Snehal Fulzele of Cloud Lending Solutions
For today’s profile we are joined by Snehal Fulzele from Cloud Lending Solutions.
Cloud Lending Solutions is a financial services technology company.
Our questions are in bold.
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Who are you and what’s your background?
Cloud Lending Solutions (CLS) is a financial services technology company with a vision to simplify banking. We offer a cloud-based, end-to-end lending platform delivering rapid innovation to the global financial community. Cloud Lending Solutions digitizes origination, underwriting, servicing and collections, creating a superior experience for borrowers. Clients include banks, traditional finance companies, online lenders, and marketplace platforms.
What is your job title and what are your general responsibilities?
As co-founder & CEO of Cloud Lending Solutions, my main responsibility is to execute organization’s strategy to fulfill our vision. As part of that, I am responsible for ensuring success of our customers, hiring the right talent, building the right infrastructure and operational efficiencies in the organization to scale. By doing this, we create value for clients, shareholders and employees.
My passion and drive is to help lending institutions maximize the value of cloud technology by digitizing the entire lending lifecycle to achieve operational efficiency, grow their borrower base, launch new lending products easily, and deliver a superior borrowing experience.
Can you give us an overview of your business?
Cloud Lending Solutions provides best-in-class cloud technology for loan origination, underwriting, servicing, and collection. Unlike yesterday’s legacy technology platforms, which are expensive to maintain and prevent agile responses to market conditions, our platform enables clients to quickly implement, extend, and digitize the entire lending lifecycle. It is based on a single system of record to ensure innovation and cohesion, and the platform can scale to meet the needs of lenders of all sizes.
CL Originate(tm) is a next generation application for loan origination and underwriting that has been designed to meet lenders’ requirements for automated decisioning using big-data underwriting capabilities and workflow/document management. CL Originate supports variety of asset types including secured/unsecured consumer loans, small business loans, commercial loans such as Commercial Real Estate (CRE) and Commercial & Industrial (C&I) loans.
CL Loan(tm) is an end-to-end cloud-based loan management application that efficiently handles loan servicing, collections and portfolio management reporting. CL Loan can configure new loan products instantly in response to new opportunities, and integrates easily with mobile platforms.
CL LeaseTM is a lease servicing application built natively on Salesforce that efficiently manages equipment leases throughout the lifecycle. CL Lease simplifies lease servicing and collections, and provides detailed view of leases complete with aging and approvals. CL Lease can either be integrated with your existing origination platform or with our in-house origination and underwriting platform, CL OriginateTM. You can also integrate CL Lease with CL CollectionsTM, our advanced collections solution that enables lessors to define and automate their collection process.
CL MarketplaceTM is designed to manage complex marketplace loan cycles and multiple investor portfolios. Built natively on Salesforce, this fully integrated, cloud-based solution can help lenders launch marketplace lending platforms in less than 90 days. Its open architecture enables lenders to quickly configure solutions that fulfill evolving market and regulatory needs. CL Marketplace also accelerates the delivery of capital, improves access to lending alternatives, and enhances the borrower experience. We have 20 marketplace customers around the world, which we believe is the most in the industry. We are very excited by these numbers.
Tell us how you are funded.
Cloud Lending Solutions raised $8 million in a Series A late last year. In total, CLS has raised over $10M in venture financing.
Why did you start the company? To solve what problems?
Founded in 2012, the idea for the company was germinated when I was trying to acquire a loan following the 2008 financial meltdown. It was a period of inordinately strict lending standards. Few banks were lending. As I researched my options to acquire a credit line I learned that the alternative finance (AltFi) market was beginning to make loans in areas where banks had withdrawn. At the same time, the rise of big data, social media, and mobile technology were laying the groundwork for new types of lending criteria that could supplement traditional FICO scores. These convergent market trends helped to launch and nurture a huge variety of AltFi companies. Cloud Lending Solutions set out to enable variety of lending institutions, including online lenders as well as banks, to improve experience for their customers by modernizing their back office technology.
We believe that banking must be simplified. Banks have many advantages that FinTechs lack – established customer relationships, vast capital holdings and a working knowledge of today’s complex regulatory climate. However, it has been difficult for many banks to determine how to use the latest technology to innovate new product offerings in a meaningful way. Thanks to highly accessible and versatile cloud models, those business dynamics are changing fast. FinTech lenders have proven simplification generates revenue at a small scale. It is just a matter of time until traditional finance companies and banks will start to improve their borrower’s experience to stay competitive with these FinTech lenders.
Who are your target customers? What’s your revenue model?
