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Banks are falling behind when it comes to understanding — and using — data

Banks are falling behind when it comes to data strategy, especially when it comes to matching — and competing with — platforms.

Finance companies typically monetize data by using it to personalize product offerings for customers, such as credit cards based on transactional history or loan offerings based on customer ages and milestones. But with the shift to open banking systems and the integration of AI technologies, banks will soon look to emulate the monetization models of companies like Facebook and Amazon to create incentives for customers to generate more data and new types of data.

“Banks are just starting to think about data as a revenue source,” said Bradley Leimer, head of fintech strategy at Explorer Advisor & Capital, adding that it’s an interesting time as banks dabble in platforms and AI-driven processes.

According to a recently published report by the World Economic Forum in collaboration with Deloitte, data will become a growing point of differentiation for banks, which, for that reason, will have to use “a combination of data strategies to collect the depth and breadth of data needed to follow the lead of tech firms in data monetization.”

For example, Allied Irish Bank has a Visa partnership in which it offers cash backs to customers. In return, retailers receive customer data, which they can use to provide targeted offers.

Of course, the existing challenge is that banks have higher fiduciary standards than other data stewards, like Facebook or Google. People sort of know that those companies are using their data — selling it even — to third parties. But they don’t expect their banks to handle their data that way, and the banks understand data give them a unique position of customer trust. So on one hand, banks have to compete with platforms, but are held to very different standards.

The legacy infrastructure also holds them back: Banks’ ability to access and analyze customer data is restricted in large because it’s usually stored in legacy mainframes.

“Banks’ data are spread around in several legacy databases and not easily accessible,” said Ron van Wezel, a senior analyst at Aite Group. “Data mining will require collecting data —including metadata — in one big accessible ‘data lake’ and this is not something that large banks currently have.”

They also need to be able to access external data through APIs to create new offerings, he added.

Three or four years ago, the dominant model among financial institutions was to completely remove and replace the core system, which was an expensive path and had a high risk of failure, according to Jesse McWaters, the World Economic Forum’s project lead on disruptive innovation in financial services and author of the report.

What banks are doing now, he said, is carving out particular functions or processes and moving them to a more agile environment: cloud-based information providers. Traditionally they’ve been external clouds, but they don’t necessarily have to be.

“Traditionally financial institutions have thought of themselves as having the data advantage in that they have a large store of data,” McWaters said. “Increasing they’re realizing they haven’t been flexible in their ability to analyze that store of data and are now working to rectify that.”

Another implication of this shift in how banks think about monetizing data, according to the WEF report, is it creates a new business line for fintech startups as traditional banks figure out how to effectively manage, use and secure their data.

A startup called AlphaRank, for example, turns credit and debit data into human influence graphs. Another, called Peotic, uses purchase behavior and payment data to help retailers target consumers.

Soon, the monetization strategy will extend beyond banks’ own customers, channels and products, said Devon Watson, vp of strategy and operations at Diebold Nixdorf.

“The future is much more about how can a bank act as your trusted and secure financial steward but also help plug you into an ecosystem of other offers, insights, exclusive promotions and things like that,” Watson said. “Banks will become more interconnected in how they use data and bring value to the customer from the outside world.”

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How Wells Fargo is letting customers take back control of their financial data

People store card information in a lot of places. Netflix, Spotify, Uber; various apps for their favorite workout, lunch, shopping apps. There’s sensitive financial data flying all around us; it’s the risk people take in exchange for convenience.

Now, Wells Fargo is rolling out a tool that lets customers keep track of it all, an aptly named “Control Tower,” within its mobile banking app that gives them a single view of their digital financial footprint — which includes recurring payments, third parties, mobile wallets, subscriptions, different devices where they’re signed into their banking account — and lets them turn on or off the sharing of their bank account information.

For the bank, it’s about meeting customer expectations, which have evolved. People pay for things and manage their financial lives with other non-bank financial services providers just because they like them (and they’re usually free). Instead of trying to retain customers by replicating those other offerings — which is unrealistic for an institution of Wells Fargo’s size and scale — or somehow preventing customers from buying into their allure, Wells is letting them go about their financial lives as they like and incentivizing them to at least come home at the end of the day for dinner.

The bank is piloting the product with employees later this year and plans to launch it for customers in 2018.

