Nico, we’re delighted to have you at FintecBuzz. Could you start by sharing your professional journey and how it led you to co-found Clair?
I began my professional career after college at J.P. Morgan, where I worked on projects involving hourly rideshare drivers. This helped me gain a deeper understanding of the fintech space and the obstacles that workers face to reach financial stability. Despite already earning their pay, they don’t have immediate access to it, if they need to cover for unexpected expenses. After working an hourly job in college, I experienced firsthand how incredibly frustrating it could be to wait weeks for my paycheck, and sometimes even longer as a result of processing errors. As a student managing my personal budget, in a new country, I could only imagine the level of frustration for individuals providing for their families financially.

This served as my inspiration for creating Clair, a solution to provide a flexible way for employees to get a portion of their pay before payday. Solving the gap between work and pay, and with 78% of Americans living paycheck to paycheck the ability to access their next paycheck ahead of the designated date can make all the difference.

How has payroll technology traditionally operated, and why do these methods no longer meet the needs of today’s employees?
While payroll providers have traditionally issued paychecks on a biweekly cycle, the world is moving toward faster technology and instant money transfers, yet payday remains stuck in an outdated system. Our perspective at Clair is that people should be allowed to get paid as soon as they clock out, especially since they’ve already done the work to earn that money.

Additionally, payroll technology has historically been clunky, which means it’s difficult and time-consuming for employees to use. More employers are recognizing these pain points, as 58% mentioned technology integration as one of the top areas of improvement for their payroll providers, and another 29% said tech modernization is a major concern. In order to meet the needs of the modern workforce, Clair decided to partner with a national bank to provide compliant earned wage access (EWA) to America’s workforce. Our team has worked tirelessly over the past few years to offer a banking infrastructure and compliance framework that makes accessing on-demand pay seamless. We’ve brought this – and our proprietary technology – to industry-leading HR platform partners like Gusto and TriNet, so the companies using their tools can easily offer on-demand pay to their workers.

We just announced in July that Clair grants employees at many of Gusto’s 300K supported businesses access to sign up for On-Demand Pay right in the Gusto Wallet app. This makes Gusto the first partner to announce Clair’s new embedded On-Demand Pay product, which leverages proprietary technology to provide an embedded, compliant EWA solution that integrates directly into workforce management and payroll applications.

We also recently partnered with payroll infrastructure company Check, which selected Clair as its first EWA partner. HR platforms using Check to build and launch their payroll businesses can seamlessly opt into offering Clair’s fully compliant, On-Demand Pay solution, without any impact to payroll and changes to HR.

It’s been a busy year for our team, but we’re happy to be at the forefront of a larger shift toward embedded finance in the HR and payroll industry.

Can you explain how embedded finance is converging with payroll technology and what benefits this convergence brings to both employers and employees?
We’re seeing more embedded finance tools integrated into HCM platforms for seamless use and adoption. APIs, for example, allow for financial experiences to be embedded into existing HR apps to create a “one-stop shop,” providing a more user-friendly design similar to that of consumer apps. About 41% of employees are already overwhelmed by the number of tools and technologies they’re required to use, so streamlining their HR tech stack is key.

By providing employees with one platform where they can access multiple benefits, including financial wellness tools, HR can have a better view of what’s important to employees in the workplace. This can help executives make data-driven choices, reduce the time and resources required to train employees on new benefit tools and help overall employee satisfaction and productivity.

With a top-requested benefit like earned wage access, for example, building an embedded experience is key. It’s typically complicated for HR tech to build, so finding a compliant partner that has the right tech infrastructure in place is critical. Clair’s On-Demand Pay product removes all manual work required to roll out the benefit, and that includes any manual changes to employee counts or payroll.

Why is it important to give employees flexibility when they get paid, and how does this flexibility impact employee satisfaction and retention?
For employers who are still dealing with labor shortages in essential fields like healthcare and manufacturing, offering flexible benefits like on-demand pay can be a game changer in employee satisfaction, which leads to retention. With benefits like on-demand pay, employers can help their workers get better financial footing and stand out in the labor market. Companies that go one step further to ensure embedded finance benefits are available within their existing HR apps can also gain a significant advantage, such as lessening burnout among their HR teams and prioritizing workers’ well-being and user experience, to ultimately differentiate themselves as a top employer.

With 68% of employees using financial wellness services provided by their employers in 2023, up from 51% in 2012, what does this trend indicate about the evolving needs of the workforce?
This indicates a few things about today’s workforce. They’re dealing with stressors – like unexpected expenses, student loan payments, or inflation increasing the cost of living – and they appreciate the help and support of their employers. They also want both long-term and short-term financial wellness benefits. Offering 401(k)s for long-term savings is important but many workers need help now and can benefit from access to their pay outside of the bi-weekly pay cycle, budgeting tools, financial education and more. Simply put: Employees want more flexibility and control over their finances and financial wellness benefits help deliver that.

Why is it crucial for payroll tech providers to partner with financial wellness benefit providers who understand regulatory complexities and ensure long-term compliance?
Service disruptions can be a headache and if a financial wellness benefits partner isn’t compliant, it can turn into a nightmare for employers and their employees. That’s why it’s critical to identify a partner who not only understands regulatory complexities but is also compliant, which gives employers peace of mind while extending support and buy-in from executives. When it comes to EWA in particular, it’s no longer just an advantage but rather a need as the CFPB recently proposed that EWA products should be recognized as loans, and states are also constantly enacting their own laws. This can lead to interrupted service with EWA providers that are not compliant, when laws change.

Additionally, Millennials and Gen Z-ers make up the majority of today’s professionals and have grown up with consumer-friendly apps with embedded finance experiences, like Venmo and Uber. As a result, they now expect the same app and software experiences that prioritize convenience and are designed with sleek and simple interfaces. By embedding financial offerings into HR management apps, users can easily find what they need without the extra step of extensively searching workflow documents or contacting customer support. With the help of innovative HR tech and fintech teams leveraging APIs and building proprietary technology, this experience can be brought to life. By minimizing employee confusion and lessening time-consuming questions for HR teams, workplaces can also see a rise in employee engagement rates.

Based on your experience, what advice would you give to employers looking to update their Workforce Management and Human Capital Management systems to better meet the needs of their employees?
Make it as easy as possible to keep everything integrated! Employees do not have the time or energy to navigate a new app or tool in their workflow management processes. They’re already occupied with their daily job responsibilities, so the additional task of spending time updating payroll information or logging into yet another insurance portal creates productivity obstacles. By making tools simpler and more seamless, workers are more likely to utilize them on a day-to-day basis and it makes it easier to onboard future employees.

In closing, what final thoughts or key messages would you like to share about the future of payroll technology and the importance of integrating financial wellness services for a modern workforce?
Embedded finance is key to reshaping the way employers approach employee benefits and workplace management. It’s been exciting to see the demand for financial wellness benefits increasing recently among employers and professionals. We’re excited about expanding access to On-Demand Pay and to see the noticeable impacts on employees’ lives.

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Srikrishnan, it’s great to have you with us. Can you start by sharing a bit about your professional journey and what led you to co-found Rocketlane?