Cloud Lending Solutions’ core customer base of 80 clients in 23 different countries consists of many types of financial institutions including banks, traditional alternative finance organizations, and online and marketplace lenders. Our clients have processed more than $10 billion in loans in our platform and as a result, we have grown more than 250 percent per year, year-over- year. We have 20 marketplace customers around the world, which we believe is the most in the industry. We are very excited by these numbers. We are focused on making sure our customers are successful, because their success is our success.
Customers include Harmoney, LendingPoint, Propel, Dealstruck, Borrowell, Patch of Land, Flexx, Neyber, and Chrome Capital. We also work with large traditional financial institutions.
Quotes below:
“Harmoney is not a bank or a finance company. Harmoney is a technology enabled financial marketplace that needed a robust receivables platform that was flexible, cost efficient and quick to implement. Cloud Lending’s solution was the ready answer for our requirements allowing us to break away from legacy systems. Being cloud-based, Cloud Lending enabled us to reduce the time to market to a fraction of other alternatives.”
Neil Roberts
CEO and Founder, Harmoney
“With Cloud Lending Solutions we reduced an anticipated 6 to 12 months platform build and deployment to less than 3 months. This dramatically changed our go-to-market strategy and helped us realize a faster connection with consumers. Cloud Lending was the only end-to-end solution built natively on Salesforce – a strict requirement in our platform architecture. Throughout our partnership, Cloud Lending has been attentive to our specific needs, which has made it possible for us to deliver a reliable and secure cloud-based alternative to bank lending in less than 90 days.”
Franck Fatras
CTO, LendingPoint
“With CL Loan, our business users got exactly what they wanted – one platform, flexibility and ability to quickly respond to regulatory changes.”
Peter Dreszer
Senior Manager, Propel Financial Services
“With 750 dealerships across 42 states processing tens of thousands of lease applications annually, we needed a software system that enables us to service our customers at the speed of their ride. With CL Lease we will be afforded unprecedented visibility into our lease lifecycle which will give us greater insights into our business and allow us to adapt quickly to market changes.”
Peter Wasmer
President and CEO, Chrome Capital
“Neyber’s mission is to pioneer the creation of workplace communities that will enable employees to borrow and save together at fairer rates and reduce the indebtedness of the UK’s workforce, and in turn, help increase staff engagement and productivity. In combination with our own proprietary technology Cloud Lending Solutions’ platform will support the growth of our business and enable it to fulfil this mission.”
Neyber CTO, Ezechi Britton
“Cloud Lending Solutions allows us to automate the entire leasing process, on a single system, from evaluating financial applications through servicing, collections and asset disposal. By leveraging thesalesforce.com platform, we will be able to lower our operating costs, speed time to market and maintain strong relationships with our customers to improve their overall experience.”
Mike Sheehan, President of Flexx
If you had a magic wand, what one thing would you change in the banking and/or FinTech sector?
If I had a magic wand, I would make banks realize that they must improve their borrower experience through a combination of omni-channel capabilities and big data, automated underwriting in order to stay competitive. Not only must they, they can by adopting the best of FinTech. Otherwise, they will become irrelevant in near future.
What is your message for the larger players in the Finance industry?
The time to act is now. FinTech disruptors have proven the attractiveness of their user experiences, the efficiency of their cloud technology and the innovativeness of their underwriting. All of these are deliverable today to banks. We are working with one of the largest European banks to deliver an innovative private marketplace. I would encourage them to move on omnichannel, SMB lending, online lending and marketplaces. All can be done today, and very quickly.
What phone are you carrying and why?
Android/Samsung. I like it because it is open source.
Where do you get your industry news from?
American Banker, Wall Street Journal.
Can you list anyone you rate from the FinTech sector that we should be following on Twitter?
Ron Suber/@RonSuber; Frank Rotman/https://twitter.com/fintechjunkie
Can you suggest the name of an Angel Investor or VC that might be interested in being profiled?
Tim McCarthy
What’s the best FinTech product or service you’ve seen recently?
OnDeck’s online small business loan product and their underwriting model.
Finally, let’s talk predictions. What trends do you think are going to define the next few years in the FinTech sector?
I am seeing banks and established lenders start to embrace FinTech in new ways. We all know about banks partnering with marketplaces, or putting capital into marketplaces, but we are now seeing banks coming up with innovations around marketplaces that help them retain their valuable customer relationships. We call it hybrid lending, which is essentially a private marketplace for banks’ customers and their investor community. Omnichannel customer experience is also a hot topic – established lenders want to provide an omnichannel borrower experience, with fintech underwriting models to efficiently deliver small business loans. We are also seeing more and more established lenders using FinTech to re-tool their backbone systems, division by division. The market is entering the next phase.
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Thanks to Snehal for his answers today. You can find out more about Cloud Lending Solutions on their website, twitter, facebook and LinkedIn.
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