Hi Fintech Futurists —
Welcome back to our podcast series! For those that want to subscribe in your app of choice, you can now find us at Apple, Spotify, or on RSS.
In this conversation, we chat with Matt Bivons - Founder & CEO at Canopy. Canopy’s loan management and servicing platform helps Fintechs and brands service customer accounts through automations and APIs to help improve borrower repayment rates, increase net promoter scores, and decrease the cost of servicing for lending and credit card products.
Prior to Canopy, Matt served as a VP of Growth & GM of Consumer at GreenSky (a Goldman Sachs Company), Head of Growth at fintech startup Earnest, and Director of Growth at vacation rental marketplace VaycayHero.
Topics: fintech, lending, API, Paas, credit, loan servicing, digital lending
Tags: Canopy, Earnest, GreenSky, Stripe, Kabbage, YC
👑See related coverage👑
Fintech: Nirvana, AI insurance for trucks, gets $57MM; BitGo acquires HeightZero to bring TradFi to crypto
[PREMIUM]: Long Take: Stripe will drink your embedded finance milkshake
[PREMIUM]: Long Take: Is the CFO automation suite (Brex, Ramp, Jeeves, Digits) an SMB underwriting Trojan Horse?
Timestamp
1’37”: From self-design to universal solutions: A founder's journey
7’01”: Fostering empathy in product design: Balancing personal and market problems
10’25”: Marketing strategies & cost of acquisition in fintech: Insights from Earnest and GreenSky
17’45”: Expanding horizons: Gaining experience and expertise at GreenSky
22’24”: From insight to action: Building Canopy from scratch
25’58”: Navigating the go-to-market challenge: Insights from Canopy's founding journey
31’25”: Canopy's current landscape: Scale, competencies, and customer base
34’20”: Shaping the future of digital lending: Market evolution and exciting prospects
40’02”: The channels used to connect with Matt & learn more about Canopy
Sneak Peek:
Matt Bivons:
…in starting off this journey, a bunch of VCs rejected us. I was rejected from Y Combinator. This is where the stubbornness and resiliency comes in, which is there were signals in the market that we're saying we couldn't do this with a seed funding. I think it can still be done, but we were looking to raise a couple hundred thousand. There's just no way that we could get a credit card off the ground for that, particularly compete with CAC on massive marketing budgets that Capital One has. And so, I went back to the drawing board, really went through what we were doing, what was working, what was not working. And this is I think something that you have to do as a founder where you're constantly doing a gut check of checking in with yourself, with your prospects, with your platform, and starting to tinker there. And so, for me, the system of record was always the hardest thing. The rules engine was always the hardest thing.And so towards the end of October in 2019, Money20/20 was coming up and I reached out to a bunch of larger companies that were going to be there, Chris Britt from Chime, Johnson Cook from Greenlight, and wanted to see if I could set up meetings with them to ask them are they going to get into lending and that we had this rules engine that could help them. And we were very prototype, early, early days, but in meeting with them in person, I booked a ticket on a Friday for the show was on a Sunday using some of the last bits of savings I had, didn't even get a ticket to Money20/20. It was just like me meeting with people around The Venetian and all of them said, "Yeah, we'd love to get an API to that." And so that was like…
If you would like to access the full transcript, subscribe below.
Shape Your Future
Wondering what’s shaping the future of Fintech and DeFi?
At the Fintech Blueprint, we go down the rabbit hole in the DeFi and Fintech world to help you make better investment decisions, innovate and compete in the industry.
Sign up to the Premium Fintech Blueprint newsletter and get access to:
Blueprint Short Takes, with weekly coverage of the latest Fintech and DeFi news via expert curation and in-depth analysis
Web3 Short Takes, with weekly analysis of developments in the crypto space, including digital assets, DAOs, NFTs, and institutional adoption
Full Library of Long Takes on Fintech and Web3 topics with a deep, comprehensive, and insightful analysis without shilling or marketing narratives
Digital Wealth, a weekly aggregation of digital investing, asset management, and wealthtech news
Access to Podcasts, with industry insiders along with annotated transcripts
Full Access to the Fintech Blueprint Archive, covering consumer fintech, institutional fintech, crypto/blockchain, artificial intelligence, and AR/VR
Read our Disclaimer here — this newsletter does not provide investment advice and represents solely the views and opinions of FINTECH BLUEPRINT LTD.
Want to discuss? Stop by our Discord and reach out here with questions
