Introduction to Fintech

“Money makes the world go round” is such an old cliche, but still holds so much truth. It has the ability to make the world smaller, shift traditional power dynamics in society, disrupt age-old methods, sectors, societies and so much more. How we handle, distribute and educate people about money and investment is changing so rapidly and a lot of this change is being driven by new fintechs. 

In 2019 alone, £26.4bn in venture funding was raised by fintech companies. The UK fintechs accounted for 19% (£4.9bn) of that investment. Over the past five years, there has been an approximate increase of 70% in venture capital deals. Much of the investment has been put into later-stage companies, with business lenders Greensill and Oak North (Tech Nation Future Fifty) accounting for two of the largest fintech investment deals globally in 2019. This really highlights the growing strength of the UK’s fintech scaleup ecosystem. 

In an effort to fuel the growth of the next wave of scaling companies, Tech Nation has the privilege of presenting the 23 UK FinTech companies on our Fintech 2.0 cohort, all driving change within critical sub-sectors of financial services.

British fintech is booming

Last year, investors chose to put more money into the UK than anywhere else in Europe, leading to a year of record investment. According to Findexable’s global ranking of the fintech ecosystem, the UK is number one in Europe and only trails the US globally. Some of the other statistics that help highlight the strength of the UK FinTech ecosystem include:

Why our companies stand out

The Fintech 2.0 programme has a cohort of companies developing innovative solutions across various key sub-sectors of financial services, ranging from Capital Markets & Payments to Impact Investment and Credit/Lending. On average the cohort has raised more than £4m from leading global investors, with the ambition of scaling their companies significantly over the next 12 months. 

Tech Nation’s growth programmes ensure a thorough selection process, based on the expert advice and criteria of our judging panel. Companies who make it through the judging process are selected for Tech Nation Fintech, a six-month-long sector-specific growth programme that aims to provide peer to peer learning, expert classes and a long-lasting network. 

Our companies

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Founders: Steven Hunter (CEO), Huss El-Sheikh (CTO)

Location: London

Year founded: 2016

Core area of focus: Capital Markets

Previous backing: LCIF, Seedcamp, AI Seed Fund, Fly Ventures

In a nutshell: 9fin uses artificial intelligence to extract key data & insights from financial documents. They consume, organise and understand the world’s fixed income financial data, making it easier for investment professionals to search, filter and analyse. 

9fin’s solution: 9fin provides an online platform for data, analytics and news, tailor-made for debt capital markets professionals to make their lives easier. The platform offers a range of different functions at multiple stages of the debt issuance life cycle. This includes: up-to-date tracking and monitoring of deals, real-time market news and events delivered to their clients’ inbox, price data on bonds displayed as charts and full financial data for companies. It also provides users with access to their AI tools, which help users extract data from documents they have on the platform or to upload their own.

USP: Whilst other solutions in this space tend to be manual and labour intensive, resulting in more expensive, slower and less accurate products, 9fin solves the problem of data extraction and standardisation through their technology. Even tools from tech giants like Microsoft's recent table tool had more than 40 errors on a sample document, 9fin’s tool had none. It also combines and contextualises the data extracted and offers analytical output.

Experience: The founding team has known each other for their entire professional careers, having met at University. Prior to founding 9fin, Steven worked in J.P Morgan’s Leveraged Finance team, before moving on to Babson Capital. Huss worked in the technology department of Deutsche Bank, helping to build out the company’s electronic trading platforms. The broader 9fin team also has significant domain expertise in financial markets, computer vision and machine learning.

Traction: 9fin monetised their offering after two years of testing, and they’ve now closed or agreed sales of annual licencies with every target customer segment, including Investment Banks, Sales & Trading Desks, Asset Managers and Hedge Funds. In 2018, they used their AI-powered data to predict major capital market events, making 4 deal predictions for 2018, which all came true. In 2019 they predicted 47, with 30 happening and a further 18 predictions have been made for 2020. The 9fin platform has now expanded to cover legal analysis on Bond documents and ESG data.

£2.5mTotal investment so far

Dec 20Next looking to raise

Series AAmount to raise

£160kRevenue

12FTEs

20FTEs in 12 months

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Founder: Ulyana Shtybel, Vice President

Location: London

Year founded: 2018

Core area of focus: Capital Markets

Previous backing: Angel Investor

In a nutshell: HighCastle is a capital raising and securities administration platform. They provide end-to-end technological infrastructure and legal framework for compliant offering, issuance, distribution and transfers of private securities.

HighCastle’s solution: HighCastle provides companies and funds with the blockchain-enabled digital share register.  When companies and funds manage equity on HighCastle, instead of spreadsheets, shareholders can accept and transfer their securities electronically, access shareholder register in real-time, see portfolio analytics, execute corporate actions and shareholder communication in one place. HighCastle uses a proprietary permissioned distributed ledger as an underlying technology to provide companies with the automated investment deal flow and secure share registry infrastructure.

USP: Existing Security Token Offering (STO) platforms use the public Ethereum blockchain with no clear legal framework for compliant holding of the shareholder registry. HighCastle presents a significantly more advanced and sophisticated legal approach than emerging STO platforms on the market. They have built a DLT-based (permissioned) analogue of the public securities Central Securities Depository (CSD) to digitalise issuance and post-trading/post-transfers settlement of private securities.

Experience: Ulyana Shtybel, co-founder and Chief Capital Officer at HighCastle is a top thought leader and the first and (so far) only woman in the UK representing the securities tokenisation industry. Ulyana Shtybel, Denys Goncharenko, Konstantin Pechnykov, Philip Millar and Philip Walsh co-founded and built HighCastle from scratch, introducing a totally new approach to a share registrar services and issuance of private securities. Together they have decades of experience in law, technology, financial services and compliance.