I did my bachelor’s in Computer Science & Engineering and went to one of India’s top B-schools – IIM Bangalore from 2005 to 2007. Post that I’ve been in in product companies – first building product, and later building the business. I’m a techie at heart and started my career in B2C products – across Verizon, Rediff.com, and a start-up called Jigsee. It was 2012 when I started my first start-up with a couple of close friends, and my B2B SaaS journey started with that venture. We were lucky to be acquired by Freshworks in 2015, and learned a lot about building and running a SaaS business in the 4 and a half years we spent there post-acquisition. Inspired by the success and impact I saw at Freshworks, I started Rocketlane in 2020 with the same co-founders – Vignesh and Deepak.

How does Rocketlane plan to utilize the Series B funding to advance its AI integration in the professional services sector?

We’re integrating advanced AI capabilities to revolutionize project delivery, governance, and operations with copilot experiences, automations, forecasting, insights, and recommendations.

What specific inefficiencies in customer onboarding and project management does Rocketlane aim to address with its AI-driven approach?

In our previous roles at Freshworks, we noticed that the customer onboarding phase was under-serviced, crucial for gaining customer confidence but plagued by gaps in collaboration and visibility, making value demonstration challenging. Existing tools failed to provide cohesive visibility or enforce our playbook, leading to siloed work streams and inevitable escalations. Realizing the opportunity, we spoke to other companies facing similar issues and decided to create Rocketlane—a product designed specifically for customer onboarding and client project delivery, ensuring the right visibility and experience throughout the client delivery journey.

What strategic advantages does Rocketlane foresee by integrating AI into operations, project delivery, governance, and insights?

Rocketlane is able to make better governance, increased automation and efficiency available out-of-the-box for its customers through AI vs. having to set up elaborate rules and integrations to accomplish the same. This means more customers will use the intelligent capabilities and leverage the full power of a PSA solution. This ultimately means Rocketlane customers will see more success with the platform and be happy advocates.

In what ways does Rocketlane differentiate itself from traditional PSA software in terms of enhancing client satisfaction and project success rates?

Rocketlane is purpose-built for professional services delivery. It combines project management, resource management, communication and collaboration, reporting and analytics, financial management, and project automation capabilities into one sleek platform. Our customers do not need to switch tabs and flit between spreadsheets to keep track of projects.

How do real-time insights play a role in Rocketlane’s strategy for enhancing team collaboration and decision-making?

Real-time insights on our customers’ usage of Rocketlane help us understand how our product UX and flows impact adoption of various impactful capabilities we build for customers. The data and insights help us come up with new hypotheses, as well as validate existing ones, especially when we are able to slice and dice the data by cohort, industry, use case, etc.

How does Rocketlane ensure data privacy, accuracy, and consistency through AI automation, and what impact does this have on service quality?

Rocketlane takes the security and privacy of its customers seriously. Our services are tested automatically on every SDLC lifecycle. Thousands of tests ensure that the quality of the software we release to our customers meets our stringent guidelines. All customer data is physically or logically separated from each other and encrypted at rest and in transit. These and other controls we’ve implemented ensure we can meet compliance standards like SOC 2, ISO 27001, GDPR, and HIPAA while maintaining a service SLA of 99.9% or higher.

How does Rocketlane balance automation with maintaining a personalized client experience in professional services?

Rocketlane’s automation and intelligent capabilities focus on providing the right alerts and insights in a timely manner, nudging users on actions, or providing an automated starting point for a personalized engagement. Customers use these automations, templates, and more as a nudge or an initial draft that they can work on top of to then personalize the experience – which also could be aided by AI.

Srikrishnan, what personal strategies do you employ to stay ahead in the rapidly evolving tech landscape?

• Spend deliberate time brainstorming with customers, partners, and internal team members to see what interesting and high impact ideas they have, and where they are seeing success with new products and technologies.
• Thought exercises around what kind of new product or technology can disrupt Rocketlane today.
• Part of the product/tech team is always experimenting with new technology and showcasing the experiments in weekly demos for the rest of the company to riff off on.
• Innovation seldom occurs in isolation. Watching out for innovation in other industries can carry very important clues for what can work in your own space. So, following the media to track innovation in adjacent spaces or parallels from other industries.

Finally, do you have any parting thoughts or advice for our readers about the future of AI in professional services and project management?

AI is going to aid services and project delivery professionals in a big way – increase our efficiency, identify risks, and help us codify our ways of working better.Embrace it and enable it by ensuring the data going into these AI enabled PSA and PM systems is maintained accurately at all times. By letting AI do its part – summarization, alerts, insights, document or email generation, etc., we can focus on the “human” aspects of client project delivery, and on developing the right plays to react to the insights, warnings, and inputs from AI.

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Erin, to kick things off, could you share a bit about your journey and what sparked your interest in enhancing financial fitness for consumers?
I began my career working at a bank in 1998 and then shifted to the fintech side in 2002 when I joined Digital Insight (which was acquired by NCR in 2014). Now, I am the executive director of product management for digital banking at NCR Voyix, helping community financial institutions digitally transform and enhance their product roadmap initiatives.

I have always been particularly passionate about financial health and wellness. After all, even small behavior changes can lead to meaningful impact. Over the past couple of years, my team and I have been focused on how we can empower community institutions to better support their customer and communities through unique experiences and easy self-service tools. This initiative is especially important as consumers across the country struggle with persisting inflation and a high cost of living.

I believe in community institutions’ power to help their customers improve their financial fitness and gain confidence in their financial decisions, and I’m proud of my team’s work to create tools to support those efforts.

In today’s economic climate with high inflation and living costs, what do you think are the most pressing challenges for lower and middle-income consumers and how can financial institutions help?
Inflation, loan interest rates, rising cost of living, and most recently the resumption of student loan payments have added significant financial burden to consumers across the country. As this economic uncertainty continues, one challenge is that many banks and credit unions still have a ‘one size fits all’ approach to helping customers and members with their financial fitness. There is a significant opportunity for community institutions to leverage data to create unique experiences for different segments, using technology to personalize experiences at scale and having a “one-to-one” experience.

However, there are challenges associated with where their customers are receiving their financial advice. Younger generations are generally not coming to the branch when they need assistance; instead, they’re looking to unverified influencers on TikTok or other social media sources.
To help overcome these roadblocks, banks and credit unions are taking on a more informed approach powered by real-time data, providing customers with resources, tools, and education within the context of their individual journey. Incorporating resources where customers are allows them to better understand, apply and retain the information, ultimately making it more impactful.

Community financial institutions remain the backbone of local economies and are uniquely positioned to support consumers and businesses during economic turmoil. To effectively do so, they must adopt personalized and contextual insights, backed by data.

Open APIs are becoming a game-changer for financial institutions. How do they foster innovation and broaden the range of tools available to customers?
With the advent of open APIs, it is suddenly possible for banks and credit unions to innovate more quickly than ever before, connecting with partners of choice or creating their own content to offer new and exciting technology. However, this can only happen if the bank or credit union’s architecture enables it. Platforms that are cloud-based and API-first, with a proven track record of reliable, successful integrations, should be prioritized.

