Thought Leaders in Financial Technology: Snehal Fulzele, CEO of Cloud Lending (Part 2)

Snehal Fulzele: Let’s take a use case. Many of our customers are online lenders or online fintech lenders. If I were to give you a simplified use case, we have a bunch of customers who do online small business lending. As a small business owner, you go to a website perhaps on a mobile phone and you’re filling up the application.

In the good old days of banking, you would probably walk into a brick-and-mortar branch. You’d fill up an application and give your SS number. As a business owner, you will perhaps give hard copy financial statements. After maybe two to four weeks, you get an approval or a rejection. You don’t really have visibility into what’s going on and how they’re using your information. The next generation use case is you start an application on your mobile phone. Let’s say you’re looking for a working capital loan.

All that I’m describing is a result of implementing the Cloud Lending platform. The primary borrower will start off with a mobile application and the whole process can happen on a mobile or a web-enabled device. They will start filling-up a minimalistic form. You’re just asking for the details that are required for that moment in time. Then the Cloud Lending platform will got and hit 500 different data sources. It will pull all the the data that it can possibly pull. Depending on the credit policy of the lender and if the lender wants to move forward with the application, we literally cut down the two weeks’ time to minutes.

The next step would be to provide financial statements or accounting data. The way the borrower would do it is, they will provide access to the QuickBooks and the accounting system. Again, this is happening in real time. There are no hard copies. Everything is digitized. Tt will consume all the data behind the scenes. It will also bring in some more non-traditional data sources.

One of our small lending customer partners with shipping companies. They could get shipping data for these small business owners. They use that data in the underwriting algorithm. All of this number crunching happens behind the scenes. Let’s assume that the algorithm gives the green signal. The borrower is presented with an offer. The borrower would just sign and the funds would be transmitted to the borrower’s account in a few minutes to hours. The whole two to four week lead time is cut back to hours. That’s what I mean by superior borrower experience.

Sramana Mitra: By the way, we’ve done a lot of these stories. They all have the value proposition of being able to verify eligibility very quickly and make decisions on loans very quickly. Basically what you’re doing is taking that functionality and then offering that to all lenders.

Snehal Fulzele: Precisely. OnDeck and Kabbage are lending companies. They have built some proprietary algorithms. What we are providing is a technology platform to enable the next generation of lending experience. You configure your underwriting into our platform.

Sramana Mitra: What are you seeing in terms of traction? How much of the lending industry has adopted your solution?

Snehal Fulzele: We are seeing significant growth in terms of the number of customers. We have over 85 customers right now. These are 85 online lenders and marketplace lending platforms.

Sramana Mitra: The banks are not adopting your solution?

Snehal Fulzele: A lot of the online lenders have adopted it. We are slowly seeing banks also wanting to upgrade their borrower experience. We have a couple of banks that are in the process of implementing an online lending experience for their borrowers. From Cloud Lending perspective, the biggest impact that the online lenders have had on the industry is they pushed around the incumbents such as banks to react to the borrower experience.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Thought Leaders in Financial Technology: Snehal Fulzele, CEO of Cloud Lending
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