Banking for Startups - Aion Financial

Jordan Buckner: [00:00:00] If you're a small business, you need to keep your money in a bank. But what do you choose? There's so many options out there from your large retail banks to online banks these days, and it's really important to find something that's going to work for your business right now and in the future.

Definitely no, don't keep your personal accounts coupled with your business accounts. You want those to be completely separate, but beyond that, what are the features that you need for your business? So for today's Convo, I have invited on Ajay with Aion, which allows you to bank through their platform and also has lots of other features built for businesses, including being able to access credit for your business to fund purchases as you grow.

Ajay, welcome on today. 

Ajay Krishnan: Hey, Jordan, nice to be here. 

Jordan Buckner: today we're going to be jumping into looking at the platform, all the features that it entails and what makes it a good fit for CPG businesses. But before we get into all the details, I'd love for you just to give a quick intro on what Aion is.

Ajay Krishnan: [00:01:00] Great. Yeah. First off, excited to be here. Excited to have the conversation with you. So Aion , is an all in one business finance platform. Think about it like a finance operating system that really folds in various aspects of business finances from AP, which is your payables, your expenses, your receivables, which is your invoicing, banking.

Working capital, bookkeeping, all of this in one place. I mean, historically we've seen, I mean small, medium businesses use about five to 10 products to manage various aspects of their business from customer acquisition to like digital payments to again, bookkeeping, et cetera. And we're trying to break down these silos to manage challenges and reconciliation to figure out, you and to build context on these transactions, essentially to pass that benefit back to the customer and to help them grow and focus on their business.

Jordan Buckner: Yeah, I think that's really important because a lot of times you as a founder, you'll be working with multiple different systems and it can get really confusing when [00:02:00] you're paying bills over here, you're baking products over here, you're invoicing through a different system and you're trying to make all of those work together and you're going to end up with some gaps in between.

And so Aion it helps to bring all those together plus more. 

Ajay Krishnan: Yeah. Yep, exactly. You're touching on a big note there. 

Jordan Buckner: I love it. So let's give everyone a look at what the platform's like so that they can kind of get behind the scenes and see what it actually looks like to use a platform like Aion.

And, you know, one question that we get all the time with these is, is Aion fiduciary like bank itself or does it have a partner bank for the actual funds? 

Ajay Krishnan: I'll share a little bit about that and then I'll jump into the demo. Aion is a banking platform. We have a sponsor bank, which is Crossover Bank.

Crossover is a Fort Lee, New Jersey based bank. They're again on the brink of I'd say fintech disruption they've supported large fintech companies like a firm and coinbase and various firms in the space. And they've been around for a while and [00:03:00] they are a very close partner and we rely on them and we essentially, I mean, these accounts are titled in.

Our customer's names, we don't hold or ledger these accounts as you might have seen in some other recent banking as a service provider debacles. But again we are, we do use the crossover bank partner relationship to provide these bank accounts. 

Jordan Buckner: In the crossover bank, the funds there would be, would be insured for banking regulations.

Ajay Krishnan: Absolutely. Yeah, these are FDIC insured accounts. We are constantly looking at increasing insurance protectAion on larger for companies who want to load a whole larger account balances and we need more protectAion because as you might know, the FDIC insurance coverage, especially since Last year's SVB crisis, a Silicon Valley bank crisis was kind of come to question and people were looking for higher coverage, et cetera.

So that's something we were evaluating and we're trying to get out to our customers too. 

Jordan Buckner: I love it. Thanks for that and getting that out the way. So let's jump into the platform. 

Ajay Krishnan: [00:04:00] Fantastic. Give me one second. I will dive right in. Okay. This is the Aion all in one platform. There's a lot happening here. Because it's an often one platform, which comprises multiple different apps. I want to zoom in a little bit on the Aion apps here. We offer, as Jordan. Mentioned earlier, like you mentioned earlier banking.

But also other tools like for expense management, like virtual physical cards, bill payments, and we have a lot of automation going in here to be able to extract a lot of the bill information, et cetera. Invoicing where you can customize your invoices and send it out. And then working capital lines, which kind of closely hook up to receivables.

If there are outstanding invoices you're borrowing, borrowing against or inventory, which we're funding on. So all of this kind of wrapped together in one platform. This is an easy to use kind of navigation navigational dashboard here. You, anyone who opens an Aion account essentially will see this and you [00:05:00] can connect external banks here.

