2015-09-29


Jed Simon is the CEO and Founder of

FastPay, a company that has built quite a reputation
in the invoice finance sector of marketplace lending. Jed
has quietly built a leading company that will cross a billion
dollars of total loans originated before the end of the year.

I wanted to get Jed on the Lend Academy Podcast because I
think they have a unique story to tell. FastPay is totally focused
on one niche, where they are the clear market leaders, and they
have one of lowest bad debt ratios in the industry.

In this podcast you will learn:

How a career in the entertainment business led to the formation
of FastPay.
Why Jed decided to make his start in the digital media
business.
How FastPay thinks of the two parties to their transactions:
the buyers and sellers.
How their underwriting process works for the buyers, sellers
and the individual who owns the seller.
Why fraud risk is more important than credit risk in invoice
finance.
How much of an invoice they will typically advance to the
buyer.
How quickly the portfolio pays back.
The typical APR that these borrowers are now paying and why
this average is coming down at FastPay.
Why they prefer to finance all of a company’s invoices.
Why Jed preferred to grow FastPay organically.
The monthly loan volume they are doing today.
Their bad debt ratio and how they have been able to keep it so
low.
How they are sourcing borrowers today.
Why Jed believes it is important to have a diversified investor
base.
The kinds of investors who participate in their
marketplace.
Where the investor demand is coming from today.
Where FastPay stands on the risk curve.
Why they recently expanded to the UK.
Where they are focusing their energy for future growth.

You can also watch a video of
Jed’s company demoat LendIt USA
2015 as well as the
Receivables Finance panelwhere
Jed was a panelist.

Transcription Options

Download a PDF of the transcription
of Podcast 47: Jed Simon of FastPay.

Click to Read Podcast Transcription (Full Text Version)
Below

Podcast Transcription Episode 47: Jed Simon of FastPay

Welcome to the Lend Academy Podcast Episode No. 47. This is your
host, Peter Renton, Founder of Lend Academy.

(music)

Peter Renton: Today on the show we have a
fascinating guest. He runs a company that has really made a name
for itself in the invoice finance space. Jed Simon is the CEO and
Founder of FastPay. Now as I said, FastPay is focused on invoice
finance, but they’ve really targeted one specific niche and that is
digital media publishing and they’ve been incredibly successful at
focusing on that niche and you’re going to learn a lot about this
industry. I certainly learned a great deal. I didn’t know much
about it to be honest before the show, but Jed’s company has really
carved out a niche that is very compelling for both borrowers and
investors alike. Hope you enjoy the show.

Welcome to the podcast, Jed.

Jed Simon: Thank you, Peter, appreciate you
inviting me.

Peter: Okay, so let’s get started with just giving
the listeners a little bit of background about yourself and what
you did before you started FastPay.

Jed: Absolutely, so I grew up in Los Angeles, I’m
from here and grew up right near UCLA. Went to Brown University,
undergrad, studied Philosophy and joined…as a lot of people do or
did back then, worked at Morgan Stanley in the Investment Banking
Media Group in the analyst program for a couple of years and from
there wanted to get into the music business. So at the time
DreamWorks was starting and I had been sort of a follower and an
acolyte of David Geffen and knowing that he was starting a record
company just seemed too cool. So, basically, figured out a way and
spent a lot of time…it’s a story for another time, but ended up
getting a job and was an early employee at DreamWorks. I was there
for almost ten years so I was in entertainment for quite a long
time.

Peter: Okay, so then did you leave DreamWorks to
go start FastPay? What was the transition like?

Jed: Yeah, so what happened was I worked in the
Strategic Planning Group for a year or two under a guy named Ron
Nelson who was the COO of DreamWorks at the time. Now he is the CEO
of AVIS and did that, then I ended up getting assigned to the
record company, worked for a guy named Mo Ostin, who was in charge
of it, who was sort of an industry legend, one of the founders of
Warner Bros. Records, actually was a founder of Warner Brothers
Records, worked for Frank Sinatra, he was just awesome, but the
challenge was the record business wasn’t doing very well. The
industry, sort of recorded music, had sort of hit its pinnacle in
the mid-90’s for a variety of reasons and Geffen decided to sell
the company, so I was involved with that. That was actually a lot
of fun, so we sold the company to Universal Interscope and I didn’t
want to go to Interscope so I actually switched to the film company
and worked in the UK. It didn’t really…I was basically in charge of
international marketing and distribution for DreamWorks Films which
at that time was largely almost exclusively animation at least
internationally. So it was an interesting job…definitely wasn’t
what I wanted to be doing for a living so I spent most of my time
there plotting my next step and came up with a bunch of business
plans, and a bunch of ideas and one of those was FastPay, which
sort of carried me through to today.