Such architecture is also critical to unify channels, which is becoming increasingly critical for institutions. Traditionally, channels such as digital banking, the contact center, the branch, etc., have operated in siloes, creating disconnected customer and member experiences and inefficiencies for the institution. With an open, API-first architecture, it becomes possible to connect touchpoints, creating a consistent, efficient experience that isn’t defined by channels alone.

In a digital-first world, how can banks and credit unions ensure they maintain the human touch in their digital interactions?
Effectively humanizing the digital experience has never been so important. This means leading with empathy throughout the customer experience – in person, online or on their phones. Even something as simple as analyzing the language used in an error message can have a major impact. Banks and credit unions should evaluate everything with a person in mind – are you delivering relevant information in a human way, making them feel comfortable and supported along the journey? Personalization is a key factor here as well. Money and finances are extremely personal and should be treated that way.

Humanizing digital in this way is only possible through the effective use of data, using it to uncover crucial consumer behaviors, channel preferences, transactional patterns, and key events in the consumer journey. The banks and credit unions that prioritize looking for ways to incorporate more empathy and personalization within their platforms will be well positioned to strengthen relationships and drive loyalty with their customers and members.

What are some practical steps financial institutions can take to lead with empathy and personalize the digital experience for their customers?
Personalization really means showing the consumer that you know and care about them; they’re not just another number. Doing so effectively requires creating digital experiences that feel like they’re catered to each individual user. Even if low loan rates or high deposit rates are what got the consumer in the door, it won’t be what keeps them there. The financial institutions that emphasize building and maintaining relationships will be better positioned for loyalty and success.

AI is rapidly evolving in the financial sector. How should banks and credit unions approach AI integration to ensure it adds real value rather than just following trends?
There’s no denying that AI has significant potential, from creating personalized interactions with each consumer at scale and increasing efficiencies. Institutions should evaluate how AI can help institutions improve certain processes. For example, more are leveraging AI for lending decisions instead of just relying on traditional factors.

Banks and credit unions should keep in mind that AI, and especially generative AI, is only as strong as the data and information behind it. AI is not a magic bullet; there is notable work required to train AI to make it effective. The right data and training are needed, as well as ongoing human oversight.

Speaking of data, we’ve already established that the effective analysis and use of data is critical across the institutions. This is also where AI can have significant impact, allowing banks and credit unions to better collect and analyze this data. Such efforts will enable them to better anticipate customer and member behaviors and offer more accurate contextual assistance, such as tailoring their website content to specific needs.

For institutions starting their AI journey, what advice would you give on setting realistic expectations and effectively managing the implementation process?
Banks and credit unions should first ask themselves what they’re trying to accomplish with AI; it shouldn’t be adopted just for innovation’s sake. For example, do they have more of a need to enhance back-office efficiencies or do they need to offer different ways to support users? Be selective and prioritize; you don’t have to do everything all at once. Experimenting and making adjustments along the way will be critical in the process.

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Arthur, welcome to Fintec Buzz. To start, could you please share a bit about your professional journey and what led you to become the Vice President of Financial Crime at WorkFusion?

Thank you! Before joining WorkFusion in 2022, I spent more than 20 years in anti-financial crime programs across financial institutions, tackling the same complex banking problems our customers face today: sanctions, anti-money laundering (AML), fraud, and Know Your Customer (KYC). My professional journey includes American Express, UBS, Commerzbank, and Rabobank. Combined with my legal and compliance experience as a practicing attorney, you could say that I have been readying myself for WorkFusion for years! I joined WorkFusion because I saw it as a game changer for the anti-financial crime industry, with pre-packaged AI Assistant Digital Workers that could complete many of the rote, mundane, repetitive tasks as well as help tackle the false positive problem.

Banks face numerous challenges with AML and Sanctions regulatory compliance. From your perspective, what are the biggest obstacles financial institutions encounter in this area?

The three biggest challenges with AML and Sanctions regulatory compliance are evolving regulations, risk mitigation, and staff management. Banks and financial institutions have struggled with the same challenges for decades. The combination of manual work, large numbers of false positives, and limited capacity combined with increasing volumes creates a vicious cycle. The shortage of full-time analyst staff, whether due to hiring freezes or the general lack of L1 analyst availability, results in FinCrime compliance teams becoming massively overwhelmed, which can lead to burnout among existing staff and difficulties maintaining effective and efficient compliance operations.

Additionally, the sheer volume of alerts that needs to be reviewed, dispositioned and investigated for AML and Sanctions compliance is enormous. And 99% of these alerts are false positives. This leads to inefficiencies as compliance teams spend considerable resources, time, and effort reviewing alerts that ultimately do not represent genuine risks, diverting attention from higher risk and more critical investigations.

Can you explain what AI Digital Workers are and how they function within the context of financial institutions?

WorkFusion’s AI Digital Workers are AI AML and Sanctions analysts that come out of the box with up to five years of experience in a specific job role. They are technology controls that mitigate risk and can integrate into financial institutions seamlessly, increasing their compliance team’s capacity. Think of WorkFusion’s AI Digital Workers as employees that have infinite capacity to automate alert reviews and document-heavy, tedious, and error-prone work.
We launched our AI Digital Workers in 2022, after in-depth conversations with how our customers were using our machine learning and automation. We learned that many had given the technology a human name and interacted with it like it was an employee. That was the beginning of packaging the technology up as personified AI solutions – they each have a human name, a human persona, and were trained to do a specific job in AML and Sanctions compliance. We have Evelyn, who does adverse media monitoring and sanctions/PEP screening alert review; Tara, who is a transaction screening analyst; Isaac, who is a transaction monitoring investigator, and many more focused on KYC and pKYC.

Our AI Digital Workers improve the quality and consistency of the work being done, help mitigate risk, improve operational effectiveness and efficiency, and help ensure a positive customer experience. They are also easier and faster to onboard than a traditional employee or outsourcing the work. They improve compliance with detailed narratives and complete audit trails. They also make work easier for analysts by taking on the document-heavy, tedious busy work that is typically done by Level 1 analysts. It turns the analyst from hunter-gatherers to true risk analysts. This helps reduce employee burnout and improve job satisfaction. For example, we have even seen U.S. Department of the Treasury Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) officers doing the work of L1 analysts because they were so short staffed. An OFAC officer shouldn’t be dispositioning sanctions alerts, especially when there is technology that can alleviate that burden.

How are AI Digital Workers helping financial institutions meet compliance with regulatory bodies such as the BSA, AMLA, OFAC, FinCEN, OCC, and FDIC?

There is already a collective push toward integrating technologies to augment, liberate, and improve human intervention and judgment, which will enhance operational effectiveness and efficiency, while reducing errors. Government agencies, regulatory bodies, and financial crime oversight organizations, including the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN), with its AML Act of 2020 and Innovation Initiative, explicitly advocate for innovative approaches to address various challenges to mitigate financial crime and AML and Sanctions compliance risks.

