Better business banking

Lisa Shields launched Vancouver’s FI.SPAN with one goal in mind: “We want to make business banking not suck,” she says. That may be a tall order, but she is making progress.

Shields, a long-time fintech entrepreneur, founded the company in 2016 to fix the many frustrations small-business owners have with their vendor-related transactions. Typically, when a company needs to pay a vendor, it sends a file with payment instructions to its bank. The bank must act on those instructions, report whether the money was transferred successfully, and then someone has to enter the information into the company’s enterprise resource planning (ERP) software. “It’s really old school,” Shields says.

To make life easier for both bank and business, she creates application program interfaces (APIs) that allow financial institutions to tap directly into a company’s ERP system, quickly sending and receiving the data needed to make transactions happen. Businesses will know in nearly an instant whether a payment went through.

Speed is just one issue Shields hopes to address. By using her APIs, banks and other fintech companies will be able to offer services more efficiently. For instance, if a bank could tap into a company’s ERP system and get a full picture of its payables and receivables, in some cases it would be able to offer loans at lower rates. “Imagine if you could accept a lower rate with a push of a button,” she says. “The data to do that is available.”

It may still be a while before all the world’s banks see the value in sharing data, but with more clients demanding better banking products, that day will come. “Banks have fundamentally superior financial products, but they have inferior user experiences,” she says. “We want to change that.”