We’ve seen an explosion of fintech companies in the last few years with the rise of infrastructure platforms like Plaid, Marqeta, Lithic and more making it very easy for fintech companies to get started. This has allowed both traditional companies to spin up their own banking, card and lending products and has allowed fast moving fintech startups to raise hundreds of millions of venture funding as well.  

As the competition heats up across these companies, fintech companies are now searching for alternative sources of data that will allow them to better understand and underwrite their end customers and provide a better experience for their customers.

Today, Rutter works with several of the top fintech lending startups, credit card companies and business banks. Below are some of the top fintech use cases that Rutter powers using our set of Commerce APIs and our recently launched Accounting APIs as well.

Top Fintech Use Cases

1. Offer loans much faster than competitors - Rutter enables fintech companies to access and fetch data a lot faster through its universal API and data fetching configuration that constantly polls all platforms for new data. This reduces the manual underwriting process that fintech companies have to undertake and enables them to offer loans immediately after getting all the data.

2. Gain a unique understanding of the health of a business - With the additional endpoints Rutter provides, fintech companies are able to gain a better understanding of their customers through our endpoints that allow them to pull inventory, payouts, customer data and now accounting data as well. These data points help power a “company health score” used for underwriting and credit models.

3. Predict future growth of their merchants - By gaining access to past inventory, sales and marketing data, fintech companies are also able to use Rutter to predict the future growth of their customers as well. Rutter makes it very easy for fintech companies to fetch historical data that otherwise would take several days to process. This historical data then allows companies to:

• Understand Inventory Turnover - This enables lenders to understand how well merchants are utilizing their inventory and what the ROI of working capital loans for new inventory could be for a merchant.
• The Seasonality of What a Merchant Sells - Understanding the inventory alongside sales and marketing data can help companies better understand the seasonality of a business and whether or not sales is impacted by the lack inventory or the seasonality of the products or both. Understanding seasonality allows lenders to also understand the prime time to lend to their merchants as well.
• Customer Engagement & LTV - How often does a customer keep coming back? How sticky are our customers? What is the repurchase rate for certain items?‍

4. Prevent Fraud - Some merchants might be artificially creating multiple orders in order to get a better deal from fintech companies. Some of the ways Rutter is used to better prevent fraud include:

• Understanding the customer concentration and if all the orders are being created by the same customer during a short time period.
• Looking into the inventory history to see if there is an actual drop inventory and if the orders are actually getting shipped out.
• Analyzing refunds data to see if there is an abnormal amount of refunds and returns.

Why fintech companies choose Rutter

1. Best in class developer experience - Commerce platforms are complex to integrate with because of all of the things you can do with them - there are many components to a store or business in addition to products, orders, and customers, such as inventory, fulfillments, transactions, discount codes, shipping methods, and so on. Rutter makes it as easy as possible for fintech teams to get what they need from these commerce platforms. Check out our developer documentation and get started!

2. Full Platform Coverage - Our goal is to cover every commerce platform on the internet including ecommerce platforms, marketplaces, accounting systems and more. We support over a dozen of these today and are planning on having over 500+ integrations supported by the end of the year. We also recently launched our Accounting APIs and now support platforms like Xero, Quickbooks, Netsuite and Freshbooks as well.

3. Industry expertise - Having worked with hundreds of customers to-date we have developed best practices on how to onboard customers to make sure they are able to get up and running as fast as possible and know the nuances of every single platform. Our customer success team works very closely with each of our customers to make sure they’re onboarded successfully!

This is just the tip of the iceberg in terms of use cases that Rutter enables for fintech companies. We continue to build out products focused on helping fintech and financial services companies better server their customers. If you’re interested in learning about any of the above use cases or have other use cases for Rutter, we’d love to chat!