CARY – When Carl Ryden, Ken Garcia, and Mitchell Epstein founded PrecisionLender in 2009, the goal was to build a solution to help managers at banks.  The three cofounders had significant prior experience in private equity and venture capital and had operated startup companies.

PrecisionLender

It didn’t take long for the financial technology, or fintech, venture to secure their first client, who signed a contract on the first day of 2010, Ryden tells WRAL TechWire. Once that first client was on the books, the bootstrapped company averaged adding one bank per week to their client list, and now serve more than 250 banks of a variety of sizes.

The company provides the PrecisionLender platform, which, according to the company’s website, turns commercial pricing from a commodity to a point of differentiation.  Essentially, the company’s platform helps banks improve their customer-facing operations by providing in-depth pricing information on deals and actionable insights.

The result?  “Better conversations with their customers that focus on their needs,” said Ryden.

PrecisionLender also built and released an artificial intelligence platform, Andi®, that operates as an always-on virtual analyst that uses machine learning to offer real-time, actionable insights to bankers.

The company hit a major milestone this past quarter—they are on pace to price more than $1 trillion in commercial deals this year.

If the company was a financial institution, said Ryden, “we would be the fourth largest bank in the United States.”

What is PrecisionLender?

Most commercial banks suffer a pricing process that is outdated and dysfunctional. They rely on spreadsheets that only provide insight after the fact.

These tools can make calculations, but can’t foster the right conversations.

The PrecisionLender platform does both, turning commercial pricing from a commodity to a point of differentiation. By providing actionable insights when the deal is being priced, PrecisionLender helps banks deliver the experience their customers want, and the results their directors demand.

Source: PrecisionLender

Managing growth

Ryden and his cofounders were committed to bootstrapping the company—until they realized that investment would help them scale more rapidly.  The young company had grown from the cofounding team to a team of 20, with offices in Cary and in Charlotte, yet the cofounders felt they were always understaffed, said Ryden.

“We asked ourselves ‘are we sizing the business to the opportunity, or are we sizing the opportunity to our business?’” said Ryden.  The founding team chose the former, and quickly navigated an investment from Century Capital Partners and Georgian Partners. The company also took investment from Insight Ventures in 2017.

“We didn’t really need the capital to grow, but having great partners made a lot of sense,” said Ryden.  “Now, we’re extremely capital efficient, and the opportunity we now see is bigger than we ever thought it was before.”

Global expansion

In June, PrecisionLender announced plans to open offices in New York City and London.  This follows recent openings in Chicago, Dallas, and in Sydney.

The company decided to expand as a response to a growing demand for AI capabilities as banks continue to seek a competitive advantage, which often means accelerating the pace of technological change, the company said in a statement.

A global expansion also made sense, said Ryden, as one of their clients decided to adopt and implement the platform globally across all markets.  “Our international expansion started as we would follow our customers,” said Ryden. “We followed our best customers there.”

The company already employs more than 100 people already based from the Cary office, and approximately 30 more in the Charlotte office.  Now, the company plans to staff their other office locations to be able to provide high-level customer service to their banking clients across every time zone in which they operate.  They’ve also made high-level management hires in each global market.

These three key senior leaders are Paul Yoo, senior vice president, business development; Gianluigi “Gigi” Salatiello, senior vice president, Europe, the Middle East, and Africa; and Gita Thollesson, senior vice president, Client Success.  Salatiello will be based in the London office and oversee the expansion of PrecisionLender in the U.K. and across Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. Yoo and Tholleson will oversee the New York office.

More hires may be on the way in North Carolina as well as the company continues to expand.  According to Ryden, the company’s retention rate is astronomically high compared to other technology startups.  Traditionally, about 20 percent of the workforce will change during a calendar year, said Ryden, but at PrecisionLender, it’s closer to three percent, or about the same retention rate as the U.S. Government.

Cary has access to a number of really high-quality software developers, engineers, and data scientists, said Ryden, both homegrown from the region’s universities and attracted to the market from other locations.

“That’s what’s attracting companies like Apple and Amazon here,” said Ryden.  The Triangle talent market is very product focused, said Ryden, and the Charlotte talent market is very project focused. “Our business needs both—we have been able to blend both strengths.”

North Carolina is rapidly becoming home to a number of growth-stage companies that are disrupting the traditional financial services markets through technological innovation, said Ryden.

“We’re rebuilding the brain of banks around the world right here in North Carolina,” he said.

Carl Ryden, homegrown entrepreneur

Ryden grew up in eastern North Carolina.  His mother worked two jobs, at the local Wal-Mart store and as a waitress, to support their family, and Ryden was a recipient of free and reduced school lunches through the Federal and State assistance programs.

The trajectory of his life would change dramatically in ninth grade, as he finally met a teacher that would become a mentor to him and help him unlock the potential and the desire to apply and receive admission to the North Carolina School of Science in Mathematics in Durham.

“Behind many of the entrepreneurial companies in North Carolina is an NCSSM alumnus,” said Ryden, listing key roles that alumni play at Red Hat, Pendo, Fandango, Sageworks, and others.

Though Carl left the state to attend MIT, he returned eventually, after a stint at Bain & Company.  The future of North Carolina depends on the state’s ability to successfully educate the next generation of entrepreneurial leaders—and keep them in the state for higher education and to launch their careers.

After all, education is one of the forces that can transform the economy, said Ryden.