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.”

Do you see any trade-off between innovation and standardization? Can you give me an example? 

“I think both are critical, but you have to innovate, especially in our space of Financial Tech. It’s an ever-evolving, ever-changing space and big data is just one facet of it. We actually have a separate team here whose job is to focus on innovation from technology, product and merchant perspectives. Standardization is also important because people want consistency and speed-to-market. People tend to be less patient now, because they don’t have to be – we see something on Amazon and two days later it’s at the house. To get to that level of five 9’s of efficiency in our business, we have to standardize. Both are critical and I don’t think you can trade one for the other.”