CUSTOMER Q&A: SLOPE

Slope is a buy now, pay later (BNPL) system for B2B businesses, allowing them to pay in installments at checkout.

Slope was co-founded by two second-time founders, Alice Deng and Lawrence Lin Murata, who met at a rival hackathon between the University of California, Berkeley, and Stanford in 2016. Slope’s mission to transform how businesses accept payments and offer more flexible financing has attracted high-profile investors. Its founders believe BNPL is the foundation for rebuilding the messy cross-border B2B payments infrastructure. 

In this interview from Plaid Effects, we speak with Lawrence Lin Murata, Co-Founder and CEO, about Slope’s origins, how Plaid’s reliable bank data was essential for their business model, and how they use that data to build AI risk models. 

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

Plaid: Tell us about Slope and how the idea came about.

Lin Murata: Slope is a B2B payments company that helps wholesalers digitize their B2B business. Our mission is to help digitize the $125 trillion B2B economy.

I grew up in Brazil. My parents run a wholesale business selling toys to other companies. During school breaks, I always helped my parents. Everything was offline and based on in-person trust—very old-school. 

During COVID, my parents' business and many others were forced to shut down and go online. I also saw the rise of consumer ecommerce and how it became easy for consumers to make purchases online with one click.

That inspired us to create a consumer-grade experience that helps B2B businesses come online.

Plaid: Why did you choose Plaid to help start your business?

Lin Murata: Plaid is an industry standard for collecting open banking data that our customers trust. It has enabled us to create beautiful experiences that allow our customers to quickly connect their bank accounts and for us to analyze banking data. 

Slope is a payments company, and any payments company cares about fraud and risk. The bank transaction data that Plaid provides is the lifeblood of our business. These transactions have two critical properties. 

1. They’re real-time. We can see any cash that’s coming in and out, giving us a real-time view of what’s happening in the business. 

2. They’re unfalsifiable. Plaid is pulling directly from banks, so we’re able to get truthful information. We’ve actually built all of our AI large language risk models on top of data from Plaid. 

Plaid: How has using Plaid promoted a sense of trust and security for your customers

Lin Murata: Plaid gives us a reliable and trustworthy way for our business customers to connect to their bank accounts. It’s easy and happens in real time. It's enabled us to have a five-minute application experience, and our decisioning is instant.

In the offline world, that usually takes weeks with many back-and-forth interactions, sometimes in person. With Plaid, we can quickly analyze data, assess risk, and create a smooth customer experience. 

Plaid: Last question, how did you come up with the name ‘Slope’?

Lin Murata: One of our investors says you should always hire for slope instead of y-intercept. Slope refers to the growth rate of a curve, and y-intercept refers to job experience. That is reflected in our backgrounds as founders. 

We both came from unusual backgrounds. Being from Brazil, my parents knew nothing about the tech world. When I went to Stanford, it was a distant reality from where I grew up. For me, Slope really represents the idea of always improving and always learning. It’s all about growth.