Rightfoot, a data connectivity startup for lenders and financial institutions, launched its consumer permissioned data product Connect Magic last week following the completion of a $15 million Series A round.
To get the information needed for a full financial picture of their customers, lenders and other financial institutions often require said customers to supply certain data — either by manually uploading financial statements or logging in with usernames and passwords to provide access to bank account info.
Some people, however, are not comfortable sharing their bank account info online, and manually uploading financial documents is burdensome.
Financial institutions, according to Rightfoot, experience a 40% dropoff when they require customers to provide such data, therefore decreasing customer conversion and revenue.
Connect Magic, however, requires customer consent to retrieve the data from the financial institutions they already use. With their consent, Connect Magic securely retrieves the customer’s financial information from those institutions.
“We're ultimately decreasing friction in the user experience,” explained Danielle Pensack, co-founder and CEO at Rightfoot.
Rightfoot clients can use the technology in several different ways, she said. Some lender clients are using it for account monitoring, thus allowing them to see what’s really happening inside customer accounts. If a lender notices that a customer’s financial position is getting worse, Rightfoot allows them to reach out to the customer to create a game plan.
“[They can] reach out proactively and ask, ‘Do you want to get on this different plan? Or maybe you can skip a month’ or something like that,” to avoid a missed payment and also avoid the customer’s financial positioning worsening, she said.
Customers can, of course, take away the permissioned access whenever they want. But, in the aforementioned case, they wouldn’t be able to create any of those on-the-fly game plans with their lenders.
The Series A was led by venture capital firms Blue Lion Global and Renegade Partners, with participation from Bain Capital Ventures, Box Group and Kraken Ventures.
“Getting access to actionable customer data has been a known-mammoth of a problem for financial institutions across sectors and product offerings,” Blue Lion Global founder Manu Gupta said in a statement. “Rightfoot is solving one of the biggest issues in financial technology today with unique technology, expertise, and an unparalleled commitment.”
The Series A funds will allow Pensack and her co-founders to expand their team from its current 13-person roster and bring on new clients.
While she wouldn’t share how many financial institutions Rightfoot has as clientele, the list ranges from fintechs to Fortune 500 institutions, Pensack said.
“[Financial institutions] all have challenges around ‘how do I help increase access for my customers? How do I make sure I'm making the best decisions leveraging data, and how to I have a better sort of recovery or collection strategy that puts the customer at the center?’” she noted. “If we could reach tens of millions of people a year from now, I think that would be absolutely fantastic – and I don't think that's that crazy to think about.”
