About ForwardAI

ForwardAI is a simple, single, and lender-first API that delivers the most robust accounting &financial data suite for small business lending.

Through our API, we provide 3 main value propositions:

1) Accounting Data Integration: Our single API provides easy & instant access to the real-time accounting and financial data of a business. We support more than 15 accounting systems, and extracted data is normalized for ease of use in the lending process.

2) Historical &Forward-Looking Data: Lenders get access to 3 years of historical data (variances, trends, KPIs, etc.) based on 160+ data points. On more than 100 of these data points, our innovative technology provides access to forward-looking data as an early warning system to better predict a small business’s future financial viability. The predictive data includes cash flow, income, and expenses, etc.,

3) Validation of Accounting data with Banking Data: We cross-reference business data with banking data to speed up business lending decisions. Cross-validation is done by intelligent mapping transactions in both the accounting system and multiple bank accounts to bring better transparency and trust.

Location: Vancouver

Year Founded: 2021

Vertical: Lending / Borrowing

Employees: 11 – 50

Website: forwardai.com

Social Media:

Problem

The small business lending process at most institutes today is highly manual and conducted across a multitude of unintegrated systems. We believe that a shift is happening in the small business lending and underwriting decisions; the focus is moving from historical to real-time predictive data. Currently, accounting, and financial data are locked in silos, creating workflow inefficiencies, and hindering digital transformation.

Core Benefits

We are the only provider that offers critical accounting and financial data in both historical and predictive formats. We further cross-validate accounting data with multiple bank accounts data that a business may be using to help with the authenticity of the data or detect fraud. We believe that high-frequency small amount funding decisions can be fully automated using real-time business data. Our technology is helping banks and lenders solve complicated problems so that they are not flying blind. Lenders can develop targeted marketing campaigns; for example, funding applications are rejected because small businesses could not qualify for the loan, but if the connection is continuous, the lender may notice when that business may be eligible and come up with a product offer.

Every accounting data provider is unique and offers data through API in a special format. It is a daunting task to understand and implement these APIs into a decision engine in any normalized & secure way. This is where ForwardAI’s API shines; our API provides context-rich data(information about recurring invoices or bills, whether paying bills or receiving payments on time, etc.) in a standardized format regardless of who the endpoint is. Once our API is implemented, lenders can download accounting data from many accounting platforms in a simple, straightforward way without worrying about various formats.

Ideal Customers

Businesses (B2B)

Milestones

• The company is in active discussions with many possible clients to use its technology and recently signed up a lender in Australia as its first customer.
• We are currently outreaching to alternative lenders in UK, Australia, New Zealand, the USA, and Canada while working on our SOC2 audit compliance.