Data collection company Upswot aims to help financial institutions

After a journey that began in Eastern Europe, stopped in San Francisco and set up shop in North Carolina, Upswot has settled down in Cape Girardeau.

Upswot, named after the acronym "SWOT" — a methodology that analyzes a company's Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats — has been in business 22 months as a financial technology startup that provides a platform to help banks and other financial institutions increase sales and marketing insights for business banking customers through data collection.

In August, Codefi's sixth annual 1ST50K startup competition brought Upswot and three other new technology companies to town. The developers of Upswot, SportsTrace, Swipesum and Venku will each receive $50,000 equity-free, as well as membership in Codefi, access to venture capital and angel investment networks, business coaching and mentorship, and they will each relocate to Cape Girardeau as part of the 12-month long 1ST50K program.

An early stage company that originated in Eastern Europe, Upswot gains business insights through QuickBooks, Shopify, Amazon and more than 120 other API-enabled apps, providing fast financial underwriting and continuous credit reassessment for banks. Upswot then tailors the data to provide risk, marketing and business analysis for the financial institution and its clients.

Dmitry Norenko, founder and CEO, said Upswot was created to "solve problems between businesses and financial institutions. We give them an option to get very deep inside the business apps of their business clients — data banks don't have access to. We make this data available to them legally."

Upswot allows banks to be able to see a client's tax returns, expenses, income, balance sheet, etc. Customers wouldn't need to bring papers to a bank for a line of credit, working capital or payroll protection program, for example. They can see what's happening with a business in real time. To simplify it, a business would connect QuickBooks to the bank, and the bank gets all the financial data.

"You know when you're running out of cash, you know in which marketing channels you should invest, you know how to grow your sales and you know which of your employees is most efficient. And in real time, to help people make their businesses better." Norenko said.

The Upswot team.Submitted

He added, "Banks can make decisions faster, cheaper and even better, because they can reduce interest rates, increase commercial credit cards, etc., resulting in better financial performance of their clients."

James Stapleton, founder of Codefi said, "Dmitry and Upswot are great indications of the increased quality of early stage tech companies we are attracting and building. Unfortunately, some local folks associate startups with small business. While it is relatively young, Upswot has developed extremely complex technology and is making terrific progress on a path to considerable growth and success. We are pleased Dmitry chose Cape to plan a critical part of his venture."

Always wanting to move the company to the U.S., Norenko found Cape Girardeau by way of the 1ST50K program through Codefi.

"We are not native people. We need to provide English-speaking support and sales department and we'll need more people because we are actively growing. From the beginning, we needed to focus on the largest global market, and this is the United States."

After initially landing in San Francisco, Upswot began exploring other areas after the coronavirus pandemic began because people weren't meeting face-to-face in addition to how expensive the cost of living is in San Francisco.

"We started looking for other regions where we can hire great people, so we are now developing a support branch of Upswot in Cape Girardeau," Norenko said. "While the headquarters will be in Charlotte, North Carolina, Upswot plans to have a presence in Cape Girardeau for years to come."

Norenko also said the presence of Southeast Missouri State University is a plus and a great way to hire and teach the students, and help them to grow with the company.

Upswot is working with 32 financial institutions, mostly in pilot programs, including two out of top 10 biggest banks in the U.S., with hopes of converting the pilots into contracts at the beginning of 2021. The company also caters to smaller institutions such as community banks.

In their short time here, Upswot has had meetings with three local community banks.

"We are actually launching with two of them, maybe at the end of the year, and the other one the beginning of the next year," Norenko said. "We have business clients in the U.S., but community banking is the new segment for us and we got the first clients in the community banking segment thanks to 1ST50K program."

"In our case, we didn't need this cash, we needed a place to start," said Norenko in reference to receiving the $50,000. More important than the money was the introductions to business decision makers face-to-face to get feedback on what Upswot needs to do to improve. "This is the value of your city. Cape delivers access to the community. In New York, it's a different story. Cape Girardeau is focused on building the community and building a pathway to success."

Upswot is in a growth pattern and during the next two to three years, it plans to hire at least 100 people to provide support and sales.