Through a number of moves over the last year, Wells Fargo has positioned itself as leader of the crusade to give customers control over their financial data and how it’s used, but none so pronounced as the introduction of the Control Tower. Ben Soccorsy, head of digital payments product management at Wells Fargo, called it a new type of interaction model for customers — one based on control and trust.

“There are fintechs and other types of companies that can deliver pieces of this already,” Soccorsy said. “It’s not those pieces or the inherent technology that are new, it’s this new way of putting it together in a way that delivers new value to the customer. It’s not just data sharing here and turning your debit card on or off there, device management there. It’s one place.”

That customers expect self-service — ATM withdrawals and deposits, online bill pay, mobile money transfers — from their bank is perhaps the most visible way technology has changed banking. The Control Tower takes that a step further. Giving customers control over how their data is used is the holy grail of digital identity, and the bank has been taking steps toward that goal over the past year by signing agreements with Xero, Intuit — owner of QuickBooks, TurboTax and Mint — and Finicity that allow it to share customer data with the third party using application programming interfaces.

The Control Tower will be rolled out in stages as the bank pursues similar agreements with more third parties; they need to connect with the bank through an API in order for the customer to get the full benefits of the offering, Wells CEO Tim Sloan said at Fortune’s Brainstorm Tech conference in Aspen last week. That implies Wells Fargo is about to get pretty aggressive in its partnering strategy.

The first ambition of these arrangements is to move away from the commonly used screen-scraping method — where the third party “scrapes” the necessary information when customers log in with their bank credentials and hold onto it for future use. Wells has also been speaking out about the need for banks to take a stand against screen-scraping by creating industry standards for data exchange.

Beyond data security, the move by Wells is a sign of the industry’s new willingness to break down their silos and partner or collaborate with third party providers and in some cases products that could be considered competitors, like Apple Pay — all in the name of offering customers choice and developing emotional loyalty.

“We want our customers to have their financial relationship with Wells Fargo. If you want to use another payments provider because that’s your choice, that’s fine, as long as you come back to Wells Fargo,” Sloan said. “We want to offer our customers convenience as long as, ultimately, they come home.”

That’s similar to what JPMorgan Chase said when it announced its data sharing agreement with Finicity two weeks ago.

“Our customers really want to use these financial apps and they do use them a lot,” Trish Wexler, a JPMorgan spokeswoman, said at the time. “We want them to find a safe, secure and private way for them to be able to do that without having to hand over their bank password.”

How personal financial management apps like Moven, Clarity or even old timers like Intuit’s Mint survive in a world where all banks can show customers their entire financial snapshot beyond just their bank accounts is unclear. It’s too early to say, but there’s probably room for both types to exist, Wells Fargo’s Soccorsy said. Of course, the startups also provide a lot of inspiration.

“It’s a good thing we have companies out there looking at creative and innovative ways to help customers be more financially successful. They do it in a way that’s focused on probably one use case, one type of problem, one very specific need a customer has,” he said. “Our company has learned that they’ve been successful in doing that in pieces and parts; we are putting it together in more comprehensive ways.”

That’s one of the reasons innovation appears more difficult to execute at banks than at startups. Small announcements like credit card toggling and direct fraud alerts seem insignificant when they land in customers’ inboxes, but banks are often working to solve broader problems before customers even realize they’re problems. Whether Wells customers begin to care about who has their financial data and how it’s being used once they have the ability to control it remains to be seen.

“That’s part of the role we play. Control is about making you feel comfortable and it comes back to trust,” Soccorsy said. “Our company wants to build trust everyday with customers. This is a forward looking opportunity to do that, recognizing that customers aren’t asking for it by name today.”

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WTF is digital identity?

Moving shopping and banking online means our transactions are more than making money: They’re about getting data.

“People are extremely aware of how digitized their lives have become and how little control over that. They want to know that if they’re providing this info they’re getting something for it and it’s not just for banks or large technology companies to use for their own purposes,” said Steven Ehrlich, lead analyst for emerging technologies at Spitzberg Partners.

That data says a lot about us — a lot more than a piece of plastic with a photo and address on it. There lies the digital identity dilemma: legally accepted drivers licenses and passports supposedly show that we are who we say we are in the physical world, but don’t do the same in the digital world. As the digital world evolves, that could get complicated. But right now banks, technology firms and governments are all looking at how to make it easier for people to prove they are who say they are, effectively allowing customers to own their own identity. In this WTF, we dive deep into digital identity.

