Thought Leaders in Financial Technology: Rich Longo, President of NXTSoft (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: The example that you gave of Neilsoft versus Salesforce is not the right example for you. The right example is Salesforce itself and its Force.com platform where a lot of people have built a lot of applications. 

Rich Longo: Yes, Force.com is a perfect example. You could look at others that built their solutions on Force.com. They recently went into an IPO situation and they have been successful.

The flip side of it, just to be open and direct with you, is when you start getting into a situation where you are on Force.com and you are dependent on Salesforce. The regulators’ question would be, “You are now interconnected into Salesforce as what we call as a critical vendor.”

Sramana Mitra: I think you are misunderstanding what I said. Force.com is a platform on which applications were built that were outside of Salesforce’s core application business. It’s a platform on which a lot of companies have been built.

I think what you are saying is that you are providing the FinTech platform on which many other application providers are building solutions. That’s the parallel that I was drawing. 

Rich Longo: Yes, we provide the connectivity, but we necessarily don’t have the platform from which you would build that. We’re agnostics. We don’t want to be in the business of creating applications, because once we do that, then there’s some other application. For example, FIS won’t do business with us if the applications are built on our stack.

Sramana Mitra: That’s why you used the Neilsoft example because you are like the Neilsoft of the FinTech space. 

Rich Longo: Correct. 

Sramana Mitra: Got it. That makes a lot of sense. I’m going to switch gears. What are the open problems in your space right now where you would like to see entrepreneurs come in and build new companies? You have an interesting vantage point from which you are seeing customer and customer problems. Where do you see opportunities for building new companies?

Rich Longo: Slicing and dicing it using RPA and NLP tools because we can provide the plumbing to get all that data to an RPA. Leveraging a strong structured RPA use case on several solutions would be massively helpful to these institutions.

With a post-COVID environment, they are struggling with their cost. Rates are at an all-time low, noninterest income is sparse, so they are looking at the cost and looking at providers and new entrants that can help them reduce their overall cost.

If there are entrepreneurs out there that can figure out how they could leverage our data connectivity and get data to them and figure out a solution where they can take out the cost, that’s a huge value and an easy win for them in gaining momentum in the business. 

Sramana Mitra: Thank you for your time.

This segment is part 4 in the series : Thought Leaders in Financial Technology: Rich Longo, President of NXTSoft
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