Traction: Since a soft launch, they have 190+ accounts registered, 8 companies that manage their equity at HighCastle. Furthermore, they have 3000+ assets, 3700+ registered users, 35+ corporate clients on the HighCastle Market Data platform, 60К+ monthly visitors and 9 listing partners.

£214kTotal investment so far

NowNext looking to raise

Seed +Amount to raise

-Revenue

8FTEs

12FTEs in 12 months

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Founder: Dr Avtar Sehra, CEO

Location: London

Year founded: 2016

Core area of focus: Capital Markets

Previous backing: Digital Currency Group, London Stock Exchange Group, Santander InnoVentures, Allen & Overy

In a nutshell: Nivaura provides digital investment banking solutions that are revolutionising capital markets by optimising efficiency, transparency and accessibility for market intermediaries. Their primary initiative is to defragment and vertically integrate capital markets by automating the issuance, administration and entire life cycle of financial instruments.

Nivaura’s solution: Nivaura offers a disruptive solution to put an end to the current complexity, cost-inefficiency and centralisation in primary markets, including both debt and equity financial instruments within the capital markets. Their solution consists of a white labelled digital platform which automates the entire lifecycle of a financial instrument, from issuance to execution and settlement in a cost-efficient, fully compliant and increasingly transparent manner.

USP: Nivaura’s prime advantage is that their solution is the first in the capital markets industry to introduce two revolutionary core theses. These are the vertical integration and automation of both the financial process and legal documentation of financial instruments, across all asset classes of both debt and equity. It focuses on evolving the financial ecosystem for all market participants, from issuers to dealers and large investment banks to SMEs, by reducing 80% of timelines and cost structures when facilitating issuances of varying sizes.

Experience: Nivaura's Executive and Advisory board include highly respected leaders in the financial services industry. Amongst them, they have years of experience at leading financial institutions as financial services heads, quantitative analysts & risk managers in addition to complimentary experience leading numerous scale projects with major investment banks. 

Traction: Nivaura has shown substantial growth, success and traction. They are the only company to have participated in all four FCA Regulatory Sandbox cohorts, and as a result of this, full regulatory permissions including CASS and MiFiD were permitted, which is rare for a startup. In addition, they also received early attention from industry giants and closed their Seed Funding round at $20 million led by London Stock Exchange.

£20mTotal Investment so far

Dec 20Next looking to raise

£400kRevenue

Series AAmount to raise

34FTEs

50FTEs in 12 months

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Founders: Anand Sambasivan (CEO) & Kieran D'Silva (CFO)

Location: London

Year founded: 2012

Core area of focus: Capital Markets

Previous backing: Hambro Perks, Outward VC, Pentech Ventures

In a nutshell: PrimaryBid connects everyday retail investors to listed companies raising capital.

PrimaryBid’s solution: PrimaryBid connects retail investors to live, public-market offerings where they receive real-time notifications of new transactions and can subscribe via the website or on the app. PrimaryBid has also partnered with stockbrokers who distribute PrimaryBid Offers on their behalf on a white label basis.

USP:
1. Exclusive long term partnerships with London Stock Exchange and Euronext, the leading pan-European stock exchange

2. Conflict-free model: No competitive tension from incumbents players

3. Intermediary agreements: Existing deep relationships built and will take long to replicate

4. Specialised regulatory permissions: Required significant regulatory cost and time

Experience: PrimaryBid’s founding team combine years of experience building Darwin Strategic, an investment company that successfully completed 150 deals and deployed £100m of capital, and they have extensive experience in investment banking, FCA regulated companies and a number of high calibre firms including Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, BAML, Citi and Credit Suisse.

Traction: PrimaryBid has had over £68m of transactions through the platform to date. They’ve completed 52 transactions with UK listed companies and have exclusive commercial agreement in place with London Stock Exchange and Euronext, the leading pan-European stock exchange. It has access to over 500,000 retail investors in the UK and settlement agreement in place with 43 UK stockbrokers. 

£10.2mTotal investment so far

Jan 21Next looking to raise

Series BAmount to raise

£979kRevenue

20FTEs

30FTEs in 12 months

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Founders: Freddy Kelly (CEO) & Matt Schofield (CTO) (check, one pic)

Location: London

Year founded: 2015

Core area of focus: Consumer Credit & Lending

Previous backing: Ascension Ventures, Entrepreneur First, NFT Ventures

In a nutshell: Credit Kudos is a Credit Reference Agency and Open Banking provider helping UK lenders (B2B) make better and faster credit decisions. They use newly available open banking and PSD2 data to increase accuracy, whilst widening the pool of borrowers to those previously excluded by traditional credit scoring methods.

Credit Kudos’ solution: Their solution provides more accuracy and coverage than traditional tools. It uses an individual's banking information, scoring over 95% of the UK population, making it possible to score people with no history of borrowing money and providing a much more accurate appraisal for people otherwise considered "thin-file" or "no-file", due to lack of data. It also eliminates friction and makes a better consumer experience, as an increasing number of applicants fall through and request manual checks. This is time consuming and labour intensive, but Credit Kudos automates the collection and objectively analyses this data in real-time, providing more accuracy and removing human error.

USP: Credit Kudos are experts in building risk models and predictive features on top of Open Banking data. Harnessing advanced machine learning approaches, they combine transaction data with loan outcomes to accurately predict risk for previously overlooked applicants - helping lenders increase acceptances without increasing their risk appetite.

Experience: The founding team, Freddy Kelly & Matt Schofield, are engineers and studied Computer Science together at Manchester University. Matt went on to run Data Science for Universal Music, and Freddy dove into Silicon Valley, working as an engineer, and gaining experience in building scalable platforms. He developed TXN's transaction analytics capability using U.S. credit and debit card data. The team has scaled to 32 people, all coming from a wide variety of industries. 