Peter: Okay, so can you tell us…what does FastPay
do exactly?

Jed: Sure, so what we do is…what FastPay is, it’s
a liquidity and work flow platform for digital businesses globally.
What we do is, we provide liquidity in capital, we also provide
work flow solutions like clearing house and other types of payment
solutions to become sort of the utility, the financial utility for
these digital businesses.

We started with media as our first focal point because if you
sort of look…if you take a step back, media was only about 2%
digital in 2001 and is mostly an analog business, TV, cable, radio.
Fast forward to 2015, it’s about 40/45% digital and it’s still
underweighted. In terms of media getting bought programmatically,
which means even buying television in analog format using sort of
digital tools, it’s going to be 100% digital within probably three
or four years. So we started with media because it seemed like the
need was great and the receivables were very high quality so that
was our initial focal point and it proved out pretty well.

Peter: Okay, so then let’s just…I think it’s
probably best illustrated with an example. I know you gave one in
your company demo at LendIt, but I think that…can you explain to
the listeners, give an example of like a media company and the
challenge they have being paid and how FastPay kind of helps in
this area.

Jed: Absolutely, well in the digital economy which
is…even though it’s probably about 10, 15 years in, it’s still
fairly nascent. These businesses…by these businesses we’re talking
about publishers, sub-content publishers, think of it as websites
or applications along with advertising technology businesses, media
tech businesses, demand side platforms, exchanges, these are sort
of the businesses which are helping to deliver these ads for
advertisers, the pipes that are sort of serving these ads to these
publishers…these businesses have been particularly underserved by
banks. They have fairly new business models, no hard assets.

Traditional lenders have a hard time sort of wrapping their
heads around new industries. So we’re vertically focused…in terms
of an example, say you have a content publisher that is…say it’s a
male health site where you’re focused…for MMA or any type of other
audience that they’re serving. These businesses create inventory by
garnering audiences and this inventory is monetized by selling it
to advertisers.

There’s different ways of monetizing it. You can monetize sort
of programmatically using Google and Facebook, however, sort of the
Holy Grail where these guys really make most of their money is by
selling to premium advertisers, selling directly to big brands or
though big agencies. That’s where you get the bigger dollars, the
bigger ad dollars, the higher CPM to get sort of more bank for your
buck. When these businesses grow and hit scale, increasingly they
start selling directly to these advertisers.

The challenge is the bigger brands…you know, you talk about the
M&M Mars, the AB InBevs, the Procter & Gambles, the
prevailing payment terms are typically about net 120. So if you run
media, give a campaign for AB InBev in January, you actually are
not going to get paid until May or June and that’s just standard so
in the interim you still have to pay for your overhead, pay for new
writers, servers, technology. In terms of marketing your site
there’s something called native advertising where you’ll pick some
of your content and try to distribute it to Facebook and other
places, to try to garner even greater audiences. Those media
sources typically require payment upfront or payment within, call
it 15 to 30 days so there’s really an inherent working capital
shortfall or working capital problem that needs to be solved. So
what we’ve created is a point solution just for that, that sort of
custom fits and it works really well in this type of dynamic.

Peter: Okay, so you’ve got a content publisher,
let’s say he’s getting say a million page views a month and he has
like Nike or Budweiser or someone coming on board serving ads, they
are then….it’s obviously generating great revenue for him, but he
has to wait. So he comes along to FastPay and then what do you do,
how do you onboard them, how do you say, well, okay, this guy is
legitimate, he has a legitimate business with legitimate
advertisers, how do you kind of go through the underwriting
process?

Jed: So what you’re talking about here is a true
invoicing economy, you’ve got a buyer and a seller. The seller are
our clients, they’re the ones who are selling their inventory or
their products or their service and you have the buyers who in this
case are the advertisers.

So in terms of our process flow, the way we evaluate risk and
the way we think about sort of credit in our industry, there’s
three primary criteria, there is the company who’s borrowing so
that’s the publisher in this instance; you have the individual who
is the principal of the publisher and you have the debtor, the
payer/the buyer so you’ve got kind of the buyer credit, the seller
credit and the individual.

