Launching Financial Products In Less Than A Week With Productfy

Called the Shopify of embedded finance by its founder and CEO Duy Vo, Productfy is a banking-as-a-service (BaaS) that provides businesses a platform to launch financial offerings.

In light of the firm’s 16 million Series A funding round, Benzinga caught up with Vo to talk about his motivations as well as what he’s focused on.

Here’s the conversation that transpired.

Benzinga: Can you provide us some context on your background and motivations behind Productfy?

Vo: I’m a product engineer. Most of the time, I was writing code and then, over time, I had been given the opportunity to run product engineering and operations teams.

Further, I have three areas that I’m super interested in: healthtech, fintech and education. After spending a lot of time in fintech, I felt that financial services have both a tremendous opportunity and a huge moral obligation to do societal good.

We, as an industry, haven’t served the most vulnerable people in our society. I’m a first-generation immigrant and I know what it’s like to be homeless. I know what it’s like to have a hard time accessing financial services.

So, I started the company shortly after my daughter was born, and the question was: “What is the one tiny little thing I can do, in this world, that can engender a financial ecosystem that’s kinder, fairer, more compassionate, more socially just because I want my daughter to grow up in a better world.”

Can you explain what Productfy is all about?

We started Productfy with the thesis that financial services are moving towards the edge. More non-financial institutions are going to be providing financial products and services.

There are two fundamental problems we are trying to solve. The first is to enable the vision of financial services to move towards the edge. The second half is how do we power a church, fintech, or gaming company at the edge?

Unpack for me your solution to the first problem.

The first piece is [enabling] any company to launch a financial product in as little as three weeks.

Think about churches, universities, your favorite retail stores. How do we enable those organizations to offer a financial product that better serves their customer? So, we’re launching Project Latinum, a fully white-labeled fintech in a box. With that, you don’t need an engineering team to deploy a financial product, anymore.

What about the second problem?

We’re basically wiring a network of banks together, into a distributed financial infrastructure, and providing the layer of technology, compliance, program management, due diligence on top of it.

What are the implications of your solutions, at scale?

We’re going to take power away from people who’ve abused them and spread it around to community banks, moving it to the edge where the user is. We can add a node in South Africa, Vietnam or Brazil.

We can create the first-ever globally distributed financial infrastructure that allows fund transfers, globally, in less than a second, safely and securely. This will allow people to issue and have access to cards around the world.

So what’s your sole focus, if you will, given all the problems you’re tackling?

We basically have three segments. The first is what we call the core revenue segment. The second segment is what we call indirect revenue. The third is mission-driven.

The core revenue is our client’s business model or how they make money. Indirect revenue … supports their revenue.

For that, we are launching Project Latinum. You don’t need an engineering team. We do customer support, compliance, and cardholder agreements.

And then, mission-driven is about taking care of people who are members of your organization.

Imagine if my mother’s church can offer her a secure credit or debit card, at like no fees, a deposit where she can put her money, and that money can be used to help other members of her church not able to get a payday loan.

What if that church can also do cash checking so that people who don’t make money the way that you and I do, who go to church, can maybe afford this service?

Visions for the future? Where to next?

Between January and August, or something, we had like 150,000 persons created on our system, in a production environment.

We launched a debit card program, and now we’re starting to see that take off. Q4 is about becoming the Shopify of embedded finance.

If you want our APIs, you have them. But, now, you don’t need an engineering team to launch a financial product, right?

Into 2022, it’s about rounding out the rest of our offerings primarily focused on credit so that, by the end of 2022, we can say: “If you want to launch a credit union experience, be a debit card, secured credit card, unsecured lending – whatever it is – you can do it in less than a week.”