Traction: Credit Kudos have over 50 clients, including well known lenders and brokers like ClearScore, Lending Works, Bamboo Loans, Drover, Salad Money and Mojo Mortgages.  Credit Kudos have over 50 clients, including well-known lenders and brokers like ClearScore, Lending Works, Bamboo Loans, Drover, Salad Money and Mojo Mortgages.  

£2.7mTotal investment so far

Jun 20Next looking to raise

Series AAmount to raise

-Revenue

32FTEs

65FTEs in 12 months

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Founder: Francesca Carlesi (CEO)

Location: London

Year founded: 2016

Core area of focus: Consumer Credit & Lending

Previous backing: Ubon Partners

In a nutshell: Molo is the UK’s first fully-digital mortgage lender. By bringing together a real-time mortgage decisioning engine with an easy online application process designed by and for customers, they deliver a proposition focused on speed, ease and transparency.

Molo’s solution: Molo uses APIs to triangulate the data needed to approve or decline a loan application. By building both the front and back-end systems in-house, and being the lender making the underwriting decisions, they control the full value chain, and can deliver an incredibly quick, easy and transparent customer experience. Their target is 15-minute mortgages, leveraging instant decisioning and real-time data validation.

USP: The speed, ease and transparent process offers a paperless service, where no appointments are needed, allowing their customers to know if they are approved for a mortgage in just a few minutes. It eliminates the cost of brokers, along with the ability to give data-driven advice and automated underwriting decisions. 

Experience: Molo is extremely proud of their team and their unique mix of experience across fintech, startups and banking. Their team brings together some of the best minds across these sectors.

Traction: Molo launched their product MVP in November 2018, which featured the front-end application and a range of individual buy-to-let products. By December they launched their limited company buy-to-let mortgage products and shortly after their 2.0 front-end customer application experience. Since then, they have strived to improve their service, basing changes on customer feedback. In July 2019 they had their first Open Banking for income validation. In February they announced a partnership with Experian, improving further their product, and also joined Starling Bank's Marketplace.

£13.7mTotal investment so far

Oct 20Next looking to raise

Series BAmount to raise

£82.7kRevenue

35FTEs

60FTEs in 12 months

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Founders: John Downie (CEO)  & Victor Pawley (CPO)

Location: London

Year founded: 2017

Core area of focus: Consumer Credit & Lending

Previous backing: Hambro Perks, Fair By Design (Ascension Ventures)

In a nutshell: SteadyPay is a socially aware credit service with a vision to provide financial wellness to those paid by the hour/gig. They do this by smoothing out workers’ income, giving them consistency across pay cycles which allows them to budget, save and pay for expenses.

SteadyPay’s solution: Their service provides an alternative to the traditional credit solutions. By working out the customer’s average pay they top up their pay when a customer earns lower than average. The top-up is a cash advance deposited into the customer’s current account. This provides the predictability of income needed to get a handle on everyday expenses and moreover, the top-ups are interest free. SteadyPay mitigates the risk of the customer falling into problem debt. 

USP: Their competitive advantage derives from how they address pay volatility and improves the financial wellness of people working in the growing gig economy. The solution disrupts the traditional lending model by not charging interest and by not charging ‘rip-off fees’ based on how people make repayments. Instead, they operate as a simple subscription credit service – customers only pay a single, low, weekly fee.

Experience: SteadyPay’s team has extensive industry experience. The co-founder and CEO John Downie, with a track record of building companies, is an experienced technology executive and consultant with a deep knowledge of banking and delivering a number of projects to large banks. The founder team brings a mix of experience in the financial sector, product management, digital transformation, credit risk, regulatory and payments.

Traction: After their tech team was formed in December 2017, SteadyPay gained FCA approval in October 2018 and launched their beta. Soft launch followed in December 2018 and since then they’ve gained over 100 members, and have a waiting list of over 1000 people. 

£2.9mTotal investment so far

Nov 20Next looking to raise

£10mAmount to raise

-Revenue

8FTEs

8FTEs in 12 months

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Founder: Francesca Hodgson (Managing Director), Andrew O'Brien (President) & Tiborn Barna (CTO)

Location: Manchester

Year founded: 2016

Core area of focus: Fintech for Good

Previous backing: Pontaq, Seedrs

In a nutshell: GoodBox serves the charity sector by providing a single point of entry to a full range of fundraising solutions. From award-winning contactless hardware, to a platform enabling charities to analyse and improve their fundraising, GoodBox provides charities with the tools needed to thrive in an ever-changing digital landscape. Their clients have seen an increase of 64% in fundraising revenue, and they have so far raised around £3,700,000 for UK based charities.

GoodBox’s solution: GoodBox’s unique offering is controlling every part of the charity chain, a rare freedom in a tightly regulated market. This is made possible as they are an FCA registered Payment Institution, fully PCI compliant, and a VISA and Mastercard registered Payment Facilitator. This full-stack solution enables them to tailor products and services to the fundraising sector and has resulted in early growth and traction.

USP: GoodBox has custom-built their technology solutions with a sole-sector focus, resulting in a pipeline of products which address the needs of charities. Not only does it give people the option to donate using card or contactless payment, the user portal also provides clients with real-time fundraising results, analysis and billing information, but will ultimately allow them to easily access a host of fundraising solutions, including: GiftAid*, QR code fundraising, recurring payments, direct debit fundraising, raffles and more.

Experience: The GoodBox products and services are a result of a multitude of fields of study, ranging from hardware to payments, software, IoT, logistics, design, Big Data, KYC, AML, and more. Between the founders, they have complementary skill-sets, with decades of experience in investment banking, charity, conceptual design, IT infrastructures and technology, but are also deeply rooted in the non-profit sector. 

Traction: GoodBox has raised over £3.7m and 650k donors. They have over 2000 contactless devices live across the country and fundraised for 1000+ charities, including household names such as National History Museum and Comic Relief. They have been the power behind many esteemed charitable campaigns and received investment from Andy Murray, won several awards (amongst them, the Red Dot Award) and are expected to break even as soon as 2021. 