An enormous amount of manual work and false positives exist within financial crime programs — onboarding, periodic reviews, risk assessments, transaction monitoring, sanctions alerts, and quality control — making it time-consuming and error-prone. For example, with manual operations, a transaction may get delayed for hours due to similarities of one on the OFAC sanctions watchlists. Consider this: Level 1 analysts can typically work 200-300 sanctions alerts per day. Yet when sanctions alert volumes spike, financial institutions can face up to 500-800 daily sanction alerts. This becomes not only overwhelming but impossible without automation.

AML and Sanctions compliance can be significantly eased through automation, reducing the amount of time-consuming and tedious tasks worked by human staff and allowing analysts to concentrate on genuine risks.

Addressing AML risks is a critical task for financial institutions. How do AI Digital Workers contribute to mitigating these risks effectively?

WorkFusion’s AI Digital Workers significantly enhance the ability of financial institutions to mitigate AML and Sanctions compliance risks by automating repetitive and data-intensive tasks traditionally performed by human analysts. These AI AML and Sanctions analysts are technology controls that organizations can use in their risk mitigation toolkit. By automating these job roles, there is increased consistency and quality of reviews, material and immaterial errors are reduced, alert surges have nearly zero impact, they avoid missed escalations and missed true positives, and avoid delays leading to poor customer experience. Ultimately, AI Digital Workers improve overall risk management and operational effectiveness and efficiency by freeing up human analysts to focus on high-risk areas.

In your opinion, why is it essential for financial institutions to innovate their AML and Sanctions compliance programs continuously to mitigate risk?

Continuous innovation in FinCrime compliance programs is essential for financial institutions to effectively mitigate risk because the landscape of financial crime is constantly evolving. As illicit activities become more sophisticated, so must the tools and strategies used to combat them. Traditional manual processes are inefficient and increasingly inadequate in addressing the complexities of modern financial crimes. Innovating with AI and machine learning allows organizations to keep pace with the rapid changes in transaction patterns and regulatory requirements and expectations, ensuring they can detect and respond to threats more swiftly and accurately. Additionally, regulatory bodies such as FinCEN and the Office of Foreign Assets Control (FCA) advocate for innovative approaches, underscoring the importance of leveraging technology to enhance compliance efforts and reduce the risk of non-compliance and associated penalties.

There is often caution among financial institutions when it comes to implementing AI. What are the primary concerns, and how can these institutions overcome them?

The primary concerns around implementing AI are data privacy, model risk management, and security issues, the potential for bias in AI algorithms, the complexity of integrating AI with existing legacy systems, and regulatory compliance. To overcome these concerns, we recommend that institutions take small steps. Ensuring robust data governance and security measures can address privacy and security issues. Implementing transparent and explainable AI models can help mitigate biases and increase trust in AI-driven decisions. Ensure you follow internal governance when planning, implementing, and deploying any AI use case. Follow your model risk management framework and testing protocols, and put analytics, monitoring, and guardrails in place to ensure the AI solution is working as intended and within acceptable parameters. Partnering with experienced AI solution providers can facilitate smoother integration with legacy systems and ensure compliance with regulatory standards.

Leveraging the benefits of Generative AI without adding risks is a delicate balance. How can financial institutions achieve this balance effectively?

Generative AI and the LLMs that support it have absorbed the mindshare of the AI market. To best achieve its promised value — particularly in financial services — organizations need to not only seek the benefits but mitigate the risk. To do this, they need to look to processes that combine the best of LLMs and complement them with traditional AI and human-in-the loop.

To go deeper, financial institutions can achieve a balance in leveraging Generative AI by implementing comprehensive risk management strategies encompassing both the technological and operational aspects of AI deployment. This includes developing clear policies and guidelines for AI usage and ensuring that all AI-generated outputs are subject to human review and validation to prevent errors and biases. Employing robust data governance frameworks will help maintain data integrity and security. Regular staff training and upskilling on AI tools and their implications can foster a better understanding and more effective use of these technologies.

Adopting a phased approach to AI implementation, starting with low-risk areas and gradually expanding to more critical functions, can help institutions mitigate risks while realizing the benefits of AI.

Could you share your personal strategy when it comes to staying ahead of trends and changes in the AML and Sanctions compliance landscape?

Staying well-informed and prepared will help you keep up with trends and changes in the AML and Sanctions compliance landscape. My strategy involves continuous learning and engagement with customers, other industry experts, and regulatory bodies. I regularly participate in industry conferences, webinars, and training sessions to stay informed about the latest regulatory changes and technological advancements. I also engage with professional networks and forums to exchange insights with peers and experts. Paying close attention to publications from regulatory bodies such as FinCEN, OFAC, and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) helps me understand emerging expectations and compliance requirements. Additionally, I invest time in to understand the latest advancements in AI and machine learning, as these technologies are pivotal in shaping the future of AML and Sanctions compliance.

Finally, what advice would you give to professionals in the financial industry who are looking to enhance their AML and Sanctions compliance programs with AI technology?

For professionals seeking to enhance their AML and Sanctions compliance programs with AI technology, my primary advice is to start with a clear understanding of your specific challenges and objectives. Identify the area where AI can have the most significant impact, such as automating repetitive task, aggregating data or documents, or reducing false positives needed to be adjudicated. It is crucial to partner with experienced AI solution providers who understand the unique requirements of the financial industry. Focus on integrating scalable AI solutions that deploy quickly with minimal customization.

Training and upskilling staff to work alongside AI tools are also essential to maximize the benefits and ensure a smooth transition. Maintain robust data governance and ensure transparency in AI decision-making processes to help build trust and compliance with regulatory standards. Continuously monitor and evaluate the performance of AI systems to adapt to any regulatory environment changes and improve their effectiveness over time. By following these steps, financial institutions can leverage AI to significantly enhance their AML and Sanctions Compliance programs.

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Could you start by telling us about your journey and what led you to create Corridor Platforms?

I have spent most of my career consulting or working in financial services firms. Improving decisioning and analytical capabilities to keep up with the latest innovations is something all firms struggle to do, especially regulated entities like banks. The existing decision management workflow involves many manual handoffs between data teams, modeling teams, strategy implementers, and governance groups leading to long lead times in developing, testing, and implementing any change in decisioning logic. Additionally, financial institutions (FIs) building big data and machine learning capabilities face one common issue: the more sophisticated the data, models, and strategies are, the longer it takes to go through governance and testing procedures for implementation in production. And the pace of change in big data, AI and now Gen AI is so fast that most financial institutions are struggling to keep up with agile competition.

To address this, we launched Corridor Platforms with a team of seasoned risk professionals. Our goal was to develop end-to-end digital decisioning capabilities that allowed regulated entities to innovate using cutting-edge AI and big data technologies on a highly automated and governed platform. By connecting Data, Modeling, and Decision Strategy workbenches, we are enabling FIs to experiment and keep up with the latest modeling advancements and then allowing them to quickly and seamlessly reap the benefit in production.

Another driving factor behind building Corridor was the slow pace at which FIs iterated on analytics and the inefficiencies they faced in deploying them to production. Traditionally, changing strategies and decisions has been a slow, manual process, taking weeks to months. In the digital age, where customers expect instant gratification and have multiple choices, it’s now an imperative for FIs to elevate their analytical sophistication and offer real-time decisioning to grow and sustain customer relationships. Our platform enables this by providing end-to-end connectivity, automating and compressing the change management lifecycle from weeks to hours. Our goal is to help FIs compete against new-age competitors and win the best customers in the digital era.

