Vincent: Hi, everyone. Welcome to the New Relic office. Thank you very much and thank you for having us. Welcome everyone to another monthly installment of the FinTech meet up. I’m going to start now that this is starting to come together. It’s going to be a really interesting topic this evening. It’s probably a little too much to cover for one panel and we’ve actually got a lot of requests to do this type of format again. You can expect us to do this again. I’m not going to talk for too long tonight.
The only real thing is I want to introduce a couple of people to just give you a little bit of a chat so you know where the things from the menu are coming from. I’ll hand it over in a second. In December, we’re probably going to take a small break and do a social event, although most of them tend to be fairly social anyway. The other thing I just wanted to bring to your attention as well is I have had an approach earlier today from someone who’s within the membership who wanted to set up a component within the group to actually help people who are specifically looking to try and find other people within FinTech. It could be a cofounder or an engineer or an analyst of someone to work on a particular thing.
I think that’s a common theme I’ve heard especially in the last six months. There’s a gentleman here in the front called Matt and he’s going to be spearheading this. It will be run through the meet up group but as a separate set of meet ups that we do or events we do where the focus really is on trying to find a particular person for something that you’re working on or potentially are going to work on. If you do have an interest in that, you can get in touch with Matt directly. He’s actually one of the event organizers after this meet up and you should expect to see some progress on that in the next couple of weeks. Without further ado, I’m going to … unless Yanna is about to …
Yanna: I was going to cut the music but I can chat first.
Vincent: Music is wonderful.
Yanna: Yeah. Hey everyone. How’s it going, did you guys get enough food? Sorry. I’m Yanna, I’m part of the community team at New Relic. How many of you guys know what New Relic is and what we do? Okay, all right, a bunch of you guys. For those that don’t know what New Relic is, we’re software analytics company. We help people monitor web and mobile applications. You can think of us as a developer tool where you can use your log in to New Relic and you use us to troubleshoot what’s happening with your application. Thanks for coming.
Vincent: Also, I’m going to introduce Robert Schwentker from PayPal who cosponsored the evening and put on a lot of food to it.
Robert: Thanks, Vincent, so much. Welcome to everybody. I’m Robert Schwentker. I’m a developer in startup relations with PayPal. Thanks to this great panel here, I think they’re going to really rock our socks tonight. One other thing I would like to point out, we’re going to have a crowdfunding meet up at PayPal in December. We’ll send out invites for that. That will be like around December 12, I think it’s a Thursday. Anyway, thanks so much for coming and thanks again, Vincent. We have a good panel.
Vincent: Let’s place them on the ground and get to talking for now. Sanj … directly, you can take it …
Sanj: Use this?
Vincent: Yes, you use that.
Sanj: Can everyone hear me in the back? It works? Okay, great. So as we get started, I do want to say first thank you to Vincent and Billy and the meet up crowd for making this happen and Robert. Most of the country is watching Kansas-Duke. It show how out of touch we are to be here talking about APIs and FinTech. I think that what we’d like to do just to give you a sense of how the night will unfold, we’re going to spend about 45 to 50 minutes here. I’ve been asked to be the referee from all these competitors so we’ll take points on who scores … lands the most blows. We’re going to try to have an interactive session here about topics related to FinTech and APIs and then leave 30 to 45 minutes for question and answer and we’ll go as long as you guys have an appetite for this.
Let me just … I’ll introduce myself and turn it over to the panel. I’m Sanj Goyle, the CEO and cofounder of BancBox. We are a financial API company. We integrate with banks and expose the functionality of banks through our set of API so that BancBox itself or our customers can build applications involving the movement of money or the storage of money. We’ve been around about eight years. We’ve raised about $11 M from our RBCs. You can take a look at our website. We’ve quite a long history of being in that space. Derek, you want to start? Go.
Derek: I’m Derek Webster, founder and CEO of CardFlight. We provide tools and infrastructure to app developers that are looking to incorporate mobile payments acceptance into their own applications. One way of thinking about it would be if you’re a food truck or a lemonade stand and you’re looking to take payments in the field. Go use Square, go use PayPal here, go use any of the other hundreds of payment companies you hear about. We help enterprises and vertical solution providers.
If you manage a sales team of a thousand people and you’re trying to build a way for them to take credit card payments in the field and you need that to be tied into your analytics and reporting and back office systems and inventory and fulfillment and all those fun enterprise-y things, we provide the tools for the payment piece. We provide encrypted hardware readers, Native, iOS, and Android software development kits, connect payment gateway that supports 23 different payment processors.
Dan K: I’m Dan [Inaudible 00:05:53]. I’m cofounder and CEO of a company called Sender Treasury. What we do is we help banks deploy APIs. Next year, you’ll start seeing banks have their own APIs and software development kits and developer portals and actually developer communities will power the vast preponderance of those. We’re also building authentication and delegation frameworks like Facebook connect but for banks so that apps can directly integrate with banks, have framework commissioning both online and on mobile.
Patrick: I’m Patrick Giamanco. I am the GM of client … actually customer success at Yodlee and also Yodlee Interactive. We’re an online banking platform with about 50 million consumers we’re aggregating data for. In the other side of business which is I will help run is actually our platform for developers who build really cool innovative applications on top of that platform.