£6.2mTotal investment so far

NowNext looking to raise

Series A +Amount to raise

£921kRevenue

41FTEs

60FTEs in 12 months

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Founder headshot: Andrew Rabbitt (CEO)

Location: Yorkshire, Ilkley

Year founded: 2016

Core area of focus: Fintech for Good

Previous backing: Ascension Ventures, Northstar Ventures

In a nutshell: incuto is a technology platform for credit unions, community banks and lenders, transforming them into community-focused challenger banks. It makes ethical lenders relevant, accessible, sustainable and efficient, incuto is tackling the poverty premium by ensuring everyone can gain access to affordable, responsible financial services.

Incuto’s solution: incuto is a hosted technology platform that improves the customer experience of low-cost, ethical financial service providers (Credit Unions, CDFIs, Community Banks etc.). These institutions are prone to suffer from high costs and inefficiency, due to the lack of technology. incuto provides this network with an integrated customer-facing and back-office solution, allowing these organisations mobile and online access to their accounts, loans, banking services, and financial support & education tools. As a result, they can be a viable challenger to payday or other high-cost lenders.

USP: incuto stands out by charging for transactions over the platform, not for licence fees. As a result they generate recurring revenue from continued relationships. These transactions include SMS/emails, credit scores, payments and debit cards, i.e. fees which would be paid to an external company anyway. They leverage the ability to aggregate volume to negotiate significant reductions in costs, so their transaction fees are often 40% - 75% cheaper than traditional solutions. 

Experience: The team at incuto brings together an interesting mix of skills and backgrounds with everything from behaviour change as a specialism, banking, working for some of the largest software houses to early-stage startups and managing large infrastructure projects.  

Traction: Their platform was launched in March 2018 and since then, they’ve grown from 11,500 end users in March 2018 to 489,000 end-users by June 2019. incuto also won a 2-year HM Treasury contract to deliver the Prize Linked Savings pilot scheme in May 2019, a NESTA development prize in October 2019 and is working closely with Experian to deliver a pilot project that will bring ethical lenders into loan aggregator websites during Q1&2 2020.

£1mTotal investment so far

NowNext looking to raise

Series AAmount to raise

£1.1mRevenue

22FTEs

35FTEs in 12 months

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Founder headshot: Matt Latham & Tom McGillycuddy

Location: Liverpool

Year founded: 2018

Core area of focus: Impact Retail Investing

Previous backing: Seedrs, SLJ Investment Partners, Fintech Angels

In a nutshell: tickr is transforming impact investment for Europe’s next generation of investors. It offers investments for people who want to have a positive impact on society and the environment, and is designed for first time investors.

tickr’s solution: Tickr is making investing more about investing in the causes you believe in and helping to resolve the pressing problems the world is facing. By making investing about having a positive impact as well as making a financial return, they make it personal and relatable. The tickr mobile app is jargon-free, allows users to invest at a risk level they feel comfortable with and provides impact stories about the companies the customer has invested in. 

USP: tickr is the first impact investment app in Europe. They are a millennial investment option with a vision to become the leader in impact investing across Europe through B2C, B2B2C and their own fund offerings.

Experience: The founding team has a combined experience of almost 20 years in the investment management industry, working with private clients and charities, as well as impact investment. 

Traction: After raising £860K from figures in the investment management industry in September 2018, they went on to raise a further £1.6million in 2019. Their app is available on both iOS and Android, and has tens of thousands of users across the platforms. The team has had significant growth to 13 full-time and diverse individuals, all based in the UK. It was also announced in the Wealthtech 100 in April 2019, and as the Tech Nation Rising Stars winner for 2019. tickr is FCA regulated as an Appointed Representative. 

£2.4mTotal investment so far

May 20Next looking to raise

£3.5mAmount to raise

£3000Revenue

13FTEs

25FTEs in 12 months

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Founder: Georgia Stewart (CEO), Will Goodwin (Product Owner) and Ben King (CTO)

Location: Bristol

Year founded: 2018

Core area of focus: Retail/Pension sustainable investment     

Previous backing: Angel Investor

In a nutshell: Tumelo enables investment providers to engage their retail and pension customers. Their solution gives investors visibility over their underlying fund holdings and a shareholder voice on issues they care about at companies they own, such as gender equality at Microsoft or climate change at Shell.

Tumelo’s solution: Tumelo’s white-label software plugs into existing investment platforms and pension portals, driving positive customer interactions in order to increase retention and AUM for their partners, as well as derive deep customer insights. Tumelo’s data engine draws in underlying holdings data directly from fund managers, as well as company and shareholder voting data which is distributed via a personalised dashboard integrated into existing customer journeys. Votes are aggregated and fed back to fund managers in order to influence environmental, social and governance decisions at the world’s largest public companies.

USP: Tumelo allows indirect shareholders, invested via funds, portfolios and pension pots, to have a voice at the companies they own. By leveraging pertinent social and environmental issues to create a more engaging investment experience for retail investors and pension members, Tumelo are raising the bar for engagement across the industry. The data and customer insights derived from Tumelo’s platform will facilitate superior, customer-centric and more sustainable decision making across industry stakeholders, from investor relations at multinational PLCs, to asset managers, investment platforms and even workplace pension schemes.

Experience: Tumelo’s founding team studied Natural Sciences together at Cambridge University. While there, they worked to transform how the university’s £6B endowment was investment, working closely with students, professors, the press and other universities around the world to campaign for transparency and shareholder engagement. The trio (now CEO, Product Manager and Tech Lead) have experience in sustainable asset management, capital markets and software engineering.

Traction: Tumelo are continuing to invest in product development, testing with end users, scaling fund coverage and broadening platform functionality beyond voting. A successful commercial pilot with one of the UK’s largest pension providers in 2019 has led to a pipeline of work with some of the world’s largest investment managers.

