FINANCE
nCino | April 01, 2022
nCino, Inc., a pioneer in cloud banking and digital transformation solutions for the global financial services industry, today announced that Wells Fargo & Company will expand its use of the nCino Bank Operating System® to accelerate digital transformation within its Consumer and Small Business Banking division to deliver a premier, cutting-edge technology experience. Previously, Wells Fargo selected nCino as the technological foundation to transform its commercial lending operations.
“The pandemic has certainly changed the way our customers want to work with us,” said Derek Ellington, Head of Small Business Banking at Wells Fargo. “Providing more access to digital banking options that are fast, safe and convenient is important and has spurred additional investments in technology. Collaborating with nCino is expected to provide our customers with a more streamlined lending experience, reducing the sometimes tedious back and forth that sometimes occurs when applying for and obtaining a loan, and it provides our employees a single view of each customer, making the end-to-end lending experience quicker and more efficient.”
For Wells Fargo, a leading financial services company that proudly serves one in three U.S. households and more than 10% of small businesses in the U.S. and is the leading middle market banking provider in the U.S., a key component to its digital transformation strategy was selecting an end-to-end, flexible, cloud-native platform that could scale as the business required. As small business owners increasingly seek quicker access to capital, as well as digital experiences without having to visit a branch, nCino's Small Business Banking Solution offers a single platform to streamline the entire lending process for origination, underwriting and portfolio management.
“We’re incredibly proud to expand our relationship with Wells Fargo two quarters after they first selected nCino to transform their commercial lending operations. Wells Fargo clearly sees the value of the cloud as an enabler in their continued evolution and transformation, and we are confident our best-in-class cloud platform will help drive additional efficiencies and unlock even more value for their employees and small business clients.”
Pierre Naudé, CEO of nCino
About nCino
nCino is the worldwide leader in cloud banking. The nCino Bank Operating System® empowers financial institutions with scalable technology to help them achieve revenue growth, greater efficiency, cost savings and regulatory compliance. In a digital-first world, nCino's single cloud-based platform enhances the employee and client experience to enable financial institutions to more effectively onboard clients, make loans and manage the entire loan life cycle, and open deposit and other accounts across lines of business and channels. Transforming how financial institutions operate through innovation, reputation and speed, nCino is partnered with more than 1,750 financial institutions of all types and sizes on a global basis.
About Wells Fargo
Wells Fargo & Company is a leading financial services company that has approximately $1.9 trillion in assets, proudly serves one in three U.S. households and more than 10% of small businesses in the U.S., and is the leading middle market banking provider in the U.S. We provide a diversified set of banking, investment and mortgage products and services, as well as consumer and commercial finance, through our four reportable operating segments: Consumer Banking and Lending, Commercial Banking, Corporate and Investment Banking, and Wealth & Investment Management. Wells Fargo ranked No. 37 on Fortune’s 2021 rankings of America’s largest corporations. In the communities we serve, the company focuses its social impact on building a sustainable, inclusive future for all by supporting housing affordability, small business growth, financial health, and a low-carbon economy.
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TECHNOLOGY
Tingo Inc. | January 13, 2022
One of the most important advantages of the internet is making the world a global village. This has revolutionized how people learn, work, buy and sell, love, and experience things with others. While businesses of all sizes are already leveraging the many advantages, many are still left out or not exploring it to its full potential.
A new online portal, the Integrated Micro, Small & Medium Enterprise (iMSME) ecosystem is being developed to close this gap.
iMSME will be a portal open to businesses of all sizes, with a focus on SMEs, designed to facilitate communication among businesses and to build relationships with potential partners, clients and customers.
The portal is a product of a partnership endeavor between business solutions company, ITScope Consulting, a technology and communications company, Tingo Inc., the parent company of Tingo Mobile PLC, Africa’s leading agri-fintech company, and the federal government of Nigeria through the Small & Medium Enterprises Development Agency of Nigeria (SMEDAN), an establishment charged with the responsibility of stimulating, monitoring and coordinating the development of the micro, small and medium enterprises sub-sector.