So, what’s a digital identity?
A guy walks into a bar and shows the bartender his ID. In doing so, he gives the bartender more information than he needs: his name, date of birth, address, height, weight, eye color, whether or not he’s an organ donor. But all the bartender needs to verify is this guy’s date of birth, because all he needs to know is if he’s of the age to be in a bar.

People do this online everyday: when they want to login somewhere or make a transaction they often give away more data than they may realize they want to, and to a company that doesn’t need all of that information.

“How the consumer behaves when online, what they share about themselves, where they’re located, how they interact with their device — all of those components are really what creates digital identity,” said Kim Sutherland, senior director of fraud and identity management strategy at LexisNexis Risk Solutions. “There are use cases where your digital identity never has been connected to the physical world and there are other times when your digital ID and physical ID do need to intersect.”

What’s the problem?
Everyone owns your identity, except you. According to the government, you are what your drivers license or identification card says you are. Amazon, Facebook and Google identify you by the places you check into and map, what you purchase and where you have it delivered. But the airline operating your flight home won’t believe you’re you if you give them the email tied to all that data. And Amazon doesn’t ask for your drivers license when you want to buy something, you enter a password.

Where do banks come into this?
Banks are well positioned to provide identity verification services because of the amount of data they hold and the level of trust consumers and corporations have in them as authoritative institutions. Even when confidence is low.

“Banks really think about their role as custodians of personal data and the identities of their customers,” said Ehrlich. “They recognize it’s becoming more important to have access to this information so they can optimize services but do it in a way that is transparent, secure and equitable so people continue to use the services and provide them with even more data.”

Now banks need to look at what data is necessary for them to conduct their operations and how they can best use the information to optimize their services in a way that makes their clients feel they really are equal partners.

What’s the solution?
The holy grail of digital identity is that people only provide the minimum data necessary for their purpose. There isn’t a credible plan to make it happen across the world and across industries. But everyone involved is working on it.

“In order to get to that situation we need to find a way for people to be in charge of their own information so they don’t necessarily have to trust a bank or Google or Facebook,” Ehrlich said.

Biometric authentication efforts are the most visible examples.

IBM is working with security company SecureKey and several major Canadian banks on an app that would push notifications to people when utility providers need access to their information. For example, when signing up for a new phone line, the customer would receive a notification saying the wireless provider needs to verify his or her name, address, date of birth and social security number, and that it will access that information through the customer’s bank. The customer approves, by biometrical authenticating on the phone, and the bank transfers that data to allow the customer to open the account.

“People will feel much more secure if they know they can control their information and permission it out only if they want to,” Ehrlich said.

He added that there’s a design element to the solutions as well. Organizations working on solutions worry that everyday people won’t have the tech savvy to work with encryption, but that can be solved by creating a user interface customers want to try and use.

How long will this take?
As they say in the Valley, it will change the world in our lifetime. Future generations will be taking this for granted.

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The biggest challenge to secure data access is time: Xero president

Xero is making it easier for small businesses to manage their finances, one bank partner at a time.

The accounting technology firm on Thursday entered its fourth bank partnership with Capital One, which built an application programming interface that lets Xero retrieve customer data from the bank without compromising, through scraping, customers’ sensitive bank login credentials — the more common way of accessing customer data. Xero has made similar deals with Wells Fargo, Silicon Valley Bank and City National Bank.

“For a business owner to have their own customized financial web and sit at the center of it, we have to have the relationships all across the ecosystem,” said Keri Gohman, president of Xero Americas. “All the banks, accounting partners, ecosystem partners so the business owner can see its full tech stack and how to make it work together.”

Gohman joined Xero less than a year ago from Capital One. Tearsheet caught up with her to discuss the problems data poses for small businesses and the challenges for banks and third parties trying to serve them.

This is Xero’s fourth bank partnership. Is there a theme here?
These bank integrations are happening more and more and it’s a recognition that customers want control of their financials. This is just another continued reinforcement of that trend and the reality that banks really want to get ahead of customer demand.

How has demand from small businesses changed in the last five years?
As consumers, we’re able to log onto Google Maps and have it pull ratings and reviews from Yelp, Uber so I can schedule a car, Waze so I can see traffic. I don’t really know I’m in all those things but I expect them all to work together. In much the same way, business owners are starting to expect that. They’re using the cloud, realizing the benefits of collaboration, they want things to work that same way.