Dan M: My name is Dan Maffey and I have my microphone. I’m a cofounder of Subledger. Basically get revenue guy which means a lot of things to an early stage startup. What we do, we’re an API for a ledgering or accounting in applications. What that means is imagine you’re a building mover today. When the customer gets in your … uses your mover, they do a transaction for a drive for $100. That’s tracked and the ping on Subledger, it’s recorded as accounts payable of $80 to the driver and $20 of revenue is booked to mover. Then the customer can look at their balance on the app and see all the transactions and trips … see their current balance outstanding with their application. Then the finance guy or the CFO of the company, your company or you can aggregate up all these transactions and see where you are financially. How much accounts payable, how much cash, how much revenue and it’s all done automatically. We’re replacing bookkeeping with APIs mostly.
Sanj: Go on.
Charlie: Can anyone hear me, at the back? My name is Charlie Pinto and I am the cofounder and CEO of SlidePay. We make it really easy for developers to integrate transaction methods within their applications. Right now, what we do really well is we allow developers to integrate card present and card not present payments within their mobile or web based applications. We do things like instant merchant on boarding and underwriting. Payments like I mentioned. We also have the ability for you to utilize encrypted point to point, encrypted car meters as well as controls settlements to bank accounts and clearings and whatnot. We’re working on some other features too right now but where we’re primarily accelerating is helping service provider or mobile application developers who are building service provider apps to innovate payments inside of their mobile workflows.
Sanj: That’s great. Before we get to some questions here, could I get a show of hands here, how many here are developers? Pretty good audience. How many people here have their own startup or had a startup. Then who’s everyone else? It’s a question. All right, so one of the things … a good friend of mine in payments once told me a long time ago that the problem with payments companies is that they focus on the payments. That it’s really the applications that you build on top of the payments and the workflow and all of the things like the meta transactions that go around the payments is really where you differentiate that value. One of things that bubble up to the panel here is if maybe we can just take an upper level from say when we’re talking about APIs for FinTech, what is the uber idea here that has allowed all of us to go out and raise a bunch of money and project a big opportunity. What is that exactly? What does it mean for this developer community?
Charlie: I think it’s standardizing compliance across all app developers as well as giving them functionality that banks do not. If you really think about what a FinTech start up is, it’s an extraction laid on top of the bank whether it’s one bank, many banks or other financial institutions. The things that financial companies whether they’re building APIs for banks or you’re a payments company, what you’re really doing is you’re enabling a developer to integrate inside of their own vertical specific workflows, a payment acceptance or transactional acceptance method and that’s what I really think it is.
Sanj: Good.
Dan M: I think I heard the guys at balance payments say this really well. Our API is for hiding the crap. (Laughter) I think that’s what an API is. It’s a whole bunch of complexity with banking or credit card acceptance or accounting or payments that a developer if they’re building an app from scratch, we have to go through and figure out. Now you’ve got all these tooling in the form of APIs so you can literally walk into Home Depot and just buy the hammer and buy the saw and get back to work and build a unique piece.
That you’re building the value and not spend all your time developing resources trying to figure out accounting and how to automate my banking and things like that. I think that means as a community, an entrepreneurial community, we can move so much faster. To build a mover today, I think it’s going to take three months right. Really? You just put all these APIs together and go to market. Obviously, the hard piece is the marketing and some of the data science they’re doing. I think core infrastructure is available via API today so that’s interesting.
Patrick: I guess really what we look at is how we are helping a lot of developers. Last weekend, we were in New York at a FinTech to talk about application kind of thing and we see a lot of companies building … using APIs with a lot of different sources. You just don’t have one application using a Yodlee API but they were using a lot of different types of APIs. Seeing a mashing of applications taking the best of what someone else has built and using that for the crap that you talked about, if you see the crap behind the scenes and actually build some really cool applications.
Dan K: We really see it as a data problem because what developers want is they want to be able to read data out of their account and the accounts of their customers. They want to be able to write data in the form of transactions. In fact, banks ought to be able to federate that data to clearly and with proper authentication delegation, rates management. They want to be able to meaningfully increase the volume of transactions because that’s what moves EPS. Banks are worried about where they move EPS and develop earnings per share and developers are the necessary channel for them to increase operating leverage but without proper data authentication, federation and transaction flows, you just can't move the needle. We think that APIs are the way to move that needle.
Derek: I think somebody earlier commented about extraction and hiding crap is total accurate. The important thing to think about is what that enables. Our clients, we serve a number of verticals but to pick one like healthcare space. We help people building practice manage solutions for doctor’s office that are good at building solutions for doctors and HIPAA compliance and getting distribution to doctor’s offices and doing their patient records and EHR and appointment management, CRM and insurance billing and reconciliation, all these things.
No doctor’s office is better off, when it’s time for them to take a patient co-pay and they need to collect that $40 co-pay using something else. Whether that something else is a fare a phone terminal or Square, the point is it doesn’t need to be some other proprietary thing that only does payments. It should be integrated to what you do for the rest of their business. We really view our value add as making it possible for someone who’s not a payment expert to play in the payment space in a way that let’s them do more than just payments.
Sanj: I think … would it be fair to say, we all feel like these are our customers. It’s a very developer focused and developer centric service offering that we’re offering up. Let me ask you this then, if all payments is abstracted away as crap and all you’ve got is this nice little code that people can write to, where’s the differentiation? How do developers right … because a lot of times, solving problems is what you do to differentiate yourself and create a company out of that. How does this all affect the developer community if all of this become genericized, does it become commoditized?