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Dash.fi streamlines risk management & underwriting with real-time accounting data

January 25, 2022
dashfi marketing credit card

The digital advertising industry has experienced extreme growth, especially since the COVID-19 pandemic, growing by 31.3% in 2021. Dash.fi understood that the largest card-driven expense for e-commerce brands is marketing, and specifically advertising, so they wanted to create a platform that enabled success in this area.  

E-commerce companies spend up to 30% of their revenue on customer acquisition costs with marketing budgets comprising of 6-20% of a company’s gross revenue. To support this growth and spend, dash.fi has created the world’s first financial platform and card for marketing and advertisers. According to dash.fi, 44% of an e-commerce brand’s total card-based spend is on paid advertising, specifically.

How traditional credit facilitation has been impacted recently

 The 14 main lenders for United States credit cards cut $99B from their customers’ spending limits in 2020. During the pandemic, many individuals experienced changes to their credit limits, which can impact small business owners, as well. Unexpected change to credit limits can create a waterfall effect where a business may need to make a decision to close marketing campaigns or turn off ad accounts, impacting their business and revenue.

Traditional underwriting data sources are becoming increasingly unreliable in the last year, with slow processes. Factors such as a lack of historical data, an unanticipated plunge in revenue, and a lack of office address, can impact FICO scores of small- and medium-sized businesses (SMBs), making it difficult for them to obtain credit. Dash.fi turned to alternative business data to build its risk model. To achieve this, dash.fi needed a way to collect SMB accounting data and analyze it across the platforms and banks their SMBs use and rely on.

Introducing: A new card small and medium-sized businesses' digital ad spend with dash.fi

Dash.fi is excited to announce that they deliver 10x higher daily limits than their counterparts, by monitoring and assessing risk in real-time, detecting fraud, and making fast financial decisions for their commercial customers. Dash.fi’s cardholders spend upwards of $10M per year on advertising so to manage that risk it’s important to have a holistic view of the cardholders historical finances.

Dash.fi relies on real-time access to financial data on their businesses to make credit decisions. The data they rely on, such as payments, accounting, banking, and advertising integrations, help inform their credit decisions. This enables dash.fi to provide their commercial customers pre-approved, daily surge spending limits for peak holiday times, like Black Friday or Prime Day. Brands often spend hundreds of thousands in a single day on these types of holidays, with total 2020 Black Friday digital advertising spending in the U.S. equalling $71.6M. Businesses need a card provider they can trust to provide them the limits they need for this type of surge spend and dash.fi wants to be that partner for business owners.

dashfi marketing digital ad spend card

“We wanted to make it ‘push button’ easy for our cardholders to connect their accounting data and sync transactions.”

Dash.fi’s solution was to build Railz into their application flow so they could better manage risk as their scale their charge card business.


A short sales cycle, scalable pricing model, analytics dashboard, and a fast-paced product roadmap excited dash.fi about Railz. The solutions dash.fi used:

  • Railz Accounting Data-as-a-Service API™
  • Railz Connect™
  • Railz Analytics™

Sourcing and integrating with APIs across the variety of digital banking, classic banking, and other accounting and financial solutions is no small task. The hardest part is actually normalizing the data and rebuilding the raw data from the API into financial statements and financial health insights that are easy for an underwriting and the risk team to view.

Dash.fi had one engineer take on the challenge of connecting Railz’s API. No strangers to the process of rolling out a new integration, they expected bugs and a lengthy process but gratefully found the opposite when integrating with Railz. In less than  two sprints and thirty days later, their Railz API integration was complete and live.

Most organizations need an engineering, data, and machine learning team in place to build a custom integration that reflects Railz’s capabilities and insights.

“From a founder perspective, it can be great when you don’t hear anything about the rollout of a new integration and data provider. It just worked. The dev team loved the process.” 

After analyzing all the API partners and reviewing their coverage dash.fi chose Railz

Dash.fi spoke with Railz in November where Railz promised metrics by the first week of December. Having heard a sales pitch before, dash.fi was iffy on whether or not Railz would push the features as claimed. In that first week of December, Railz delivered on the promise. Dash.fi received the analytics dashboard they were looking for then the push functionality they needed - and they can’t wait to see what’s next. Railz pushes features out alongside customers to build a platform to their needs.

“When somebody is willing to scale with you on a variable basis - it just makes it a no brainer.”

Dash.fi  appreciates that Railz’s pricing is designed to scale with their financial institution. No long term contracts. Usage based pricing. No minimums.  Aside from the cost savings in not having to hire an in-house team or consultant to complete aspects of a project of this caliber, the pricing is flexible. Often, financial institutions and digital banking companies can have an item on the product roadmap in development for months at a time. This can mean paying API fees for six to twelve months before hitting the level of scale where there is a break-even point on the investment. Railz customers get immediate value from the platform as Railz’s pricing is designed to scale with a company’s growth.

Finally, our sales and onboarding processes move fast. Keeping the process simple and smooth ensures no one wastes time and resources at any stage. Dash.fi skipped the multi-year contracts and monthly minimums to jump right into an integration with Railz to use the solution with their SMBs immediately.

How dash.fi’s bank partners responded to the Railz integration

“Our bank partners love that we have access to real-time accounting data.  That was huge in getting a credit facility.”

Dash.fi bank partners enable them to provide credit to their end customers. Their banking patterns are excited about having Railz in place - it means they are receiving the data necessary to facilitate providing credit to their business customers so dash.fi can create the best card for digital ad spend.

How can Railz impact your digital lending or credit facilitation company?

Railz is building the largest financial data network to empower you to build the next great financial technology product for businesses. Sign up to start using our API or join our Slack community to meet our customers, partners, and see what’s next on our roadmap.

Director of Marketing

Samantha Lloyd is the Director of Marketing at Railz. We're building the largest financial data network to support the future of finance. She has a decade of experience building organic growth, brand, and digital marketing for startups and technology companies. In her free time, you can find Sam SCUBA diving, snorkelling, paddle boarding, and jet skiing.