What we’ve done is, through our history and expertise in the
space, we’ve created sort of predictive technology to speed up the
underwriting and reducing risk, but it’s all based upon those three
sort of criteria and based upon different situations and different
sizes and different sort of maturity and all the rest, You know,
the algorithm sort of weighs them differently.

Peter: So then…obviously, if you’ve got like a
Nike or a Procter & Gamble who is the ultimate buyer it means
it’s a very low risk transaction even if…I mean, you obviously make
sure fraud is not going to happen, but as long as these guys have a
legitimate business…how high…I guess the question is, how much do
you weigh the buyer versus the seller?

Jed: Right and that’s a good question and I think
you posed the question in sort of an interesting way which you said
if it’s Nike, I think you said, there’s really no risk, except for
fraud. I would say if you look at the factoring industry,
traditionally, historically, fraud has been sort of a 20x or so and
that’s what’s been told and that’s what I hear from a lot of
people, sort of a 20x greater risk factor in credit. So, yeah, Nike
seems to be a solid credit, you can underwrite them, probably not a
lot of credit risk there, however, you’ve got fraud risk.

Fraud risk, number one, is this invoice real? You have to
validate it which with some buyers is easy to do. They’ve tools
where you can do that or they have APIs or in other cases you can’t
and you have to resort to other methodologies. You have redirection
risk. One of the ways we mitigate risk is we actually collect so we
have a lock box. If you to sell us your Nike invoice, the money
comes to us, not to you so there is the collectibility component,
so making sure the money comes to us. Thirdly is…so you’re
validating it, you’re making sure it’s collected and the third
component obviously is credit risk and in this case Nike. That’s
probably the least of those three sort of concerns.

Peter: Right, so it’s always interesting to me,
you’ve got a lock box and you’re a digital business in a digital
age and you’re still getting paid by check, right? Does that happen
most of the time or what?

Jed: Not exclusively check, it’s a combination of
check, ACH and wires, I’d have to check, but it’s increasingly
becoming digital.

Peter: That’s good to know, good to know. I think
it’s humorous how much checks are still actually used today.

Jed: Yeah, it’s still…I read somewhere, as of a
couple of years ago we were still at 70%. I think it’s come down,
probably closer to 50 now, but still.

Peter: Still way too high. Other countries, it’s
zero.

Jed: Europe is way ahead.

Peter: Same with Australia. That’s a topic for
another time. So let’s just talk about the terms of the loans. So
you’ve sort of approved the loan, it’s legitimate, you’re
comfortable with it and say it’s a hundred thousand dollar invoice,
what are you going to advance to the seller?

Jed: Advance rates vary. Again, based upon those
three factors I mentioned earlier, but you can assume somewhere
between 70% and 85% is typical; the average is close to 80% or so.
In terms of duration, there’s two ways of thinking about it. You’ve
got the client relationship and you have the individual transaction
link. These transactions have a lot of liquidity and velocity to
them, right, because you’re talking about average days outstanding,
let’s call it 60 to 90 days across the portfolio because, yes,
you’ve got the high quality AB InBevs and M&M Mars’ and
Mondelezes which are net 120 or net 140 somewhere in that range,
but you also have the Googles which pay, call it net 28 or so on
average so on balance, it weighs out to about 60 to 90 days. I
think our average, right now, is about 68 days average DSO across
the portfolio.

So you’ve got the client relationship which is more persistent;
the client relationships last a few years. You have the individual
transaction which sort of cycle on about 68-day rotation.

Peter: Okay, so then what about the interest rate
that the seller pays for the privilege of getting this money
quickly? What kind of APRs are they looking at?

Jed: I’m glad you characterize it as a privilege
because it is a privilege.

Peter: (laughs)

Jed: In terms of the rates, we quote on a sort of
face value. These are discounts to the face value of the invoice,
but on an APR basis, when we started it was high, it was sort of,
call it 30+%, over time it’s come down. Our average is sort of in
the high high teens, low twenties now, but as we’ve got bigger…our
purview has broadened and we’ve kind of come more up market. We’ve
been able to serve sort of call it greater segments of the market
so we still have a lot of SMB’s, but we’re moving a little bit up
market in terms of the ability to serve a little bit larger
publisher, a larger client base. In those instances the rates can
come down to sort of mid to high single digit. So it’s a range, if
you’re smaller, higher risk, lower outstanding balances, smaller
invoices…the rates are a little bit higher, call it 20’s and if
you’re more established, a little bit more bankable, showing some
profits, bigger invoice values, we’re probably talking high single
digits.