Can you explain the data access issue for small businesses?
Getting access to lending is about your financial history and performance over time. It’s the lifeblood of what a business lives on, and relies on how they get underlying data and how that data all works together. Third party integration is always tough because the data isn’t always reliable, and the feed can get interrupted. Having this data feed directly with the bank creates a tighter integration.

So what’s the problem Xero is trying to solve with Capital One?
Sharing customer data with third parties safely, securely and in a way that puts the customer in control. There’s been a proliferation of great fintech solutions for small businesses, but they don’t all work together. And financial companies are recognizing they want the world to work together. Everything financially should work together so if I’m a business owner I’m asking what’s my bank, what are all the business applications I need? I need all my data to flow through to my P&L. I need to be able to manage all of my business in one place.

What’s the biggest challenge?
Banks have higher fiduciary standards. I don’t tell Google to start feeding Yelp, Waze or Uber, but consumers don’t expect their financial data to just be shared everywhere. If it’s sitting in another system and your bank allowed it to go there, who do you blame? Not the other company. All the banks are wrestling with the right way to do this but also give customers flexibility. We have to go one by one by one to all the financial institutions to set up these partnerships, and they also need to go one by one by one. The challenge is really time.

Where do we go from here?
Everything will become interconnected over time. What this unlocks over time is the economy. It has the ability to transform the data we have access to, the ability to make the systems work together really have the potential to unlock productivity in ways we can’t consider today.

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Wells Fargo: Banks need to create data exchange standards

Wells Fargo is trying to establish itself as the leader of a movement to give banks’ customers control over their data and how it’s used.

The first step, according to Brett Pitts, head of digital for Wells Fargo Virtual Channels, is to come up with cross-industry standards for moving data to different parties.

“This will be successful if more banks, more aggregators, more fintech firms wind up signing into these kinds of agreements, and figure out an open standard way of passing data and keeping customers at the center of discussions,” Pitts said of its data-exchange agreement with data aggregator Finicity, announced earlier this week. “Ultimately, this isn’t going to work if its just Wells Fargo, Intuit and Finicity doing it.”

The agreement allows Wells Fargo to share its customer data with Finicity using application programming interfaces. The bank made similar agreements with Intuit, which owns QuickBooks, TurboTax and Mint, in February and with Xero last summer. This week’s agreement is different in that it allows Wells to move data to third-party fintech apps that work with Finicity, whereas the agreements with Intuit and Xero allow them to use customer data on their own financial applications.

Right now the most common way of accessing customer data is through a method called screen scraping: customers log into the third party site or app with their bank credentials and that company “scrapes” the information to be able to log in as the customer to retrieve account data as necessary.

“Screen scraping is the anti-pattern we want to stop,” said Pam Dingle, principal technical architect at Ping Identity, a maker of identity management software. “By sharing their passwords, customers are allowing the third parties to be them – transfer money, take out loans, literally do everything the customer can do. These passwords are stored in a format which allows them to be used, so a breach at the third party is a breach of the bank account.”

Intuit also established a data sharing agreement with JPMorgan Chase in January; in February Silicon Valley Bank and Xero made a similar move. Wells’ arrangement with Finicity is the third such agreement, but Pitts indicated the bank doesn’t plan to stop there.

“We have lots of these kinds of conversations in the pipeline right now,” Pitts said. “Early on it’s important for Wells that we show leadership, that this is possible, that we build momentum through these kinds of agreements and they’re used as a catalyst for creating an industry standard ways of doing things. We’re hoping this can constitute a sort of tipping point.”

When Wells Fargo announced its agreement with Xero it framed it as one that takes a stand against the more common practice of screen scraping. Its progress in establishing more agreements with more data companies has “felt a little bit slower than what we would have liked” because of the variety of business models among various aggregators, Pitts said.

Now Wells is hoping over time its campaign to end screen scraping becomes better understood and more easily replicable by others, by making sure its different arrangements can have have as many common elements as possible on the technology side, Pitts said.

“The strategy is to really provide quality access and quality data for consumers financial records,” said Finicity CEO Steve Smith, “to digitize and speed up the existing process thats been out there for a long time and enable speed, security and convenience of financial records.”