"The iMSME portal will foster economic growth and development of all micro small and medium enterprises (MSMEs) in Nigeria when deployed. I urged MSMEs to leverage the portal to grow their businesses. The iMSME portal is a real-time integrated ICT platform designed to provide a digital solution to most of the problems faced by MSMEs in Nigeria."
– Dr. Dikko Umaru Radda, Director General SMEDAN
This portal is expected to make business processes more intuitive and enable businesses of all sizes to benefit from a growing ecosystem.
“The iMSME portal in conjunction with SMEDAN is the sustainable catalyst that will transform the entire hitherto unorganized informal sector in Nigeria, which makes up 50% of our GDP, into a functional ecosystem that opens talented indigenous entrepreneurs to efficient, affordable online business development services, enhance logistics support for small businesses and increase access to markets not just within Nigeria but regionally and across Africa.” – Obinna Amuchienwa, Chairman
ITScope
ITScope Consulting will be serving as the central clearinghouse for verified businesses operating in Nigeria, which will be registered on the portal, and Tingo, Inc. will serve as a technology partner.
“We are delighted to work with SMEDAN and ITScope to deliver this important platform, which will assist in delivering increased and sustainable economic growth in Nigeria and across Africa.
“When I started my business over 20 years ago, some of the biggest challenges I faced were identifying and connecting with the best partners to deliver strategic goals and to efficiently engage with these partners and customers on a day-to-day basis.
The iMSME portal allows entrepreneurs and business of all sizes to connect, engage and do business. This increase in efficiency will lead to a more prosperous economy for Nigeria and across Africa as the platform grows.
This partnership highlights our commitment to fostering a sustainable, digitally led economy that supports entrepreneurs and business across Africa.” – Dozy Mmobuosi, CEO Tingo, Inc.
The portal aims to revolutionize many of the processes of businesses of all sizes and across multiple sectors of the economy. A key feature of the portal is MyQ, an appointment scheduling system that allows businesses autonomy to control how partners and clients book appointments, thereby reducing cost while also increasing efficiency. Another feature that will do this is i-Chatbot, which allows businesses to automate the customer contact matrix, at a fraction of the cost of employing support staff, providing fast and business-specific answers to frequently asked questions.
There will also be an e-Wallet to serve as escrow to protect both buyers and sellers on the platform. This is in addition to microloans and grants that can be electronically set to allow only pre-approved payments. The vision is to create an effective payment management system for these businesses. This will be delivered by Tingo, which already operates a mobile wallet, Tingo Pay, used by over nine million customers.
One use case envisioned by Tingo is to facilitate a connection and communication between a wheat farmer, flour mill and baker, enabling them to easily discover each other, place orders, make payments, insure the transaction and complete logistics, all verified and guaranteed via the central clearing authority.
“With iMSME, we intend to use technology in driving economics of scale to reduce costs for our MSME partners, thereby allowing us to achieve key goals of the SMEDAN mandate:
Promoting and facilitating development programs, instruments and support services to accelerate the development and modernization of MSME operations.
Serving as vanguard for rural industrialization, poverty reduction, job creation and enhanced livelihoods.
Linking MSMEs to internal and external sources of finance, appropriate technology, technical skills as well as to large enterprises.” – Ajibola Edwards, Director ITScope
Through the portal, businesses can curate targeted advertising of products and services to drive awareness and increase sales. iMSME users will also benefit from several other features – more than connecting with customers, clients and other businesses on the portal, they will also have access to business services like CAC registration, Tax Identification Number registration, Group Insurance, Pension Management, and even access to a digital support suite that can help small businesses scale tech support.
iMSME is bringing over 2.5m verified business under a central repository with the potential to fully onboard 41m businesses over the lifetime of the ten-year agreement.
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IMPACT
H&R Block | February 24, 2022
H&R Block announces its third consecutive year of partnership with Nextdoor to find and execute 10 community improvement projects through Block's Make Every Block Better community impact platform.
