AI Co-Pilots for Small Business Owners

The global conference features an exploration of key fintech trends and of course that includes AI.

Our founder and CEO Vince Mollini is back on the ground for a live discussion about the evolving technology.

Hi Vince, what do you have for us this morning?

Thanks, Remi.

I'm here with Rob Strathoff, who's the CEO of Libera.

Rob, kick us off.

Just us a little bit about Am I getting it right, Liberri?

That's correct.

Yeah.

So thank you for having me.

Look, Liberri is an embedded finance platform that integrates with large partners that serve small businesses.

Think about eBay, think about Vergaro, think about Worldpay, Barclaycard, etc.

We have 40 partners across 16. countries where we do small business finance to, you know, small business owners.

Now, needless to say, there's a huge gap there of, you know, a funding gap for small business owners.

They don't get served by traditional banks very well, and we step into that gap with our partners as a white label platform to enable the funding directly to the small businesses in seconds.

So such a powerful component when we have to get capital to our small businesses to grow, job, create economic prosperity, so a perfect void that you're moving to fill.

And is it ADA, your new underwriting product, correct?

Yeah, you know, tell me more about that and how that's kind of filling a new gap.

Yeah, so we launched AAA.

Lovely.

There we go, which was the first female mathematician in the UK, and we basically the bott is an agentic AI that helps our underwriters 10 to 100 times their outputs in terms of underwriting.

So it's a fully automated underwriting agent that pulls all the information that we need to underwrite a customer and does it in 5 minutes instead of.

50 minutes, so about a 10th time time time saving.

But what's really interesting is it is about 6% higher in except rate but also far more accurate than our underwriters are themselves.

And of course we've built all kinds of safeguards in there so it's not, you know, autonomous.

It still has to be enabled by a human, so it's human times AI.

Uh, but it does a human feedback loop, so we train it up with mistakes that it can make.

We can check it, so there's a high, you know, high version of checkability of the outputs and the inputs.

And of course, you know, we will track and trace it on every single day where we improve it and over time we strongly believe that with the same amount of underwriters we can probably tenfold our volumes.

Massively powerful then, so more efficient, you're getting a higher approval rate.

It appears given the, I guess, deeper dive into the data points.

Too early to tell what the less default rate would be, but I assume you have some hypothesis on that.

Yeah, exactly.

So we calculated all the default rates on the basis of the data that we have.

So we've done well over a few 100,000 underwrites on businesses every single month we received 1.2 million business data points from our partners.

Anonymized that we feed into our models that both do the targeting of small businesses as well as the underwriting of small businesses.

Now that means that A gets fed all that information and of course, you know, it's a high, high degree of accountability.

We will make sure that there's no biases in the data.

We'll make sure that there's underwriters on the basis of business performance and not just, you know, on the basis of where someone lives, how their credit score is, and whether they have blonde hair or dark hair.

So it's, it's a true, um, uh, you know, agnostic underwriter, uh, that just takes the data.

To accounts terrific.

Well, aside from Ada, is there other AI developments that you're experimenting with looking at as part of the rollout?

Yeah.

So we've, this is our first one.

We're working on the collections agents.

We're already using it in our sales team, sales coaching, but also from a compliance perspective, what we do is we used to be 5% of our calls.

We used to check from a compliance perspective.

Now we can do a 100% checking on the basis of 10 or 12 criteria which says have you mentioned representative terms?

Have you the Ts and C's, you mentioned the split payments, etc. and if a sales agent forgets to mention one of those, it automatically gives an email to the sales agent saying, Hey, by the way, you need to follow up with an email or a call to the merchant because you haven't mentioned this.

And then also from a training perspective, our managers can then see this agent has forgotten that let's give some extra training or let's position it slightly different.

So those are kind of a few of the bots that we see.

But the biggest, you know, the biggest future I would see over the next 3 to 3 to 5 years is SMB copilots.

I strongly believe we're going to see every single small business owner having a GenAI co-pilot in their back pocket or on their phone or in their integrated into their software that is going to do a um advisory work for them.

They have a marketing expert, a CFO, a purchasing, you know, experts all in their back pockets, but Automatically says, you know, there's a discount on your stock out here.

Why don't you purchase from this vendor because you get 20% discount right now and it automatically executes on, you know, marketing, you can see Google has a 10 time ROI for marketing.

TikTok might have a 12 times ROI on marketing.

Facebook might have a 3 time ROI on marketing, just making something up.

That agent S&B co-pilot will.

Then say, why don't you, you know, borrow $10,000 from Liberri, put it into marketing on Instagram or Facebook or TikTok, and these are the returns that you can see.

So we can then very quickly not only underwrite but also on a personalized basis, say this is the best use of your money.

Put $10,000 here and you get $150,000 in revenues.

Your own team of superheroes within the agent it looks like that's that's terrific.

Hey, we've got about 15 to 20 seconds left.

Maybe just give me a little shout out of what you're doing on some of the partnerships.

I know you have something going on in the multimedia platform.

And perhaps some of the other mission that you've got coming out.

Yeah, look, we're we're working very hard with big platforms like eBay, lots of consumer focused, focused platforms.

We're working with a lot of vertical software providers like Vergaro.

We're going to go deep into each of those vertical software providers and, you know, deliver specific products for specific use cases.

So my one line that I always like to say is the right product at the right time for the right customer.

That's what we're going to focus on for the next 2 years.

Terrific.

Well, Rob, excellent, uh, recap. really appreciate everything that you've got going on.

Thank you for joining us today.

Thank you so much.

My pleasure.