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“Let’s say you wanted to bring in a couple pallets of inventory that you knew would be successful, but the hassle of getting a small loan from the bank, all of that, maybe it’s something you don’t end up doing,” Dasilva said in an interview.
“There’s a lot of friction associated with those (financial services) components, and we’re trying to create a frictionless experience for the business.”
There’s a lot of buzz in the technology world about financial services. Apple Inc. now has a credit card that tightly integrates with an iPhone app, and its Apple Pay product.
Uber Technologies Inc. issues a Visa debit card to drivers that is tied to a chequing account. Facebook Inc. has even tried to create its own money in the form of the Libra cryptocurrency.
It’s very possible, as Angela Strange, a general partner at the influential Silicon Valley venture-capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, headlined her blog post in January, that Every Company Will Be a Fintech Company.
Strange was mostly focused on the United States and the new breed of technology companies that take on a specific layer of the banking system — for example, fraud prevention or regulatory compliance — and offer it as a service.
This burgeoning trend opens up opportunities for innovative companies to work with service providers in developing new kinds of financial services, which has multiple benefits.
For one thing, it’s another line of revenue for the technology companies. For instance, Ottawa-based Shopify Inc. makes e-commerce software, but it doesn’t earn the majority of its revenue from the subscription fees for that software.