What are some of the core problems in decision workflow governance and automation that Corridor Platforms is designed to solve?

We are a decisioning workflow automation bench built on a foundation of data governance to help regulated companies leapfrog legacy AI decisioning processes and technologies to a NextGen Digital Decisioning platform needed to win in the age of digital transformation.

The platform has two distinct and connected modules that solve the core problems FIs currently face:

Data and Model Management – Introducing new and alternate sources of data, ensuring permissible usage across the decisioning cycle, and ensuring that the models built are compliant with fair lending and other regulations is a large challenge at most regulated institutions. In our experience, the underlying core issue that solves this challenge is connecting the Data, Modeling, and Business Strategy workbenches (teams and their tools). Eliminating manual handoffs reduces operational inefficiencies, creates transparency across the decision lifecycle, and provides auditability that allows for enhanced controls. Corridor achieves this connectivity and creates a single source of truth for all analytics and decisions, enabling FIs to experiment and keep up with the latest modeling advancements without disruption.

Strategy Automation – Changing strategies and decisions, in most organizations, is a slow manual process resulting in a lag of weeks to months. Strategies are evaluated, sent for approvals, programmed by technology, and tested before putting into production. In the age of digital offerings, where consumers are able to compare alternative offerings simultaneously, every hour is material as one reacts to changes in competitive or economic conditions. We have created end-to-end connectivity that enables automation and compresses the change management lifecycle into hours rather than weeks/months. A core theme of the platform is ensuring FIs maintain the highest regulatory standards even while moving to real-time decisioning. Our goal is to help clients manage and win against traditional and new-age competition, especially through challenging economic cycles.

Another critical design focus is to ensure that the platform is plug-and-play and that it integrates quickly through APIs with legacy infrastructure, making time to market and impact a clear differentiator. Corridor is highly modular and recognizes that most banks have built some components of a connected decisioning life cycle. We integrate with current components to fill in the gaps and have implemented the software at startups as well as highly sophisticated banks.

Given your extensive background at American Express, particularly with Big Data and Machine Learning, how do these experiences influence the technological direction of Corridor Platforms?

American Express has always been one of the leaders in financial services driving innovation and change to serve its customer base with the highest standards. It was also one of the first movers to adopt big data and machine learning in banking. The experience and learnings gained by driving innovation in analytics at Amex and before that as a consultant serving other leading banks are foundational in helping design a Next-Gen decisioning platform. The founding team of Corridor had the benefit of rethinking the entire process and designing from scratch a decisioning and governance automation platform based on our practical experience in understanding all the pain points that need to be addressed to enable advanced decisioning in regulated entities.

What sets Corridor Platforms apart from other solutions in the market when it comes to helping financial institutions innovate while maintaining governance standards?

Our platform operates as an open, flexible, and modular system. Unlike closed-off analytical products that restrict innovation to their specific toolkits and coding languages, we enable you to innovate using various ML libraries and feature engineering while seamlessly integrating into our interconnected decision management rail. Our design principle ensures easy integration and interchangeability of different decision components, so that you can innovate within these individual components while orchestrating the entire process with standardized automation on the platform.

Additionally, we enable FIs to build and own their core in-house capability instead of just renting it for long-term value, and we span across the entire customer lifecycle, be it origination, marketing, cross-selling, or loss management.

The other key differentiators of the platform can be described in four parts:

a. End-to-end Digital Decisioning lifecycle solution: Provides an end-to-end decisioning lifecycle solution that ‘strings the pearls’ for decision objects of data, feature, model and strategies/rules in a controlled interconnected shared digital workbench.

b. System of record for Analytics: The analytical decisioning platform from Corridor becomes the ‘single source of truth’ for ALL analytics at a regulated firm including past versions of analytics use cases which were approved and locked on the platform for post-production scrutiny by internal compliance teams or external regulators. While analytical systems can come and go, the system of record like Corridor memorializes these decision artifacts for review/investigation post-fact in perpetuity.

c. Systematic governance & compliance: The platform integrates systematic governance and standardized compliance at the ‘source’ when objects are created versus downstream where they are used. This paradigm of ‘Left Shift Decisioning’ where compliance happens upstream and allows downstream decisioning to be approved quicker with less surprise and enables speed with safety.

d. One click-to-production: We are one of the only firms where AI-powered decision artifacts move from analytical environment to production post compliance and approval in ‘one-click’ with no recoding. This reduces the time-to-market, ensures strict control of what decisions are put into production, and allows for post-decision regulatory oversight (e.g., a regulator inquiring, “Why was that applicant rejected four years ago?”).

Could you share an example of how Corridor Platforms has helped a financial institution optimize its decisions in real-time?

A US G-SIB bank was looking for ways to reduce the time and resources required to develop and deploy models in its credit card business. As a highly regulated entity, a priority for the client was to increase speed to market while demonstrating to internal stakeholders and regulators that model, operational, and compliance risk remained the same or ideally decreased. The client engaged Corridor Platforms to perform a rapid diagnostic pilot, focusing on the capabilities of data provisioning, model development, model validation, and deployment to production.

Use of Corridor Platforms reduced model development, governance, and deployment timelines by 30% to 40%. The platform significantly enhanced governance and controls with standardized interfaces, automation of workflows, and greater transparency to reduce friction and inefficiencies. In addition, the team identified significant transformational opportunities by moving manual processes to the platform including model performance tracking and alerts, ongoing approval management, etc.

With the rapid advancement of AI and big data technologies, how do you ensure that Corridor Platforms stays ahead of the curve in terms of innovation and effectiveness?

Corridor Platforms is highly modular and enables FIs to slot in or slot out their decision components with the latest technology without disrupting their existing workflows – enabling them to always stay ahead of the curve in terms of innovation.

Corridor continuously evaluates new and cutting-edge trends in AI/Gen AI algorithms being used in new use cases and how the platform adopts or integrates into it, ensuring our technology is always ‘Current’ for our clients.

In addition, we have launched a starter validation kit called Gen Guard X (Project GGX) in partnership with Oliver Wyman where we have lifted and shifted the product to enable risk management of Gen AI pipelines. Project GGX enables robust governance and provides a centralized and highly integrated platform for evaluating and managing risk at every point of your GenAI application pipeline in a tightly controlled & governed environment.

How does your team’s experience with managing multi-billion-dollar lending portfolios contribute to the development and functionality of Corridor Platforms?

Corridor is founded by industry practitioners and experts who have honed their expertise by working in the industry for more than three decades.
Our technology solves the practical problems faced by companies regularly by combining the knowledge of industry experts and the design and technical skills of a highly skilled and current technology bench. We have built a system that we felt we would have benefited from tremendously when we were on the business side.

What were some of the significant challenges you encountered while building Corridor Platforms, and how did you overcome them?

