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TMC-backed fintech platform announces collaboration to digitize health care expenses

This Texas Medical Center startup is digitizing employee expense management within health care. Photo courtesy of TMC

The Texas Medical Center announced a partnership with San Francisco-based Bond Financial Technologies Inc this month on a platform that will bring an embedded financial solution into the realm of health care expenses.

According to a statement from the companies, inefficiencies make up about 35 percent of the $5 trillion annual health care expenditure in the U.S.

To find a solution, TMC Innovation launched its own fintech company, Tanaflow, which aims to digitize health care expense management through applying machine-based learning. Bond Financial launched Bond Treasury in tandem to facilitate the innovation.

Together the products will first aim to tackle the often paper-based and cumbersome task of employee expense reimbursements, which accounts for an estimated $300 million a year at TMC, according to the statement.

“TMC’s Tanaflow will use Bond Treasury to embed financial services into our software applications to save time and money so we can refocus on serving the more than 10 million patients we see annually,” Odero Otieno, founder in residence at TMC and CEO of Tanaflow, says in a statement. “Over time, we expect to expand into other non-clinical tasks and transactions, such as payment acquiring, treasury management, and credit. Bond has the technology platform, talent, and vision to be our long-term partner and we are incredibly excited to partner on this new journey.”

The Tanaflow technology will be integrated across TMC's 61 institutions and 21 hospitals.

This will be Bond Financial's first foray into the health care industry. The company, founded in 2019, aims to create, launch and scale embedded financial experiences across industries at an enterprise level through its API platform. Investors include the likes of Goldman Sachs and Mastercard.

"We’re seeing tremendous interest from enterprise businesses that want to embed purpose-built financial products into their software applications, and are excited to partner with impactful organizations such as TMC to bring more efficiencies into the healthcare vertical,” Roy Ng, co-founder and CEO of Bond, adds in a statement.

The TMC is also currently underway on its 250,000-square-foot, $186 million TMC3 Collaborative Building, which will house research initiatives and foster collaboration among academic health care institutions and industry partners. Slated to open in the fall of 2023, it's also designed to support strategic initiatives and investment from life science-focused firms and national venture and equity and partners.

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Building Houston

 
 

A panel of Houston innovators explained how impact investment isn't charity. It provides both financial and societal returns. Photo courtesy of SWAN

Houston innovators called for existing and potential investors to focus on impact investing — for the improvement of both society and your bottom line.

SWAN Impact Network, which announced its expansion into Houston earlier last month, is an investment organization that prioritizes funding mission driven startups and educating angels on how to analyze impact investment companies. The organization hosted a launch event and panel at the Ion last week to discuss the process and goals of impact investing and highlighted their own success stories as angel investors. The panelists included Bob Bridge, Kerri Smith, and Emily Reiser, who were moderated by Grace Rodriguez, executive director of Impact Hub Houston.

Emily Reiser, associate director of the Texas Medical Center’s innovation team, said impact investing, though focused on improving people’s lives through innovations, should still rely on typical business models and return profiles.

“It’s not charity investment, it’s investing with an eye towards how that investment is going to also return to the greater society as well as back to your pockets,” Reiser says.

As there was a mix of prospective angel investors and entrepreneurs in attendance at the event, Reiser encouraged the founders to have formal business plans in place before meeting with investors, from setting up customer feedback systems to budgeting estimates.

“In the impact space you’ll get some great enthusiasm from people who want to join your mission to save lives, or change the world, or save the planet but make sure you do all the rest of the work behind that to build out the rest of your business model, figure out how you’re going to sell, get it optioned, and on the market,” Reiser says.

Bob Bridge, the founder and executive director of SWAN, stressed the importance of examining long term consequences of impact-driven startups. Bridge illustrated the importance of doing research into how these startups could unintentionally harm communities before investing in them by discussing the well known shoe manufacturer TOMS, whose business model revolved around matching each pair of purchased shoes by donating a pair to people in developing countries, putting local manufacturers out of business.

“These companies are often just now entering the market place so they can’t measure their actual impact results yet because they’re not delivering services or products yet,” Bridge says. “We look for them to have some sort of data to give us a clue if what they’re doing is going to work … convince us there is efficacy to what you are doing and that your impact solution is competitive.”

Bridge also adds there is no concrete definition of impact investing because every society has different needs to be met through creative solutions, from developing more robust technology to encouraging the hiring of underrepresented minority groups. When making decisions over which companies to invest in, Bridge says he also prioritizes startup teams that are collaborative and transparent.

“We don’t invest in Steve Jobs' kind of personalities … We want people who are always learning from their customers, competitors, and employees,” he explains.

Kerri Smith, executive director of the Rice Alliance Clean Energy Accelerator program, says her team readies their emerging startups to tackle meetings with investors by asking them to quantify the impact of their technology on users.

“We’re seeing a lot of investors as well as boards of directors requiring companies to be more responsive to those kinds of things,” Smith says. “We try to prepare the startups in ways that will make them more ready to answer questions about the impact that they’re having societally as well as financially.”

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