Fundwell powers business growth

Helping businesses size up through funding

One of the biggest hurdles for businesses of all sizes is to grow from where they’re at to where they want to be. For a small business or a startup, it often comes down to the capital to get off the ground. For a larger, more established company, funding provides the jump to the next level of business.

Fundwell serves clients across this entire spectrum —  from small, privately owned to publicly traded companies — by helping match each one up with the right financial products. By sourcing from a substantial network of funding outlets and lending institutions, the NYC-based firm connects businesses with funders and financing options, like short-term funding, inventory financing, bridge loans, and factoring.

Adam Anzuoni, CTO at Fundwell, explains how his IT group initially came to the Intelligent Content Cloud. He says, “We needed a content tool that would integrate seamlessly into our customer relationship management tool, Salesforce. In other words, we were looking for a solution to marry our customer journey with our content journey."

Grounding the customer journey in Salesforce

Like a lot of client-focused companies, Fundwell uses Salesforce to track and manage the lifecycle of each customer. Since Salesforce is such a central technology to the business,  Anzuoni’s team sought a secure content platform that would integrate seamlessly and securely with Salesforce. “Before Box,” he remembers, “we had customer files and financial documents anywhere from Docusign to Gmail to Dropbox. Worst of all, people had files locally stored on their computers. We went with Box because we needed a centralized content layer to track and manage all of our content.”

Now, employees who are deeply reliant on Salesforce can get their work done with all those tools in one secure place. Box is tightly integrated with Salesforce, which offers multiple benefits.

• One central place for content: Any file associated with a customer record is automatically stored in Box, using the approved folder structure
• Granular permissions: Even if a customer has multiple financial products with Fundwell, it’s intuitive to find, track, and manage permissions around content for each
• Real-time collaboration: When multiple people are  working together on a deal or another file, updates sync in real time in the cloud

With the Intelligent Content Cloud, it’s easy to know exactly where files are at all times, and to be confident there’s no inadvertent file duplication, risk of breach, or compliance issue.  “For us to be able to marry the content and customer journeys,” Anzuoni  concludes, “we needed the Salesforce integration, plus a suite of tools to allow us to automate a number of processes related to requesting and managing those files.”

Smoothing out the flow of work in Box

With Box providing the content layer, all of these processes can flow smoothly. Data comes in from an external source (the client) and is passed into the Intelligent Content Cloud. From there, staff can share content with clients and  external funders via a simple shared link, without sacrificing security in the transition. The Fundwell sales team, underwriting team, and processing team all tap into Box to get work done in a more efficient and secure way.

The benefits of Box apply to the customer experience as well. When a prospective customer visits the company’s website, they can click “Apply Now” to launch a small-medium business loan application process. This incredibly streamlined, simple process from the prospect’s point of view is powered by a sophisticated Box Relay event on the backend. Box Relay automatically uploads their application and any supporting documentation to a new folder, incorporating e-signature via Box Sign, and creating a new account within Salesforce — all without human intervention.

This is a first step, but the client lifecycle can be long — years if not decades — so the ability to conduct file sharing and content governance in one place is an enormous lever for Fundwell. Anzuoni says, “We use Box to manage all the content we get from a client throughout their journey and automate a number of steps, including requesting documents and sending them to both internal and external users.”

Secure and centralized sharing of sensitive client data

Prior to adopting Box, Anzuoni recalls, “Our business was mainly run on emailing files from one person to another. Think about how many people have to touch an account before it gets funded!”

Stakeholders might include sales reps, underwriters, the legal team, the finance team, and external funders —a lot of folks handling content, which creates an unfortunate opportunity for security issues. Box remedies those. Right off the bat, when a new client comes on board, they are required to send along their three most recent bank statements. Fundwell then directly uploads those statements to Box via Salesforce before passing the baton to the underwriting team.

A year later, the client might decide to add on an additional Fundwell product. At this point, the account team has a year’s worth of tracked statements and data to refer to, all securely managed in a centralized place via Salesforce. “Security and permissions are very important to us,” says Anzuoni. “Shared links that can be watermarked and set to expire, and the ability to set different folder permissions, are all critical to our lifecycle and a big enabler of our current success.”

That customer lifecycle begins with marketing, cements as clients are onboarded, and continues as they renew and add financial products. Along the way, Fundwell requires various financial documents be tracked, stored, and secured in order to fully understand the client’s financial needs over time and to issue client documentation to external funders without jeopardizing a client’s financial content.

Saving 30 hours a week with Box AI

The release of Box AI created an instant productivity boost for Fundwell. Anzuoni says, “Not only are we able to ask our files questions and create new content based on our existing client content, but we can use the Box AI API to ask questions of a file without even needing to open it. That’s been a game changer for our company.”

For instance, before they begin the underwriting process for a client, they have to comb through three to four months of bank statements from that client. In the past, a human from the underwriting team would scour all incoming documents (things like bank statements) to find details like the start and end balance of an account each month of the year.

Box AI helps expedite the process. How it works:

• Employee uploads bank statements to Box in the form of a Salesforce lead 
• Box AI checks to confirm they have three bank statements, each containing the right data
• Box for Salesforce automatically submits the documents to the underwriting team

The entire process happens in the background, thanks to Box AI. Anzuoni says, “Since going live with Box AI, our underwriters have saved on average 30 hours a week -—which is equivalent to adding another underwriter to our team of four."

He envisions a lot of potential for using Box AI in the future. He says, “We’re always thinking about questions we can ask our files, such as, ‘What is the legal name on the bank statement?’ and ‘What are some more questions that we can ask our files programmatically?’” He envisions using Box AI to surface important data from sensitive client documents without having to even open those documents. For instance, the underwriting team could extract a potential client’s birthdate from their passport without having access to the entire document.

The untapped potential of Box AI intrigues Anzuoni, who says, “I’m really excited to look back at past data and see if there’s any correlation between things like loan performance and financial documentation. A lot of the files we’ve accrued in Box probably contain really valuable information, but the only way to know will be to extract that information with AI.”

What’s possible on the Content Cloud

“The implementation of Box has really changed how we operate,” Anzuoni confirms, “because our users don’t need to go to as many places. All the customer data and the content live within Box, embedded in Salesforce.”

For those looking to enlist the Intelligent Content Cloud to unite their unstructured data, his advice is to lean into the Box Community, calling it “a great place where you can find a lot of content from past clients implementing Box — and a really good place to ask questions.”

Then experiment, testing out the integrations and the API possibilities. This is an approach that has worked well for Fundwell, and it’s a good template for any financial services business.

The top three things Fundwell loves about Box, according to Anzuoni:

1. The Box API: “The API-first approach allows us to programmatically perform a number of tasks that we used to do manually.”
2. Ease of use: “The second is the generally Box provides a “clean user experience.”
3. Integrations: “How easy it is to embed within our existing applications, like Salesforce.”

 

Box AI’s extraction agents have transformed how Fundwell derives insights from our content. For over a year, we’ve been testing Box AI’s extract API in our workflows, averaging over 20,000 calls per month. What used to take hours, pulling key financial data from statements, tax forms, and investment documents, now happens in mere minutes with an extremely high level of accuracy and reliability. 

 

Box is constantly improving the quality of results, making our processes both more efficient and cost-effective. Our teams can focus on providing strategic advice rather than manual data entry. With Box AI continuing to evolve, it remains our content intelligence tool of choice for our mission-critical processes.

—Adam Anzuoni, CTO, Fundwell