Starting a business from scratch has its many challenges. One of our main obstacles was creating a team that could blend the experience of industry practitioners with a talented younger cohort skilled in the latest tech and analytical advancements to make our vision into reality. We have kept the company lean with minimal layers to ensure efficient problem-solving and we are able to create and maintain a next-gen platform that is evolving rapidly with new innovations in data and analytics. Our aim is to always stay ahead of the curve for our clients so that they can experiment and deploy the latest advancements in decisioning analytics, AI and GenAI.

As someone with a deep background in risk management, how do you see the future of risk management evolving, and how is Corridor Platforms positioned to address these changes?

Risk Management has evolved significantly in the past years, transitioning from a back-end support function to a key enabler allowing banks to innovate and advance their products and services to serve their customer base with excellence. In my view, this trend will continue as data analytics-driven decisioning becomes prevalent across all industries, especially in banking. From marketing, underwriting to customer cross-selling, all functions are now utilizing the latest innovations in Artificial Intelligence and predictive analytics to improve their products and services. With these advancements comes the responsibility to govern data usage, control systematic bias, ensure proper monitoring for accuracy and compliance – all functions which rely on risk management expertise.

What are your long-term visions for Corridor Platforms? Are there any exciting developments or expansions on the horizon that you can share with us?

We aim to be known as the best-in-class decision management platform for the build, evaluate, govern and implement cycle across large and mid-market FIs. We are also rapidly expanding our RiskDecisioning.ai offering in the mid-market segment. Our new Build-Operate-Transfer offering is targeted at smaller banks and credit unions. This turnkey solution not only equips them with the platform and capabilities to quickly become best-in-class but also includes dedicated consulting teams that can help set up, deliver benefits and then train the banks to take over tasks to ensure self-sufficiency.

To remain at the forefront of innovation, Corridor Platforms and Oliver Wyman recently launched Project GGX, a generative AI initiative focused on safely deploying GenAI in large, regulated enterprises and safeguarding against unintended LLM risks. Combining Oliver Wyman’s risk management expertise with Corridor’s advanced technology, the project aims to test, measure, and monitor the novel risks associated with GenAI.

Stay Ahead of the Financial Curve with Our Latest Fintech News Updates!

Fintech is a new industry for you, career-wise. What excited you about the opportunity?

Fintech is a really broad category. Though I’d put GTreasury in there, I think about my job more about serving the needs of the Treasurer, who sits inside the office of the CFO, who themselves sit inside modern, complex businesses.

And that’s my niche. I’ve focused my career on B2B SaaS, and I love it. Show me a workflow, show me a spreadsheet, and together we can come up with 100 ways to make that process faster, easier, more accurate, and more scalable for modern business needs. It’s fun. And it’s meaningful because we spend most of our lives at work, and if a tool that I help build can itself help users go home happier and less frustrated—and hopefully more successful in their role—then I’ve contributed just a little bit to the total level of happiness / non-irritation in the world.

But back to GTreasury… What’s interesting to me about this particular company and this particular product at this particular moment in time is that the Office of the CFO seems to be one of the last major functions in the enterprise that hasn’t moved over to digital tooling. A full 70% of the market is coming off of spreadsheets. That’s crazy! There’s so much room to make so many parts of the Treasury work faster, better, more accurate, etc. Which brings us back to the happiness project, and contributing in my own way to the total level of happiness in the world.

And finally, of course, the most important part of the opportunity was working for this amazing CEO and with this incredible collection of people. I’m learning a lot from the team here, and I love it.

What problems does GTreasury solve for finance and treasury professionals?

We know that Treasurers are struggling with increased complexity, with a greater need for cash visibility, as well as with reductions in treasury staff and in a constant struggle to gain more mind-share at the business. Fundamentally, the GTreasury platform unleashes the potential of treasury by creating connections between and among different parts of the treasury workflows. That means increased automation, decreased risk and human error, improved ability to manage cash, improved transparency and controls, as well as lower banking costs, and improved returns.

We do that through capabilities like seamless real-time banking connectivity, process automation, and clear and accurate visibility into their current cash and risk positions, as well as hedge accounting, financial instrument workflows, payments, etc. The best thing about the GTreasury platform is that it can grow as the treasury needs grow. Many customers start with us by just buying our cash visibility solution set, and then add in payments, or reconciliation, or financial instruments as their needs grow and change. It’s really incredible to be able to help customers over multiple years of growth at their companies, and be able to solve the problems with them as they grow.

How has GTreasury adapted its products and services to help corporate treasurers navigate ongoing volatility, such as supply chain issues and inflationary pressure?

This is going to sound hyperbolic, but I really don’t know how a Treasurer could do her job without a modern tool like GTreasury. Especially today. Since the 2008 financial crisis, we’ve gotten hit after hit of “once in a lifetime” events. Just a few months ago, everyone with a Treasury title got a phone call in which their boss asked, “How much counterparty risk do we have with Silicon Valley Bank?”

All of the pressures of this particular economic climate are felt acutely by the Treasurer. We help by, initially, letting the Treasurer know with their single morning log-in where their cash is and what their current cash position looks like. This already helps with things like FX exposure, because Treasury can now see how exposed they are to, say, the Rubel rising or falling or, gulp, having all Rubel assets frozen. We also help with interest rate visibility and forecasting, and then with identifying excess cash reserves and moving those to where they need to be operationally, or into a higher yield money market fund. And finally, let’s not forget the ability to quickly get answers to questions that the organizational leaders are asking. We allow Treasury to easily harness data from many sources, run analyses, and support C-suite decision-making.

How did the pandemic affect the priorities and challenges of corporate treasury teams? Has there been a lasting impact?

The pandemic was a shock, but it wasn’t the first and won’t be the last. The ongoing impact on the Treasury function is that, incrementally, Treasury is being asked to participate in higher-level strategic decision-making. When the system gets shocked, the first question is “How are we on cash?” Enabling Treasurers to answer that question—and to keep on top it—is the best way organizations have to protect themselves in the future.

I’m new to the industry, but what I’ve heard from customers is that the Covid shock opened the door a little bit more inside their companies to Treasury having a seat at the strategic table. I personally don’t think this trend will stop, and bit by bit that door will continue to open, now that organizations see how valuable—how crucial—the Treasury function is. That, plus the macro trends aren’t slowing down… Global M&A activity is still at record highs, which increases organizational complexity, FX and IR are still volatile, which increases the need for forecasting and quick decision-making, and the drive toward enterprise digitization will continue to push Treasury forward.

What are the biggest challenges treasury teams face right now?

Many treasurers find cash forecasting challenging due to the limitations of the outdated technology and manual processes they rely on. Without effective automation, treasury teams simply can’t match the pace required to complete forecasts at their desired frequency—and therefore can’t navigate market conditions optimally. Antiquated data systems further limit treasurers’ ability to centralize and translate crucial data into valuable insights. Treasurers grappling with traditional cumbersome banking connectivity methods struggle as well; they spend significant time and resources to complete basic transactions while leaving cash on the table as a result of errors, fees, and poor optimization. Fortunately, organizations can directly address these challenges with the right treasury modernization strategy.

What are some of the more exciting industry-wide developments that you think will have a big impact on treasury and finance teams in the near future?

I’ll mention three key fronts where treasury teams should look at outsized opportunities to modernize their technology:

The first is centralized and instant (or nearly instant) access to the data required for cash forecasting, predictive analysis, and scenario planning capabilities.

