Tag Archives: #pitching

Startup Vic’s Professional Services Pitch Night

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For the first of Startup Vic’s monthly pitch nights for 2018, professional services were put under the spotlight. There is a public dialogue on the types and numbers of roles that will disappear due to automation (the professions are no different) and here were four startups seeking to engage in that conversation. Assuming that every industry and every occupation is vulnerable to disruption (and should be alert to the potential opportunities that presents), why should accountants and lawyers feel left out?

Image sourced from Startup Vic Meetup page

Myaccountant

With the promise of enabling users to lodge their BAS return from a smart phone, this app is aimed at micro businesses that struggle with bookkeeping and accounting tasks. Since accounting software packages do not support direct BAS lodgement (although expect this to change…), the app charges $39 per BAS, with no bookkeeping or accounting fees, and shares the fee with the accountants who do the lodgement.

The app is able to extract data from vendor APIs such as Expert360, Airtasker, Uber, etc., and connect to users’ bank accounts. Since launching in January, the app has generated 200 sign ups, with very little direct marketing or paid acquisition so far. The app is also aiming to achieve ISO 27000 (information security).

The panel of judges would have liked to have heard more about the acquisition strategy, and how the app deals with income and expense categorisation, different tax rates, zero rated items, and export sales etc. They also wondered about the competition, and overseas markets

Contractprobe

Developed by Neural Contract, this product uses machine learning to review contracts in 60 seconds. Using a scoring model, it rates documents according to established best practice and bench-marking, suggest sample text for missing clauses, and identifies problems found.

The service is available for ad hoc use, under a monthly subscription, or as custom packages.

According to the founders, the service can save 40% of the time usually spent on contract reviews. It offers a high level of privacy – the uploaded contract, report and transaction ID is deleted upon completion (although it wasn’t clear what records are retained for the purposes of clause analysis, data and analytics – including client profiling and user context.)

To reassure any lawyers in the audience, the product stills relies on human input to apply judgment to the choice of clauses, for example. However, a clear value of the review process is ensuring that phrases and key words are properly defined in the contract.

The judges wondered where this product fits in with open source documentation and pre-drafted documents, whether there are specific verticals more suited to this service, and what trust and liability issues might arise. Is it more of a “clause-spotter” rather than an expert system? How does it address statutory clauses, and the question of whether clauses are actually enforceable?

The service has about 40 clients, including law firms, and is now moving into corporate clients.

Businest

This product is designed to help with cashflow management, which the founders describe as an “iceberg” issue. They point to data that suggests 87% of SMEs have issues with cashflow.

Claiming to use AI to coach SMEs and accountants, the goal is to allow business owners to focus on what they do best, and move accountants from “compliance to advisory”. Applying its own algorithm to cashflow analysis, the service also provides training content to advisors.

Offering both SME and advisor pricing models, the founders have launched a pilot with MYOB. They also point to market research and commentary (CEDR, AFR, CPA, CA…) that indicates the market wants it.

The judges felt that the banks won’t rush to endorse the service (although under the open banking data protocol, they won’t be able to prevent customers linking their accounts) because they are used to the interest they charge on overdraft facilities and credit cards.

Brandollo

This is a marketing tech start-up, aimed at SMEs that struggle to access tailored advice. Targeting B2B clients, in the professional services sector,  with less than 80 staff.

Briefly referring to the use of AI and ML, the service claims to reduce marketing costs by 80%. It offers a brand gap analysis and makes recommendations, that can be implemented without external help. The process looks at execution issues, content requirements, and actual solutions.

Aiming for 200,000 clients in 5 years (currently standing at 200+), the main competitor is Benchmarketing. Brandello offers a freemium model, with a 3-tier paid-for service. They can connect clients to experts, provide a quote to execute and then take a commission on the resulting solution.

 

Based on the judges’ verdict, the winner was Myaccountant. While the people’s choice was a tie between Myaccountant and Contractprobe.

Next week: The General Taxonomy for Cryptographic Assets

Conclusions from the Intersekt Festival

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The first Intesekt Festival of FinTech in Melbourne, incorporating the second Collab/Collide Summit, ran from October 27th to November 3rd, and included an academic symposium, a hackathon, various co-working space open days and corporate field trips, a Blockchain Day, a pitch competition, as well as the 2-day Collab/Collide event. Plans are already being made for 2018….

Like all such multi-stream conferences, you have to be selective, and hopefully pick out the most interesting and relevant sessions and events. Overall, the event attracted solid numbers, a great selection of overseas speakers and delegates, and managed to debate some of the hot topics in FinTech today.

First, kudos to the Victorian Government, and in particular Minister Philip Dalidakis and his team for again partnering with FinTech Australia to bring this event to Melbourne (especially after a difficult year, with the LaunchVic and 500 Startups debacle).

Second, respect to the Federal Treasurer, Scott Morrison, for again speaking at the conference. Last year, he announced his open banking data policy; this year, he announced the comprehensive credit reporting (CCR) policy. (Needless to say the Treasurer found himself having to discuss Parliamentarians’ genealogy with the press pack outside the conference hall.)

