Thought Leaders in Financial Technology: Gina Taylor Cotter, SVP & GM, Global Commercial Financing, American Express (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Are any of the experiments in equity crowd financing for small businesses on your radar or are you exclusively focused on debt?

Gina Taylor Cotter: We’re not watching that too closely. What’s more interesting to me is seeing some of the bigger small business players evolve their model. You mentioned two – Kabbage and OnDeck. How are they evolving from being the lender to being a technology provider for others? I just wanted to make sure I mentioned the trend because I’m interested to see with all of those lenders, how are they thinking about making money over time?

Sramana Mitra: Who are the others that you’re tracking?

Gina Taylor Cotter: I’ll mention one more that I’ve been watching as well. It’s Biz2Credit. What’s their mix of being a lender themselves versus being a technology provider?

Sramana Mitra: Are they now providing technology to the banks? Are they white-labeling their technology to the banks?

Gina Taylor Cotter: Yes.

Sramana Mitra: Conceivably, what they offer could be offered by any bank on top of their technology at this point. That’s the model that they’re going towards.

Gina Taylor Cotter: I don’t know. I’ve seen the partnerships. Chase with OnDeck. Kabbage has a whole slew of international partners.

Sramana Mitra: Obviously not certain, you would consider bringing in a provider like that to offer a comparable service from American Express. At which point, you could conceivably combine the knowledge of that merchant that you have through their usage of American Express what an OnDeck or Kabbage can provide, and vastly augment the knowledge of that business.

Gina Taylor Cotter: Conceivably, that could happen.

Sramana Mitra: What are some of the open problems out there that you’re particularly interested in that you would like some entrepreneurs to start working on that you don’t have the bandwidth to work on inside American Express.

Gina Taylor Cotter: There are a number of things that we’re focused on in serving small businesses. I’d always encourage entrepreneurs to think about how they can solve problems for small businesses even more effectively. That could mean insight and data to help small businesses be more effective in their decision-making process. Another is an online advisory to help small businesses think about and use the data of other small businesses to help guide them.

There’re opportunities to provide rich content to small businesses to help them be effective at growing their business. Small businesses growing will help America grow. Certainly, entrepreneurs are able to solve a core problem that makes sense to small businesses, we would partner with them to bring it to bare to the market. How can they solve these core needs? That’s an interesting area for me to understand.

Sramana Mitra: Terrific. Thank you for your time.

This segment is part 4 in the series : Thought Leaders in Financial Technology: Gina Taylor Cotter, SVP & GM, Global Commercial Financing, American Express
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