As finance went digital in 2020 the identity verification space became hot. Suddenly every bank needed to onboard customers online and they had to verify the identity of these customers. So, established companies that could provide a simple way to do this were in hot demand.
Our next guest on the Fintech One-on-One podcast is Laura Spiekerman, the co-founder and Chief Revenue Officer of Alloy. Alloy has been around since 2015 and they were starting to get real traction before the pandemic hit. Now, they have been on a growth tear as demand for identity verification has skyrocketed due to the pandemic.
In this podcast you will learn:
- The founding story of Alloy.
- A description of their core product and how it has evolved over time.
- How their technology works.
- How the different verticals within fintech use their technology.
- What they did to accelerate their growth during the pandemic.
- How their conversations with banks have changed.
- The Goldilocks approach to friction in customer experience.
- Why Alloy stores their customers data.
- In what circumstances do fintechs and banks re-verify their customers.
- Why they added credit underwriting to their offerings.
- How they approach diversity and what it takes to create an atypical fintech workforce.
- How they got over the challenges in their early days.
- What they are focused on for 2022.
You can subscribe to the Fintech One on One Podcast via Apple Podcasts or Spotify. To listen to this podcast episode there is an audio player directly above or you can download the MP3 file here.
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FINTECH ONE-ON-ONE PODCAST 328-LAURA SPIEKERMAN
Welcome to the Fintech One-on-One Podcast, Episode No.328. This is your host, Peter Renton, Chairman and Co-Founder of LendIt Fintech.
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Today’s episode is brought to you by LendIt Fintech LatAm, the region’s leading fintech event. It’s happening both online and in-person in Miami on Dec. 7th and 8th. Latin America is still the hottest region for fintech in the world and LendIt Fintech LatAm features the leading players in the region. So, join the LatAm fintech community this year where you will meet the people who matter, learn from the experts and get business done. In-person and virtual tickets are available at lendit.com/latam
Peter Renton: Today on the show, I’m delighted to welcome Laura Spiekerman, she is the Chief Revenue Office and Co-Founder of Alloy. Now, Alloy is a really interesting company, they are what is known as an identity decisioning platform and they help banks and fintechs onboard customers and verify the identity of the customers they’re onboarding and we get into that process in some depth.
We talk about what types of customers are using this today, we talk about how the technology works, the differences between integrating a bank and a fintech, what the impact of the pandemic has been and, you know, we also dig into some of the new offerings such as their credit underwriting offering. We talk about diversity and the commitment to diversity that Alloy has and Laura has, specifically, and much more. It was a fascinating interview, hope you enjoy the show.
Welcome to the podcast, Laura!
Laura Spiekerman: Thanks for having me, Peter.
Peter: My pleasure. So, let’s get started by giving the listeners a little bit of background, I mean, you’ve been doing Alloy for many years now, but take us through some of the highlights of your career to date.
Laura: I started in fintech about ten years ago. I joined as a first employee at a fintech company called Kopo Kopo, it was a company based in Nairobi that has built a merchant payment software platform and now lending platform off of the M-PESA rails. Some of your listeners may not be familiar with M-PESA, but it’s for the way people send P2P payments in East Africa, in particular, run by the telco Safaricom. That was my first foray in fintech and I just fell in love with fintech infrastructure and software and how modernizing the infrastructure could really affect what financial services were possible in any given market.
I then joined an investment company where we were investing in emerging markets, funds for companies on how the social environmental impact….that company was acquired by Goldman Sachs, but I spent a few years there, really loved it in the beginning, not so much at the end, how I was like jealous of the entrepreneurs I was meeting and really wanted to go back into an operating role. I was largely fortunate to work largely with a client who cared a lot about fintech and financial services in emerging markets and so back to see and venture different models like for finance, funds and all sorts of stuff, it was really inspiring for me.
So, a few years later when I decided to go back to operating, I joined a very early stage startup in ACH clearance space so it was also onboarding-focused as we are at Alloy, but this was onboarding for payments, getting money into crypto wallets or brokerage account or whatever it may be. At that company, had this realization that part of the challenges in onboarding to financial services are, of course, payments. You don’t want ACH to take three to five days, it’s the less than ideal system used in the United States, but part of it also was identity challenges, fraud, KYC, all those things and so that was what inspired us to start Alloy. So, that’s been the last ten years in Alloy when there was around six of us in 2015.
Peter: Okay. So, maybe can you just flesh out a little bit more about that founding story, I’d like to kind of get some of the thinking that you had back then and what was the inspiration to start the company?
