Codat Launches New Flagship Risk Product Assess for Smarter SMB Risk Decisioning

Codat, the universal API for small business data, today announced the general availability launch of Assess, its new flagship risk product that enables smarter credit decisions on small to medium-sized businesses with real-time customer data via a single API. Codat built Assess in response to lender requests for a product that would support faster business decisions without increasing risks. Since Assess was made available to existing clients, 25 financial service providers have already made use of the new product, and it has been used in the underwriting process for more than 271 small businesses.

With multi-platform coverage and the ability to build and manage multiple integrations, Assess pulls real-time accounting, commerce, and banking data from the software customers already use. Codat also cross-references data sources to verify accuracy.

“Over the last 5 years, many millions of financial datasets have been processed via Codat’s infrastructure,” said Pete Lord, Codat’s CEO. “The financial ratios, intelligent categorization and validation that Assess offers is the culmination of the scale of our experience and copious feedback from customers. It will help credit providers underwrite faster and smarter, providing a lifeline for some of the millions of businesses in the US who have fewer than 15 cash buffer days.”

Before Assess, lenders had to first collect, then enrich and verify SMB data, making underwriting a manual, lengthy task. Many categorized and calculated ratios needed by hand, which meant the process was not only slow but prone to error, impacting risk ratios and difficult to scale. Assess enables SMB customers to share their data easily and then automatically enriches data, auto-generating ratios and metrics ready to be plugged into credit models. This reduces the time it takes to underwrite and gets much needed finance in the hands of the SMB faster.

“We’ve traditionally had to oversee ratios and metrics calculations that are fed into our scoring engine. As financial reports are often erroneous and miscategorized, this resulted in discrepant scoring and, ultimately, customer loss, said Dan Shapir, CTO and co-founder of Precise Finance. “We recently had the privilege of being part of the beta testing for Assess, which introduced a set of pre-calculated ratios and metrics and an auto-categories feature. It has reduced our development resources dramatically and yielded precise account classification, enabling us to increase customer acquisition.”

Last year, the number of small businesses in the United States grew to 32.5 million, according to the U.S. Small Business Administration, underscoring the need for customized lending and data services for this growing market.

As Codat continues to expand its customer base and strategic growth initiatives, it launched Sync for Commerce, which automatically synchronizes sales data with accounting platforms, last month. Another product designed to ease the administrative burden for SMBs, Sync for Commerce radically simplifies the reconciliation process.