Autobooks: Detroit’s finest drives payments innovation for financial institutions and their SMB customers

Why MissionOG invested in this leading small business payment and accounting services platform

 

A large part of MissionOG’s success is due to our commitment to investing in areas where we have deep experience, and we believe that these segments offer particular opportunity for growth. One of our core investment themes is that both consumer and commercial payments will continue to rapidly migrate from paper/manual to electronic/digital. While we have seen this paper-to-digital migration occur for some time, and clearly the onset of COVID-19 significantly accelerated this trend, we expect the transition to continue for the foreseeable future.

In addition to this over-arching theme of paper-to-digital migration, we also believe that many traditional financial services companies are desperately trying to determine how best to compete with emerging fintechs who deliver “best of breed” products and services directly to both consumers and commercial customers. Quite frequently, more established financial institutions now partner with fintechs whose focus allow them to offer superior, targeted solutions. These partnerships create a win/win/win, as a financial institution retains a valuable customer, the customer benefits with market-leading solutions, and the fintech gains access to a large potential customer base at a very low cost of acquisition.

It is with these perspectives in mind that we were impressed with and ultimately invested in Autobooks. The company helps financial institutions upgrade banking services for small businesses by helping them deliver the product suite that is “just the right fit” for both the customer and financial institution. With the Autobooks solution, small businesses are able to:

• Accept online payments from customers via card and ACH, having the incoming payments deposited directly into their existing checking account
• Easily track incoming customer payments and outgoing bill payments in a single application
• Automate bookkeeping tasks and access to financial reports without having to use an expensive and complicated third-party accounting system

By partnering with Autobooks, financial institutions benefit by delivering new and existing customers best-in-class market services, enabling them to increase customer deposits and non-interest income, and become a more attractive alternative to new deposit relationships.

Riding the tailwinds of favorable market trends and their unique value proposition, Autobooks has demonstrated strong momentum. Over the past twelve months, Autobooks secured over 40 new financial institution relationships including TD Bank, TCF Bank, and First Citizens Bank, three very large, deposit-oriented banks with significant SMB customer bases. Additionally, the company has developed top tier channel relationships with leading financial technology providers such as FIS, Jack Henry, Elavon, CSI and Q2, enabling them to drive accelerated market penetration. Further, SMB adoption growth has increased over 300% year-over-year, demonstrating strong market acceptance of Autobooks’ solutions.

We are extremely impressed with the Autobooks management team. Steve Robert, CEO and co-founder, and his team have a deep breadth of digital payments expertise, bank technology know-how, and insight on the financial services needs of small businesses. Autobooks has developed a best-in-class implementation and service model, demonstrating the ability to quickly launch customers and deliver immediate value within their small business customer base. With the capital raise, Autobooks will expand its product development, engineering and sales teams, allowing them to accelerate their innovation engine and drive faster and broader market penetration.

To assist Autobooks to realize its vision to empower its financial institution clients and their customers, MissionOG has led a Series B investment with participation from other investors including Renaissance Venture Capital, Detroit Venture Partners and Draper Triangle, along with TD Bank Group. We very much look forward to supporting the company’s road ahead.