Third, over recent times I have been encouraged by the level of engagement between the FinTech sector, and the Australian regulators, most notably ASIC and its Commissioner, John Price. (Good to see a number of ASIC staff at the conference as well, as it’s critical for them to see and hear what is going on in the industry.)

Some of the overarching and consistent themes of the conference were (understandably): Big Data, AI, machine learning, regulatory oversight, digital disruption, financial literacy, FinTech startup inclusivity, and the future of financial services.

I covered the hackathon and the pitch night previously – as well as the reverse pitch night by some leading VC funds. There were also some engaging presentations from challenger banks and disruptive FinTech brands. Always interesting to hear from other markets.

On the Blockchain day, and at the Collab/Collide conference, there were a number of presentations on ICOs and token issuance programs. Unfortunately, there was a lot of misinformation and confusion about the regulatory and other legal issues associated with this new phenomenon – even among lawyers.

Elsewhere, there were updates on the EY FinTech Australia Census, various regulatory developments, and a session on alternative funding models with the introduction of new equity crowdfunding rules. P2P lending also made an appearance, as did robo-advice and the New Payments Platform.

Finally, the dilemma of the major banks in responding to the new world of financial services was illustrated by the announcement of NAB’s job cuts, in response to technology and automation – which sort of goes to the heart of FinTech.

Next week: Consensus: Invest and Blockchain Expo

 

 

FF18 pitch night – Melbourne semi-final

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As part of the Intersekt FinTech festival, Next Money ran the Melbourne semi-final of their 2018 Future FinTech pitch competition.

Ten startups presented, in the following order, in front of a panel of judges representing different parts of the Melbourne startup ecosystem:

BASIQ

Describing itself as “the future of finance”, and quoting the trendy mantra of “Data is the new oil”, BASIQ is an API marketplace for financial data. Designed to counter-balance “the Faustian pact” of big data, social media and search, and to compensate for the information asymmetry of bank-owned data, BASIQ espouses open banking, even though it is backed by two bank-related VC funds (NAB Ventures & Reinventure – see last week’s blog). With a focus on the needs of app developers, the commercial model is based on a licensing fee per user per transaction. Leveraging the AWS security layer (presumably to maintain privacy and data integrity), the pitch also mentioned “screen scraping” – so it wasn’t clear to me whether the data is only coming from publicly available sources? Currently, the platform only connects to financial institutions in Australia and New Zealand.

Breezedocs

A participant in the FF17 Semi-Final earlier this year, Breezedocs is a robotic document processing solution. In short, it can read/scan, sort and extract relevant data from standard documents that need to be presented by customers in support of a loan application. Operating via an API, it can work with multiple document types and multiple formats: data can be structured, semi-structured, or even unstructured. The benefits for lenders and brokers are reduced loan approval times and increased conversion, with much
better CX for the loan applicant as well. The goal is to help the standard loan origination process to go paperless, and could be extended to life insurance, income protection insurance, and immigration and visa applications.

Doshii

Doshii ensures that apps and POS solutions can connect to one another, via a common POS API platform. Apparently, there are 130 different POS providers in Australia, and many merchants use multiple services. Now backed by Reinventure, Doshii has a focus on the hospitality sector. The biggest challenge is physically connecting a POS to the API, so Doshii has developed a SDK. However, so far, only five of the 130 providers have signed up.

egenda

I hope I got this right, but egenda appears to be the new product name for the WordFlow solution for board agendas and meetings. Offering an “affordable web-based solution for every meeting”, the product is currently being trialed by a number of universities. The platform can convert PDF/word files into HTML, transforming and enriching them into a single secure website.
The panel asked how egenda compares to say, Google productivity suite or IntelligenceBank. A key aspect seems to be that egenda is platform agnostic – so it doesn’t matter the source of the document (or where it needs to be published to?). A key challenge in managing board papers is that it’s like herding cats – so a single but highly functional repository would sound attractive?

HipPocket

This US-based app is looking to launch in Australia. A phone-based financial decision app linked to a user’s bank account, it is designed to help with personalised goal-setting, budgeting and financial engagement. Asked whether it can support long-term goals, the pitch referred to data that suggests an increasing number of people are effectively living from pay-day to pay-day, and have no capacity to meet even the smallest of unexpected  bills. Having attracted a grant from the Queensland government, they are currently experimenting with different customer acquisition models, but they hope to prove that with daily engagement, it is possible to build a long-term relationship.

ID Exchange

With a tag line of “privacy protection power”, ID Exchange addresses a key issue of the “consent economy” – how to control who has access to your personal data, and how much, and for what purpose. With the whole notion of “trust” being challenged by decentralised and trustless solutions such as Blockchain applications; the plethora of data connections with the growth of IoT; and the regulatory framework around KYC, AML, CTF, data protection and privacy, there is a need for harmonised solutions. Under an “OptOut/OptIn” solution (from the website, it looks like this is a partnership with digi.me?), the idea is that users take more responsibility for managing their own data. ID Exchange offers a $20 subscription service – but unfortunately, based on the pitch, it was not clear what does this actually meant or included.

