Railz with Sam Kawtharani | E233

Making accounting data more accessible and actionable.

On today's Fintech Impact episode, Jason Pereira will talk to Sam Kawtharani, VP of Product of Railz. The company collects data from different accounting systems, create a standardized file format, allows that information to be pushed into other products and vendors, and create unity around different accounting reporting systems.

Episode Highlights

  • 0.36: Railz is a single API provider for accounting and financial data on small and medium businesses or SMBs in general. With Railz, they are solving the noise in the financial data that one would have in a typical business. 

  • 0.54: We are able to connect, normalize and set analytics that you are able to consume and make the decisions, whether it's a lending application or business floor management tool, says Sam.

  • 2.21: Railz is a continuous journey of Corl, an alternative lender that uses data to make investment decisions. We started solving the problem of how you can use business accounting and financial information and make investment decisions based on that, explains Sam.

  • 4.49: Sam talks about the big verticals they have been marketing into and about different use cases they have seen over the top.

  • 5.50: From a tax perspective, banking and e-commerce flow into our accounting system. The lending, management of payables, and receivables are some top three use cases that Railz deals with, and we are always working on expanding into that space, says Sam.

  • 7.11: Railz products can be customized based on the business industry and the business's financials. You get the chest to monitor your portfolio after it because you have access to that information for up to a year before you have to renew it.

  • 9.06: In business, you deal with a lot of suppliers, you deal with a lot of customers, and by understanding the behaviour of your vendors or understanding the behaviours of customers, you can tell a lot about a business.

  • 11.12: With Railz, we have two-way sync where we allow you to pull your bills and push back bill payments to the vendor. We can create that synchronized workflow for business workflow management, explains Sam.

  • 13.03: Open banking is not that useful from an SMB or commercial perspective because you have access to banking data, but that's like your one side of word business datasets and commerce.

  • 13.50: Even if you have the plaids or the bank aggregators out there connecting the information, you will not understand the full picture of the small business unless you have access to all their financial data.

  • 17.21: Every service provider has its own draconian rules for the cause of how you access the data, what you can do with it, and what not. These are some of the challenges which make it part of what we're building and removing nightmares for other customers.

  • 18.28: SMB financial evolution or innovation only started a few years ago, and some SMBs are still marginalized in that space. So, this space wakes me up every morning knowing we're building some cool stuff.

3 Key Points

  1. Railz is taking all noise of data and translating it into something where customers and FinTechs can make sense of it and make a decision based on that.

  2. The credit cards are able to reconcile it back into the accounting system through journal or expense entries so that as a business owner today, you just see everything landing in your accounting system, and instead of doing their entry, you are doing a quick review and closing your month-end.

  3. One tricky thing when you are trying to build in Fintech or if you are a third-party fintech, your adoption depends on the adoption of your feedback.

Tweetable Quotes

  • "What is nice with using Railz is now that you can ask the businesses to grant you access to their financial and accounting information." – Sam

  • "Except insurance and lending measurement of payable is another use case we are seeing, and there are two use cases of management of payable." - Sam

  • "Open banking is one thing, but open data is a long-term play, and it's important to make it easy for people to move between venues when we have access and rights to it." - Sam 

  • "Bottom line is you are one of the good guys sitting in the middle, and ensuring access to data is one thing, and if you have data from five different places at one is another value proposition." - Jason

Resources Mentioned

Fintech ImpactJason PereiraFintech