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 scale IT projects for faster delivery?

“We are always researching and reading technology articles, but we tend to not pay much attention to what our competitors do specifically around IT, because we are focused on what we can do to better a small business’ life. There’s a lot of emotional turmoil for a business that’s in need of money. We want to take that out of the way as quickly as possible, but while speed-to-quote is important, accuracy-of-quote is equally important. So everything we do with technology, like eliminating technical debt or re-architecting something to run in the cloud, starts with the end-state of our customers. Many businesses want to partner with us; they want our custom built web-portals with our decisioning engine integrated, but we’re very selective about who we partner with in order to stay true to our brand – an answer is no good if it’s not true.

With big data and analytics we can educate small companies on the health of their business through profiling – here’s the value your business brings, here’s what you can effectively afford, here’s where you should say, ‘this dollar I will have to pay back is not worth the dollar I borrowed.”  On the flip side, analytics also helps us avoid and successfully decline businesses that are just skirting, with no intention to pay back. We take the points we save by avoiding those default companies, and apply it to our product offering, so that we actually save honest merchants money, by not doing business with dishonest merchants!  It’s good for everyone and it helps us tune our credit model.”