We did it, friends! We won Best of Show at FinovateSpring 2024 - more than 1,200 attendees and 300 financial institutions were represented.
How did we get here?
1. Solve a REAL PROBLEM: After months of quietly working with more and more banks the verdict is in - we have proven a huge opportunity to improve SBA, USDA & small business lending and Cascading AI (YC S23) has over night become the new technology leader, as the first AI-native Loan Origination System beating legacy systems.
2. Build something PEOPLE WANT / NEED: Investors often ask me what things we want to build next - the truth is we don't build what WE want, the last 6 months of development were 100% focused on solving one loan officer & underwriter problem after another. Here are some examples:
- 63% of loan applicants apply outside of banking hours (nights and weekends), so we built an AI Loan Assistant that can respond to inquiries around the clock
- 80% of loan officer time is spent chasing applicants to collect documents and complete a loan file, so we built a secure applicant portal and 40+ integrations to pull together a rich loan file with 0 effort for the loan officers
- now, as we are seeing up to 10x increases in full loan applications, the next 2 challenges are clear - automate loan servicing (portfolio mgmt., payments, annual risk reviews) and allow easy deposit account opening in one smooth Casca flow (we already collect 90% of the necessary data and banks really want to grow deposits alongside their loan portfolio)
3. BE BOLD: Many people told us that our ideas were big - maybe too big for a young company. But we were convinced - AI has changed the game - not only will smart banking leaders replace all legacy banking software with AI-native systems, we can also use AI ourselves to develop 10x faster than people ever could. I am incredibly excited for the future of lending and the future of banking.
A huge THANK YOU to my amazing co-founder, Isaiah Williams, our brilliant team, investors, partners, customers and everyone who has been hyping us up over the past few months!
Justin Norwood, Serhii Nechyporchuk, Elliott Chong, Ahmad Akhrass, ilana stern, Sarah Smith, Nik Milanović, Ryan H., Bankwell, Jaimin Desai, This Week in Fintech, The Fintech Fund 🚀, Clocktower Ventures, Peterson Ventures, Simon Taylor, Angela Strange, Jonathan Awad, Jelena Zec, Finovate, Greg Palmer, Gordon Brott, Bill Merz, Jocelyn W., Rian I., Olga Chumanskaya, Saffron Quinn
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