Laura: It was as simple as we were very, very early stage company and we wanted to buy the product that Alloy now sells. We were talking to our customers which were largely early stage fintech companies, this was 2014, so that was the early stages of crypto, talking to a number of different companies who were trying to acquire customers and they were coming to us and saying, look, half the time I’m onboarding someone, I’m sending them to a manual review process because their name matches, but their address doesn’t match.
They’re probably who they say they are, but I need to have this information verified and XYZ public records data source has their address that’s probably from two years ago and they moved or they’re a student or they’re a young person or they’ve moved to the US in the last couple of years, it’s just really hard to find. Once you send someone to manual review, about 80% just drop out altogether and these are really expensive, high customer acquisition cost, high LTV products and so it’s kind of just buckets of money that we saw being wasted. And so, we tried to buy a solution just to incorporate it into ours didn’t exist and then, you know, as we went on, we realized this is a huge opportunity, we’re seeing that APIs are starting to emerge in financial services full stop.
Plaid was coming to the market in 2015, Stripe obviously existed and people were taking this kind of building blocks, these API modules very seriously at that point as fundamental ways to build the next generation of financial services and financial products. And so, we said, look, digital financial services are going to be around for a while, and we believe they are, and people are going to need to build on top of an identity platform, an identity API.
Peter: Right. So then, tell us a little bit about the first product and sort of the early days of the company, you know, getting to market and exactly what the product did and how it’s evolved maybe as well.
Laura: So, in the early days we were serving just other early stage fintech companies, that was who we knew, those were our friends, that was our community, that was the use cases that felt most obvious to us. What they really wanted was an API that we could query, get a yes/no/maybe back and get some data back from our API and make a decision off of that. As we started working and we started initially working with jut partner banks or banks that were taking fintech very seriously so, again, either by partnering with fintech companies or launching their own digital banking brands, for example, or neobanks within the bank brand, they were coming to us and saying, the API’s great, but we need a little bit of software around it.
We need an added record, we need a dashboard to be able to show that, we need some permission controls so that was really in 2017, I would say, we started fleshing out the product to become a little bit more usable by not just fintech developers, by folks who were doing manual reviews and all these compliance people so we kind of expanded the profile, I think.
And then, 2018/2019 came around, Embedded Fintech, Banking-as-a-Service blew up or started to blow up, I think this was actually that we were seeing the fruits of that come about, but that’s where we found that there were other products we can really integrate into and be a building blocks and sort of build into them. So, we started offering our API to channel partners, so Banking-as-a-Service partners, online account opening partners and the product is the same, but it was really how we went to market together that was kind of a new thing for us.
Peter: Right.
Laura: And then we started working with really large banks, you know, then we had to work with how do we handle case management, I mean, there’s this number of products we worked closely with and got larger and larger as we started working with larger financial decisions.
Peter: Right. Can you just take us through how the technology works. You know, during the onboarding process you’re doing identity verification, what is it that you’re actually doing and what is the customer who is actually ultimately trying to verify their identity, what do they have to do?
Laura: What our clients are doing is they’re integrating our API and our software platform. Once they’ve integrated, which is pretty simple, they configure their own rules and data sources inside the Alloy dashboard. The fact is, we help them do that, we say, here are our best practices, here are some of the data partners that I think will make a lot of sense for your use case or your demographic or your risk tolerance and so we’re kind of holding their hands in that process, but the technology itself is an API that aggregates a bunch of third party data sources.
So, you can think of these as traditional, the credit bureaus, public records databases, alternative data sources like phone and email databases, self-identification tools, biometrics tools like sort of you name it, we have it. We go into those integrations, put them in one API so that, again, you as a client can configure here are the data sources I want to use, here are the rules I want to apply. And then what’s great about the technology is that you might start off with one particular workflow, ones set of data partners, one set of rules, but three months in, you realize, you know what, I’m being a little bit too conservative, I’m turning away far too many people who probably look good.
You might do that with A/B testing in our platform, with a retro analysis, but you can change the rules really easily so in a few clicks you can say, I’m actually going to lower my risk tolerance here, I’m going to add a new data source here, test it out so you’ve made a solution that’s incredibly dynamic, really easy just to test and configure on an on point basis. So, it really becomes these stories that we live in to improve and optimize your workflows over time and then, of course, as you add-in new products, new users, new demographics you can respond or its compliance as a regulatory environment changes, the fraud environment changes, you react really quickly in your own time.