Look Who’s Charging

This is a platform for analysing credit and charge card transactions, to identify anomalies and reduce disputed charges. Currently with about 7.5% market penetration (based on merchant volumes?), it can help with fraud checks and spend analysis, by combining AI, crowd-sourcing and data science. But from the pitch, it wasn’t clear where the data is coming from. Also, a key part of the problem might be the data mismatch between card acquirers (merchant services) and card issuers (banks and financial institutions). Given that the growth in credit card fraud is coming from online shopping and CNP (card not present) purchases, it would seem that a better solution is to tighten procedures around these transactions?

Plenty

Plenty describes itself as a “financial GPS”, and is designed to address the issue of poor financial awareness. Only 20% of people see a financial planner, but now with robo-advice tools, even personalised advice can be scalable. Essentially a self-directed financial planning tool, it is free for customers to create a basic financial plan and when searching for a mortgages. For a subscription fee, customers can begin to access other products and advisors, which generates commission-based fees to Plenty.

Proviso

Another of these FinTechs to have featured in this blog before, as well as competing at FF17, Proviso makes “financial data frictionless”, in particular the loan application process. With 250,000 users per month, and 150 financial institutions signed up, their success can be ascribed to the way they standardise the data and the UX. Plus, they can access more data, from more sources, quicker. And then there are the analytics they can offer their institutional clients. In the future, there will be open banking APIs, plus insights, such as the categorisation of transaction types, affordability analysis, and decision-metrics.

Trade Ledger

This is a new platform that supports SME lending based on receivables, that also reduces the effort for SMEs seeking this form of financing. Given that cashflow issues are inextricably linked to insolvency risk, Trade Ledger has developed a unique credit assessment method, and is product-type agnostic. It also aims to offer automated solutions, with an emphasis on the digital UX of products, and use machine learning to generate a predictive probability of default (PPD). Currently the biggest challenge is in the multiple variations of bank credit and lending processes and models that need to be integrated or streamlined.

Of the ten pitches on view, I have to say that none really had a “wow” factor (although if Trade Ledger can scale their PPD model, and if ID Exchange spent a bit more time on defining their key message, both could be huge products). They were mostly worthy ideas, but still defined by current banking and finance procedures. Maybe these platforms need to do more with the transactional and customer data they generate or process, to uncover more opportunities. Or think about what they could do to disrupt adjacent markets? Anyway, on the night, Proviso proved the favourite with the judges.

Next week: Conclusions from the Intersekt Festival

 

VCs battle it out in the reverse pitch night

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As part of the Intersekt FinTech Festival, the organisers, FinTech Australia partnered with Startup VIC and NAB to host a “Reverse Pitch Night”.Turning the tables on the usual pitch night, four VCs were invited to pitch to a panel of startup founders.

Representatives from Rampersand, Reinventure, YBF Ventures and NAB Ventures battled it out on stage to demonstrate why founders should want to work with their firms. Since I have been involved in pitching or presenting to two of these funds, and I know people involved with all four firms, I will aggregate these reverse pitches, highlight the common themes and try and pick out some of the key points of differentiation and/or competitor advantage.

Following a similar startup pitch format (problem, solution, team, achievement and future growth), each VC stressed the importance of getting the “right money”, and identifying the ways in which VCs can help with growth and people as well as capital. So it’s as much about how VCs can add overall value, rather than just the size of the cheques they can write.

Despite the supposed differences, there were a lot of similarities. There was much talk about how the VC model is broken, yet I didn’t see much in the way of novel funding or structuring solutions. Also, with NAB and Westpac directly involved in two of the funds, and ANZ linked to a third, isn’t this compounding the problem – aren’t banks part of the problem?

While having access to a bank’s balance sheet may result in larger cheques, the average size of individual investments looks to fall within a similar range. And of the deals that were referenced, a number were co-invested by the same funds and/or the same international partners. So doesn’t that itself restrict or constrain the variety of deals that can be struck?

On the positive side, most of the VCs allocate a substantial proportion (50%) of their funds for follow-on rounds. Some funds actively help to incubate the companies they invest in, even though they may still only take a minority stake. So the focus is on building a portfolio, and helping to scale the right companies. In one case, the VC has only invested in five out of 1,000 opportunities, so clearly there is a challenge with the screening process, or we just aren’t seeing the right startups.

Or maybe the smart startups realise they don’t need/want VC money in the first place? Only one of the four VCs specifically mentioned working with a startup that has launched an ICO – surely the most disruptive development to hit traditional VC funding in a long while?

Finally, given this was a FinTech-related event, I didn’t see any evidence of how these firms are using better technology to manage VC funding.

Surprisingly, given the reaction from the audience, the panel judged Reinventure to be the winner.

Next week: FF18 pitch night – Melbourne semi-final