£1.25mTotal investment so far

Jun 20Next looking to raise

£5mAmount to raise

-Revenue

11FTEs

20FTEs in 12 months

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Founder headshot: Peter Keenan, CEO

Location: London

Year founded: 2016

Core area of focus: Payment Infrastructure

Previous backing: Forward Partners, MMC Ventures, Alliance Venture

In a nutshell: Apexx is a payment platform that connects enterprise to multiple acquiring banks, APMs, and PSPs as well as optimising the payment flow to drive up payment acceptance and lower costs. APEXX consolidates these providers into a single integration point, offering complex merchants the flexibility to operate a payment stack that reflects the needs of their business.

Apexx’s solution: By enabling merchants to process transactions in the country of origin of the transaction, Apexx increases acceptance rates; issuers accept more of the transactions due to lower history of fraud. This reduces interchange and scheme fee costs because domestically processed transactions cost less to process. Their platform connects Merchants to over 180 acquiring banks globally through a single API connection.

USP: They have built a routing engine (Apexx AIRE) that routes transactions once received to the correct acquiring bank to increase conversion and lower costs. In addition, Apexx has built the capability to audit transactions in real-time to check the correct interchange and scheme fees are being applied.

Experience: Apexx’s founding team brings a variety of skills to the table. Between them they specialise in retail & eCommerce leadership, mobile payments, payment innovation, qualified chartered accountancy, global acquiring, complex payment acceptance setups, and innovation in payment technology. 

Traction: Apexx had revenue of  £1.7m last year. Their product is live with 5 clients, with a further 6 in implementation.

£10mTotal investment so far

Jun 21Next looking to raise

Series BAmount to raise

£1.7mRevenue

60FTEs

60FTEs in 12 months

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Founder: Marcus Kern (Director) & Esteban Diaz Asua (Director)

Location: Cornwall

Year founded: 2016

Core area of focus: Payment Automation

Previous backing: Serial Entrepreneurs with previous exits 

In a nutshell: Duesday has reinvented regular bill payments, giving control and rewards to the payer and convenience to the merchant. They help utilities, leisure clubs and the housing sector to automate bill collections and loyalty offers. Their core payments platform is integrated with the UK and Mexican payment networks.

Duesday’s solution: Duesday has developed a core payments platform integrated into the UK and Mexico payments network on direct account payments and credit/debit card payments. Their platform is augmented with the Duesday App to deliver features directly into the payer's hands. Duesday has been authorized by the FCA as a Payment Institution and is Level 1 PCI/DSS compliant, works closely with BACS and is participating in a new payment architecture pilot with PAY.UK for the upcoming UK Request-to-Pay scheme. 

USP: Duesday offers an automation solution for billing challenges to both consumers and providers. They foster loyalty and strengthen relationships rather than stimulating constant provider switching. Internationally they offer a reliable pull-payment service and have integrated this with Point-Of-Sale equipment providers like HP and Ingenico. 

Experience: Both original founders are serial entrepreneurs, who have started and exited multiple companies prior to founding Duesday. The rest of the founder team consists of a Financial Controller who is a qualified chartered accountant, an award-winning UX director and a genius Head of Development.

Traction: Duesday launched with Snowden Wilkinson, a Manchester letting agent as a Proof of Concept. Their pilot with VTUK Ltd, a letting agent software provider, serviced 500,000+ properties. In Mexico Duesday launched its eMePOS with HP and EVO/Banamex rolling out 16,000 revolutionary POS terminals in 2020.

£1mTotal investment so far

NowNext looking to raise

£1.9mAmount to raise

£50,000Revenue

13FTEs

25FTEs in 12 months

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Founder: Aaron Holmes, CEO

Location: Newcastle

Year founded: 2018

Core area of focus: Payment Infrastructure

Previous backing: - 

In a nutshell: Our mission is to reduce complexity for financial services businesses, so they can concentrate on offering great products to their customers.  We do this by developing great software that helps FinTech companies to run their operations and finance functions efficiently. We take data from processors, card schemes, banks and more, and create automated reconciliations and beautiful reporting.

Kani’s solution: Kani’s platform integrates with clients’ transactional processing platforms, card schemes and other data sources in order to automatically import, clean and transform data. Once imported, clients are able to access tangible outputs from this data including reports & business intelligence, and reconciliations that can be fully automated, ensuring that payments have been executed correctly.  Where there are errors, omissions or reconciliation breaks, Kani’s system and support services identify these and chase down the root cause. 

USP: Combined, Kani’s team members have roughly 80 years of fintech experience. The group of co-founders have previously built a successful transactional processor and their CEO and CCO have also worked within the payment space for a number of years. That core understanding means their products are built specifically for FinTech disruptors, backed by a team who understand the processes and intricacies behind the data.

Experience: The CEO of Kani, Aaron Holmes, has extensive experience within the financial/payments sector, previously working at Wirecard and as the Chief Operating Officer & Chief Innovation Officer of payments giant GPS (the platform behind Starling Bank, Revolut, Curve and 150 other FinTech disruptors). His specialities include card payments, BIN sponsorship, MasterCard, project management, product development, relationship management, e-money, SEPA, Payment Services Regulations, mobile payments, and contactless payments. The rest of the team bring skills like software development, programming and product development. 

Traction 

Kani was named ‘Europe’s Leading Financial Services or Payments Start-up’ by the Emerging Payments Association (EPA) in 2019, having secured over a dozen clients across 4 continents since launch.  These clients include challenger banks, established banks, electronic money issuers, and gift card providers. The business is on track to report & reconcile over $1bn of payments, double its client base, and move into profit by the end of 2020.

