Our guest today is Keren Moynihan, founder and CEO of Boss Insights.
Our conversation with Keren is especially timely, as we recorded this podcast on Monday, March 16th, 2020. Just the day before, Sunday March 15th , the US Federal Reserve held an emergency meeting and announced a set of monetary policy measures to support the economy during the #coronavirus crisis. The measures are strongly focused on the need to keep lending flowing to both businesses and individuals, to help them through what we all hope will be a temporary period of serious economic difficulty.
This is where Keren comes in: Boss Insights has developed a set of tech applications and solutions to make lending faster, cheaper and better. In a nutshell, Boss Insights helps lenders like banks and credit unions to get fast and easy access to relevant data from the businesses that are borrowing from them or would like to borrow from them. This is especially relevant for private companies, which don’t have the same reporting requirements as publicly listed companies on the stock market. With these data, Boss
Insights can help banks understand their clients better.
This means they can have a better assessment of the risk of the loans they make, but also of their customers’ evolving needs. For example, lenders can better anticipate whether a business will need foreign exchange services, or other financial services to manage its employees or its supply chain.
The current crisis highlights how important it is for lenders to have a better, real-time understanding of their customers. The extreme social distancing measures adopted in the US and in some European countries will have a very negative impact on some sectors of the economy, and small businesses will be hit especially hard.
The Fed has emphasized that banks should keep lending, to help their customers through this difficult period. For banks then it becomes crucial to be able to understand which customers face only a temporary disruption because of the shock, and which ones instead might have a more structural problem in their business model – because they need to focus their help on those businesses that can stand on their own feet once the crisis is over.
Keren also talks about how the #Fintech revolution is transforming the financial sector, the role of Ai and more. It’s a great conversation on the prospects of finance and lending not just through this crisis but beyond it and well into the future.
Enjoy the episode, share it with friends and colleagues, and if you can spare a few minutes do write us a review on Apple Podcasts. Thanks for being curious, and stay safe during this difficult time!