Assess simplifies how providers make credit decisions by surfacing actionable insights using your business customers’ real-time accounting, commerce, and banking data.
Financial providers need to underwrite businesses quickly, but understanding small business financial health can be a real headache. Accessing real-time, relevant data from customers is difficult and enriching the data so you can actually derive meaningful insights is even harder.
“We’ve traditionally had to oversee ratios and metrics calculations that are fed into our scoring engine. As financial reports are often erroneous and mis-categorized, this resulted in discrepant scoring and, ultimately, customer loss.”
“We recently had the privilege of being part of the beta testing for Assess, which introduced a set of pre-calculated ratios and metrics and an auto-categories feature. It has reduced our development resources dramatically and yielded precise account classification, enabling us to increase customer acquisition.”
Dan Shapir – CTO & Co-Founder of Precise Finance
From today, all Codat clients making risk decisions will have access to our latest product, Assess. Take a look at our docs to find out more and get started here. As always, we are here to help when you need us.
How does Assess work?
1. Seamless data access
Assess allows providers, from lenders to payment platforms, to understand small business risk in minutes by enabling their customers to share their real-time accounting, commerce, and banking data via a single link.
2. Critical insights
Assess then turns customer data into powerful insights and surfaces them in the right format, ready to be used in credit models.
3. Auto-generated metrics
Assess auto-calculates financial ratios and sales metrics using accounting and commerce data and cross-references data sources to catch inconsistencies.
Credit decisioning today is broken
Lenders simply don’t have access to the right data. Instead, they rely on out-of-date financial snapshots or data from credit bureaus that doesn’t paint the complete picture of an SMB’s financial health. This results in poor decision-making.
Many providers manually collect and categorize customer data and then calculate the necessary metrics for underwriting. Unfortunately, this process is prone to manual error and slows down decisioning time, severely limiting the growth trajectory of providers.
The trickle-down effect for SMBs
The pain of credit decisioning is felt by both providers and small businesses. Small businesses spend hours collecting the data needed for loan applications and wait days or even months for a decision on the credit they urgently need. Providers often turn away creditworthy SMBs due to a lack of access to relevant, real-time data.
This can have devastating implications.
According to research from JP Morgan, 50% of small businesses have fewer than 15 cash buffer days, with only 40% having more than three weeks. COVID-19 has exacerbated the situation. During the pandemic, the average SMB with more than $10,000 in monthly expenses had just two weeks of cash on hand.
Small businesses generate around 44% of economic activity in the US and account for 62% of new jobs. Worldwide, SMBs are responsible for 50% of employment. It’s therefore hard to overstate the impact of supporting small businesses on the wider economy.
The bridge to smarter credit decisions
In recent years, the SMB lending market has become much more competitive. Lenders including Codat clients, Pipe, Mainstreet, Wayflyer, and Wiserfunding are scaling rapidly, and new entrants are emerging to offer alternative forms of finance such as eCommerce funding, inventory financing, subscription advances, and B2B Buy Now, Pay Later (BNPL).
We speak to providers every day who are trying (and struggling) to build and maintain integrations themselves.
This may seem like a sensible solution, but building and keeping up with every new integration across multiple data types takes teams away from enhancing your core product.
For those providers just getting started or launching new products in unfamiliar territory, building out the models to categorize and calculate metrics for underwriting and knowing which metrics and ratios to produce is a task in itself. In today’s competitive landscape, speed to market is the priority, but these challenges slow down the pace of innovation.
That’s why we built Assess
We built Assess to help the providers fuelling SMB growth by arming them with the necessary toolkit to compete in this market.
Assess handles all the legwork when it comes to collecting and enhancing customer data for credit decisions.
It provides a simple way for your customers to share real-time data from 30+ accounting, banking, PoS, payments, and eCommerce platforms.
Using models trained on over 90,000 businesses with a 99% categorization rate, Assess takes care of data enrichment, so you always receive it in the correct format. Further, Assess cross-references bank and accounting data to measure the accuracy of SMB data and protect providers from fraud.
Assess gives you a leg up on the competition. It alleviates the burden of manual calculations by auto-generating the most relevant and insightful financial ratios and sales analysis. It not only speeds up the decisioning process but eliminates any concerns around the applicability of the metrics, leaving you free to launch your next product without worrying about the data.
Start making smarter risk decisions today by exploring the API in Swagger. Sign up for our Free plan to get your API keys and upgrade to a Start-up or Enterprise plans when you’re ready to scale.