FindCRA

Ben Loli started FindCRA to solve a real compliance headache for banks. The Community Reinvestment Act—enacted about 40 years ago—requires banks to meet the credit and financial service needs of all areas in their communities, including low-to-moderate income neighborhoods. Banks typically need to partner with nonprofits to fulfill these obligations, but identifying eligible organizations across their assessment areas was tedious, manual work. For a CRA officer managing multiple branch locations and counties, this was a significant burden.

The company launched in 2017, but initially took an agency approach—essentially consulting with banks directly. However, Ben quickly realized this high-touch model wasn't scalable. "Our initial approach was not going to be scalable. It was too much consultation," he explained. In 2016, they pivoted entirely to a SaaS model, shifting from selling services to selling data access and software.

The new platform aggregates publicly available data from sources like the IRS—CSV files that are technically downloadable by anyone—but curates them through a proprietary algorithm. Banks can now search eligible nonprofits by city, state, zip code, or county within their assessment areas. The value isn't in discovering new data; it's in doing the heavy lifting at scale.

FindCRA launched the SaaS product about 18 months before this interview (so roughly mid-2018). They've now landed 11 banks, working across the full spectrum from small single-branch institutions to large regional players. The pricing is deliberately simple: $1,250/year for 1-2 branches, $2,500/year for banks with ~$1 billion in assets operating in 10-15 markets, and $5,000/year for those above $3 billion in assets. This tiered approach means Ben's current customer base spans all three price points.

With 11 banks on board and roughly $14-15,000 in current ARR, FindCRA is in very early stages. They've raised $900,000 to date and operate with a lean team of three full-time employees, one part-time staffer, and one contractor—all based in Louisville, Kentucky. Ben noted that profitability metrics like churn and LTV "probably wouldn't have a lot of meaning" yet given their scale, but he's planning to hire an account executive in January to accelerate sales nationwide. The company is young, but solving a real compliance problem for a regulated industry with recurring revenue built in.