Seamless working capital finance, with Alek Koenig (Settle)
How to Lend Money to Strangers
Brendan le Grange
4.9 • 43 Ratings
🗓️ 13 January 2022
⏱️ 21 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
A lender will always want to know as much as possible about a business’ health before extending credit. That’s not changed, but until recently the only data that could help in that regard was slow and expensive to produce. And in turn, SME loan application processes were slow and expensive to complete. To make matters worse, these slow and expensively-produced numbers are seldom fit for purpose, even the old faithful financial reports are only a summary of what was actually happening, not a deep dive into the business mechanics.
This is maybe why some entrepreneurs, like Alek Koenig, are solving the problem by circumventing financial reports and going straight to the source.
“But the reality of Settle was, I was using this accounts payable software and I just thought it was the worst product I'd ever used… so I was like, hey, why don't we just build better accounts payable software? So that's when I was thinking about my background in credit and lending, and thinking, well, if we could combine this accounts payable software with lending, then we could actually make the product 10x better and actually help these businesses out.”
In this episode, we talk about consumer lending and SME lending, about creating the data you need to lend against, about removing friction, and about transitioning from traditional credit to start-up and from employee to entrepreneur.
You can learn more about Settle and how to work with them on their homepage
You can learn more about myself, Brendan le Grange, on my LinkedIn page
If you have any feedback, questions, or if you would like to participate in the show, please feel free to reach out to me at brendan@howtolendmoneytostrangers.show
A full written transcript with timestamps can be found on HowtoLendMoneytoStrangers.Show
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | And at that point, I got really in-patch away with startups, and I figured the best way to learn |
| 0:04.6 | about them is to join one. So I joined a mortgage lending startup in LA. |
| 0:17.9 | I've said it before, but my first real job was as a business analyst for Capital One. |
| 0:23.6 | A role I got by essentially spamming all of the organizations in my university's graduate |
| 0:28.8 | program handbook. It's a route into consumer lending that will sound familiar. In fact, if my friends |
| 0:35.0 | are listening as often as they say they are, it's a route into consumer lending that I know many |
| 0:39.6 | of you have taken yourselves. I tried and tested first step on the latter that will hopefully take |
| 0:44.8 | you to a senior management role in a bank or big international lender. But I've recently joined |
| 0:50.4 | a startup, ConfirmU, we game of high credit scores for the unbanked, check us out in episode 24. |
| 0:56.6 | But yeah, joining a startup got me thinking more about the entrepreneur's route into the industry. |
| 1:02.1 | Surely it's got to be the polar opposite of mine. Well, not always. Today I speak to |
| 1:08.8 | Alec Kunik, who also started his journey into lending as a business analyst at Capital One. |
| 1:13.9 | But then Alec took proactive steps to get himself into the startup stream, and after helping |
| 1:20.4 | shape a firm into the BNPL powerhouse that it is today, he struck out on his own with Settle. |
| 1:26.4 | The fintech that's rewriting bullpayment solutions, and using the data they create in the back end, |
| 1:31.9 | to make providing working capital to those same customers frictionless. Welcome to how to lend money |
| 1:38.1 | to strangers with Brain and LaGrange. Alec, thank you so much for coming on for the show. |
| 2:02.0 | And I might be preempting our conversation a little bit. Congratulations on the big month |
| 2:07.0 | with Settle's second birthday and a recently closed series B. So you must be feeling pretty good. |
| 2:12.8 | Yeah, a little gift in a curse when you raise a lot of money. Another way to looking at that is |
| 2:17.8 | you're selling a chunk of your company. So it's kind of funny how we celebrate these moments, |
| 2:22.0 | but that just means the bar is higher for us and now we have to build a bigger business. |
... |
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