£1mInvestment so far

Dec 20Next looking to raise

£3mAmount looking to raise

£250kRevenue

10FTEs

13FTEs in 12 months

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Founder: Anna Tsyupko, CEO

Location: London

Year founded: 2013

Core area of focus: Payment Infrastructure

Previous backing: Grant from Innovate UK (2017)

In a nutshell: Paybase is the most flexible payments solution for the platform economy, FinTechs and blockchain businesses. Its sophisticated API combines payments, compliance and risk management, allowing businesses to reach market quickly and seamlessly. Through structured flexibility, Paybase accommodates a wide array of use cases, enabling new and established businesses to build better, more competitive products.

Paybase’s solution: The Paybase solution is specialised to serve businesses that facilitate multi-party payments (i.e. payments that are sent, split, held and routed between multiple buyers and multiple sellers). For platform businesses (online marketplaces or gig/sharing economy platforms), FinTechs and blockchain businesses, Paybase is the only payments solution that offers flexibility out-of-the-box, enabling standout features such as white label escrow, 15-second end-to-end payments, split payments and more.  

USP: With flexibility built into the core of the Paybase platform, Paybase has the scope to serve myriad use cases for businesses at any stage of development. Their Rules Engine enables them to do this. Using an if-this-then-that framework, they offer infinite customisable capabilities without the need for costly custom development such as reducing fees on a seller’s birthday, refer-a-friend rewards, escrow milestones, instant payouts, percentage reductions and more. 

Experience: The Paybase team is comprised of innovative, creative individuals, all with experience working in transformative, tech-driven, and entrepreneurial businesses. Their Founder, Anna, first founded a Berlin-based real estate firm which went on to make €6M in revenue on its first project. This gave her the skills necessary to run a successful startup - budgeting, financial forecasting and the securing of capital from high profile and global investors. On identifying the shortcomings of the payments sector, Anna saw the need for an accessible, flexible payments solution. From here, the idea for Paybase was born. 

Traction: Paybase went live in the first quarter of 2019. Within one month, they had processed over £30K in transactions from only one client. They now have ten live clients and over 30 actively onboarding. 

£7.4mInvestment so far

NowNext looking to raise

Seed +Amount to raise

£5mRevenue

25FTEs

30FTEs in 12 months

Website | Twitter | Contact

Founder: Gavin Sewell (CEO)

Location: Durham

Year founded: 2014

Core area of focus: Platform

Previous backing: Crowdcube, Maven Capital Partners, Barclays

In a nutshell: Honcho Markets operates a reverse-auction electronic marketplace for the distribution of financial services products. Product vendors compete in real-time, open and transparent auctions to win a consumers’ business. Honcho charges vendors a nominal fee, removing expensive sales commissions from the distribution chain.

Honcho’s solution: Honcho’s solution can be considered a combination of price comparison website and eBay in reverse. Consumers use the Honcho Apps to capture the details of their required product before invoking an auction. At the same time, the vendors receive a request for bids from Honcho for a particular consumer's required product and then decide if they can offer a suitable product at a good price. If they offer, vendors will be charged £1 to enter an auction to win the consumer's business, discouraging them to offer poorly suited and expensive products. 

USP: Honcho operates as a completely open, transparent and equitable marketplace in the best interests of both consumers and market participants. In addition, their real-time reverse-auction marketplace allows market participants (insurers in the first instance) to combine competitive market data with their traditional risk-underwriting pricing. They will be able to 'trade' algorithmically in the Honcho marketplace to achieve the best cost per acquisition per policy sold.

Experience: Honcho’s team brings together impressive skills and experience. Combined, they have over 60 years of experience in the sector and a track record of founding several successful fintech businesses as well as working with some of the biggest players in the industry.  

Traction: Honcho has signed 15 insurers and brokers as initial launch participants, of which 8 are currently live. They are working with another 20 to join the platform in the next 6 months. In addition, they’ve raised £3.6m from regional ERDF funding, Angels, the crowd via CrowdCube and Maven Capital Partners which has allowed them to build and launch an MVP and gain authorisation from the FCA. 

£3.6mInvestment so far

Dec 20Next looking to raise

Series AAmount to raise

-Revenue

8FTEs

12FTEs in 12 months

Website | Twitter | Contact

Founder: Stefan Pajkovic, CEO

Location: London

Year founded: 2013

Core area of focus: Platform

Previous backing: South Central Ventures

In a nutshell: TradeCore is a platform-as-a-service provider that enables fintechs to build next-generation banking and investment products. TradeCore’s full stack offering does all the heavy lifting, allowing companies to focus on launching unique customer experiences.

TradeCore’s solution: TradeCore's products remove the significant complexities that every fintech business faces when navigating the verticals of compliance, regulation, payments, banking and capital markets. By providing access to this infrastructure in the form of a service, their customers are able to take advantage of TradeCore's accumulated domain expertise in these areas, and focus their own attention on the core essentials of their own product offering.

USP: TradeCore differs from other market participants in that their goal is to provide their customers with access to core infrastructure and connectors across both the digital banking and digital brokerage verticals, as well as the necessary regulatory permissions for them to be able to operate in the market.

Experience: TradeCore is particularly proud of the fintech knowledge and expertise the team has been able to acquire, and the strong performance of their team members. Their CEO, Stefan Pajkovic comes from a coding background, founded his first startup in 2000, and was involved in a number of fintech businesses before starting TradeCore.

Traction: TradeCore has ten customers across their core product offerings, including a global top-10 online retail derivatives broker, and the European B2C arm of a major US ETF issuer. In aggregate, they hold millions of end-users accounts, and capture hundreds of millions of payment transactions annually.

£4.6mTotal investments so far

NowNext looking to raise

Seed +Amount to raise

£1.9mRevenue

75FTEs

85FTEs in 12 months

Website | Twitter | Contact

Founders: Eduard Pantelev (Co-CEO), Boris Diakonov(Co-CEO), Vyacheslav Akulov (COO), Nikita Filippov (CPO) and & 3 others.