Peter: Okay, so does the seller typically give you
all of their invoices or do you do like one by one?

Jed: Yeah, that’s a good question, Peter, so we
prefer and we’re structured in terms of the way our process flow
works, to take on all of your invoices. You don’t necessarily have
to finance them all, although 95% of our clients do.

The other type of strategy or product is called spot factoring.
Spot factoring is not what we do, it’s a different sort of business
model. We’re more…which kind of goes back to the beginning of the
company. This is much more…we want to be a continuity product,
we’re looking to help you with sort of all of your capital needs
not just sort of a one-time problem you may have in March because
something goes wrong.

We want to provide greater financial services, more products to
you so we have a clearing house we’ve been developing. We just
launched it, we haven’t really announced it yet. There’s some other
products in the work flow side to sort of tie us more into these
clients and give them more tools and greater resources, but,
philosophically, we want to become your liquidity solution and so
our product is really geared toward becoming a complete solution
for all of your invoices, not just become a spot solution unlike
others in the market.

Peter: Right, right, that’s fair enough. So let’s
just talk about loan volume, I know you’ve been around for a lot
longer than most of the companies in the marketplace lending
industry, so what year did you start and how much in the way of
loans have you done since inception?

Jed: Going back, we started in 2010. But at the
time, when I say we I should say I because really back then it was
just me and unlike others, we didn’t go out and raise a lot of
money. I kind of came at it from a different perspective which was
more of…I had a couple of…at DreamWorks I had become friends with a
couple of sort of high net worth individuals, well respected people
here in LA, private equity ones, kind of private equity real
estate, raised a small amount of money, about half a million
dollars, and wanted to sort of prove out the credit model first. I
figured technology could come a little bit later. I wanted to sort
of prove the concept in kind of that minimum viable product and
develop a few cohorts and see…it’s very easy to put money out, the
hard part is getting it back, right?

Peter: Right. (laughs)

Jed: I wanted to make sure the process worked and
that there was demand and that the pricing worked and all of that.
So we didn’t really raise a formal sort of institutional round
until last year, late last year, 2014.

I think this question started with loan volume and so over time
we grew organically really and so just recently have we taken sort
of a formal $15 million growth venture round. Even so, we’ve got…to
give you a sense, we’re doing about $50 million a month in
origination volume and a lot of that has really been organic
growth, sort of bootstrapping, but now, the use of proceeds is
really from this Oak investment…primarily has been our
technology.

We’ve got a team, about 15 engineers, and we’ve been developing
more and more of these work flow products, and iterating our
platform, we’re shipping another version in about a month which is
really the first version that I’m in love with. The other ones have
been great and our clients really like them, but this one, I think,
is really going to be the first one that I feel great about. But,
yeah, doing about $50 million.

Peter:Okay.

Jed: We’re going to cross…we should cross the
billion dollars in origination volume in the next quarter.

Peter: Wow, that is significant. So then, okay, so
you’re almost at a billion dollars, what about bad debts, how have
you been going with how that’s concerned?

Jed: Bad debt has been about under 10 basis
points, historically, and that’s been pretty consistent.

Peter: Wow, so…..

Jed: Yeah, 10 basis points, I think is on the very
low end of the spectrum for sort of our peers in the industry. I
think that speaks to a couple of things. I mean, I do think that
are sort of our underwriting team has done a great job and they’ve
developed sort of the right algorithm. I think we kind of figured
out how the risk curve rolls out in this industry that we’re
in.

I also think this vertical sector that we focused on
initially…you know the whole premise was you’ve got a very strong
set of buyers and a fairly dislocated set of sellers and I think
that premise has played out…you know, there has not been a lot of
credit defaults, but, obviously, we’ve figured out the validation
and redirection component, and lastly, I’d say this asset class
just due to its sort of velocity…you know it’s an asset class you
can monitor very closely, it’s got a lot of velocity to it, it’s
got a lot of liquidity to it so, I mean, those sort of three things
together is why we’ve managed to sort of perform at that level.

Peter: Okay, so let’s talk about borrowers, I
mean, you mentioned this thing, they’re a dislocated bunch, the
sellers you’ve got, everyone from like this guy and his garage with
a website, who has got some traction through to real publishers,
magazines, all sorts of different publishers who are very well
established.

Jed: A fair amount of pretty decent-sized
technology companies doing hundreds of millions in revenue.

Peter: Right, right, so how do you find these
people, how do you find borrowers who are interested in getting
your financing options?

