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By partnering with Finley, Coast has been able to:
- Easily keep an eye on key capital markets KPIs
- Save headcount across the finance team
- Build trust with their bank partner
- Save time executing on their facility
Coast is a B2B fintech company that enables fleet owners to manage their entire fleet at a glance. Their technology provides smart fleet cards that can be locked to fuel-only or enabled for different expenses.
Coast’s product is a 30-day charge card. Coast customers use their Coast charge cards and then pay the balance every month. That means that the Coast team needs to make sure they have the capital they need to fund their receivables as they carry the month between the spend and the payment. Like any startup in the credit business, they needed to figure out how to fund their receivables.
In the context of asset-backed lending, Coast has high-quality assets (i.e., its customers have very high-quality credit). As Coast kept growing, its Finance team needed to figure out how to fund the company’s receivables at scale. They went to the market for funding solutions and found a bank partner to provide debt capital.
As a fintech startup, as soon as you find a funding solution, you have to figure out how to operationalize it. Coast had to ensure that it could manage the day-to-day reporting demands that come with raising a debt facility without having to hire many extra people.
Finley as a solution
After exploring several solutions in the market, the Coast team received references for Finley through multiple partners. Finley’s robust offering and hands-on customer success team were a good fit for Coast.
“Trust is something that you can’t measure. It’s important to trust the platform you’re using. We trust Finley. Their high-touch customer support and knowing exactly where to look in our 100-page long agreement to answer any of our questions is incredible.”—Anurag Puranik, Chief Risk Officer, Coast
From the very beginning, the communication between Finely and Coast was very clear. The Finley team walked Coast through the requirements to set up their facility and what the team needed to produce to be successful. Finley’s positive relationship with Coast’s bank partner has proven crucial to their success.
“Our bank partners know Finley, and Finley knows our bank partner's requirements. We are accountable to the bank partner, and it’s one thing for us to be able to trust Finley, but perhaps even more importantly, our bank partner trusts Finley. As soon as we got the requirements from our bank, Finley knew exactly how to execute on them.” —Anurag Puranik, Chief Risk Officer, Coast
Finley also advised Coast on how to improve operational efficiency and was able to implement its software solution in three weeks. Now that the funding automation process is set up, Coast’s users just have to drop the tape daily, and nothing else needs to be done. They are able to manage their large credit facility efficiently because Finley abstracts away all the complexity that comes with operating a facility.
“I spend two hours per week or less on facility management. I’ve spoken with founders of other companies where they have raised facilities, and it sometimes requires two- or three-person capital markets teams to operate. Without Finley, we would definitely need to hire a full-time employee.” —Anurag Puranik, Chief Risk Officer, Coast
How Coast Relies on Finley
Coast uses Finley’s insights feature to see the whole balance of their portfolio alongside what they have pledged to the bank. It provides a detailed insight into Coast’s covenants, what is eligible and what is not, and granular-level reporting. At the same time, the team can access high-level details to grab quick insights and snapshots of what’s happening in the portfolio at any given time.
Coast also relies on Finley’s automated cash recycling component. A historically time-consuming aspect of managing a debt facility, the draw recycling component lets Coast auto-generate certain loan tapes that satisfy bank requirements in 30 minutes or less.
“I definitely recommend Findley for a few key reasons. Cost efficiency is always there—we save money with Finley. More important is efficiency—it keeps you focused on growing your business by making all operations very efficient. Even more important is trust—getting your bank partners and everyone on board to trust the platform is a huge vote of confidence for us. This is especially important for a young company, as banks tend to ask more questions of younger companies. Consistently reporting correctly and meeting their requirements helps build long-term trust, which we can leverage when negotiating our next facility.” —Anurag Puranik, Chief Risk Officer, Coast
