Launch HN: Finley (YC W21) – Debt capital monitoring and reporting software • Hacker News Board

Re: Launch HN: Finley (YC W21) – Debt capital monitoring and reporting software

#21

Post by suhpreme » Thu, Mar 18, 2021, 12:02 AM UTC

mathackernews wrote: post #17

Congrats on the launch and Finley looks like an exciting product. Do you plan to mainly focus on the borrower side or also look at the lending side? Do you have any integrations with particular lenders or lending software? What integrations do you have to enable routine reporting? eg. integrations with specific accounting software? Generic API integration, etc?

Thanks!

Finley sits in between debt investors and borrowers, but focused on the borrower side. We think that’s the key bottleneck to solve for since borrowers often have the bigger knowledge/technical gap. e.g. a fintech founder doesn't need capital markets expertise to discover a fantastic lending product. We do believe debt investors will be a major distribution source, since today debt investors often bear the burden of educating/managing first-time borrowers. Finley can take care of that for them.

We’re planning an API integration, but for our MVP have figured out regular data delivery processes with customers that work with their existing workflows (e.g. a cross-account s3 bucket). We’ve built pipelines from there to automate reports upon receiving that data.

Re: Launch HN: Finley (YC W21) – Debt capital monitoring and reporting software

#22

Post by suhpreme » Thu, Mar 18, 2021, 12:47 AM UTC

lefstathiou wrote: post #20

Hi Kevin, congrats on the launch! I'm the cofounder and CEO of FINSIGHT, one of the few... sustained (for lack of a better word)... entrants into the capital markets infrastructure space (we own Deal Roadshow which markets about roughly half of IPOs, 99% of ABS and 20% of corporate DCM new issue in the US). My two cents on overall go to market: 1) Good job not mentioning AI/ML/Blockchain/Distributed Ledger anywhere o…

Thanks for taking the time to write this! FINSIGHT is a great company we’ve admired from afar.

Love these two cents. It's early, but good to know we’re building some right muscles with things we’re doing today. We’ve embraced the PG mantra and have been putting in extra efforts to prospect/reach out to clients, win social proof, and do the things that don’t scale to bolster our automation and make our customers love us. We’ll keep that spirit strong as we grow.

Also completely agree with your point on prospecting clients proactively + early. As you know, there’s such a knowledge gap in this space that it doesn’t make sense to expect customers to show up on our doorstep with ads. Though we’re investing in content since we think there isn’t enough education out there for e.g. first-time fintech founders, we’ll keep outbound core to our DNA. Also appreciate the thoughtful feedback on our website, value-props, go-to market. Looking forward to connecting!

Re: Launch HN: Finley (YC W21) – Debt capital monitoring and reporting software

#23

Post by brycelarkin » Thu, Mar 18, 2021, 4:43 AM UTC

Looks cool! I use to work as a debt investor. Our group never really had trouble in the compliance area (really, it was just trying to deploy all our capital). I think in my time at the company, we've only had 2-3 misreported compliance certificates and we just asked the company to resend an updated version. From a debtor's point of view, is setting up the compliance infra for a note/revolver time intensive?

Re: Launch HN: Finley (YC W21) – Debt capital monitoring and reporting software

#24

Post by jeremytsui » Thu, Mar 18, 2021, 4:17 PM UTC

brycelarkin wrote: post #23

Looks cool! I use to work as a debt investor. Our group never really had trouble in the compliance area (really, it was just trying to deploy all our capital). I think in my time at the company, we've only had 2-3 misreported compliance certificates and we just asked the company to resend an updated version. From a debtor's point of view, is setting up the compliance infra for a note/revolver time intensive?

Thanks for the question Bryce! You're certainly right that the compliance lift and infra needs may vary depending on the debtor and transaction profile. Specifically, we're currently focused on asset-backed loans as a segment within debt, where transactions tend to have more complex compliance and reporting requirements.

Re: Launch HN: Finley (YC W21) – Debt capital monitoring and reporting software

#25

Post by cpoz » Thu, Mar 18, 2021, 6:35 PM UTC

With the democratization of capital through tech companies like Pipe and Stripe Capital, it's exciting to see enabling technologies like Finley's that will benefit the entire corporate lending ecosystem, including incumbents and new entrants.

Having worked with credit agreements before, they are several hundred pages long, so it's difficult for a human to read and extract information from a single credit agreement, let alone multiple. Companies can have multiple loans, each with their own credit agreement. On the other hand, lenders have to manage credit agreements across their entire portfolio.

Re: Launch HN: Finley (YC W21) – Debt capital monitoring and reporting software

#26

Post by suhpreme » Thu, Mar 18, 2021, 10:03 PM UTC

cpoz wrote: post #25

With the democratization of capital through tech companies like Pipe and Stripe Capital, it's exciting to see enabling technologies like Finley's that will benefit the entire corporate lending ecosystem, including incumbents and new entrants. Having worked with credit agreements before, they are several hundred pages long, so it's difficult for a human to read and extract information from a single credit agreement, l…

Well articulated! And exactly right. We hope to accelerate the democratization of capital access and think we're solving the key bottleneck to achieving that.

Re: Launch HN: Finley (YC W21) – Debt capital monitoring and reporting software

#27

Post by mcicld2 » Fri, Mar 19, 2021, 10:55 PM UTC

As someone who used to work in real estate finance law, definitely can see the value. It's always been an incredibly manual, hands-on, and time-consuming process, which means as a result, it's error prone and expensive. Resources get diverted to focus on reporting vs more impactful work. Plus, there's so much valuable data that gets lost through the manual process—and that's why so many fintech and legaltech companies capturing that data (and corresponding insights) are having their renaissance.

There's so much opportunity in the finance space to modernize these processes that have always existed because "that's the way things are done." Glad you are changing the status quo. This is a diamond in the rough and can't wait to see how your team takes it on.