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Fintech startups, like many young software companies, are using fun recruiting strategies to attract most-coveted technical talent to their teams and to engage people with their brands.
August 21
Q2 Holdings, a digital banking vendor targeting regional and community banks, made its initial public offering debut Thursday.
The Austin company, formed in 2005 as CBG Holdings, sells a number of financial services products, including a browser-based banking platform, a mobile app for smartphones and tablets, and a risk and fraud service. The software company, which rebranded to Q2 Holdings in March 2013, charges most of its customers a subscription fee for its software-as-a-service.
Q2 is initially selling its 7,760,870 shares for $13 under the symbol QTWO.
Q2, as of September, claims more than 300 financial services customers, one of the largest of which is
Like most vendors, it wants more customers and estimated in a regulatory filing that the regional and community financial institution market includes upwards of 10,000 banks and credit unions.
"Our current RCFI customers represent less than 3% of the 13,570 federally-insured RCFIs in the U.S. We believe we can capture an increasing portion of the IT spend among RCFIs as we continue to grow our customer base and introduce new solutions," writes the software company in the filing.
All told, the market is greater than $3.5 billion annually, Q2 estimated in the document. The space, however, is competitive. Among the companies Q2 vies with for revenue are Digital Insight, now owned by NCR; First Data and ACI Worldwide. It also competes with core processing vendors such as Fiserv and Jack Henry and Associates.
Q2's growth plans, according to the filing, include selling more services to existing customers such as mobile apps, remote check deposit and mobile bill pay as well as to introduce new services and form more partnerships.
Q2 also said it plans to migrate its data center operations to Dallas from Nevada within the first half of 2014 and hire more sales reps across the U.S.
Already, Q2 has increased its headcount to 400 (as of September) from 203 employees (as of December 2011). The virtual banking provider
On a call earlier this year with Bank Technology News, Adam Anderson, executive vice president and chief technology officer of Q2, said the company was recommending that clients better analyze their so-called small data to better target services to their customers. An example of small data is identifying micromerchants who are hiding as retail customers by crunching transaction data to see which ones are regularly processing Square transactions, for example.
Q2, a relatively newer entrant into the digital banking landscape, is known for its playful recruiting tactics to attract coders to the brand in the battle for top talent. Case in point: the company has hosted a
Umpqua Bank's CIO, Sonny Sonnenstein cited Q2's architecture as one of the reasons the bank, known for its stellar customer service, chose the company's online and mobile banking software. "It's a very modern approach," Sonnenstein says.
He expects Umpqua to complete a conversion to Q2 by third quarter. The tech investment offers the latest example of an enhancement to the bank's overall customer experience strategy, in which it brings innovations, including events like yoga lessons, into its stores.
"At the end of the day, it's an 'and,' not an 'or,'" says Sonnenstein. "The store is still very vibrant and important.... The next frontier is really blending the two together."