The second is API-based banking connectivity. Harnessing APIs offers night-and-day advantages over time-consuming and error-prone manual methods, making it possible to complete and confirm transactions in real-time.

Finally, treasury teams are increasingly seeing benefits by leveraging business intelligence and data lakes. The analysis, insights, and reporting these initiatives deliver can render an organization’s strategic decisions that much more timely and accurate.

What’s next for GTreasury in terms of new products or features that are on your roadmap?
We’re excited about the recent launch of ClearConnect Gateway, our out-of-the-box global bank API connectivity suite. With ClearConnect Gateway, our customers now have a uniquely-comprehensive solution for instant API connectivity and data integrations into their preferred banking partners.

Looking forward, we’ll continue to launch new features that bring simplicity and interoperability to treasury functions. Increasing our AI/ML capabilities, including real-time analysis and predictive modeling, is also on the horizon.

Digging deeper there, how do you see the role of AI and ML evolving within treasury management? How is GTreasury incorporating these technologies into its products?

AI/ML capabilities—whether via AI-powered predictions of liquidity needs, AI for process automation, etc.—are promising and will deliver increasingly important optimization and productivity benefits within treasury teams. I do think it’s worth noting, however, that AI/ML tooling is only as advantageous if the data it has to work with is complete and accurate. We want our utilization of AI/ML to sit atop very solid foundations from a data perspective; that is top of mind with any AI/ML-integrated solution we bring to market.

What advice would you give to other technology leaders and entrepreneurs considering moving into the fintech industry, as you have?

Great question! I think my advice would be “never lose sight of the customer or the user.” It’s easy in FinTech to get distracted by the big data, by the very exciting industry standardization, and by the thrill of solving complex problems. But at the heart of every great product is a deep understanding of customer needs. FinTech is no different than any other category in that regard. We all survive or die based on our ability to understand and answer customer needs, whether those needs are “help me with cross-currency netting” or “help me add a note to a journal entry.” To bring that sentiment full circle, this is what I meant by the “happiness project” concept at the start of the interview. Let’s make it our mission to let our customers and users go home at the end of the day a little bit happier, a little bit less frustrated, with a little bit more pride in a job well done. That’s what we’re here for, after all.

What led you to start Settle?

I come from a finance background. I started my career at Capital One, then later moved to Affirm where I cut my teeth in lending. These roles exposed me to the ins and outs of small businesses, many of them in retail/e-commerce.
The biggest learning from my experiences was that small business is the lifeblood of our economy. But were disproportionately underserved compared to larger organizations.

Software to manage basic back-office functions, like accounts receivable and accounts payable, was clunky and dated. Even more important, access to working capital was scarce. All of this still stands true today—and the urgency is perhaps even more pronounced today given the state of the economy.

The fact is businesses live or die on their working capital. Case in point: 80% of SMBs fail because of cash flow issues.

Our mission at Settle from Day One has been to provide a central system to manage a business’s cash flow operations, which encompasses AP, cash management, and lending. This unique integration is our big differentiator. The ability to leverage data straight from a company’s AP to streamline lending is powerful. More timely data enables us to lend faster and with lower risk, which changes the entire trajectory of many businesses.

What challenge is Settle solving for customers?

Growth companies—e-commerce companies especially—are in the business of turning inventory into revenue. But they need financing in order to purchase the inventory, to begin with.

Simultaneously, they need to be out there winning customers, not worrying about the minutiae of paying bills, cash flow, and hunting for working capital.

The answer: to take all the back-office hassle off their plate and streamline their payments and financing so they can grow their business. It’s that simple.

Can you break down your solution and the various offerings?

Settle’s core product combines accounts payable software with payments, integrated with alternative lending and overall accounting. Our software ingests our customers’ invoices from their vendors. We parse all the data and enable one-click payment.

We also sync their accounting activity into our software, so basically we always have their latest financial position and can lend working capital without delay. And since their vendors—many are international—get paid on our platform, we become part of their accounts receivable solution.

By combining these functions, we save huge amounts of time for our customers. The magic recipe is that we are a direct lender that does not have to wait for their financial reports. The fresh data we need to finance them comes straight from their banking, purchasing, and accounting activity. That makes us a very well-informed lender, able to immediately provide the working capital our customers need.

Settle packaged all that into one coherent solution. Incidentally, we automatically perform a sort of auditing or compliance function for our customers; on 25% of their orders, we find some discrepancy between invoice, PO, and what was received.

At the heart of it, we relieve most customers of their big challenge of obtaining working capital, bypassing all the usual documentation and tedious approvals. We improve their cash conversion cycle, but even more importantly, we can help boost their company revenues exponentially. Case in point: we have a current customer that we recently helped grow by 7x!

We understand cash flow/working capital can be complex. Can you explain to us the different use cases your customers deal with?

Our biggest market is e-commerce and consumer / CPG companies. Often high growth, absolutely driven by cash flow needs. Many could add venture capital, but our solution is non-dilutive.

For many startups, debt is preferable at earlier stages. We provide the financing with flexible payment terms so it can work for their specific business. In turn, they can increase their inventory to scale revenues. Then they can raise equity after they have the benefit of that additional scale—for less dilution. Scale lets them cut per-unit purchase, sales, and shipping costs and boost profitability, or achieve profitability faster.

What makes Settle stand out from the competition?

As I mentioned previously, our ability to integrate AP data to accelerate lending is critical to getting businesses the runway they need, when they need it. This is especially important for entrepreneurs in inventory-heavy industries like e-commerce and CPG.

We provide a much faster, more accessible credit solution by virtue of knowing a business’ accounting down to the rivets. This level of engagement bonds us to a business’s progress, triumphs, and challenges. Lots of lenders talk about knowing their customers’ business; we actually do.

We also pride ourselves on bringing products to markets fast and providing a delightful user experience. The latter is lacking in most AR / AP solutions today.

Has cash flow management become more in demand given the economic headwinds?

Absolutely. With the pandemic, which we hope was a thousand-year event, cash flow leaped in importance. Consumers turned like never before to e-commerce, which is our biggest vertical. E-commerce startups usually have a cash flow gap between ordering inventory and turning it into revenue to pay the vendor.

The interest rate hikes had a huge impact on cash management and liquidity. This year, it’s harder to borrow, lenders tightened up, customers cut back, and vendors are more reluctant to extend terms. If our customers choose, we pay their vendors directly with Settle’s money. Our customer pays us back in on flexible terms. Our “just-in-time working capital” helps companies scale rapidly,

How do you see the cash flow management space evolving in 5-10 years?

B2B payments are still ripe for innovation. Right now, there’s a bit of a lull in financial services technology, but this is temporary. We are going to see another explosion of startups competing for a share of the SMB mindshare, primarily because the pain points are real and the market is huge.

And we welcome competition. The more players in the space, the better the ecosystem becomes. And the more options for brands, the better. More solutions with increased flexibility and integrations to manage accounts payable, working capital, and accounting will make it easier to scale a business rapidly and boost ROI.

Tell us a bit about your culture. What makes Settle’s culture unique?

