Can you introduce yourself and explain your role at Finley?
I'm Callie Tausig, and I work on the Capital Markets team here at Finley. We own the process of implementing all Finley customers to utilize our software, from borrowers who have taken out debt and manage their facilities on Finley's platform, to lender customers who manage all of their facility portfolio operations within Finley’s platform.
Our team works very closely with our customers from inception through final implementation so that customers feel empowered to manage all of their debt facility operations on the Finley platform and leverage the streamlined monitoring analytics that are produced.
What were you doing before joining Finley?
I was previously at J.P. Morgan within Credit and then Lending Solutions, and saw first-hand how private credit operations were handled at some of these larger institutions in a more traditional finance context.
What interested me the most about joining Finley was the opportunity to build technology that would significantly streamline and automate the legacy debt capital workflows that exist today. Bringing technology to the forefront of financial services is definitely where the market is going. Fintech companies, particularly a company like Finley, create an exciting opportunity to address the inefficiencies that exist within debt capital markets.
We have the opportunity to provide access to data that many companies wouldn’t have previously been able to harness, and those insights and analytics can help banks and borrowers be more strategic in their operations.
How does technology facilitate strategic advantages for borrowers and lenders?
Technology plays a pivotal role in streamlining capital markets operations, enhancing data analyses, and improving decision-making processes. Leveraging technology empowers you to synthesize all of your data, which provides you with a clearer picture of where your portfolio stands as you assess against the macroeconomic backdrop.
It also helps organizations streamline workflows and makes teams more efficient. Teams with better access to more robust, cleaner data, have the opportunity to act more strategically with their time and focus on financial initiatives that matter most to the business.
Where do you recommend companies start?
When you’re thinking about bringing in any type of software provider, you want to start with your key pain points.
Take a hard look at the existing workflows and identify areas where you’d like to improve. This could include data access and understanding, capital markets workflow engagement, increasing automation for manual work, or any other number of breakdowns.
Ultimately, you're asking, “How can we leverage and bring in this technology platform to solve our needs and integrate seamlessly into the existing workflows and processes that we have in place today?”
Choosing the right vendor is paramount.
What are some core benefits technology like Finley offers to borrowers and lenders? What pain points are you seeing solved?
Finley serves as a central hub for managing debt capital markets operations, streamlining processes, and enhancing data transparency. The platform simplifies managing credit facilities for borrowers and capital providers alike by providing real-time analytics and risk assessment tools.
We integrate with their data systems and provide a single source of truth for all debt capital markets activity. We help ensure that the programs, data infrastructure, and technologies put in place will scale as their business grows.
Our systems make leveraging data significantly easier, and we’ve seen numerous borrower customers use the analytics available to them to be more proactive and strategic in thinking about how they’re going to operate and utilize the debt capital facilities that they have in place as they look towards the future.
Borrowers and lenders alike can normalize all the data that runs through our system to identify portfolio trends like an uptick in delinquencies or even identify broader learnings from various covenant thresholds. Because they have that easy access to data, they’re going beyond improving their debt facility workflows—which is huge—to help them add an additional layer of risk analytics and monitoring to their underlying portfolio needs.
Lenders similarly benefit from comprehensive portfolio management and real-time insights into their investments, enabling effective monitoring and decision-making. So whether that's monitoring the underlying assets that are serving as collateral for these credit facilities when they're asset-backed or just getting a sense of the profiles for all of the credit facilities that you have in place, a simple dashboard can tell you where you stand.
How should fintech companies approach risk management?
Effective risk management revolves around proactive data analysis and transparent communication. Understanding and normalizing data through advanced analytics helps in identifying and mitigating risks early on.
For example, let’s say a company has a receivables-secured facility. That company can use Finley to drill down into the performance of underlying assets to get a sense of overall performance. They can access real-time delinquency information, default details, and more to get a solid sense of how things are performing. It’s easy to access and easy to slice the data in any way you need it.
These insights help inform companies of the overall risk profile of the book they have while also telling them how they can leverage that information because it is all normalized in one place.
Teams can make more informed decisions from a risk-monitoring perspective.
We can also use that data to provide a layer of protection for companies. If our customers are getting close to various thresholds, teams can get warnings and alerts about these indicators as well. With all this easy access to their data, teams can be more proactive instead of reactive.
What distinguishes high-performing fintech companies from their peers?
High-performing fintech companies excel at leveraging data to drive strategic decisions. They know how to use technology to gain deep insights into their operations, market trends, and customer needs, which enables them to innovate continuously, stay competitive, and scale their business effectively.
That’s a common thread that I've seen throughout my time at Finley and also during my time at J.P. Morgan.
The most successful companies understand what their data is telling them. They know how to aggregate information, surface what’s most important, and then make better, more informed decisions.
What does all this mean for teams? How does making data more accessible while automating away mundane tasks impact team dynamics?
Automating routine tasks allows team members to focus on strategic and high-value activities. It fosters a more dynamic, agile, and collaborative work environment where teams can respond faster to market changes and capitalize on new opportunities.
Debt capital markets as an industry is ripe for innovation. Everyone is asking how tech can increase the productivity of teams. The transparency technology platforms like Finley provides improves the dynamics between borrowers and lenders which then improves internal dynamics on both sides.
That centralized source of truth and transparency layer is crucial for teams to operate as efficiently as possible. It significantly improves the speed at which things can get done, whether that’s requesting funds, approving funding activity, making sure that all parties have a sense of what reporting deliverables are due and when, and even underlying portfolio performance.
What does all this automation mean for junior-level members of the Finance team?
From what I have seen, every operations team member managing these facilities today wants increased automation. If they had this tooling in place to automate many of these routine tasks that simply take needless time and are prone to manual error, they would be able to focus more on strategic contributions.
Finley's technology and data platform are really added layers that allow teams to be more efficient and focus on more pertinent finance objectives. Automating workflows allows them to spend more time on strategic initiatives, which allows, again, going back to what separates high-performing fintechs from the rest of their competitors: performing at that extremely high level needed to win.
Want to learn more about Finley?
Finley is private credit management software that helps private credit borrowers and asset managers streamline and monitor asset-backed loans. From tracking covenants and deliverables, to assembling funding requests and analyzing asset performance, Finley gives borrowers and lenders peace of mind when it comes to debt capital management. For more, check out our Product page.
Interested in learning more about what it’s like to work at Finley? Check out our careers page.