Now through March 31, people can nominate their neighborhood for a project that helps improve the places and spaces where neighborhoods convene. The call for community improvement projects supports neighborhoods and involves small businesses, ultimately positively impacting millions of Americans. The companies will narrow the submissions and bring 10 winning projects to life. Nominations are open for the following categories: neighborhood beautification, neighborhood cleanup, park renewal, community garden and more.
In the last two years, this partnership between H&R Block and Nextdoor has received nearly 4,000 submissions narrowed down to 20 projects across the country. The chosen neighborhoods came together to build gardens, community spaces, murals, revitalizations and even a butterfly sanctuary. One example includes a playground project in New Jersey’s West Milford neighborhood that continues to bring life to the community.
“The local kids and parents are spending more time together and helping to build better relationships with neighbors at the playground, but it has also increased our community pride.”
Elisabeth Kenney, a resident of West Milford, N.J.
This partnership is just one way H&R Block is working to Make Every Block Better through its community impact platform, which launched in 2019. To date, the company has supported more than 258 communities and 304,000 small businesses, with H&R Block associates volunteering more than 205,000 hours.
About H&R Block
H&R Block, Inc. provides help and inspires confidence in its clients and communities everywhere through global tax preparation services, financial products, and small-business solutions. The company blends digital innovation with human expertise and care as it helps people get the best outcome at tax time and also be better with money using its mobile banking app, Spruce. Through Block Advisors and Wave, the company helps small-business owners thrive with innovative products like Wave Money, a small-business banking and bookkeeping solution, and the only business bank account to manage bookkeeping automatically.
About Nextdoor
Nextdoor is where you connect to the neighborhoods that matter to you so you can belong. Kindness is core to our purpose: to cultivate a kinder world where everyone has a neighborhood they can rely on. Neighbors around the world turn to Nextdoor daily to receive trusted information, give and get help, get things done, and build real-world connections with those nearby neighbors, businesses, and public services.
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FINANCE
Alchemy | April 07, 2022
Small and Medium Sized Enterprises (SME) are the backbone of the world economy. They play a major role in economic development, job creation, and innovation. Furthermore, SMEs create up to 50% of employment worldwide and represent almost 90% of commerce worldwide. According to research, entrepreneurs and business owners will create over 600 million jobs in the next 10 years which will consist of 70% of new jobs around the globe.
Today, small business owners are less likely to receive funding from large national or international banks. Instead, they rely on their own savings to bootstrap their business. According to the International Finance Corporation (IFC), there are 65 million small businesses or 40% of all SMEs in the world who have unmet financing needs. In other words, small business owners need funding to give them the boost they need to grow and expand their business.
There are many emerging markets such as Latin America, that have started to explore credit information infrastructure where lenders and financing companies can underwrite small businesses by accessing the SME's credit history and banking transactions. Alchemy along with other partners in Latin America and around the world have built white labeled software that can help launch lending companies to start offering much needed financing products for millions of SMEs worldwide.
Alchemy has assisted in developing government backed lending systems and automated crucial elements of the small business lending decision points. To properly underwrite a small business, the lending software must be able to automatically verify the small business's corporate information as well as the true owner's personal identity. We can automatically verify all small business owners' personal identity to provide a high level of confidence that these applicants are using their identity.
Cash flow is another critical element of SME lending underwriting decision. Identity verification, personal and corporate credit tells us the history and behavior of the business, but it may not necessarily tell us the current financial health of the business. Alchemy has integrated with partners such as Codat and Plaid, which offer a deep dive into a company's cash flow and financial stability. We've spent years perfecting our automated application process, decision engine, and workflows that allows lenders to negotiate with their borrowers before a final offer is signed.
Alchemy's powerful loan management system can manage line of credit, installment loans, and revenue-based repayment structures. The Alchemy lending system covers repayments, payment reminders, and collections modules to help lenders to stay on top of their portfolio and investment.
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