Phil Norris, CIO at Business Backer

WHAT WE DO:

“Business Backer provides alternative funding to small businesses who are too new or don’t fit a bank’s actuaries. We’re unique in that we are up front about purchase price and we have no legalese in our easy-read contracts. In fact, we have received numerous awards for our highly ethical lending practices from entities like the City of Cincinnati and the State of Ohio, among others. If we can’t fund a business, we take the time to find them funding. We use technology for our underwriting and data sourcing, so that we can be very clear in our answer to a client and they can trust our quotes and our speed to market. The more data we put behind a decision, the cleaner the business is going to be, and that’s one of our core philosophies. FinTech is a huge and growing space and speed is everything in our business. We’ve taken what is typically a 2-day response time and shortened it to about 60-90 seconds, all thanks to the tech products we’ve built here, including separate analytics and data teams and integrating our systems front to back.”

How do you align IT with business strategy?

“We outline our business strategy across the entire leadership team; from our CEO to everyone in Tech, to managers of finance and collections and so on. We clearly define our top priorities, then gather the respective teams to decide which ones involve Tech, then we create stories following the Scrum Method and we build off of that. We always keep our focus on priority one, two and three and the progress we’re making on them. Then about twice a month we rally and roll out part one or part two. It’s a cohesive effort between everyone on the leadership team.”