04.30.24-Startup-Ecosystem-Conference-Startups-Lendica

JERRY SHU: Hi. I'm Jerry Shu, CTO of Lendica. We are a AI lender for small businesses. If you think about a small business that's revenue range from $1 million to $50 million, every time, if you ask them, Hey, is it easy for you to get working capital or any debt facility? the answer-- the short answer is no. And in general, it's a painful process. It's not transparent. It's a lot of manual labor. So the question is, how can we make it simpler for all these hard-working entrepreneurs?

Here at Lendica, we dream the actual experience for small-business lending would be, one day, in my daily workflow, why need $500k to delay a large bill? Why I need $300k to open a new restaurant? I can one click, security share my data, and the lender will just give me money on the same day. So that's what we are-- the solution we are delivering. We basically built two parts of the solution. The first one is we identify all kinds of workflows that small business owners spend day to day at.

Either it's on their ERP system, it's their term offering for their end merchants, or it's their payment processors. There, we have our embedded solution there. So the merchants or their clients can easily make payments with delayed options, or they can just get the working capital right at those softwares. And on the other hand, we have the data processing, which is our core engine, predicting short-term revenue.

That's where we can actually confidently know this business is capable of paying us back, call it $300k, in three months or six months. With that, here's a quick screenshot of our two parts of technology. One is identifying the channels. Again, as an embedded lender, our strength, really, is to identify the different type of workflow and seamlessly provide the lending solution. I think the demo here probably won't work, but feel free to drop by the booth.

We have a live demo we can show you. What does it mean on the ERP system when, every day, you are looking at hundreds of thousands of invoice? You no longer need to present it to a bank to get those payment delayed. But rather, right there, one click, those funding will be paid instantly to your vendor, and you can delay the payments for 30 days or 60 days.

And on the other hand, on the underwriting side, the challenge, really, is there's a lot of unstructured data in those small businesses. It's really hard for financial institutions to understand. So what we do is we create complex AI-driven engine to process data, make predictions based on bank transactions, historical vendor purchases, your customer invoice, or your accounting journal entries. So with those data points-- and it's really cool-- it's live data points-- we can actually lively predict and monitor the operation of business and adjust their credit worthiness on the fly.

We have been achieving, I think, a decent progress. I work with some of the largest ERP system-- for example, Datacor. They are one of the largest ERP system for chemical processing or chemical distributors. We also work with AB InBev distributors to offer terms for free for their end liquor stores. So those are areas we identify that's really helpful for small businesses to easily delay their payment or getting working capital.

So just to share one case study just so you know how painful it was for a small business to get credit, one of our clients they are a shoe chemical company. They have been operating for over 140 years in the United States. We have banking relationship with one of the largest bank, HSBC, yet they cannot get any trade finance product. With Lendica, they can securely share their data, their ERP data, with us. And there, we can make instant decision on every single invoice.

Either it's to advance a customer or factor a customer invoice or delay a payment to their vendor. So this is really the power of data. And that's the application in the small-business lending space. With that, if you are a financial institution interested in trying out our underwriting tech, happy to chat more. Or if you rely on large-business management system, we're also happy to chat about how can we seamlessly integrate into the system such that you, your distributor, your merchants can easily get those credit products. Thank you.