Getting the Most From Investor Call

General Guidelines

Your firm is in the market to raise capital. You selected an investment banker to represent you in the process. The firm’s vision, financial goals, strategy and performance have been documented for the investors to review. An information library, stocked with materials such as a flip book, financial statements, standard forms and contracts, company policies and procedures, and a financial model is available to potential capital providers upon signing an NDA. The preparation of these materials took weeks or perhaps months. Your banker sorted through his/her contact list of investors making dozens even hundreds of preliminary investor calls. This resulted in a short-list of potentials that want to setup a conference call with your company’s top management.

Initial investor call

At this point, the many weeks and months of work are finally paying off. Surely, the investor will recognize the opportunity of marketplace lending/fintech and want to invest, right? Maybe, but remember the process is only getting started. Often company managers become hasty thinking all the preliminary work means a deal is close to consummation. For this reason, I always remind the client that the initial investor call is not to discuss the terms a deal. One should introduce themselves and the company, provide substance to certain key metrics and outline the firm’s overall strategy. Yet, I continually witness clients outline terms or discuss valuation too early in the conversation. This may make an investor feel pressured, suggest price shopping or even worse make your company appear desperate during the call. For an investor’s point-of-view, this suddenly appears like a low-probability transaction. That pushes them away from your opportunity in favor of others.

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The 2017 wave of Lending Fintechs: Alt Lending 3.0

The PitchIt startup awards is one of the best and most exciting parts of the LendIt — a lending conference. This year, there were eight finalist competitors who met in front of hundreds of investors to pitch. Four judges picked the ultimate winner, Nova. Below are the profiles of Nova and the seven other PitchIt finalists.

Nova — Credit History for Immigrants

Nova is the world’s first cross-border credit agency. Many immigrants come to the United States with no credit history. They may come from a place where credit is not an option. In many countries of the world, banks do not issue credit cards. There may not even be many, if any at all, banks. Merchants do not offer purchases on credit, so when these immigrants land on U.S. soil, their ability to interact with the economy is limited by the options they had in their native countries. Nova solves that problem.

It started as a research project at Stanford University. U.S. property managers run credit and background checks on applicants to screen for potential risks when leasing or renting housing units. Those checks typically do not include overseas credit checks. With Nova, property managers have that ability. Not only can U.S. landlords check overseas credit, but they can also report negative actions so that the credit report is affected in the applicant’s home country.

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