Jed: So in terms of sales…look, the hard part of
credit businesses, in my opinion, and having been in fintech for a
bit, you meet with a lot of people with a lot of ideas, you see the
business models, but I would say, origination is typically the hard
part, more so than capital, in my opinion. In terms of how we
originate, in terms of targeting buyers or sellers, we developed
sort of a sales strategy over time, but most of our clients come
through referrals, about half, so we started off with sort of a
small set of clients then they told their friends and they told
their friends, and then we’ve gotten a little press and all of that
and that’s driven a lot of our growth.

We have an outbound sales team, but we’ve been increasingly
working through the buyer universe. In other words, you can target
these sellers one at a time and it works and then they tell each
other and you sort of develop that, but, increasingly, we’ve been
working through the buyers because the buyers…you work with the
seller…you sign up a seller, you get one seller.

Peter: Yeah, it’s one at a time.

Jed: You sign up a buyer who has a thousand or ten
thousand or a hundred thousand sellers and you can develop some
sort of partnership whether it’s a supply chain solution or a
marketing partnership or a referral partnership then you can
target.

So we’ve been doing…we announced a partnership with Mediaocean
which is a software company. I tend to think of them as sort of the
Bloomberg terminal for advertising agencies. I think they have
something like 50,000 or 60,000 terminals out there. Most of the
large agencies in the US, I think pretty much every one of them
like the WPs, the Publicis, Omnicom and IPGs, sort of the big
names, all use their software to do their procurement so it’s the
work orders and the statements of work and the IOs and invoicing
all happens through this sort of financial work flow system called
Mediaocean. So they’re our exclusive partner and through them we’re
now in discussions and you’ll see some announcements with various
clients of theirs to develop solutions to offer our product to
their vendor bases.

Peter: Okay, okay, that sounds…

Jed: So to answer your question, we’ve been
historically targeting sellers and we’re going to keep doing that,
but now we’re increasingly working through the buyer channel to
scale.

Peter: Yeah, right, fair enough. Okay, I want to
switch gears to the investor side of the equation. You said in the
panel at LendIt that you believe the hybrid model…you have a
balance sheet, you have a marketplace. That’s a very strong way to
run your business so I guess, firstly, why do you think it’s a
strong way to run your business and then who are investing with you
guys today?

Jed: Sure, what we’re trying to do is develop some
sort of a diversified strategy on the funding side. I don’t think
we want to be beholden to any particular strategy, overly beholden,
so if you’re working only with commercial banks, you have your own
regular balance sheet, if there’s some sort of downturn and that
market dries up, you’re sort of not in a great position.

Peter: Right.

Jed: If you’re a hundred percent marketplace and
for whatever reason the tides turn and those guys either…let’s say
you’re working with a lot of credit opportunity funds and all of a
sudden there’s a downturn and they can get higher yields elsewhere
that could dry up so for us having the diversified strategy just
seems to make sense if you have different types of capital from
different asset classes then presumably it makes you more
resilient. We’ll see how this all plays out so we’ve got an on
balance sheet and marketplace.

On balance sheet we partner with Wells Fargo, there are some
other banks coming into our syndicate soon. SF Capital, who is one
of our equity investors and our partners who have been unbelievable
partners all throughout. On the marketplace side, we work with a
variety, probably about a dozen marketplace investors, and there’s
different sort of forward funding agreements there, but, yeah, we
have a pretty good mix now between the two and we may even add a
third sort of strategy next year, something we’re discussing
internally.

Peter: Okay, so then are you open to new investors
today?

Jed: We are. Particularly, as the world…for
investors who are concerned about sort of where this is all heading
or where we are in the cycle, I think having an asset class that’s
got a lot of liquidity to it, where you’re not making a
3-year….you’re not locking yourself into a 5-year investment,
you’re talking about sort of shorter duration loans, very high
credit quality, I think that’s attractive in terms of the overall
mix. We’ve been seeing a lot of traffic from people who are
interested and we’re definitely open to extending the marketplace
as we grow.

Peter: Sure, so can you share anything
along…you’ve got such a low loss rate and your APRs are reasonably
high. I imagine you’re returning solidly in the double digits as a
net return to investors, can you give some idea of expectations
there.

