Dean Leavitt | FinTech Magazine
When Dean Leavitt talks to us from his office in New York City, we get a view straight down East 48th Street in Midtown Manhattan. These streets are surrounded by some of the largest and most prestigious companies in the world, with more than one in 10 S&P 500 firms based in the city.
These large and complex organizations are the companies that Boost Payment Solutions, which Leavitt founded in 2009, targets. Active in 47 different regions globally, Boost has been focused since day one on enterprise-level B2B spend, building financial tools that help businesses bridge the gap between accounts receivable (AR) and accounts payable (AP).
Leavitt, himself a veteran of the financial industry, started a company in 1989 focused on the consumer card industry before running a public company, also in the credit card processing space. He then founded Boost 13 years ago after seeing many failed attempts, by companies large and small, to pursue B2B funding.
For the first five or six years, they were, by his own admission, an exclusively service-driven operation that drew on third-party technology to help clients. It wasn’t until six or seven years ago that Boost Payment Solutions started hearing from customers who had specific requirements, and so Boost brought in developers to help build custom software solutions in-house. Today, fintech is laser-focused on creating customized solutions that enable large companies to overcome the challenges they may face within B2B payments.
“Our buyers tend to be very large organizations,” says Leavitt. “We have more than 50% of the Fortune 100 either making payments through us or receiving payments from us. So the entities we work with tend to be very large. Our focus is on optimizing the way enterprise-level companies pay their suppliers and suppliers using proprietary technology and procedures that we have developed over a 14-year period.”
The company is active in telecommunications, healthcare, shipping and logistics, production and media. All of your customers have pain points that are unique to their industry – even unique within their industry, in some cases – as well as specific requirements for their local market. It is this diversity of needs that leads Boost to work with each client to understand their market and their situation before recommending a solution.
“Our ears are our most powerful asset,” Leavitt says when summing up the first conversation with a potential buyer. “The first thing we do is listen. We listen, we ask questions, we follow those answers closely, and we dig deeper to make sure we understand what’s really going on in that organization before we’re able to make any recommendations.”
There is no shortage of challenges facing businesses. Accruing payment methods and currency-related costs make cross-border payments a headache, while B2B transfers can often run into the tens of millions and cover thousands of invoices at once. But Leavitt is exuberant about the potential of financial technology: “If you fast forward a couple of years, you’re going to see a completely different landscape in terms of how companies make payments across borders. I suspect that some of the existing payment modalities are not going to disappear, but they are no longer going to be the main ways of moving money. So I think you’re going to see increased efficiency, increased speed and reduced costs – because that’s what the market is demanding right now – as well as reliability and more reporting capabilities.”
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