Autobooks, a small business payment and accounting services platform, today announced they reached the milestone of partnering with 61 financial institutions across the nation. Autobooks upgrades small business banking for financial institutions of all sizes by transforming existing digital banking channels into an Ecommerce platform for small businesses. To support financial institutions in the product launch, Autobooks powers a full suite of go-to-market services to ensure an effective and efficient deployment.
Read More: Alithya Launches AI-FI Trade Surveillance Solution Powered by Microsoft Azure
Autobooks makes it simple for small businesses to move their operations from in-person and manual to online and automated. Businesses enroll online through their financial institution’s online or mobile banking channel, and within minutes are approved to accept digital payments, send invoices and automate accounting tasks. Financial institutions further partner with Autobooks on a suite of go-to-market services designed to deliver better product adoption and utilization results versus traditional product launches.
This milestone marks a period of great acceleration for the Detroit-based fintech solution, which added 25 financial institutions to its list of partners in the first half of 2020. Recent partnerships include TCF Bank, Evangelical Christian Credit Union, First Bank of Missouri, and Provident Bank.
“We’re proud to extend our commitment to small businesses through our partnership with Autobooks,” says Josephine Moran, Executive Vice President, Director of Retail Banking at Provident Bank. “During these challenging times, when small business owners are looking for new ways to conduct business while social distancing, Autobooks’ cutting-edge technology enables them to offer contactless payment options. Autobooks’ payment solutions are essential for many small businesses to grow during these unprecedented times,” adds Moran.
Financial institutions that have launched Autobooks have been able to better support small businesses that are in need of transition from collecting customer payments in person, to online. During a time when the industry was experiencing 30-50% reductions of in-person transactions, Autobooks was able to help financial institutions grow monthly merchant payment volume (184%), average daily volume (193%), and the overall number of enrolled merchants (336%).
Read More: Entrust Datacard Solves Evolving Identity and Encryption Needs with Latest PKI Platform
“While we’re proud of our progress in the first half of 2020, we know there is still much work to do. Competition for small business relationships is increasing as non-bank providers are increasingly entering the market,” says Steve Robert, CEO and Co-Founder of Autobooks. “The past several months have accelerated the shift to digital for small businesses across the U.S. We look forward to each new partnership as each represents an opportunity to help small businesses and entrepreneurs better manage their business online, directly with their financial institution. This has the mutual benefit of better serving the small business owner and better equipping the financial institution to defend themselves against new competition ”
The adoption and usage of Autobooks has accelerated dramatically in the midst of the COVID-19 crisis as the financial industry increasingly recognizes the urgency of digital banking tools to serve their small businesses. Since many banks and credit unions do not yet offer similar solutions, small businesses often must turn to third-party non-bank providers such as PayPal or Square to invoice customers, accept payments, and apply for a loan. Additionally, online accounting, Ecommerce and lending platforms such as QuickBooks, Wave, Shopify and Kabbage are now all adding small business bank accounts to their online offerings.
Autobooks aims to help financial institutions better compete with non-bank providers, leveraging its capabilities as a payment facilitator, or PayFac, to dramatically expedite merchant onboarding, while not sacrificing security, compliance or risk mitigation. Financial institutions that deploy Autobooks are able to better enable small business owners to get paid online as a standard feature of their small business checking account. Improving cash flow for the small business, and protecting the small business relationship for the financial institution.
“As a credit union who serves small businesses across the country, ECCU is thrilled to be partnering with Autobooks,” says Mark Middlebrook, SVP/CMO at Evangelical Christian Credit Union. “Together, we are able to offer our members the very best in digital business tools that simplify their financial life so they can spend more time focusing on what they’re passionate about, their business. In addition to the technology, Autobook’s Marketing Playbook and tier 2 call center support allows us to bring competitive tools to market in a fraction of the time it would take us to build and deploy ourselves. We’ve found a partner that is passionate about ECCU’s mission and goals and is willing to put in as much as we are to help our members make progress in their financial lives so they can run better, more excellent small businesses in their communities.”
“Non-bank providers such as PayPal, Square and Stripe have long benefited from the payfac model and it’s now time financial institutions can too,” says Robert. “By providing a digital, self-service onboarding and automated underwriting process, a small business can now begin receiving payments directly into their existing checking account within a few minutes.”
Autobooks partners with the industry’s leading core processing, digital banking, and merchant processing providers so that financial institutions can quickly deploy to market. These integrations, coupled with Autobooks best-in-class go-to-market services, allow financial institutions to launch in as little as 90 days and start driving immediate small business adoption. To further reduce days to market, Autobooks has upcoming partner integrations that will make Autobooks a platform-wide feature that comes pre-enabled for financial institutions.
