Moving FaaSt—The Finance-as-a-Service TechScape

The sectors that seem most entrenched with incumbents and have seen limited innovation in the last few years is in payroll and accounting/GL. Note, GL was where new entrants attempted to first innovate but Quickbooks was deemed too strong in the longtail of the market.

I’m particularly bullish in the forecasting/planning and billing/invoicing subsectors as more companies in both the mid market and SMB will want easier ways to transact with their customers and plan for the future. Typically these functions have been reserved for the enterprise, but I believe that will change.

The best part (and most fascinating in my opinion) is that unlike most other large companies, Intuit has been quick to react to these emerging changes. They know their customers need more advanced tools in this new world and continue to use their deep penetration in SMBs to cross-promote products.

With the growth of cloud, functions that were previously manual like billing customers, managing expenses, and forecasting budget, became actions that could be productized — which led to a better experience for the user (the finance role) and the end customer (the payee, the customer, and one’s own employees.)