Our American dream: Bud arrives in the US!

Our story

We launched V1 in early 2016. By 2019 it became clear we had to pick one of two paths of long-term development:

a) Build pan-European payments and data aggregation capability
b) Go deep on data enrichment (transactionAI)  

It wasn’t the most obvious choice at the time, given the hype around the connectivity race. But to George and I, the decision was clear. By choosing door B, we could make a unique and positive impact on how people make financial decisions.

We spent the subsequent two years developing our core models and honing our training methodologies. These years were certainly economically challenging, pushing the business and team to the edge, but the capability we were developing served as a light at the end of a long tunnel. Today, thankfully, the results are paying off. Long-term bets aren’t something you see every day in the start-up world. We’re so grateful for our driven and incredibly-patient team members and investors who helped make this vision a reality.

Bud is an established data-intelligence leader in the UK and NZ. We currently serve a growing base of 40+ clients, primarily larger institutions such as HSBC, Zopa and ANZ Bank, some of whom have become investors as well as customers. Now, we’re thrilled to take our transactional AI solution across the Atlantic to bring speed, ease and value to lenders and borrowers in the states.

Our vision

To build financial AI which empowers every interaction between financial service providers and their customers so both can achieve better financial returns.

Due to the early rollout coupled with a competitive lending market, the UK has led the global open banking movement. The ability to access and securely share data with third parties has allowed banks and their customers to better understand one another, leading to better financial decisions by both parties. I believe that the UK will see the impact of a more efficient system created by better data intelligence, and an impact on balance sheets and wallets in the next two years, with economies in Europe following in the subsequent two years.

However, the US market is more mature in many ways. It’s a dynamic region with a unique, hyper-competitive credit market. American companies have been using alternative data to support credit decisions for years, but highly accurate cash flow analytics has remained elusive, which creates our key opportunity. US financial institutions are eager for data transformation and want to achieve far greater ROI from the data they already hold. Our team is proud to provide, in some cases, up to 45% greater accuracy than our data-intelligence competitors*. This high degree of accuracy allows our clients to turn transactional data into cash flow analytics in real time for better outcomes: actionable and successful customer insights.

The banks we speak to have two clear priorities: understanding real time portfolio-risk and increasing deposits in accounts (leveraging customer data to increase their engagement and deposit accounts with a single bank). The US is also home to a lot of unused data. And we’ve reacted very quickly to build market-specific products to meet their needs.

Consider Assess. It is a customizable product offering fast and compliant creditworthiness solutions. It can cut processing time by 43%* and help grow lending capacity. Our products help clients improve their lending decisions with faster onboarding and the potential to reduce default rates through loan portfolio monitoring. They offer rich, personalized insights, enabling lenders to have clearer and deeper conversations with borrowers regarding their ability to afford various lending opportunities. Bud’s North American products feature the same underlying technology as our UK and Europe products, but they’re designed to meet the unique needs of stateside fintechs and banks.

We’re helping clients in the US make better lending decisions with speed. We’re helping them accurately analyze their entire portfolios to predict customer problems months in advance. At Bud, we’re making it possible for clients to offer empowering, personalized services while increasing their customer lifetime value (CLV).

We welcome our US Go-to-Market (GTM) team. They’re a talented group with extensive experience building, selling and marketing products and technology for fintech companies and fast-moving organizations.

• Nathan “Nate” Mairs is our VP of Sales, North America. He comes from a strong lending background, including Klarna’s US GTM team.
• Melissa Hougie is our AVP, North American Head of Marketing. She joined the fintech Ocrolus as its first marketer and helped scale the brand in the US.
• Chris Luth is our Lead Product Manager in the US, and he comes from Moven.
• Corey Horr is our Account Executive and comes from SmartBiz with a background in both lending and GTM.

These are interesting times. Interest rates are changing and banks must move faster than ever to accelerate digital transformation. So much time and effort has been spent gaining access to data through banking core transformations. Now it is time to do something with it, profit, and provide more customer-focused experiences that fuel lifetime value.

The US offers so many wonderful challenges and opportunities. We can’t wait to serve fintechs and national, regional and community banks across the country. 

Let's go for it! 

* based on client case studies