Payability (Revisited) with Maya Pochiraju | E194

Scaling vendor financing in the era of Covid.

On today’s episode, Jason is going to talk to Maya Pochiraju, VP of product at Payability. Today, Maya will talk about the challenges faced during covid by retailers and themselves in scaling to a giant shift to online business. 

Episode Highlights:

  • 00.56: Maya says, Payability sits at the intersection of e-commerce, financing, and payments. It is the core financial platform for all e-commerce sellers providing both financing and payment solutions to help customers scale and grow their businesses. 

  • 02.15: Amazons and Shopify’s up in the world were able to tap into their data through APIs and really use e-commerce specific metrics to underwrite our customers, says Maya.

  • 02.50: Jason asks when you go to deal a traditional bank, they look at the simpler time-proven, easier, faster things for them, which is limited based on the fact that human being is reviewing that. But when you throw so many points of data, how many points of data do you guys typically consume on an average case?

  • 04.32: Customer says cashless is really the life of their business, especially waiting extended periods of time for their funds, and can really tie up their business and limit ability to grow completely. 

  • 05.10 Maya says their customers are all e-commerce sellers of varying sizes. It could be a seller as new as three months in business all the way up to someone who’s been in business for years. 

  • 06.58 Maya reiterates, “We take our relationship with our customers seriously, and so our customer service team or sales team, our product team got on the phone with our customers to understand, is there more than we are seeing? How can we continue to help, and how can we continue to grow, and that relationship that we built with our customers helped us be their preferred partner through the year?”

  • 07.52 Maya explains that they have one of the core payment products, a Payability seller card that allows their customers to spend their funds immediately and on the go.

  • 08.31: Jason asks, “Please share just how much your lending volumes increased over that period of time?”

  • 09.22: In growing the company, it is hard to continue growing the number of users you support without growing your headcount and talent and team, says Maya.

  • 10.34: The instant advances that we provide our capital advances about start customers to invest in inventory or advertising, says Maya.

  • 11.06: E-commerce business owners look and feel very different vantage traditional SMB, and we want to make sure our products really understand that, and that is a part of our customer experience, says Maya.

  • 11.32: Jason says the backlog or shipping containers to come out of to get into the harbor in this crisis point is unprecedented in US ports. 

  • 12.21: Maya points out that supply chain challenges have caused the increase in kind of time to get inventory from upstream vendors to our customers. 

  • 14.00: The technology is what drives the business and what drives our customer experience, says Maya.

3 Key Points:

  1. Maya explains that they have a lot and a ton of data that they leverage on a daily basis to continue to serve their customers.

  2. Maya shares how their financing products are really microgeneration in nature and how they quickly got customers and more money with their daily payment products.

  3. The e-commerce marketplaces have done a fantastic job of giving their sellers access to share data so that we don’t have to rely on traditional metrics but instead can lean in on e-commerce specific metrics, says Maya.

Tweetable Quotes:

  • “When talking about scaling typically, vendor financing is the biggest issue.” – Jason

  • “We are consuming over 1700 data points on an average customer” -Maya

  • “We have done to date almost four and a half billion dollars worth of financing.” – Maya

  • “We think about how we can make our financing our products very targeted to the e-commerce world e-commerce.” - Maya


Resources Mentioned:

Fintech ImpactJason PereiraFintech