We’re hyperfocused on people, we hire wicked smart people with a built-in bias for action – same as the founders we serve – which helps us better connect with small business owners. As a startup, we are humble, we understand their challenges and work tirelessly to build a 10x or 100x better solution that can positively impact their businesses.

What motivates you to get up every morning? What do you take pride in when it comes to your company?
The perfect segue from your previous question. We’re driven by helping our customers grow. Cash flow is king. The more we can facilitate capital, the more quickly they can scale. Cash flow is a force multiplier!

We get to see how this energizes their business, and we hear stories that Settle’s help up-leveled or even saved their company. That’s electrifying to hear; we know our customers in a way few lenders can, and when they take leaps and bounds—it’s like seeing your favorite sports team win.

We are a payments company and alternative financing provider, but our mission is bigger: to address cash flow management and unlock easier sources of working capital—and working capital is the unheralded driver of business success, and make optimal use of data about all business activity of a company.

Alana, please introduce yourself to our audience and tell us how you got started in the affiliate marketing industry.

Complete happenstance. My background is actually in finance and economics, but I was connected with our founder around 11 years ago and fell in love with what she was building. For those in affiliate marketing who know, the channel is a perfect match between advertorial and PR, and what attracted me to this industry was the inherent foundation of partnership where everyone wins – brand, affiliate, and consumer. The opportunity to work at a technology company that really specialized and offered ways to scale and create efficiency with this type of marketing was exciting.

What attracted you to Fintel Connect and the opportunity to become a CRO?

Fintel Connect emerged from another business that we ran in a different industry. We recognized a huge opportunity in financial services and evaluated whether we could really make a difference and create value by bringing a new solution to the space.
My background and career have focused on growth, which means leveraging scrappy marketing and creating meaningful partnerships and relationships. As a result, I took on the responsibility of driving the growth of the business forward. When we launched the product at the start of the COVID pandemic, we had to be scrappy and go back to basics by focusing on building networks, leveraging existing connections, and naturally – creating meaningful partnerships. This approach created the strong foundation that we have today.

How do you define success in your role as CRO?

As a venture-backed SaaS company focused on achieving our growth targets, our objective is to create predictability around growth, which is a work in progress, especially as our product and commercial model continue to evolve. We measure our success by the predictable growth in new partnerships and customers, as well as our team’s growth and the development of their skill sets as we expand this area of the business.

What are some of the biggest challenges that you face in your position and how do you overcome them?

There is always too much to do, especially because we are still a fairly lean team. It can be difficult to see so many opportunities in front of you and really hone in on the thing that you know will bring the greatest success. It is important to say no to some opportunities because you need to focus on your main goals, and this is probably one of the hardest things for a founder early on. You must know where to put your energy and when to say, “Not now, maybe later.”

Additionally, we are fighting against some bigger more well-known household brands in the space. We are also working to build our credibility in a highly regulated and compliant industry, where credibility is a significant factor.

Can you describe your leadership style and how you motivate and empower your team?

I make a conscious effort to lead by example and empower my team, ensuring that each person has their own individual responsibilities that they own. Organizationally, we set targets and goals for individual team members and give our team the right balance of structure and freedom to achieve them on their own.

What are some of the emerging trends in the affiliate marketing space that you are paying attention to?

First and foremost, a transitioning trend that deserves attention is the use of platforms like TikTok in the financial services industry. There is a lot of talk about those who have a voice in this space and how much content Gen Z consumes on this platform.

According to a survey by Morning Consult, almost 68% of Gen Z scroll through TikTok and 76% are on Instagram for more than 4 hours a day. It is essential to consider other avenues that affiliates can potentially use for content creation if TikTok were to disappear. ChatGPT is another one that of course comes to mind, and it will have a significant impact on the quality of content available. The credibility of content is also crucial, and having direct relationships and access to brands makes a big difference in the voice affiliates have and the trust they can create with their audiences.

Finally, an important trend to keep an eye on is the rollout of GA4 and its impact on rankings and reporting metrics once switched on. There are significant foundational shifts taking place, and while they are happening slowly, we will likely start to see a true impact in the latter half of this year.

How do you stay on top of industry changes and ensure Fintel Connect remains competitive?

Our audiences fall into two categories, and we closely monitor what is happening with our affiliates in the marketing space. This involves consuming content through marketing and performance publications, as well as staying up to date with regulatory changes in the financial industry. Additionally, we keep an eye on market trends, such as inflation and interest rates, as they will impact how end consumers behave and therefore what our clients will want to be focusing on from a marketing standpoint. It is crucial to stay on top of these trends so we can better serve and guide our customers, providing them with direction on where they can achieve the most success depending on their goals.

How does Fintel Connect approach customer service and support for its clients?

We take a partnership approach with all of our clients. Every brand we work with has a different need and priority. For fintech partners, we understand the need to be lean and prove ROI quickly on marketing spend. For more traditional financial brands that are just getting started with digital, we provide a lot more high-touch guidance and support to help train their teams and set them up for success in the long term.

How does Fintel Connect prioritize diversity and inclusion within the company and industry?

We believe in hiring based on merit and provide training to our team and hiring managers to objectively assess the skills required for each position. Our goal is to create a supportive and inclusive environment. Our team is very inclusive, and we are proud to be based in Vancouver, whose population is inherently very diverse and has a deep value-set of supporting people from all walks of life and backgrounds. We aim to emulate this through our hiring and promotional practices. This is most easily seen when you look at our C-Suite team of women.

How do you balance the needs of clients and partners with the goals of Fintel Connect?

Bluntly speaking, our growth is tied to our client’s growth. We succeed when our clients succeed. Therefore, we only take on clients where we know we can make a significant difference. Over the past 12 months, we have been in a discovery phase and have refined our definition of an ideal client. When we bring on a client that is a good fit and they start to see the success that we can deliver, everyone wins.

Can you discuss any challenges or opportunities you see for Fintel Connect in the current market?

Regulatory fluctuations will always present challenges, and there is a lot of unpredictability in the current economic climate. Therefore, we closely monitor what major financial institutions are doing, as well as any shifts in priorities around the campaigns they are running and what they are looking to promote. The challenge is staying on top of these developments and guiding our clients based on what we see. We also aim to support our affiliate partners by providing them with transparency and advance notice if we anticipate any shifts.

What excites you most about the future of Intel Connect and the affiliate marketing industry?

As a business, what excites me the most is the position we are creating for ourselves and the direction we are moving towards. Our vision is to be the digital backbone of financial services, and while we currently only touch a small piece of that marketing stack, there is so much opportunity. We have done some serious heavy lifting and set the foundation to be able to bolt on new functions and features based on our client’s needs. An example of this is our Fintel Check tool to support marketing compliance. We will continue to build on this and create solutions that serve the industry best.

On the affiliate side, affiliate marketing has been around for many years, and it is a channel that often does not get enough love or is not considered a foundational pillar like Google or Facebook. However, it still has so much potential for continued growth. The influencer space has helped shine a light on affiliates and give them a fresh new perspective. I believe this channel will continue to evolve, and if we can support content creators and make it easy for meaningful partnerships to take place, there is infinite room for growth in this space.