Q&A with Codat VP Sales Matt Hicks

Hey Matt, great to meet you. I think it would be best to kick off with an introduction to you and of course Codat.

Of course. So I’m the VP Sales here at Codat. We launched in 2017 and we’re a data integration platform which helps financial institutions and fintechs to seamlessly exchange data with their small business customers. We deliver a single API to our clients that grants access to standardised financial data from a wide range of sources and platforms. These integrations are built and managed by us. Our initial focus was enabling small businesses to benefit and thrive by sharing their accounting data with both traditional and alternative lenders but over time we have built in access to commerce and banking data via direct in-house developed integrations with platforms like Square and Shopify and also through partnerships with the likes of Plaid.

You alluded to Codat’s drive towards a market where Small Business are enabled to seek the optimal services through contributing their own financial data. How do you see this working?

We have positioned ourselves as the key component in the provision of effective infrastructure required for SMEs to harness the power of their own data. This can be extremely valuable in the quest for credit or additional funding, pushing data from multiple sources into their accounting platform to save time and money on reconciliation or even enabling them to accurately forecast all business spending by analysing up-to-the-minute P&Ls or Balance Sheet.

Until Codat - companies were reliant on out-dated financial statements or credit scores built on redundant data. Now Codat clients and SMEs around the world can gain access to the services they need and they can do this more quickly and, therefore, at a significantly reduced cost.

The SME can now leverage their own data as if it were a currency. A bargaining chip if you like. The great thing here is that the service providers and lenders also benefit from the transparency that we help to create.

What Codat provides our clients is the opportunity to build next generation products and services for SMEs with easy, real-time data connectivity to their financial software.

How does Codat fit in with Open Banking and companies like Plaid?

The lines between ‘Open Banking’, ‘Open Accounting’ and other open-source financial data types has become a hot topic in the market. Not least after the Plaid/Visa headlines of the last few months. Our view at Codat is that these categorisations are no longer required and with product developments across the last 6-8 months, we can confidently position ourselves as the market leading aggregator of financial data for SMEs. Whether the data can be categorised under Banking, eCommerce, POS, Accounting and soon to be Payroll - the SME doesn’t care. They just need the infrastructure in place that allows the data types to flow freely into the corresponding applications and platforms and allow them to gain access to the products and services that they deserve and expect. 

That’s what we do.

So, as a champion of the SME, do you work directly with this market?

We don’t work directly with the SME market but we make it very clear that our product is developed with their needs in mind. Codat’s current client base consists of alternative lenders, tier one banks  eCommerce platforms, insurance firms and a wide array of business applications. Some specific client examples may add some additional colour to this question. So we work with PayPal, Natwest, Experian and Virgin Money and a long list of fintechs and business apps. 

By providing these organisations with our single API solution, they can offer an unrivaled quality of product and/or service to their SME clients.

Awesome. So what’s next for Codat?

Well, on the product front we have some big updates arriving across Q1. We have doubled our headcount over the last 6 months - mostly across the growth and engineering teams - which has allowed us to not only bolster our existing coverage across accounting, banking and commerce/POS data sources but we have also taken our first steps towards a fully fledged insights tool. With our new Visualise, Categorisation and Cross Referencing products, Codat clients will now have an even clearer view on the financial health of their customers which, in turn, enhances the products and services they provide the SME community. 

From a strategic perspective, our key focus is on the expansion and conquering of the US market. Our Founder and CEO recently made the move to New York to join our growing sales, solutions and ops teams already bursting the walls of our Park Avenue South office. Between lockdowns of course…