innovative ideas who do not have capital Rich will never see the light of day, says Jason.
25:22: A lot of Youtubers make significantly more than the average person in the world. However, mortgage companies don't deem that to be a reliable source of income.
27:01: Daniel explains how they create a single marketplace where the influences could upload everything that they have ever recommended, and their supporters could go on there and buy it through that marketplace and influencer always gets their cash and the merchant knows who did it.
29:42: The youngest of the youngest fintech startup is being told by regulators in Europe to have expert access for every single type of customer ever, because you're not allowed to launch a product that doesn't cater to the needs of vulnerable people.
32:01: Forcing consumer protection is a great way to create innovation that is now more secure, says Jason.
32:31: As crypto cools, fintech's become the higher risk category, and Daniel would be interested to see how that plays out over the next couple of years.
33:08: Daniel has added features that auto debit fees. If you're charging a pound to do a wire transfer, Integrated Finance takes that pound out of your users account and sweeps it up to a separate physical account elsewhere within your ecosystem in real-time.
34:01: It will be interesting to see what the continued demand of the regulator is over the next two years and how much of that fits into the pocket of innovation from startups racing.
34:28: One thing it would like to do is force adoption of a set of standards for identifying individuals and businesses because right now there is there's guidance given by the regulator on how you should do that is wishy-washy and it's open to interpretation.
36.32: The biggest challenge in the company where is it today is to fully evaluate the ecosystem that Daniel is trying to build and strategically add new partners as they grow.
39.15: Finding something that you love where you don't get Sunday blues changed Daniel's life about 7-8 years ago it was running his own business.
40:35: There is going to be a continuance of entrepreneurs whose dreams are dashed and whose real-world problems are not getting solved because they're going to come up to some juncture and fall at some hurdle and just be another average fintech. And as long that's happening there will be no innovation and no change in anybody's life.
3 Key Points:
Daniel explains how they target the payments piece, they go even more specific than that on account generation, because this is something that's often overlooked in Fintech.
It's the mountain of non-differentiating stuff that needs to be built before you can get your head above the water line just to breathe.
There is an asymmetric relationship with industries that are currently growing rapidly, and the way legacy industries are built to serve that growth.
Tweetable Quotes:
"Rather than focusing on the core assets of the back end of Fintech, we focus on homogenizing the experience our Fintech customers get." – Daniel
"The principal reason you increase engagement with anyone in any industry is by giving them account, and that's why we are in the payment and account space to give Fintech and Non-Fintech greater control of their user base." – Daniel
"When a customer comes to us, the first thing, we do is we analyze what their requirements are, and we set them up with a sandbox that works with the bank, and they can do what they want." – Daniel
"If I just look at my sales pipeline, there's a huge wave of innovation at top of the funnel where we see the value, pain, and hear ideas that make total sense, even though we've got no direct experience with that problem." – Daniel
"If customer says there is a specific market where I got to have real time payments, we'll look at the best providers of that service, and we'll integrate them, and by doing that, we're combining a super powerful tool like currency cloud along with the real-time payments for the specific region and now the customer gets the best of both worlds." – Daniel
"We establish a marketplace where all gaps are filled, and we're doing minimal filtering of features for every single partner, and that drives major commercial alignment." – Daniel
"I want the cost of entry to financial services to get low enough so that the problems that really stress people out in their day-to-day can be solved by someone who knows the problem best, and not by an MBA or grad or someone who's wealthy." - Daniel
Resources Mentioned:
Facebook – Jason Pereira's Facebook
LinkedIn – Jason Pereira's LinkedIn
https://www.linkedin.com/in/danielcroninif/?originalSubdomain=uk