Location: Cardiff

Year founded: 2016

Core area of focus: SME Finance

Previous backing: Kinetik, Seedrs

In a nutshell: ANNA combines a business account and debit card with invoicing and tax reminders. For freelancers and small businesses, it’s ideal for SMEs that use light commercial vehicles (“LCVs”) for their work.

ANNA’s solution: ANNA Money is built for SMEs who use light commercial vehicles. It has an inexpensive and easy to use product suite which not only covers their main business banking and business administration needs (invoicing, payments, business card, expense management and tax support) but is also integrated with their vehicle consoles and integrates voice control. It makes their customer’s experience and business life much easier. It’s a one stop-shop for everything an independent business owner or SME will need to run their business. 

USP: ANNA was formed to be a catalyst in the evolution of the banking and business services market and to deliver accessibility and control on-the-go. With this in mind, ANNA has established an SME banking product in the UK market which provides an unequalled foundation of user-friendliness from day one. 

Experience: The founding team consists of impressive skills and experience and all members have a background in banking. This includes working for innovative consumer banks and larger, privately owned banks. 

Traction: ANNA launched its initial SME account-based service in September 2018. The app uses a (natural language) chat-driven adaptive mobile interface supported by integrated AI/human customer support to provide services to their clients. This differentiates ANNA, even from the new players, and it is highly valued by their clients. Since its launch, ANNA has on-boarded over 7000 clients. The current client on-boarding is running at 1000 per month and is growing by 8-12% per month. Transaction volumes are currently in excess of 48,000 per month. 

£19.1mInvestment so far

NowNext looking to raise

Series A+Amount to raise

£500kRevenue

90FTEs

140FTEs in 12 months

Website | Twitter | Contact

Founder: Nicholas Heller (CEO)  & Stephanie Galantine (Director)

Location: London

Year founded: 2014

Core area of focus: SME Finance

Previous backing: Seedcamp, Deloitte

In a nutshell: Fractal is a platform-as-a-service that is reinventing how Small-Medium-Enterprise (SME) access financial services. They help financial institutions (FI) and their SME clients save money by providing a smarter payments engine and an insights platform to deliver the right product, to the right SME, at the right time.

Fractal Labs’s solution: Fractal helps their customers to streamline the SME financial services they give by providing white-label payment solutions, and enabling them to build applications on top of Fractal’s suite of APIs, giving them the ability to initiate payments, generate financial insights and personalised products.

USP: Fractal looks to solve the root causes, not simply treat the symptoms of cash flow issues faced by SMEs. For example, Fractal’s payment solution gives financial institutions real-time access to permissioned credit risk data, the ability to help their SME clients get paid with more certainty, and access lending at the point of payment. Fractal’s cash flow forecasting capabilities is superior to what’s on the market because of how we enhance data from multiple financial sources, and how we present that data back to both financial institutions and SMEs, thereby facilitating lending.

Experience: The core Fractal team has prior entrepreneurial, scale-up and exit experience, blended with complementary professional and academic backgrounds. Their backgrounds include leading the European R&D team at Google, investment banking, gaming and mobile.

Traction: Current Fractal customers include tier one banks, accountants and advisors, neo-banks, alternative lenders and other fintechs. Fractal has a rich commercial pipeline, and follows a structured and rigorous sales operation process, with prospect qualification, status levels and probability weighting. The business is on target to have 26 large enterprise customers by the end of 2020.

£1.8mTnvestment so far

NowNext looking to raise

Seed+Amount to raise

£685kRevenue

23FTEs

65FTEs in 12 months

Website | Twitter | Contact

Founder: Tom Howsam (CEO) & Natasha Foster (COO)

Location: Darlington

Year founded: 2018

Core area of focus: SME Finance, Enterprise SaaS

Previous backing: Barclays Techstars Accelerator London

In a nutshell: Paid uses automation to bring businesses together. Whether the business is a client or a supplier, they benefit - clients save costs through use of our robotic process automation (RPA) and collaboration software for their buying process, and suppliers get a quick and smooth sales cycle and can take advantage of our supply chain finance offer to get paid on time, every time. In this way, Paid facilitates businesses of all sizes to work together. 

Paid’s solution: Paid provides RPA and Collaboration software to buyers (Enterprises and SMEs), sitting on top of existing ERP systems, to procure from suppliers. The platform automates, for both the client and supplier: Onboarding, Contracting, Work Management, Automated Invoicing, Working capital management. Paid offers suppliers instant payment on completion of work with clients (true non-recourse invoice finance). Suppliers get access to a supplier portal that provides their own work management tools, including invoice issuance and integration with accounting software, and automated processes for dealing with their clients. Suppliers can also initiate their own transactions with clients and upload invoices for instant payment. 

USP: Paid’s advantage is that the founding team comes from both an enterprise and a micro business background - they understand the pain and what the market is missing on both sides. For Suppliers - Paid does the admin so they can do the business they love. And Paid gets them paid, on time, every time. For clients, Paid automates their buying processes to improve internal collaboration and drastically cut costs of managing suppliers, as well as ensuring clients can report timely payments to the Government for all of their long tail of suppliers. 

Experience: CEO and Co-Founder, Tom Howsam, has experience building and exiting his own company, experience within a large corporation (Clicksco) and of scaling teams internationally. With Tom’s technical background and the background of the team, he has ensured the underlying architecture of the product is scalable and well thought out. COO and Co-Founder, Natasha Foster, has extensive experience as a corporate finance lawyer and investment banker working for and with large global corporations. She has also run her own consultancy firm and advised and acted as NED for numerous startups. Natasha brings invaluable corporate, managerial and operational experience to complement Tom’s technical and managerial experience. 

