Swoop Funding with Daire Burke | E218
Aggregating small business lending solutions.
On today’s episode of the Fintech Impact, Jason is going to talk to Daire Burke, head of Canada for Swoop Funding. Swoop Funding is an Irish-based company that works in multiple countries. It provides companies with access to a platform that aggregates lending solutions to meet their needs from various commercial blenders.
Episode Highlights:
00.46: Swoop is an online marketplace for small businesses looking to find funding for their business. We are giving business owners a tool to quickly find and compare funding products from right across the market, says Daire.
02.22: Access to capital for small and medium-sized businesses across the globe is an enormous challenge. They are not just smaller versions of big companies, and they have immense trouble from traditional banks getting capital, says Daire.
04.24: In Canada, over a million companies are turning over less than $10 million, and those are the businesses that can probably benefit from our platform the most. The important point in the design is that this is a free-to-use service for businesses.
09.30: This is a real challenge, especially in Canadian banks, unless it is a small business loan backed by BBC, which the government backs, they’re not going to take a risk, but there are alternatives out there for funding, says Jason.
10.43: We have a range of other digital lenders, non-bank lenders, grant writing agencies, angel groups, and we are trying to ensure we have a marketplace to fit all the financing needs of smaller and medium business owners would have, says Daire.
11.31: We don’t grow up learning with vendor financing or receivables funding. We don’t learn about any of that, and it’s not surprising that a small business owner hasn’t seen this stuff, says Jason.
12.24: The experience of dealing with alternative lenders compared to the banks is like night and day. The banks are like – here is everything we need from you, and weeks later, we also need this laundry list of things from you, and it’s like a never-ending succession of documentation, says Jason.
15.40: We have done white label projects with some of the biggest banks and their subsidiaries in the UK and NatWest, and that’s allowed them to serve their clients with other products that they wouldn’t ordinarily be able to, like grants or equity, explains Daire.
16.00: In terms of onboarding, lenders haven’t been enormously challenging because you are supporting them greatly with customer acquisition and loan origination.
17.10: Our customer user journey is quite short. You can register an account for free. You provide some basic business information to understand the key points about your business that we need to learn about your financial requirement, and the users can integrate their cloud accounting software and banking data, says Daire.
20.45: What Jason understands about swoop is that they are not just coming out here saying – we are not only trying to capitalize on lending but also trying to bring you every option, and you possibly can, to get the money you need.
22.31: Access to publicly available data on companies would benefit so many different areas of this industry. When you’re getting information on the business directors, the filings, the financials, and kind of proliferation of data have so many benefits, not just in transparency but also in designing new products and meeting the needs of businesses, says Daire.
24.34: Hire people that are smarter than you and and and can do things that you can’t, think a way to go, etc., but getting the right people in at the right time is always a challenge, says Daire.
25.56 According to Daire, what they are doing seems to be a bit new, and there is a big scope for impact, which is energizing and exciting over the next few years. There is so much opportunity for value for consumers and businesses, and as per Daire, they can be at the center.
3 Key Points
Swoop Funding is trying to make small businesses get the most value from their data, empowering them to use data to find all of the products out there that can create value for their business, says Daire.
For the lenders in the Canadian SME lending space, the growth they have had over the last number of years has been very high, and you have to look at the reasons why that happens, says Daire.
Daire explains that they have a massive period of growth for their business in covid because they were acquiring all new users trying to figure out what type of government funding programs they could be available. It enabled them to serve their users the best way that they could at that moment.
Tweetable Quotes
“We are trying to use a design attacks solution to address the funding gap, knowledge gap, and financial literacy gap that exists for many small business owners.”- Daire Burke
“There are some green sheets on opening up with digital, fintech, and non-bank lenders that use different models to make decisions.”- Daire Burke
“Aside from just funding, we are also helping business owners to identify savings opportunities for their business and reduce some overheads based on data analysis as well.” - Daire Burke
“The corporate beneficial ownership registry has been a real sticking point in an issue for a while and many standpoints.” – Jason
Resources Mentioned:
Facebook – Jason Pereira’s Facebook
LinkedIn – Jason Pereira’s LinkedIn
Woodgate.com – Sponsor