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10 years on: Once a first mover, Mint must work to stay relevant

Mint was an instant hit when it launched 10 years ago. It came out of nowhere, making something boring but important like budgeting kind of fun. It was easy to use, and best of all, it was free.

It was so full of promise it exceeded its new user acquisition goal of 100,000 in the first six months — by 10 times that. Two years in, it hit 1.5 million and was sold to the data aggregator Intuit for $170 million. It hasn’t had much in the way of competition — until now.

Mint today is a mobile app working to stay relevant in a sea of similar personal financial management (PFM) apps, such as Moven, Clarity and Penny. The popularity of such apps has increased over the last two or three years and will probably continue to do so with the rise of digital assistants like Siri or Alexa, automated savings and investment apps and an overall financial services shift toward customer self-service and control over their money.

Mint still stands out from the crowd, but it hasn’t been able to attract new users like it used to, said Stephen Greer, an analyst in consulting firm Celent’s banking practice. People who like managing and tracking their money carefully tend to check their accounts more frequently today than they did 10 years ago which is running Mint into the same wall blocking all PFM apps: getting secure real time data feeds from the financial institution.

“For a while, Mint was the best on the market because it was the only one on the market,” he said. “It did a good job for a while but the biggest issue for Mint, and one reason it’s gone downhill, has always been the aggregation piece. If the site isn’t accurately reflecting your spending – if it’s not live, it’s not real time, you see discrepancies – you’re most likely not going to use that service.”

Mint now has more than 20 million customers, according to an April 2016 blog post. It hit 10 million users around Aug. 2012. Mint did not provide growth figures over the last 10 years by deadline.

That friction also creates a sort of set-it-and-forget-it mentality, said Tiffani Montez, a senior analyst with Aite Group.

“One of the challenges is [PFM] is like a shiny toy,” she said. “If you try to combat the set-it-and-forget-it mentality you have to be able to provide some additional value that deepens the relationship.”

That may require a smoother flow of customer data between the customer’s bank and PFM app, like the ones Intuit just won from Wells Fargo and JPMorgan Chase. Earlier this year it reached deals with both banks that should theoretically help reduce some of the friction around data sharing. According to the agreement, Chase customers can authorize the bank to share their data electronically with Intuit’s apps: Mint, TurboTax and QuickBooks. Before, customers would give third parties their online banking passwords so they could log in and import customer account information.

Many banks have claimed that common practice compromises cybersecurity and in 2015 several of them, including JPMorgan, temporarily suspended customer data access to third-party data aggregators like Intuit.

However, how much data gets shared is unclear, Greer noted. The banks can probably share basic transactional information like how much money a customer spent in a given period or the current account balance, but might not reveal how much interest a customer is being charged on a credit card or what kinds of fees he or she is paying.

Mint said while it’s always been good at tracking and insights, it is now focusing on moving into transacting on users’ behalf, beginning with its bill pay functionality.

“In the past you got that insight but you had to take action yourself,” said Kevin Kirn, head of product for Mint. “Bill pay is just the beginning of that journey from insight to action. All our teams are looking for ways to connect that action experience through Mint.”

Perhaps the data sharing agreements will help Mint in creating more and more action experiences, but Greer is skeptical.

“Opacity is in their best interest and withholding a lot of that data works in the financial institution’s best interest,” Greer said. “My curiosity is in how much information they’re actually getting through this ‘direct connection’ and what that entails. My skepticism is around how much value that provides. I’m willing to say its not as much as it could be.”

That’s because even with the agreement, Mint is a direct-to-consumer product. Today there are plenty of companies that sell their PFM solutions to the banks themselves, aggregators like Yodlee, MX and Plaid that provide more value to the bank than Mint does. Mint makes money off its consumer business. When it comes to advice, it makes recommendations in customers’ best interest – and not necessarily in the best interest of the banks.

About a year ago Intuit shut down its financial services aggregation services, probably so it could access a market of direct connections – like those with JPM and Wells – and direct links to feed its specific services, like Mint.

“There’s just more value they can provide,” Greer said of the MXs, Yodlees and other direct-access data aggregators and infrastructure providers. “Mint hasn’t provided a whole lot of value to institutions and banks don’t want to play that game. They’d rather cut off the aggregator from getting data on consumers so the service will buffer – that’s essentially what’s happened.”

