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cover art for Railz with Sam Kawtharani | E233

Fintech Impact

Railz with Sam Kawtharani | E233

Ep. 233
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Jason talks to Sam Kawtharani, VP of Product with Railz. The company collects data from different accounting systems, create a standardized file format, allows that information to be pushed into other products and vendors, and create unity around different accounting reporting systems.


Episode Highlights

  • 0.36: Railz is a single API provider for accounting and financial data on small and medium businesses or SMBs in general. With Railz, they are solving the noise in the financial data that one would have in a typical business. 
  • 0.54: We are able to connect, normalize and set analytics that you are able to consume and make the decisions, whether it's a lending application or business floor management tool, says Sam.
  • 5.50: From a tax perspective, banking and e-commerce flow into our accounting system. The lending, management of payables, and receivables are some top three use cases that Railz deals with, and we are always working on expanding into that space, says Sam.
  • 7.11: Railz products can be customized based on the business industry and the business's financials. You get the chest to monitor your portfolio after it because you have access to that information for up to a year before you have to renew it.
  • 11.12: With Railz, we have two-way sync where we allow you to pull your bills and push back bill payments to the vendor. We can create that synchronized workflow for business workflow management, explains Sam.
  • 17.21: Every service provider has its own draconian rules for the cause of how you access the data, what you can do with it, and what not. These are some of the challenges which make it part of what we're building and removing nightmares for other customers.


3 Key Points

  1. Railz is taking all noise of data and translating it into something where customers and FinTechs can make sense of it and make a decision based on that.
  2. The credit cards are able to reconcile it back into the accounting system through journal or expense entries so that as a business owner today, you just see everything landing in your accounting system, and instead of doing their entry, you are doing a quick review and closing your month-end.
  3. One tricky thing when you are trying to build in Fintech or if you are a third-party fintech, your adoption depends on the adoption of your feedback.


Tweetable Quotes

  • "What is nice with using Railz is now that you can ask the businesses to grant you access to their financial and accounting information." – Sam
  • "Except insurance and lending measurement of payable is another use case we are seeing, and there are two use cases of management of payable." - Sam
  • "Open banking is one thing, but open data is a long-term play, and it's important to make it easy for people to move between venues when we have access and rights to it." - Sam 


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