Jed: I think the expectation…look, we do have
investors who are getting double digit returns and it’s been
working well. The area where we’ve seen a lot of growth and a lot
of demand has been in the higher credit quality area so think of
them as bigger borrowers, higher credit quality, lower yield, so I
would call it mid to high single digits, but you’re talking about
sort of a lot of triple A credits in terms of debtor quality in
there. So that’s been an area of growth and that’s where we’re
focusing. There’s a fair amount of interest in double digits,
double digit yields in the marketplace, but we’re really looking
for sort of single digit guys looking for higher liquidity, higher
credit quality because that’s where we stand in terms of the
overall risk curve.

Peter: Okay, yeah, sure, so before I let you go
I’ve got a couple of more things I want to cover.

Jed:Sure.

Peter:You recently expanded to the UK so can
you…are you just duplicating what you’ve done in the US? Can you
just tell the listeners what you’re doing in the UK?

Jed: Sure, well we’ve seen in the UK market and
some of the other Euro markets some real structural similarities on
both the buyer and the seller side in terms of dynamics. You’ve got
a lot of the same ad agencies, in fact, almost identical, so the
debtors are largely the same. I mean, the global advertisers are
pretty much…if you look at sort of the mix. You do have a few in
the UK there is Reckitt Benckiser which is kind of like their
Johnson & Johnson. We’ve seen a lot of activity from them, but
the reality is it’s a lot of the same debtor credits, a lot of the
same agencies and on the seller side, very similar market in terms
of types of sellers and concentrations and business models and all
the rest.

So our platform is highly extensible…what we’ve built and so
what we did last year is we got all the licenses and the capital
lined up to go into that market. We started testing that market, we
have some early success stories there so what we’re really looking
to do is sort of expand more of a sales and operations office than
sort of much more than that, but we started training there, it’s
going well, just hired a few people so by the end of the year we’ll
have that office staffed, but there should be other markets as well
added to the mix, next year, additionally.

Peter: Okay, so, yeah, that’s my last question.
Are you looking to be really…like you talk about digital
businesses, but then you said the vertical you’re focused on is
media, digital media businesses. Are you really going…is your plan
to be a digital media business and expand that into like other
geographies or are you going to expand across different verticals?
What’s in your crystal ball for your planning?

Jed: Well, we obviously spend a lot of time in the
market, we look at a lot of opportunities and as we’ve scaled a bit
we’ve gotten more inbound opportunities so we have to sort of
evaluate and put them through sort of our competency check list and
see where it makes sense. What we know is that the core market
we’ve been focusing on initially, which is really media and
advertising, digital media and advertising global, it’s growing
really quickly. It’s been growing about 22% per annum since we
started this and it’s truly international.

You’re seeing a lot of these guys, a lot of really interesting
tech companies that are selling to…these same global advertisers
are based all over the world and for us it makes a lot of sense to
sort of capture this market, we understand it really well. In
credit it takes a long time to sort of understand market and credit
dynamics and prevailing terms and conditions and payment patterns
and all of that which I think we’ve done a really good job focusing
on this vertical…one of the reasons why our loss rate is so low. So
it makes a lot of sense to extend that into other markets.

In terms of horizontal, other verticals, there are some sort of
very close tangents that we’ve been selling products into and
testing. There are some other sort of digital verticals that could
make sense down stream, but for now we found a sweet spot. There’s
an awful lot of headroom we want to exploit that really, you know,
maximize it and keep building products to serve these clients.

Peter:Right, right. Okay, well on that note I’ll
let you go. I really appreciate you coming on the show, Jed.

Jed: Thank you for inviting us, it was a lot of
fun. Thanks, Peter.

Peter: Okay, see you.

Jed: Bye,

Peter: You know there’s certainly options for new
marketplace lenders entering the space today, but I think targeting
on a specific niche certainly gives an advantage to the platform
because they’re able to understand it and develop tools and
marketing approaches specific to that niche. Particularly with
invoice finance, I think different niches have very different needs
and what Jed has been able to do with FastPay, particularly given
their extraordinarily low default rates, I think what he has been
able to do and build up to a really decent sized business in a
relatively short period of time I think demonstrates the power of
that approach where you basically learn all there is to know about
one niche and provide a service just for that. Now it’s not going
to work for everybody, but it’s certainly working well for FastPay
and I wish them all the best.

On that note, I’ll sign off. I very much appreciate you
listening and I will catch you next time. Bye.

You can subscribe to the Lend Academy Podcast via

iTunes
or

Stitcher
. To listen to this podcast episode there is an audio player
directly below or you can

download the MP3 file here
.

The post
Podcast 47: Jed Simon of
FastPayappeared first on
Lend Academy.

Show more