Peter: So then, I guess some customers, I imagine, they’re just using…now, they might be using some basic data, others are wanting to take a photograph of your driver’s license so, basically, however deep they want to go, you can kind of handle this.
Laura: We can support that and that’s exactly why so different kind of levels, of how sure do you want to be about this person and usually that’s a test of how high risk that activity is, right. So, you might even want to have different step-up triggers, maybe it’s depending on how much money that person is transferring, maybe it’s on whether this is crypto or not, whether it’s, you know, how much fraud you’re seeing in a given use case for demographic. So, there are different things that would influence how deep you want to go.
Peter: So, when I was doing some reading about you guys, you really have a pretty broad customer base.
Laura: We do.
Peter: You have, as you say, your traditional banks, digital banks and then crypto so I’m just curious about how they’re using your system. I mean, it seems like there’s different identity verification demands, depending on the type of organization, I would say. What’s different when you work with the different types of verticals within fintech?
Laura: There’s some commonalities. Everyone wants a good user experience, everyone wants high conversion rate, everyone wants low fraud, but they’re going to have certainly different….risk tolerance is there, some businesses seem to see more fraud than others, depending on whether advertising for it is simple and as you’d expect, there’s just (inaudible) even within the fintech companies, right. There’s earlier stage, they’re just trying to get live, they actually don’t even care about conversion that much because they’re only onboarding their friends and family right now, they just need a proof point. If they have to do all of those manually, that’s fine because it’s tripper days so who cares, that’s one aspect.
Then there’s growth mode where they’re saying conversion actually really matters, right, we’re spending tons of money, we’re doing these flashy billboards, we’d really, really need to acquire these customers so we care if they make it through our funnel, we care about customer experience. So, maybe we don’t really care about fraud that much, I mean, that’s a real profile, well, of course, you should care about fraud, but maybe it’s not your biggest factor because you’re just trying to prove to investors that this thing works so we’ll figure out the fraud problem later, right, that’s on the expense part of your bucket.
And then, there’s kind of mature enterprise fintech companies where they may care a lot more about going international, for example, right. We figure this out in the United States, but now they need to scale it and they need to get fraud under control, they’re under the eyes of the regulators now so they have to pay more attention to what they’re doing, they also have to prove what they’re doing and have a really nicely, easily digestible way of sharing that, for example, with auditors or regulators.
So, they really is a different value prop for everyone whereas on the banking side, same deal. Community banks, for example, I think their motivations are largely around increasing deposits, just being able to compete and stay alive against the biggest banks in the United States and their digital experiences which is really hard for them, but they won’t necessarily grow the way a fintech company does.
So, they want to increase their deposit base, they want to create great customer experience, but it’s very, very different from a company that has raised $100 Million, you know, trying to be a rocket ship. So, anyways, all to say they’re all very different profiles, but you might be surprised at how similar some of their workflows are, right, the tools they use are not that different. They all want to understand identities, they have to. There’s a little bit more experimentation and optimization that would happen in a fintech company that banks get to learn from which I think is cool. Banks get to sort of say like oh, the fintech companies are starting to do this, there see the fraud first before and now I get to learn the cycle with only two months after the fintech has learned how to do this.
Peter: Right, right. So, I imagine, the pandemic was probably pretty good for you guys, I’m guessing, because you had the whole segment of customers. Obviously, the fintechs have always been doing digital onboarding for the most part, but there’ll be probably a whole bunch of banks that have never done digital onboarding or have done it in a very rudimentary way so take us through, what was it like for you guys?
Laura: Yeah. I mean, of course, like everyone we freaked out in March, in April we did a hiring freeze, our investors freaked out. Our company is based in New York City and at that time almost everyone was based there so first number one thing was make sure everyone’s okay, at the height of COVID in New York that was a really scary time. It was May-ish when we started going, oh my God, I think this is …first of all, our team’s okay, second of all, this is like really good for our business.
We started seeing usage grow in a bunch of our areas, our use cases, of course, some were hit hard, credit use cases, in particular, but on the whole we saw things just rising, you know, going up into the right….PPP I think was a really good example of where fintech was able to step up to and say, the government’s kind of failed us right now, they have zero plans in place, but they’ve told us we need to stand up a program by Monday so we got a lot of calls from banks on Friday saying, help me figure this out.
That was a really good opportunity for us to help them figure out how to onboard a bunch of business customers really, really quickly and those are business customers who are, hopefully, sticking with them and have a really good experience with that bank. Banks, overall, came to us and said hey, you know that digital transformation project I had scheduled for 2024 (Peter laughs), I need to move it up a couple of years. These projects were great for us, getting to be involved in helping speed digital transformation was really exciting, I think huge for these banks who had to kind of figure out how to move a lot faster than they’re used to moving.
