What data will fintech entrepreneurs be looking for next year? (Part one)

At Fintech Sandbox, our mission is to help address the high cost and inaccessibility of data that early-stage fintech entrepreneurs need to build new products. These products often wouldn’t and couldn’t be built but for access to this data. We are grateful to our 40+ Data Partners who have been so helpful and generous, enabling us to support more than 450 fintech startups and counting.

We are privileged to work with these entrepreneurs when their companies are in their earliest stages, looking out over the horizon at emerging technologies, new approaches, and new markets.

We’re working hard to expand our data offerings to support our Data Access Residency founders. Here are four different types of data we think will be useful in building the next wave of fintech startups.

Private Company Credit Data

Detailed private company data is notoriously hard to come by. In-depth data on private company loan performance? Harder still.

Today’s headlines prove that even the most sophisticated investors need better data and risk models when extending loans to private companies – and when monitoring the performance of those loans over time. It’s a challenge that fintech entrepreneurs are more than willing to take up if more of the underlying data to make such credit decisions is accessible.

Alternative Data

What alternative data will entrepreneurs be looking for? What have you got?

In the ten-plus years since Fintech Sandbox was founded, the types of datasets entrepreneurs have been able to utilize have grown tremendously. They now routinely ingest unstructured data to produce trading signals and utilize satellite imagery to more accurately underwrite the perils caused by climate change. AI is also driving the demand for new and different types of data for use in training LLMs and other models.

We know that fintech entrepreneurs will continue to make creative use of new types of data, data that isn’t used in standard financial reporting or insurance underwriting today. We’re open to hearing from our community on this one!

Tokenized Securities Data

Tokenization of stocks, bonds, money funds, bank deposits, and anything else you think you might want to trade on-chain, will lead to a Cambrian explosion of new data – from reference data to tick data and beyond.

Trading these tokenized securities is going to produce a tremendous amount of new data. Tokenized stocks may not always trade at the same price or at the same time as traditional stocks, creating two or more sets of tick data. You could even have multiple tokenized versions of each stock with different rights or liquidity profiles, exponentially expanding the volume of tick data alone.

Economic, Health, and Climate Data

When data that was once reliably available and trustworthy disappears or is no longer being collected in a timely manner, where do entrepreneurs turn to replace it?

Fintech entrepreneurs need new sources for this critical information.

If your company has this data, and you would like to see how talented fintech entrepreneurs might use it, we’d like to talk to you. In fact, if you have any sort of new, unique, or different datasets, and you’re willing to help us fulfill our mission, please reach out!

If you’d like to see what six startups that have recently taken part in our Data Access Residency have accomplished using datasets provided by our partners, please register for Demo Day 12, taking place on April 28 and starting at 11:00 a.m. EDT. It’s free and virtual.

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Meet Agxes — A Demo Day 12 Presenting Startup

This year, Fintech Sandbox Demo Day will take place on Tuesday, April 28. The presentations will be virtual and the event, as always, is free. Demo Days are exciting because we get to showcase startups that are on the very cutting edge of innovation and you get to see what they’re up to before they’re discovered.

Over the next few weeks, we’ll highlight this year’s presenting entrepreneurs. Today, we’re talking to Victoria Tostado Bringas, Co-founder and CEO of Cambridge-based fintech Agxes. Agxes is bringing artificial intelligence to agricultural lending, using it to help bridge the gap between bankers and farmers.

Victoria Tostado Brigas, Co-founder and CEO of Cambridge-based fintech Agxes.

Victoria, tell us a bit about Agxes. What problems are you solving?

At Agxes, we are tackling the inefficiencies and system challenges in agricultural lending. Today, the process for farmers can take anywhere between 30-90 days. For farmers, we solve for a:

  • Very long lending process
  • Compliance hurdles
  • Little standardization

For lenders, we offer:

  • Operations optimization
  • New sources of income

What is your company’s origin story?

I have been a farmer for 7 years and have firsthand experience of the ag lending process and the difficulty of translating operational data to financials. Also, I have been and independent consultant for a development bank. Having the opportunity to work from both perspectives, I knew I wanted to solve this global problem.

I met Oscar Guardado, our CTO, at MIT. He is a national physics olympiad absolut gold medalist working in ag-tech, so the timing was right.

What is different about agronomic data?

  • Domain expertise is required to match it with finance risk models.
  • There are unique data sources, for example: water availability, soil quality, weather, market movements, satellite imagery, that give a more full picture of the biological process of farming – everything affects the potential future revenue of a farmer, and therefore more sophisticated risk models are needed.

Which Fintech Sandbox Data Partner have you worked with?

We have worked with Equifax, using their Sandbox to explore their credit data and integrating credit reports into the lending workflow, evaluating behavior for ag loan repayment models.

We’ve always had farmers. How can it be that agriculture lending has some of the highest operational costs among the US banking services?

The complexity of the process and the kind of data that is analyzed go beyond financials. There are more variables and more analysis required – doing this in a manual way makes costs high.

Can you describe what it’s been like to be part of the Fintech Sandbox community?

We are supported; we walk along this incredible team that is always there to guide us and support our next phase.

What milestones has Agxes achieved so far?

  • Working with a customer in CA
  • Academic collaboration with Virginia Tech to enhance agriculture- finance ecosystem regionally
  • Main metrics – time reduction, improvement of credit quality

What’s next for Agxes?

  • Farmer’s wallet – financial infrastructure for capital deployment, improve models with more high quality data.
  • Keep growing in partnerships with banking and non-banking financial institutions across the US.

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To hear more about Agxes and five other exciting fintech startups, be sure to register for Fintech Sandbox Demo Day 12!