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Behind closed ledgers: an inside perspective on the Wells Fargo / Xero integration

If you want to win small business banking, you have to address cash flow: 60% of small businesses in the US face cash flow problems on a monthly basis, according to a 2012 whitepaper by Barlow Research Associates.

Cash flow is a major problem, not just for incumbents and their frantic SMB customers, but for the American economy at large. According to an SBA report, SMBs really are the backbone of the American workforce: they employ 49% of the US population (that’s 120 million people), create 64% of net new jobs in the US, and account for 43% of US payroll dollars.

Wells Fargo has been taking steps to help small businesses get a grip on their finances.  To do so, the bank, which has 3 million small business clients and provides more loans to SMBs than any other bank in America, established the Wells Fargo Works for Small Businesses resource portal in 2014.

Barlow’s whitepaper showed that one of the main problems keeping SMBs in perpetual cash flow pandemonium is a lack of integration between banking services and accounting. Enter Xero, an accounting software and online booking company, whose new data-sharing integration with Wells Fargo should provide a simple integrated solution to joint customers of the firms.

Standardization brought them together

The US banking system is leaning more heavily on banking APIs – a set of routine definitions, protocols, and tools for building software and applications. Both startups and incumbents benefit greatly from them, using these software hooks to create holistic experiences to meet their customers’ needs. Unsurprisingly, financial companies of all sizes have begun to put aside their differences to aggressively pursue API standardization.

“Its about how we create a world where data and details can transfer more securely and more seamlessly,” says James Maiocco, General Manager of Xero.

Together, banks and fintech startups are trying to develop a balance between giving customers control over their data, while remaining within the boundaries of security, privacy, and regulatory frameworks. It was at several different conferences about banking APIs that Wells Fargo and Xero started flirting with the idea of an API-driven integration.

Moving Fast

The conversation about creating an integration for joint Wells Fargo and Xero customers started several quarters ago. However, the actual development of the integration only took six months from start to finish.

Each company had an executive sponsor – Maiocco for Xero and Brett Pitts, Head of Digital for Wells Fargo Virtual Channels – as well as respective technology and business teams that had to work through the terms. Ultimately, the negotiations were dependent upon “a small handful of people on both sides of the table,” says Maiocco. He credits API standards as enabling such small teams to pull off such a big deal:

That’s the beauty of standards. You’re not building something custom for an individual organization, you’re actually gravitating around a standard that can be used by everybody. It doesn’t require large teams, it just requires an agreement around the standards and the commercial relationships of both parties.

Marketing the integration to their client base

Even if their joint customers aren’t all caught up with both firms’ press releases (as Maiocco notes, small business owners are the busiest people on the planet), Xero will make them aware of this new integration by messaging about the service at login, as well as engaging in a certain amount of more traditional outbound marketing activities. Though he couldn’t speak to Wells Fargo’s practices, he assumes that they too will be focused on informing their customers of the integration through customized, personalized channels.

Neither Wells Fargo nor Xero are disclosing the exact number of how many joint customers they share, but Maiocco told Tradestreaming that Wells Fargo represents a double-digit percentage of their customer base in the US. Ultimately, customers have to actively choose to apply the integration.

Miraculously, everybody wins

In theory, it’s a chain reaction of good. The Wells Fargo/Xero integration enables customers to stop circling the cashflow whirlpool and start succeeding in business, potentially resulting in more revenue, jobs, and security. Wells Fargo wins, because it means less risks, less businesses defaulting on loans. Xero wins, because the SMBs continue to grow with them.

For Maiocco, one of the biggest winners are those unsung heroes, the accountants. Many small businesses with 25 employees or less outsource their bookkeeping. From experience servicing accountants, Xero learned that a lot of their time is spent doing rote tasks that could really be done with machine automation. With this new integration between Wells Fargo and Xero, accountants could save up to 2 to 4 hours per joint customer, depending on transaction volume.

This is not only significant for the SMB customers, who typically pay their accountants hundreds of dollars per hour, but for the accounts themselves, who can stop doing manual data entry and focus on higher added value services for their clients. Maiocco suspects that Xero’s accountant base will push more clients to Wells Fargo as a result of this integration.

“The average SMB  bookkeeper and accountant will have somewhere between 50-100 small businesses that they manage,” he said. “If you can save 2 to 4 hours per business per month, that’s a lot of time saved.”

Photo credit: ansik via VisualHunt.com / CC BY