In the end, the number of daily active users of fintech products went up by 330+% since January 2020, that really stuck with us. Like it’s so funny we talk about this as if it’s this crazy thing and, of course, COVID was crazy, but I feel stupid looking back and like, of course, fintech was going to grow and, of course, once you go fintech, you’re not going to go back. My Mom started using Venmo, she’s not going to go back, so it feels obvious in retrospect that it was a huge challenge for us.
Peter: What about today, has it changed the type of conversation, do you like you no longer have to convince people to have a digital experience with you. How has that changed?
Laura: It has changed quite a bit. I mean, there are definitely still banks out there, you know, even as recently in the last year where they just don’t really have a digital strategy and I always go into these conversations like what is the plan then. I don’t totally get it, but they certainly exist. That being said, the number of digital account openings that have been happening the last few years has just been going up and up and then COVID obviously changed everything, but the numbers to start was shockingly small. So, I think when we started the company it was something like 5% of accounts were being opened online, that’s a pretty small number, relatively speaking.
It’s growing like crazy, I mean, the rate of growth is crazy, but there’s still a lot to do. I think it’s just hard for banks to move fast and to adopt. As much as they want to do this stuff digitally, I think they get stuck in the mindset of like why, I’ve always opened accounts by having a person sit in front of me at a bank and they show me their identity. The person is right there and they can’t leave so let’s just translate that to online. It’s not a one-for-one experience, you have to say that I’m doing it digitally, I’m going to rely on other sources of data and I have to get comfortable with that, I mean so do the regulators, it’s not just banks.
Peter: Right. You can always just close the tab.
Laura: I mean, I know my own habits, if I’m opening like a whatever trading app and I’m signing up, I’m so impatient, if it takes more than eight seconds, I’m out so.
Peter: So then, I’m curious about that particular piece though, that friction, because I know that most people want no friction like I think there’s a balance right and I’d love to get your perspective on…some people talk about good friction, introducing friction to make it a little bit harder so that you can verify that this person is real, but how your customers kind of handling this kind of introducing friction. I imagine with your process you can pretty much go almost frictionless to introducing a ton of friction, right.
Laura: There’s a …it’s like a Goldilocks approach to friction where you want to not necessarily take it to zero for two reasons. One, you might be introducing more fraud, right, like there may be some tradeoffs there that you’re not totally thinking through. Two, some users want a little bit of friction in their financial services experience because they don’t like the idea that you could…. making this app here, but from your retina be able to get every single digit in your social security number and completely onboard you without having done anything, that freaks them out. So, there’s some sort of balance and, of course, there’s like a huge range here across age and demographic that I think is relevant, but it’s not necessarily a zero-friction experience is what you need.
Our friends and partners at Mantle which does online account opening for banks has found, and I can’t remember the exact numbers, but they basically found that you want to get your account opening experience to something like two and a half minutes, getting below that is diminishing returns. So, as long as you are there, you’re good, you don’t need to get it to 60 seconds, but you don’t want it to be at five minutes so you really have to sort of optimize certain things, but there is a sweet spot where you’re getting the best experience that you need.
Peter: Right, right. And then, as far as your data, you’re really a connector, it seems like, you’ve got your API so, the data that people are sending you, are you storing anything? I mean, how do you sort of manage the data that is coming through your APIs?
Laura: So, we are storing it because our clients use our system as their customer portal, as their kind of central identity system so what that means is that we make the onboarding decisions, but now we’ve introduced transaction monitoring and credit underwriting which address the life cycle of the customer. So, consumers onboarding, you know, through Alloy, but 30 days later or three years later, they do some weird transaction or they want to open a credit card or they want to open a new product of some other kind.
You want to have a place to understand what did I learn about them during onboarding, what do I know about them since then, their behavior since then, right, how they transact, how do they log into their profiles and what devices, etc. You want all that in one place, you can make better ongoing decisions and so for that reason, we store the information on behalf of our clients in their systems, none of it is shared, it’s all encrypted, etc. etc., but it does allow them to have better utility of the product.
Peter: Right. So, they do they even get back and re-verify someone if there’s something suspicious, I mean, you talk about synthetic identity fraud where someone is doing just fine for several years and then suddenly, boom, there’s suspicious behavior.
