TurnKey Lender with Marc Pickren | E215
Lending platform software as a service.
On today's episode of the Fintech Impact, Jason is going to talk to Marc Pickren, Chief Executive Officer of The Americas for TurnKey Lender. A global financial technology Software as a Service Business (SaaS) that has created and deployed the world's most impactful embedded finance platform since 2011. The company enables any business anywhere in the world to finance their customers, and that provides tens of millions of global citizens and businesses the opportunity to start something new, purchase needed machinery, and/or to acquire items that improve their lives.
Episode Highlights:
0.29: About four and a half months ago, Marc sold another software business that was marketing automation. A publicly traded bank had called Marc, and they knew that his previous experience had always been in the digitization of different lending platforms. Prior to this company called Nationstar, and then eventually rebranded as Mr. Cooper, and so Marc didn't have anything to do at the time, and he thought it would be really cool to be able to do the same type of digitization that they did at the previous company.
1.08: It is then that Marc started looking around at one original origination systems loan management system in the marketplace and ended up getting in touch with Elena, who is one of the co-founders of TurnKey Lender.
1.40: After having a conversation with Elena, Marc came on board as an advisor Slash unpaid CEO for a few weeks to try and see if there was a good relationship there and then eventually accepted the position as CEO for the Americas with the goal of moving their headquarters eventually from Singapore to the United States.
2.30: Marc explains the idea that as a user, you go to the store, you pick the product that you want off the shelf, and you run a credit card, and second later, you are walking out of the door for a large part of the world. That reality doesn't exist. In fact, the idea is that anybody would store electronic money on a card that you can use anywhere that is linked to your bank account.
4.03: If you see an opportunity within a nation for some form of alternative lending, you have the audience or whatever it is. You can always try to build it all yourself from scratch, but being able to count on something that is proven to work in multiple jurisdictions, I can't imagine having little nuances of how different countries handle things differently, says Jason.
5.00: The reason why we originally based out of Asia pack is because the kind of end of currency digitization of wallets. Then telecommunications is much further ahead in some of those countries, like in some of those countries you never really see anybody change paper currency, It is all electronic, says Marc.
07.40: Marc explains the two terms of kind that define their business. One is Embedded Lending, and one is Banking as a Service.
08.00: Now with inflation, who knows, we start analyzing those four presents even more, since rates in the United States have gone up a by 7 in terms of inflation, says Marc.
08.40: Since digital lending has been around since 2014, the band Magic had the top hit rude that date; digital lending has been around that long. You have 2022, and now suddenly, all of these companies are realizing. "Well, how is the auto finance? The automotive industry survived?" says Marc.
11.35: Marc explains that they exist to solve the problem of getting across the fact that lending is not something you can do in Excel in about 5 minutes. You could determine about five different profitability scenarios.
13.56: The biggest challenge we are solving in 2022 is reformatting our home page to simplify understanding that this is a company. You can spend 20 minutes of your PowerPoint with lots of words and graphs, and people say we still don't know what you do, so we're trying to simplify in terms of our positioning, says Marc.
17.10: A single company that can retain the first-party data and build loyalty for resale is probably the most important piece of what we do. Even if it is a technical department, that is the running the RFP, and they don't look at the customer loyalty piece in the same way as they do the technical specifications, says Marc.
18.52: We will work with anyone and anywhere to try and solve their kind of lending and credit challenges. We can support different communities that don't have access to capital and add unique laws regarding how they borrow, says Marc.
24.03: We use a smartsheet with 62 bullets and 100-day plan, and a lot of it deals with the simplification of the product in terms of being able to make it more understood by more people, because of the democratization of finance is a meaningful and worthy cause, says Marc.
25.58: Marc explains that they didn't have a super developed sales channel. The way that they obtain customers is largely through marketing means organic search. Continuing to build out their sales channel and make things as massive as they can be in as short a period is challenging.
3 Key Points
The Americas is a global company with 180 clients, 50 countries, and over 50 million people on the platform, and The TurnKey Lender was founded to solve a big challenge and something that is even looming heavier, which is the democratization of finance for North Americans and other parts of the world.
The biggest challenge that we are solving is just explaining that lending is not something that people should be afraid of; they should embrace it because of the multitude of positives that come from it, explains Marc.
Subprime to prime sub-lenders will do loans down to lower credit levels. So if you were in a situation like a veterinarian and care credit turns you down, you could partner with a third party that would ensure that no matter what the lender's kind of position is, you are willing to lend, particularly in a healthcare situation says Marc.
Tweetable Quotes
"Some of our original products actually focused on Malaysia in terms of helping underserved communities establish business credit so that they could launch micro-businesses."- Marc Pickren
"The democratization of money is something that is catching on globally." - Marc Pickren
"When you encounter a problem in a new country, odds are you've seen that trick before in a different way." - Marc Pickren
"The number one reason why most people are coming to us is just because of customer data." - Marc Pickren
"The finance company can't value the product because they don't manufacture it fully, and they're not 100% in the business, but they're smart." - Marc Pickren
"The amount of data on people that can make a private credit decision based upon very advanced machine learning rules has improved so much that fraud and even failure to pay has been minimized in such a way that they can manage that downside exposure." - Marc Pickren
Resources Mentioned:
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