This Is A Really Exciting Time To Join Bench.
We’ve learned so much about ourselves as a company this year.
COVID-19 threw a dump truck full of wrenches at us, and we had to once again reinvent ourselves in order to first survive and ultimately thrive. Without question, this period of intense uncertainty in the world has helped us level up as a company, and I’ve never been more proud of what we’ve been able to achieve.
This crisis has taught us that we make great business decisions when we truly care about the wellbeing of our clients.
Through this commitment, we’ve been able to support over 4300 small businesses in accessing $265M in relief loans that were literally the only chance they had to stay afloat.
With the world on lockdown, having a real human bookkeeper who can talk you through your problems has been a huge relief for our clients. We’ve also been able to share critical information with over 6.5 million visitors on our blog (roughly 7x pre-COVID), which has become the top resource on the internet for information about US government financial relief programs during COVID-19.
So, we’re doubling down on deeply giving a shit about our clients.
In fact, we’ve made it our new mission:
We will make a profound difference in the quality of life of 1 million people.
We’re literally going to ask people if we’ve made a profound difference in the quality of their lives, and count the number of people who say “yes”.
What other outcome matters?
This focus is already bearing fruit. Our NPS is at record highs, and our churn is at historic lows. We’re getting really moving reviews on Trustpilot and other review sites. This has helped us maintain a growth rate of 40% through the pandemic, despite serving one of the hardest hit sectors in the US.
In the Technology organization, we’re supporting our mission with two major initiatives:
Improving the security of our systems by pursuing a SOC2 Type 2 audit, and augmenting our offering by providing business checking accounts that integrate seamlessly with our bookkeeping.
Yep, that’s right. We’re building Bench Banking.
Bench Banking supports our mission in several ways.
Right now, our clients have to do tons of work just to get their transaction data into our system. Even when they connect to best-in-class aggregators, the data is utterly unreliable. When people are annoyed with constantly having to reconnect their accounts or even submitting PDFs, it’s a lot harder to make a profound difference in their lives.
If we’re the bank, we can get data we trust directly into our system, with no work required by our clients. This unlocks things like same-day reconciliation, which is frankly impossible with other data sources. Being the bank also fundamentally changes our revenue model, with means we reduce subscription costs for our clients. Essentially we can offer a much better service at a significantly reduced monthly cost.
That’s a great step towards making a profound difference.
Our current security effort is in support of Bench Banking, but ultimately our goal is to have a security program that reflects how much we care about our clients. If they can’t trust us to safeguard their financial information and banking capabilities, how can we make a profound difference in their lives?
We’ve been through a lot this year, and we’re stronger than ever.
Right now we’re scaling up our engineering team so that we can achieve our mission faster. We’re looking for a diverse group of folks who can connect with our mission, and figure out what we need to build in order to have that kind of impact at a massive scale.
Will you join us?
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Want to learn more about Technology at Bench?
- We Built A Tool To Help Us Foster Growth In Our Engineers
- Breaking Good — Having A Blameless Engineering Culture
- Three Unexpected Benefits of Career Development Tracks in Engineering
- Measuring Agility
- Don’t Optimize For Tenure
If you are interested in learning more about Bench Accounting or a career with our Engineering team, apply here: https://bench.co/careers/