Laura: So, you’d want to re-verify them under certain circumstances. One might be if they’re just doing something riskier, you know, maybe you let them transact with $25 in the first place so your threshold was relatively low, we don’t care that much, right, if they were going to be a bad actor. But now, they’re going to do a $10,000 wire transfer, now you really care so might re-verify them and add some additional layers. You might want to ask them to take a selfie with their driver’s license, for example, or for other reasons you have to re-screen them, right, through our back screens or negative new screens because maybe they weren’t on a watch list two years ago, but now, they are so there are a bunch of different reasons to sort of continuously check up on information.
Peter: Interesting, interesting, okay. So, I read that you recently added credit underwriting to your offerings, can you detail what exactly you’re doing there?
Laura: It’s really like an extension, we call it a new product and it certainly is a new product in many ways, but it’s also an extension of our existing product because it’s really….credit underwriting is just a form of onboarding, but specific to credit products. So, the way you can think about it is that our traditional onboarding product has been KYC and a no risk in fraud focus, this is credit-focused. I mean, just visually even looking at the products, very similar where you’re pulling in a variety of forms of data and helping to make decisions.
So, you’re writing rules that say, you know, I’m pulling data from the credit bureau and maybe I’m doing some cashflow underwriting based on your transaction history and forming a decision and instead of maybe yes/no manual review maybe my outcomes are yes with this credit limit, yes with a different credit limit, no, so you can have sort of different areas in terms of what types of credit or what credit line you want to extend to them at the end of that decision process. But, it really is conceptually the same as our onboarding product in many, many ways.
Peter: Are you adding credit data specific to the….so you are adding that kind of a little bit more intelligence for a lender.
Laura: We’re adding in credit data, we’re adding in alternative credit data and we’re adding in cashflow data so that you can make decisions on any of those things.
Peter: Okay, interesting, interesting. I want to switch gears a little bit and I want to talk about diversity. I was reading about some of the things that you have done and Alloy is probably one of the very few fintechs that has more female employees than male employees, you also have a high percentage of non-white employees. Tell us a little bit about your approach there and how you’ve been able to really, I feel like, break the mold of many fintech companies.
Laura: To break it down into a few things, and the caveat to all of this is we’re not where we want to be, particularly when it comes to non-white folks, we have a lot of work to do. So, while I’m proud of where we are relative to the industry standard, the industry standard is really bad, (both laugh), it’s very bad so that’s the caveat of all this.
Early on, I think the advice everyone gives and it’s unfortunately just true is that it matters what you do early so for us, having a woman, having a couple of other women on the team join early made a huge difference because….. and women would tell us this after they joined.
So, when they were interviewing….like I was in the office when I was interviewing and I saw two or three women there, I felt much better. Or, I looked to the website, I saw some women on the page and I just felt like it was a better place for me. So, it’s obvious, you know, there’s no secret sauce or silver bullet here, but it’s like having more women early is easier to attract a good crew of women. That’s my best advice to other founders, it’s like just do it early and make a point of it.
The second is that we have incredible people leader and we hired a people leader earlier than I think in other companies, I think she was employee no. 14 or 15, something like that and she has scaled with us and now VP of People at Alloy. This is something she is very good at and very intentional about so she reports to the Executive Team weekly. On a weekly basis, we know exactly how many women, people of color, etc. and keeps it very top of mind, not just for us, but for the whole company. So, that’s been really important because she sort of forces the issue at times where maybe we just sort of feel too busy with other things and we don’t want to pay attention to that.
The third is, I would say, is we’re trying to hold ourselves accountable by, of course, the way she is, but we’re trying to report this to the Board quarterly. We have done a bunch of work with consulting companies, one of them I would call fantastic is a company called Paradigm that comes in and helps you assess like the ways in which you’re doing your hiring process, for example, is it leading to the best outcomes that you really want, the way that you’re doing your comp bands so there’s a bunch of work in there that we’ve uncovered with some help of professionals.
These are expensive, but I need to stress the point, you have to pay attention to it, you have to spend money on it, you have to really, really acknowledge that it matters and put your money and your time…we’re in an office, we just can’t just pay lip service to it. I talk to a lot of mostly male founders who are like I’m trying to hire women, but it’s like you’re not unless you’re really spending the money and the time to actually do that. You can’t just sort of say you want to and manifest it, that’s not how it works, unfortunately.
Peter: Is it across your whole business because I imagine it’s easy to hire women marketeers than women engineers, right, I mean, it’s how you approach different scenarios.
