Ink on the Interview
Q: How’s the conference going for you? Any highlights?
A: Absolutely. So, I’m impressed by the audience. I am getting lots of important questions about payments and also about how Eltropy and our integration with them works. With Suobo, we invest a lot of time in UI and UX. So, getting feedback from clients in real time, right here, exactly, is golden for us. So, I’m impressed with the conference and how Eltropy is delivering the event.
Q: Let’s talk about Eltropy and Swivel partnership. How do you guys work together to ultimately benefit the financial institutions?
A: So Swivel and Eltropy, we have a bunch of integrations and we offer texting products to our FIs, to our members. So at the end of the day, we want to simplify the way members make payments. So Swivel and Eltropy have texting solutions, and by the end of the day we want that texting to be sent to our members so that they can make a payment. So we want to simplify the payment flow and Eltropy does a great job by sending the reminder through text. Yeah, so think about you buying a car and you decide to finance the car through a credit union. You do all the bureaucracy, all the paperwork, you sign all the agreements. A couple of days or weeks later, you need to set up your payments. So you go to the credit union’s website to set up the payment. So when you do go to create your credentials, you have to authenticate into our platform, to Suogo’s platform, and after you do that, a couple of weeks later, we send a reminder to you to make sure that you don’t forget to make your payment. So that’s how it works. The workflow is pretty unique. And the beauty of the system is that we simplify the authentication process. So when you click on our link to make a payment, you don’t have to answer a bunch of questions. We already know who you are as a member.
Q: To repurpose that, or I guess, to do that over again, it’s so redundant. That’s the R word I’m looking for.
A: Absolutely. So, to relieve consumers or members in this case of doing something like that is huge. And that equates to a quality member experience. UI and UX for us are very important. So we have dedicated product designers, we have dedicated product managers to, again, I use the word, simplify the user experience. And that’s what we’re looking for because they’re getting that in the retail environment. They’re getting that simplification on an Uber app or on, dare I say, Amazon once again. We always use that as the bar.
Q: So what’s on the horizon for you guys? You want to share some new updates or new features that you guys at Swivel are doing?
A: Please, yes, absolutely. So Swivel is a payment services company and we built a couple of capabilities over the next, over the last few months. One of them is Apple Pay. On the other hand, Apple Pay, in terms of loan payments, the workflow is a bit more complex. So we allowed members to make loan payments using a wallet called Apple Pay. So, straightforward, very easy, easy to use. What I wanted to call out is that we enable that feature for free. We do not charge extra fees to enable that new payment method. There are people out there charging fees. We don’t. So this is one of our value propositions. We facilitate payments by not charging extra fees for that.
That’s first. The second is a feature we launched three weeks ago called stored cards. So when you go make a payment on any website, sometimes you have to add your credit card information or your debit card information. We added the feature when it comes to storing your payment method. So the next time you go make a loan payment or something else, your information is already there. So all you have to do is press the button and make a payment.
So, again, our value proposition is to facilitate payments in a way where it becomes easy. So, store cards are also something we did a couple of weeks ago. It’s almost invisible, you know? I’ve heard the saying that banking should be invisible sometimes, and this sounds like a good example of that, where it’s just kind of a one-click type of situation.
Q: Anything else you want to add before I let you get back down the hallway?
A: Yes, I would like to say that Swivel is more than loan payments. Swivel acquired, in late 2023, a company called Magic Rider, and Magic Rider also gives us a new industry, the education industry. The K-12 school system is also a vertical that Sulvo is now processing payments. So we do FI, and now we do education and that helps us become a bit more agnostic on our back end. So schools is something that we offer now and we are penetrating into products called treasury management after the acquisition. So this is also on our horizon to offer treasury management products.