You can invoice, look at your AR aging to see what your customer patterns are, look at what your outstanding credit looks like. Monitor your card span, really look at bills coming into your inbox and any approvals too, but basically the gist of this is you can do all of this in one place. I want to double click a little bit into banking because that's in the context of this conversation.

Let's dive in. The banking. Platform you see here is again, very simple, easy to use. We're focused on providing simple experiences to customers. If you think about what our bank accounts look like and nothing against the large banking providers, Wells Fargo or Chase, I mean, getting to something simple as an account number or a routing number used to be a maze.

But we try to make that all, all accessible. Easy and simple to use. You can go and look at your account information. You can download your account letter, look at your statements, all of this in one [00:06:00] easy to use kind of dashboard. And we try to make against, make drill downs also easier. Again, think about you transacting from your bank account, trying to go in and narrow down a transaction, which happened three months back, like being able to search easily or filter down to a certain transaction set, download those transactions, share it with the bookkeeper, all of that is super easy, super simple to use and transparent as well.

The other piece I'd probably want to highlight here is we're constantly innovating in terms of how quickly you can move your money, because one aspect of capital is liquidity, meaning to say that if you're sending monies to your counterparties, and it takes three days. You don't have it. Your counterparty doesn't have it.

It's stuck in the middle. And someone's making float on it, right? So we're trying to again, move monies faster and enable that for our customers, whether it's emergency payments, or you want to differentiate how you show up [00:07:00] to a exciting new supplier you want to forge a relationship with, and you want to send a token advance.

You can do that. Instantly. So you, we have standard ACH rails where monies go out in a day or faster wire rails, wherein you can send out monies in a couple of hours. And then instant trails, which we've recently introduced where money settled less than a minute. And a lot of this is really supplemented with.

transaction transparency. Now what I mean by that is, is really if you click into any transaction here, there's a lot of information you can pass along with the transaction. You can, You can notify your counterparty saying, Hey, I initiated a thousand dollar payment without the counterparty coming to you or your supplier or vendor coming to you saying, Hey, did you do this?

Did you do that? Really eliminating all that back and forth between you and your counterparties or your recipients. The other piece to this, which is exciting. Is again, being an all in one platform, we can weave different aspects of your transactions [00:08:00] together into your bank account. If you think about the accountant or the bookkeeper who's trying to close your books there at the end of the month, one of the things they crucially do is they look at your bank statements and they say, Hey, this is my source of truth of how money moved in your business.

Let me reconcile that against a bill or let me reconcile that against an invoice. And if you see my screen here, we tie this transaction and we indicate to the user that, Hey, this was a bill payment and you could, when a bookkeeper is reviewing this, for instance, or an owner operator who is trying to manage their books is reviewing this, they know the context of the transaction.

They know they paid this insurance bill. So it's weaved into the bank account, which makes it. It's just adhesive and like concrete. 

Jordan Buckner: Yeah. And it's really great to see. Cause I know a lot of times I'll be 

looking at a transaction. I'm like, what is this? I'm trying to detail the memo or remittance information and have to do a lot of tracking.

So I could see that being very valuable. 

Ajay Krishnan: Yep. Yep. So that's a huge differentiator. And we've heard this repeatedly from customers saying, Hey, give us some more transparency in how we're just reaching the [00:09:00] counterparty or even when monies are coming in, you're getting paid from your customers.

Same level of transparency. It's not just ones which are originated on our platform. So we have that as kind of table stakes on this, right? So that intelligence is constantly something we're supplementing and growing off of the other thing I would say is just security and controls. Like if you are a smaller business coming in on your growing, Mhm.

And you have, let's say an outsourced bookkeeper. You want to be able to provide them some access specifically on some accounts or some transactions. We have very customized access. You can go and customize that now for that particular user. You can set controls in place to say, Hey, , any transfers of 500 or over needs to go and hit X, Y, Z.

All of this is. Basically fundamental to our platform. So you're not saying, Hey, you know what, I'm a business, which is zero to a million, and [00:10:00] then I'm using platform one. And then when I grow from one to five, I'm using platform two, and then you're going through a series of platforms, right? So our platform really scales from.

