Thought Leaders in Financial Technology: Gina Taylor Cotter, SVP & GM, Global Commercial Financing, American Express (Part 1)

Innovations in Financial Technology are flowing from the startup world into the large companies. This excellent conversation gives us a window into how Amex is bringing some of these innovations into their offerings.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing our audience to yourself as well as American Express’ activity in the financial technology area.

Gina Taylor Cotter: I work in American Express in the division that focuses on serving businesses with commercial payments. I dedicate my time to helping businesses be successful in building solutions that provide them access to capital, which is very important for small businesses.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s double-click down on that. What technology-enabled capabilities are you bringing to bare?

Gina Taylor Cotter: In the last few years, access to capital has been brought more seamlessly to them online. The fin techs led that charge and encouraged the traditional banks and others to refresh their offerings to bringing loans to bare for small businesses in a more compelling and easy way. We, at American Express, have been serving small businesses for over 25 years.

We focus on helping them grow with a variety of solutions from payments to financing. Business Loans launched last fall. It meets a core need of access to capital. The technology is really exciting because now you can gain access to a loan quickly. These are sometimes harder to get through traditional banks because of longer processes and longer applications. As I mentioned earlier, the fin techs came in to fill in that gap with easier and faster access to capital but sometimes at a higher price.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s talk about the ecosystem around small business loans. What trends have we seen? We’ve covered, for example, Kabbage and OnDeck extensively. These are small business services that have mastered the art of being able to evaluate, process, and approve loans very quickly by tying online into small businesses’ transaction systems.

Can you give us an overview of the different fin tech innovators in the space who have come before your service and showed the path that you are following and analyzing in launching your service?

Gina Taylor Cotter: I love to follow trends. We stay very closely to it. We have been in the space of financing for some time actually. We launched our merchant financing product in 2011. We’ve been in this space for some time. In following the trend of some of those fin tech competitors, we are bringing to bare a small dollar loan to our business seamlessly and quickly, leveraging our closed loop.

We have incredible data within American Express about our customers. We’re using that and bringing it to bare. If Joe from Joe’s Pizzeria could go to one of those fin tech competitors and apply for a loan and be approved in minutes, Joe can also come to American Express, as an American Express customer, and receive a very compelling offer from us using and leveraging our knowledge of Joe and his pizzeria over the years that he’s been an American Express customer.

We’re excited to bring that technology to bare to provide the solution quickly to our customers in a very seamless way. Business loan offerings can be approved in less than 60 seconds.

This segment is part 1 in the series : Thought Leaders in Financial Technology: Gina Taylor Cotter, SVP & GM, Global Commercial Financing, American Express
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