NewTech Friday: Railz – enhancing the lending process with accounting data

Sohaib Zahid, Co-Founder and CEO of Railz, spoke with Efma’s Boris Plantier about how his company is building out an impressive data network to empower lenders and help small businesses. 

Along with my Co-Founder Derek Manuge, we had separately concluded that the slow approval processes of loans and other financial needs for small-medium businesses (SMBs) needed to be changed. We noticed that the slow processes of financing SMBs tended to be the result of limited access to quality financial data to enable key decision-making from the financial institution.

Getting access to granular, high quality, and clean financial data on businesses has been a consistent struggle for all types of financial institutions, whether it’s lenders, banks, fintechs, or governments. These challenges were the basis of Railz’s launch and what led to building a single API that connects to accounting software platforms to provide normalized, sanitized, and analyzed financial data from SMBs to financial institutions.

Railz is building the largest financial data network to empower our financial institution customers to make sense of messy accounting data. Railz believes that providing access to Accounting Data-as-a-Service™ via a simple API integration enables financial institutions to make better and faster decisions for their business customers. With Railz, you can connect to, normalize, and analyze Quickbooks, Xero, and other popular accounting platform data that your business customers use.

Railz was founded by previous entrepreneurs and in 2021 we raised $12M (USD) in Series A funding. Recently, Railz was recognized as a Great Place to Work® – a huge honor for our fast-scaling, fully-remote team.

As one of Toronto’s fast-growing startups, Railz has a lot on the go. We recently announced our Q2 product updates and what our customers can expect for Q3. We’re building up our Slack community as a great place to connect with friends, partners, and companies in the fintech space. If you’re curious about what’s happening in fintech, our latest product releases, or connecting with others in the space, please join the Railz Slack Community! We can’t wait to share what we’re building with everyone!