A small young business coming to use their bank account, building history on, on the product transacting on the product, qualifying for credit because they see these cashflow gaps between customer payment patterns and their vendor payments or supplier payments. All of that really brings all of it together and gives you the ability to kind of take that benefit out of us understanding your business and understanding the business's data you.

To, to really help them grow. 

Jordan Buckner: Awesome. I love it. 

Ajay Krishnan: Some customer examples also I can think of is, is, I mean, we have businesses scaling on our platform from like, I'd say under a million dollars in revenue to much larger businesses, manufacturers who are, for instance, supplying parts to, which went on the [00:11:00] SpaceX rockets or Or or even a publicly listed cybersecurity companies were again, using the same platform.

 We're not doing, we're not, they're trying to find lowest common denominator processes. Simple processes that work for everyone, but contextualize to your business using , the data which you provide by transacting on the platform. That makes a ton of sense. 

Jordan Buckner: Let's jump in the receivables and bill payments and see how those work.

Ajay Krishnan: Let's jump into receivables. So this is again, a way for you to invoice. The way for businesses to invoice their customers. It's again, very simple. You, we, you can either receive these payments in your Aion account by providing payment details to the customer, or we also have a feature for you to accept for, for you to accept online payments.

So this is again, there's a payment link, which is sent out to the customer. The customer just clicks on the link, provides their details and the money directly arrives. And The transaction is also [00:12:00] automatically reconciled against the invoice that is created. So in all, the bookkeeping piece is also kind of taken care of along with just the invoicing piece of this.

We also offer customizatAion on invoices. which allows you to customize it for a, I mean, for based on a specific standard template or multiple different customer based templates for you to show up differently with your customers, brand yourself differently with the customers. Basis how you want to show up.

The other couple of things I will quickly call out here is

that I quickly call out here , is managing your customer information. So a lot of times we see our customers, our clients use this as well. Wherein you can go in and essentially add documents, let's say a purchase order or a contract where you're housing all of this, this is more of an organization or an efficiency.

Based system, wherein you're housing all of this in one place. So you're not like going and searching for these in multiple different places. You're tying it to the invoice. Let's say you're sending an invoice out. You can map that back [00:13:00] to the purchase order. you created, you attach it with your invoice.

So you're now your customer knows, Hey, invoice one, two, three, PO three, four, five, three is what that's related to, right? So all of it is driving one efficiency to some level of organization in your processes as you scale.

Similar notAion with products and services as well, but I'll skip over this. One of the exciting things we are doing here is on bill payments. Every customer comes in gets a custom bill payments inbox. Now this inbox essentially is something which uses AI LLM to be able to parse.

Or extract the information in these bills to say, Hey this bill is from Hartford insurance. This is your business insurance. Like you have one unpaid bill to them, giving them some context on if there were previous bills paid here and automatically categorizing your expense line items in the bill, right?

For this, we use again, large language As well as again, new and existing innovation in [00:14:00] search capabilities, something called semantic search, where we go and use multiple technologies to be able to drive accuracy. Because I mean, I'm sure you've heard of large language models, hallucinating in some instances, not providing repeated levels of accuracy.

So we try to tackle that by building in memory, by adding additional Previously used technologies, which kind of ratchet into large language models, which really help drive accuracy and how these expenses are categorized. And what does this mean for the business using this means you're not going in manually entering all this information to then organize your bills and then pay it out.

It's easy. you just click on pay. And then you. And the payment goes out again, similar to what we have in banking, as I mention we have notions of a payment memo or adding context to that particular payment for the counterparty to recognize it and notifications and whatnot.

So same standard kind of framework, which we use across the platform. 

Jordan Buckner: That's [00:15:00] really cool. It makes it easy to keep checking all your bills so that you don't miss out on payments and have people trying to chase you down. 

Ajay Krishnan: And lastly, I think I want to quickly touch upon a couple of other things here.

One being accounting system connections. I think integrations is sometimes becomes an important part of making sure that we synchronize with existing processes, businesses might have, let's say you, you're using a QuickBooks or a NetSuite or. Any existing accounting system, we sync with those accounting systems.

So your books and records are in, in sync between Aion and the accounting system. We have direct feeds into some of these accounting systems. So any transactions from your bank account feed indirectly to the accounting system. All of this to give the business some flexibility in how they operate, what processes they bring to the table and really not disrupt existing processes.

