CEO Ryan Campbell wishes he had access to MoneyThumb’s automated document evaluation and fraud solutions when he ran other Fintech companies earlier in his career. Over the past seven years, he’s seen MoneyThumb grow into a trusted service provider to hundreds of lenders and thousands of professionals. Customer feedback and a technology-first approach are keys to its success.
During his 15 years in Fintech, Campbell has been part of several successful exits and networked with scores of lenders. He knows how important they are to the economy.
“When you look at lending and fintech, they’re the backbone of what drives our economy,” he began. “That’s where Main Street SMBs get their money from. It’s it’s certainly not from banks in a meaningful way.”
AI Helps – To a Point
At its core, MoneyThumb improves clients’ efficiency at repeatable tasks. What could take a human minutes or hours to do is reduced to seconds. Performance is consistent.
PDF Insights and Thumbprint are MoneyThumb’s two flagship products. The first turns bank statements into underwriting scorecards by identifying leading characteristics like revenue trends, MCA positions, NSF and overdrafts, repeating transactions, and dozens of other criteria.
“Our goal is to help them get to yes or no faster and more efficiently than their competition,” Campbell said.
Thumbprint analyzes PDFs to see if they have been altered. Campbell said roughly 6% of evaluated documents are fraudulent in some way. AI helps Thumbprint because the system learns about documents and fraud. It has its place among other tools in a successful blend.
“It’s not always AI; algorithms often make the most sense,” Campbell explained. “That’s what makes our company powerful in what we provide and how we compete in the marketplace. We know when to use a specific set of rules and guidelines.
“There are so many things that make a successful loan and what would increase the ability of an SMB to pay that back. We help to identify so many different criteria that they use that they never had access to before.”
Tech Can Always Improve Your Product
MoneyThumb has a long to-do list, beginning with augmenting its lending and mortgage capabilities. Campbell also wants to expand the document types they can analyze. The more information a lender has, the better decisions they can make.
“Everything tells the same story, or there’s a mismatch,” Campbell said.
One challenge for companies extracting data from documents is the lack of uniformity between similar documents from different issuers. Campbell said tax forms are mostly consistent, while bank statements have thousands of iterations. One institution can change positioning on statements. Therefore, an extraction system cannot be template-dependent.
“That’s something that I think we’ve done really well,” Campbell said. “We didn’t grow up as a company where people interpreted what the documents were by themselves. We always relied on the software to do it. So we had to build software that inched towards perfection, though nobody will ever be perfect.”
Prioritizing Staff Success, Customer Input
Campbell marvels at the improvements he’s seen in MoneyThumb’s scorecards over seven years. Part of the credit must go to a focus on frequent customer engagement.
“We let customers drive our product roadmap,” Campbell said. “We show them what we are doing but ask how they use it.”
A testament to this ethos is that MoneyThumb built its customer service team before its sales force. Sales and account management constantly solicit ideas from staff. Campbell reasons that a company gets in trouble when it is out of touch with its clients.
In late August, MoneyThumb was acquired by Iron Creek Partners and Main Street Capital Corporation. Campbell said MoneyThumb pursued a deal but only under the right circumstances. The MoneyThumb team spokes with many groups but prioritized ones experienced in revenue, finance and lending, ones with a track record of shepherding the success of high-growth companies.
Equally important was maintaining a focus on the employees who helped MoneyThumb become successful. Campbell said.
“We wanted to continue the growth story for our employees,” he explained. “We built something that’s a tremendous opportunity for them. I remember when COVID-19 happened, at the beginning, we called up everybody at our company, which was tiny at that point, and said that If this thing lasts a year, 18 months, two years, whatever it is, they’ve got a job. That was before any government stimulus came out. Because, at its core, we’re a family company.”
“So when we were looking for a private equity firm, we wanted somebody who was going to take that growth and amplify it but keep that family aspect.”