Jay Letwat, executive director of business development at Sunbit, and Amy Eveland, COO of the Smile Group, spoke with "Becker's Dental + DSO Review Podcast" to discuss why patient financing innovation has been stagnant for so long.
Sunbit is a finance service serving more than 2,000 practices and DSOs.
Note: This is an edited excerpt. Listen to the full podcast episode here. This episode was sponsored by Sunbit.
Question: Why has innovation regarding patient financing been so stagnant for so long?
Jay Letwat: I think the first thing is there has been a single dominant player for the past 25 or 30 years. I think that's the key reason. And when you're so large, when you're 10,000, 20,000, 30,000 people, it's really, really hard to innovate. Why would you innovate when you dominate a market for so long? So that's why it usually takes, I would say, a small upstart company to really innovate and take over a market. You think of folks like Airbnb, Tesla, companies like this which came out of nowhere and are now dominating a very specific vertical market who didn't really have any experience in that market before.
I think [another] reason is the technology market has really, really changed in the past three to five years, specifically financial technology a lot of folks call fintech. So here's a quick stat I'll throw to you. There are more bank accounts being opened annually at neobanks — these online banks like Chime — than others that are opened at Bank of America, Chase and Wells Fargo combined. So the whole banking and financial technology industry has changed, and when you're a big company, it's really hard to innovate.
Amy Eveland: From my perspective in dealing in the offices with the patients directly, I believe it's a little bit more of [patient financing companies] catering to the higher credit scores. There was nothing out there for those who really wanted to be healthy and maintain their health, but then just couldn't afford it or, like Jay said before, they had been through some things in life and their credit score was lower than normal. Sunbit is thinking outside the box and is able to offer these patients an opportunity to get their treatment done and get their mouth healthy.