Founded in 2016 in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
FI.SPAN Helps Fin-techs, Banks and Businesses Win
You’re a small or mid-sized business. Every month you pay about 1000 invoices. Your accountant tracks all these invoices, runs them through your AP system, then uploads roughly half of them — through an Excel spreadsheet — to the vendor you use to print and mail your checks. Another 400 are uploaded to your bank, which moves money around between you and your domestic vendors. The final ten percent are sent off as international wires to your international vendors, costing you $30 a pop. It’s a headache, and there’s a cost to it, but that’s simply how it works.
Or maybe you’re a mid-market bank. You have a great relationship with your business customer, but you’re only getting half of their banking business. To build the capabilities you’d need to take on the other fifty percent, you’d have to invest significant time and energy into convincing management to build the missing capabilities, or to acquire a company that specializes in the capabilities you’re lacking. Either way, it’s an uphill battle. So your customer’s additional business sits there, untouched by you, going elsewhere.
FI.SPAN has built a platform that helps businesses and their banks overcome both of these problems.
Integrating Financial Technologies Directly Into the Banks
FI.SPAN was founded last year by CEO Lisa Shields, who also founded the financial technology firm Hyperwallet. Her experience leading a financial technology startup opened her eyes to a series of problems in the B2B banking industry: burgeoning B2B fin-tech firms have a hard time closing customers, established banks have a hard time creating modern capabilities for their customers, and small businesses have a hard time simplifying their systems and saving resources. Ms Shields founded FI.SPAN to solve these disparate problems with one technology platform.
How does it work?
FI.SPAN curates and pre-integrates B2B fin-tech services into its platform. This platform can then be integrated into the big banks, providing them with a diverse smorgasbord of services to “turn on” and offer their customers. The B2B financial services offered through FI.SPAN can range from low-value international payments, to virtual credit cards, to streamlined travel and expense systems, from blockchain payment technologies, to online lending, to new analytics capabilities. Take it as far as your imagination – or the startup world’s imagination – can take it. If it’s integratable into FI.SPAN’s platform, banks can offer it.
Driving Efficiencies for Everyone
So for our small business with the messy Accounts Payable system, the FI.SPAN platform would theoretically allow our AP department to streamline into one single customer – the bank, that the company is already doing so much business with. The bank itself is able to grow its business with a current customer by servicing a greater portion of its AP needs. The low-value international wire fin-tech company the bank offers through FI.SPAN gains another customer they would have had to work much harder to close. Everybody wins, including FI.SPAN, which is happy to stay in the background.
“Our value proposition,” says Clayton Weir, FI.SPAN’s head of strategy, “is that we can de-risk and make the bank’s dollars go farther. We remove the technological and operational burden of working with the fin-tech companies.” By partnering with FI.SPAN, banks can offer a wide variety of modern services to their business customers without acquiring or building anything new themselves.
Likewise, says Clayton, FI.SPAN tries to be very low-touch with their fin-tech partners, who they understand are entirely focused on growing their businesses.
Being such a new company, FI.SPAN is just now moving into the installation and trial portion of its product roll-out. Provided all goes well, businesses all around the world may soon be using FI.SPAN’s services without even realizing it, but relieved and happy at the simplicity of it all.