Laura: That tends to be true, product and engineering to the credit of the leadership there has actually done a fantastic job of bringing in more women engineers and they’ve been more purposeful. I think we got, on my side of things, a little bit lazy, and so you can see the difference there in the teams where they just have to be more thoughtful and kind of ruthless and say we want more female engineers or non-white engineers and that’s working. I mean, again, we still have room to improve for sure, but it’s working. It kind of goes in iterations so on the sell side, for example, we have a lot of male sales reps, but a lot of female sales leadership. So, it’s not always explainable other than the lack of time and attention, etc.
Peter: Right, right, interesting. So, we’re almost out of time, but a couple of more things I want to get to. You’ve been in this game awhile, it almost feels like to me when I look at the history of your company, you started a little too early, in some ways it felt like……could you just talk about those early days.
Now, I think I heard you on a podcast recently talk about the challenges of really getting not just your first client, your first 10/15 clients and really getting….you know, like you said that you were always sort of on the brink of disaster in those early days, but what got you over the hump. I mean, because you sound like you are really hitting your stride before the pandemic, it wasn’t just the pandemic that really got you going, what got you over the hump?
Laura: Yeah. We had about three years where the business just didn’t go anywhere, it didn’t seem like anything there was going to happen, we really struggled to see any degree of scale, get any sort of interest and I think a couple of things happened, like you said, before the pandemic. We had clients who went live and started seeing some success so either they’re businesses grew or their relationship with us deepened where there was like more stuff they realized we could be doing.
So, I think that showed itself in either, you know, usage going up, right, it was pretty clear like these clients are growing and we’re making more money as they make more money or just their shouting from the rooftops how much they love this product and they’re willing to talk about it and they’ll do case studies and they’ll do PR and they’ll tell investors. The combination of those two things started to materialize, but just took a long time and made you invest a lot of time and energy into making those companies successful and those integrations successful which my Co-Founder and CEO, Tommy largely did, he just spent a lot of time with these customers then very small ones.
And then the other things was lack of the market so I could never have predicted that Embedded Finance, Banking-as-a-Service, you know, all that stuff would be as big as it is, but in 2018/2019, those companies started to come around and it became clearer that every company would be a fintech company and we were going to be able to be at the heart of that strategy. And so, we just got lucky we hung around long enough, we didn’t run out of money, so that we were there when the going was good though part of that is we, finally convinced a large bank to work with us and that made all the difference for us when it came to raising our Series A.
Peter: Interesting, interesting. You’re off to the races now, it seems like. So, speaking of which what’s on your playbook for 2022, what can you tell us about what’s coming.
Laura: So, the biggest things for us are taking the incredible new products we have, the transaction monitoring, credit underwriting and figuring out how we take it to market so getting to products market next year is one of our biggest priorities. We’re really lucky to have Charley Ma who was formerly at Plaid, formerly at Ramp, now at Alloy figuring out basically how to get these products into the hands of the customers that need them. So, ideal customer profile, understanding exactly who’s going to be using what at what price, with what sales process, that’s one of the big, big things for next year.
And I’d say one of the other initiatives is we’ve been so fortunate to work with some of the Banking-as-a-Service providers, Embedded Fintech providers where I think we want to double down there and also make our product more developer-friendly, part of going up market meant that to some extent we didn’t do enough to make our API documentation, for example, really, really great. We’re spending some time figuring out how to make the product useful for the early stage companies who need us to get off the ground.
Peter: Right, right. Well, good luck with that, we’ll have to leave it there, Laura, I really appreciate your coming on the show today.
Laura: Thank you, Peter, for having me, appreciate it.
Peter: Okay, see you.
You know, I love hearing these stories of entrepreneurial resilience where it was hard going for Alloy in the early days. I think it’s rare that a fintech company has smooth sailing from day one, it seems like it does happen particularly these days, but most companies I think have some challenges in their early days and it was interesting to me what Laura said there was they’re really focusing on making sure that the client was successful, making sure that they were able to rave about the product and they really didn’t get over the hump until they signed that first big bank and that really helped them and I thought that was super interesting.
Anyway on that note, I will sign off. I very much appreciate you listening and I’ll catch you next time. Bye.
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Today’s episode was brought to you by LendIt Fintech LatAm, the region’s leading fintech event. It’s happening both online and in-person in Miami on Dec. 7th and 8th. Latin America is still the hottest region for fintech in the world and LendIt Fintech LatAm features the leading players in the region. So, join the LatAm fintech community this year where you will meet the people who matter, learn from the experts and get business done. In-person and virtual tickets are available at lendit.com/latam.
