Relay Financial with Yoseph West

Relay Financial offers a number of creative solutions to bookkeeping professionals. Yoseph previously worked at a company called Hubdoc where he learned about the pain points of small business owners and bookkeepers around financial statements.

[2:35] Access to data and statements is crucial for proper accounting, so Yoseph built Relay Financial in order to attack the problem from a fundamental point of view. Relay gives you the ability to issue MasterCard debit cards and manage payments all from inside your own business bank account.

[3:25] The three primary reasons businesses are switching over to Relay from the usual financial behemoths are the user permission model, the ability to manage their payables inside their bank account, and they can manage business spending by issuing cards directly to employees.

[5:40] For accountants and bookkeepers, Relay integrates directly with both Xero and QuickBooks online and delivers enriched standardized data into the accounting system which makes it easier to do the books overall.

[6:10] Inside of your financial portal, you can have multiple clients within Relay Financial and have easy access to each client’s banking information. This can save you an hour per client each month in back and forth communication. Relay Financial is a bank account that connects into your key systems and increases financial visibility for small business owners.

[7:55] Bookkeepers universally struggle with getting information from clients and Relay Financial is a potential solution to those common challenges.

[9:30] This kind of service can be revolutionary for bookkeepers and small business owners.

[10:05] Yoseph founded the company in October of 2018 and brought the first customers on board in the first half of 2019. The response to the product has been tremendously positive with the service reframing what’s possible from a bank.

[10:35] Relay is best suited for a wide range of small businesses since they all have very similar financial needs. Businesses that are typically cash-heavy like restaurants or bars are not necessarily the best fit, same with businesses that have to batch deposit a large number of checks at the same time.

[12:00] The long term vision for the company is to automate financial management for small business owners. Yoseph is looking to build useful software on top of customer’s bank accounts to make it even more valuable for business owners.

[13:10] Most people have an existing bank account, but Yoseph is seeing a lot of customers trying out Relay as a complimentary service and once they test it out they organically switch over to make Relay their primary financial institution.

[15:05] If you’re trying to convince your clients to make the switch to Relay Financial, talk to them about how they can sign up online within 10 minutes so it’s incredibly easy to get started, how it solves a specific pain point for the business, and the benefit of being able to issue cards for their employees.

[16:55] Relay Financial is currently only servicing US-based companies at the moment but expanding beyond the US is part of the plan for the business later this year.

Mentioned in this episode: Relay Financial