Thought Leaders in Financial Technology: Splitit CEO Brad Paterson (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What is your largest retailer that uses this functionality?

Brad Paterson: There is a number and not all of them are public, so I can’t share their size. We have Purple for example. 

Sramana Mitra: Is that the mattress company?

Brad Paterson: Yes, they are significant. They are a public company with revenues last year stated at $430 million. They are the largest e-commerce retailers in the home ware space.

Kenyan Bicycles is a global bicycle company. I can’t disclose their size because they are private, but they have significant revenue and size. James Allen is the online arm of the Signet Jewelers group. Those are just the couple of examples with some large brands across those categories that I mentioned before.

We are in discussion with most of the household names and brands that you can think of in those categories. We expect that to go quickly, but those are a handful of some of the brands we handle. Other examples are Nectar and other mattress companies and Resident home which is under the Resident home brand. 

Sramana Mitra: If you look at the FinTech industry in general, where do you see open problems that you see are worth going after? I’m asking this in the view of new entrepreneurs addressing those problems. If you were starting a company today, what is a problem that would be worth solving?

Brad Paterson: In the FinTech space or more closely related to our space, I think there is a common issue that is a very large issue – that is financial inclusion. How do we insure that every person has the ability to buy items now and pay over time? That’s very difficult and biased to those people with good credit score.

It’s very hard for some folks to get that credit score. How can we work on providing credit to all classes of society in a responsible way and allow them to use products such as Splitit to make purchases that they need and pay them back over time? I would count building up financial inclusivity to all classes and all aspects of society as number one.

Number two would be e-commerce. That space is filled with friction. There are so many drop off points. We still see 70% of the consumers abandon their shopping carts. Anything we can do to simplify that is a good white space. We need universal checkout carts.

We need a simple standard approach just like Apple Pay with your phone. Most retailers or terminals are standardized, and e-commerce is not. Those are the two areas I would lean into – simplify the user experience in e-commerce check out and figure out how we drive inclusion through extending credit to those who need it the most.

Sramana Mitra: I think I have your perspective and we look forward to covering the story. Thank you for your time.

This segment is part 3 in the series : Thought Leaders in Financial Technology: Splitit CEO Brad Paterson
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