The difference between Enterprise and FinTech customers
On their site, Quovo highlights three different industry verticals the company works in: wealth, lending, and payments, as opposed to targeting specific categories.
According to Lowell, borders between startups and large institutions are increasingly blurring.
“Robo-advisors like Betterment and Wealthfront, what do you call that? Are they startups, or are they enterprises? They have hundreds of thousands of customers, they have billions of assets. They’re looking more and more like Enterprise customers.”
At the same time, Lowell mentions big insurance companies that have their FinTech squads and teams building financial tools. Quovo’s offering has become part of these tools. Thus, Lowell considers these enterprises as akin to FinTech startups.
“I’d say that the biggest difference, if I had to [cite] one, is vendor management and procurement that is obviously a stated function [of] an enterprise, while it generally is more ad hoc at a FinTech company.”
The need for maintainability
Quovo aggregates data about bank accounts, investments, credit cards, insurance, student loans, etc. Unlike most startups, which think mostly about new features, Quovo expends a great deal of effort on maintaining the built infrastructure and technology.
“We need to stay on top of changes that happen at thousands of end institutions. We are building infrastructure, both human infrastructure, operational infrastructure, and technical infrastructure, to maintain our connectivity. We have connections based [anywhere] we need [them], but maintaining those connections, and maintaining them really quickly, is very challenging.”
Lowell states that connections must be fixed quickly to ensure that their clients don’t face service disruptions on their own platforms. According to Lowell, Quovo runs outlier reports on millions of accounts every night to identify inaccuracies, delays, and other issues.
“There is no way you can have enough people watching thousands and thousands of connections, so we need to have automated monitoring systems to tell us where to allocate our development resources to fix those broken connections.”
The best QAs are the clients: once a client finds a problem and informs Quovo about it, Quovo’s team solves it quickly and notifies both those who have discovered the issue and everyone else who has yet to do so.
Being in the middle, Quovo has the ability to ask institutions to correct their data, but they also build their own processes to deal with broken data and correct it if possible. Otherwise, the system stops sending data to Quovo’s customers until the institution in question corrects its own problems.
“Happy”/“unhappy” paths to authentication
Quovo provides account aggregation to offer a holistic 360-degree view of end users. To verify account ownership and balances, the company offers account authentication services. Lowell says:
“The three main ways to think about how we gather data is a happy path, [a] less happy path, and [an] unhappy path.”
He describes instant account verification as “the happy path.” In this case, the user authenticates at an institution with his/her credentials and Quovo is then able to retrieve the information needed to initiate an ACH process.
Since some institutions don’t make full instant authentication information available, users may need to validate an account. In this case, Quovo offers “the less happy path”—it initiates and automatically verifies microdeposits using its aggregation technology to parse an account’s transaction history for the receipt of the test deposits.