upSWOT Raises $4.3 Million Toward SMB Banking Help

FinTech platform upSWOT, which works to help financial institutions service small- to medium-sized businesses (SMBs), has come off a seed round with $4.3 million, a Monday (March 15) press release said.

The release said the round comes amid support from multiple venture capital firms and over 50 prominent angels and industry operators.

upSWOT’s approach is similar to Plaid’s, which is application programming interface (API) driven, the release said, with upSWOT collecting and normalizing data from several business software tools. Many tools commonly used by SMBs are featured, including QuickBooks, Xero, Salesforce, Amazon, eBay, Shopify, FreshBooks, Sage, and others, the release said.

With upSWOT, SMBs will find it easier to track business operations with key performance indicator (KPI) dashboards, real-time insights and automatic alerts.

With that, bank partners will also get more actionable data to help engage and fuel growth.

The funding will allow upSWOT to expand its U.S. footprint and keep hiring staff to help with deployments at Tier 1 and 2 financial institutions. The funding will also allow the company to continue enhancing the product to widen the competitive advantage gap.

UpSWOT is primarily attempting to right what it sees as a wrong for SMBs, which have been left without the advantages afforded to individuals who can use personal finance tools like Mint. UpSWOT is looking to team with financial institutions to afford SMBs simple-to-use data aggregation, visualization and analytics with metrics-driven dashboards and timely recommendations.

“Managing a portfolio of SMB clients is a challenge for every bank, lender and servicer,” explains Dmitry Norenko, upSWOT CEO. “Amidst a global pandemic, the financial industry must find new and innovative ways to support this vital customer segment. Our white-label cloud solution helps leading national and community banks gain granular insights into their SMB customers launched within six weeks, and with minimal strain on internal IT or overlap with legacy systems.”

While some companies have looked for an alternative to the Excel-style spreadsheet, PYMNTS writes that it’s unlikely to go away, despite its potential for errors. But SMBs use them for their versatility and flexibility, with other apps often being too complex.