Lastly, I think one I'd mention here is, and this is a new feature and we're very excited about this is just bringing, we understand that again, [00:16:00] customers or prospects might have existing banking relationships. So we've tried to weave any other bank accounts. They have the business has externally into the dashboard.

So you can see all of your business bank accounts in one place, really get a snapshot of, okay, Hey , I have a Wells Fargo account and I have X amount of balance in it. You could click in and view certain transactions in the account as well. So really not just thinking about it from. Purely an Aion standpoint, but more of putting ourselves in the business owner or the finance team shoes who are kind of straddling across different processes, which they have in different accounts, they have bring it all in one place.

And then and then really build off of that.

That makes it super easy. I love how everything is pulled together. 

Jordan Buckner: You know, one thing I would love to dive into as well as just credit and how that becomes available by using the banking system. 

Ajay Krishnan: Absolutely. So I think foundational to our product is. To our overall all in one [00:17:00] platform is these products or our apps talking to each other.

So you saw the invoicing the invoicing process briefly. Now, when an invoice gets sent out, now your customer owes you some payment. You have some net terms on it based on which the customer is going to pay, which means you have outstanding invoices or outstanding collateral. Now that essentially forms your.

Found like your core for your credit borrowing. We offer lines of revolving lines of credit for essentially businesses to use those outstanding invoices to come in and say, Hey, I have outstanding invoices to UNFI or key he. And now can I really qualify to borrow on those invoices?

And that's where the credit product steps in. And we manage that those invoices as collateral. Everything here happens dynamically. So when you're sending out an invoice and your customer waiting on that payment. Your available funds automatically gets updated. There's a credit limit that's usually agreed upon during the qualification process, and [00:18:00] you can borrow as much as you have collateral and you only pay based on how much you borrow, right?

Like, like any revolving line of credit, it's not like you're paying a standard fixed monthly amount. Really gives you a flexibility to scale, gives you flexibility in terms of an emergency situation, which you need to fund for any like critical supplier payments you want to you want to make to show up differently, various use cases.

I think payroll is another one where I think it's critical to keep the lights on. So a lot of, a lot of use cases where we see Customers using it and this is essentially debt capital, which you can use to operate your business from work to run your business as well as to grow and acquire more material or purchase more inventory to then manufacture and grow your business.

Jordan Buckner: I think that's a huge bonus because I think a lot of times founders are looking for, you know, how can I access that capital? How can I get those funds? think now the options are either right. You have to [00:19:00] have a certain level of profitability for some of the larger banks because they're not used to understanding inventory based businesses, or, you know, there's a lot of predatory loans and merchant cash advantages out there where they're looking to really Give you high interest rates that are really hard to pay back.

And so this option kind of scales with your business based on lots of factors, but including like receivables, they're coming in on things like that. Right. 

Ajay Krishnan: Yep. Yep. And again, like I'm seeing this multiple times, but transparency is again, a very important part of what we do here. And we, again, give you enough detail, enough transparency in how this collateral is moving, because again, if with a small or a large business, you want to stay close to.

How much you can borrow. So you can plan effectively and you can anticipate effectively. So a lot of what we do in grant is that transparency of how your available funds are calculated or how your your collateral is moving and getting paid off, et cetera. [00:20:00] So you can manage your books effectively.

Jordan Buckner: Absolutely. I love that. Ajay, thanks so much for joining me and talking about the platform. I love that there's so many different features on here for CPG brands to manage their businesses from banking to receivables, bill of payments, and you didn't even mention this, but you get access to essentially a debit card to be able to use for the bank account.

And then also be able to get credit as well. I think that's just a really great starting area for businesses to be able to manage. their money and manage your money smartly so that you can better run your business and not worry about the financial parts. Ajay, thanks so much for joining me today.

We're going to be including the link to learn more about Aion in the show notes as well so that you can check it out. And also just Ajay, is there a fee for getting started with banking or how can brands get started? 

Ajay Krishnan: It's absolutely free, believe it or not there is a free option wherein you come in and it takes a few minutes to apply application processes is is easy and you [00:21:00] can open a free account and get started right away.

So no, no fees. 

Jordan Buckner: So I always recommend check it out. See if it'll work for your business, try it out and go from there. Ajay, thanks so much again. 

Ajay Krishnan: Fantastic. Thanks, Jordan..