Roanoke County-based KlariVis markets solution to banks' data conundrum

The maker of KlariVis also says that it has landed five paying clients in the six months that have passed since its national product rollout in January, and that it has identified 170 potential clients.

“We’re at the beginning,” Kim Snyder, founder and CEO of KBS Analytics, said Wednesday.

The company employs 20 people, half software developers and half bankers, and has an office on Electric Road, Snyder said.

Snyder, the former CFO of Valley Bank, recalled data review being a cumbersome necessity in her previous job. Each work day’s email brought eight to 10 reports from the bank’s multitude of systems — one for new loans, another for loans paid off and another about mobile banking activity. Another report stated the balances of large depositors.

Dense but vital, the information was critical to spotting trends and red flags but hard to evaluate because different systems were used, Snyder said.

KlariVis is designed to extract and present only the choicest data points. The company is telling bankers it will enable them to sell more products and services to the customer base, she said.

Snyder was the CFO at The Egg Factory, a business catalyst in Roanoke, before she joined Valley Bank in 2005. Ten years after that, the bank was sold to the Bank of North Carolina, which was later bought by Pinnacle Bank. Snyder left Valley Bank around the time of its sale and then consulted for banks. Her clients wrestled with data access just as she had, she said.

She collaborated over the possibility of hiring outside experts to build a software solution, which led in early 2019 to the start of KBS Analytics. It brought in the programming firm InfernoRed Technology, then based in Blacksburg, Snyder said.

“I’m not a software developer, I’m a banker and kind of knew what I wanted to create,” she said.

Scott Lock, founder of InfernoRed, confirmed that Snyder’s enterprise is a client. His company’s main office is now in Reston, he said.

KBS eventually brought KlariVis to market. The total investment in KBS Analytics stands at $3.6 million, which includes the $2.5 million announced this week.

The company is on course to make money on a quarterly basis next year, the CEO said.

Veteran North Carolina banker Lynn Johnson said she often looks at her KlariVis dashboard before checking email in the morning. She also uses it to gauge the sufficiency of depositor money in the bank, the fuel for loans, at Select Bank & Trust in Dunn, near Raleigh, where she is chief operating officer. If deposits are deficient, she might drop CD rates.

KlariVis makes such calculations easier compared to before when she and her staff crunched raw data in spreadsheets, she said.

Bankers have wanted a dashboard like KlariVis for a long time. Snyder “took the ball and ran with it,” Johnson said.