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Yoseph West – CEO of Relay
Yoseph West, co-founder and CEO of Relay Bank, shares insights on how Relay helps small business and real estate owners manage their finances more effectively, tackling the challenge of running businesses based on bank balances and the need for real-time financial insights.
Avery: Hey guys, welcome back to the Short Term Show. Today, we’re going to talk about banking, and we’ve talked to Relay before, but today we have Yoseph West, the co-founder and CEO of Relay Bank. They have some really cool tools geared towards short-term rentals and just real estate investing in general.
I would love for you guys to come away with some tips and tricks to make your banking life easier. We talk a lot about how making short-term rental management and wealth building life as a whole easier, but banking is a big part of that. Relay has done some really cool stuff lately, so without further ado, I’ll let Yoseph introduce himself.
Yoseph: Thanks so much for having me, Avery! Yeah, I’d be happy to do a quick intro. I’m Yoseph, one of the co-founders and the CEO of Relay. Relay is basically an all-in-one money management platform, really built for small and medium business owners.
We focus a lot on short-term rental owners and folks who invest in real estate. We like to think of Relay as a financial command center for small and medium businesses, helping owners really understand what’s happening in their business—what they’re spending, what they’re saving. We want to make it as seamless as possible.
Avery: That’s awesome. How did you start a bank? How does one end up starting a bank?
Yoseph: Yeah, I mean, with a lot of vodka, no, I’m joking! The back story is I’ve worked in SMB technology and financial technology my whole career, and the core challenge I kept seeing was that small business owners were really running their business off their bank balance. They weren’t thinking about bills coming due, payroll, or income that’s coming in. They had $100,000 in the bank and thought they were good, but weren’t factoring in the bigger financial picture.
So we thought, how can we make the best possible financial decisions simple for them? Even the best business owners who are great at accounting are often running things with a 30-day view in the rearview mirror. That’s a problem because they don’t always know what’s happening right now in their business.
Avery: Right, a lot of people don’t. It’s just the nature of the game.
Yoseph: Exactly. And the question was, how do we make it easy for small business owners to have access to the financial information they need when they need it? The only way to solve this problem was to be the bank. And that’s where we started.