Traction To date, Paid has: launched and tested a supplier-led workflow management and non-recourse invoice finance product, with c. £10,000 invoices financed to date. Built and launched (December 2019) the Enterprise software product, with a trial contract signed with BT for the software, rolling out in End-February 2020, as well as a full contract with a home emergency repair company rolling out in February 2020. Advanced discussions are ongoing with a global financial institution, a global facilities management service, and a multinational media agency, among others, for pilots or full contracts. Paid has also put in place partnerships, lining up IPSE (85k members) and Funding Exchange for a referral distribution scheme to be fully implemented in Q2 2020.

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Founders: Martin McCann (CEO) & Matthias Born (CTO)

Location: London

Year founded: 2016

Core area of focus: SME Finance 

Previous backing: Hambro Perks 

In a nutshell: Trade Ledger is the world’s first open digital banking platform that gives banks the ability to assess business lending risk in real-time. Using Machine Learning, open APIs, Robotic Process Automation and AI, they enable banks to address the global undersupply in trade finance lending, while providing high-growth companies with the working capital needed to sustain growth.

TradeLedger’s solution: Trade Ledger is a complete digital business lending operation. They support all major types of cash flow lending products and enable faster growth. The Trade Ledger platform provides unparalleled access to business data in real-time. They combine this network data with traditional trade payment, business financial and bank account transaction information from a carefully selected network of data partners to help further support underwriting requirements. It provides the unique ability to determine trade risk and fraud accurately. 

USP: Trade Ledger is the only business lending technology in the world that can assess both structured and unstructured data sets directly from their source in the supply chain. Most lending platforms assess risk based on a small sample of invoices, whereas Trade Ledger enables lenders to make real-time, continuous credit assessments based on supply chain data and the data and communication surrounding every individual invoice.

Experience: Martin McCann, CEO and Co-Founder, has 20 years experience creating, growing, mentoring, and investing in innovative global technology companies. CTO and Co-Founder, Matthias Born, has a PhD in Business Information Systems, and Roger Vincent, CIO and GM (UK&I) is a specialist innovator with experience in driving open banking strategy and commercialisation programmes across both global corporates and fintech start-ups. Finally, CFO Rob Tragen has over 18 years experience in financial services. 

Traction: 2019 saw the launch of Trade Ledger’s European innovation lab in London, which complements their existing Sydney lab. They have also established a new office in Singapore to support Asian operations. They were selected for the inaugural HK-UK fintech bridge pilot programme, making them the first and only company to utilise two official fintech bridges from AU-UK-HK. They were listed as one of the world’s leading fintech innovators by KPMG; named fintech start-up of the year in Australia; been rated as one of the top 25 fintech start-ups in the Asia Pacific, and won the Barclays Global Open Innovation Challenge.

£2mInvestment so far

Series ANext looking to raise

£1m+Revenue

24FTEs

70FTEs in a year

Website | Twitter | Contact

Founder: Owen Hall, Managing Director

Location: London

Year founded: 2014

Core area of focus: Regtech

Previous backing: Globacap

In a nutshell: Heliocor is a regulatory compliance software business that wants to change the way the world does business; restoring trust. Their tune-able products (AI, Machine Learning and Deep Learning enabled) help financial services companies to manage risk, tailor and automate onboarding clients (Dokstor) and then monitor their transactional activity in real-time (Robolitics) to ensure regulatory compliance.

Heliocor’s solution: The demands of regulation are ever-changing. Heliocor delivers solutions that meet compliance and regulatory requirements, specifically in the area of fraud detection and prevention. In 2015, they were commissioned to review regulatory compliance software solutions in the market for a large global FX company. They discovered that there were critical gaps between what was needed and what was available. As a result, Heliocor was one of the first companies in the world to propose and deliver a real-time transaction monitoring solution to identify malfeasance and fraud. 

USP: Heliocor’s business is underpinned by a deep understanding of compliance/regulation and how that interacts with banking/finance and string technology. They believe in putting the power of the new and emerging technologies of AI, ML, Deep Learning and Blockchain into the hands of the front line compliance team. That means much time is spent on User Experience, 'dashboards' and creating 'tune-able' software that can be adjusted and amended by the frontline, not subject to 'change requests' of an IT dept. Heliocor sees themselves as the bridge from the old world of rules-based systems towards the efficient, fast and accurate world of AI-based regulation.

Experience: Heliocor has a very experienced and diverse team with deep knowledge of banking, technology and compliance/regulation. Founder and MD Owen Hall took three businesses from startup to market-leading enterprises, which between them have turned over $1bn of revenue. MD Vikas Tripathi has over 14 years of experience in financial services, and founder and CTO Angel Marquez have over 20 years of experience in identifying, qualifying, building and implementing enabling technologies and systems. Finally, finance director Irshad Akhtar has 25 years experience in leading financial institutions.

Traction: Heliocor beat Bloomberg and Mysys to supply SPD Bank London with transaction monitoring (Robolitics). The Dokstor App is in App and Play Stores, running on monthly release cycles. They were selected by Ping An Global Cloud Accelerator to shape products for the Chinese market; with privileged access to their financial services group. They have agreed a potentially multi-year programme with AmEx to double the number of card-accepting merchants, and are in advanced talks for other high-profile deals.

£2mInvestment so far

NowNext looking to raise

Seed+Amount to raise

-Revenue

32FTEs

72FTEs in 12 months

Website | Twitter | Contact

Founder: Ben Pollard, CEO and Founder

Location: London

Year founded: 2017

Core area of focus: Workplace Savings

Previous backing: Unum, Angel Investor & Crowdfunding (Seedrs)

In a nutshell: Cushon aims to turn the UK into a nation of investors by promoting the benefits of healthy savings habits via peoples employers. Cushon makes investing simple, easy and accessible for the mass market with the convenience of saving directly from pay.

Cushon’s solution: By promoting Cushon as an employee benefit, employers help the financial wellbeing of their people, encouraging healthy savings habits, often with a contribution boost from the employer as a more accessible complement to pensions. Cushon provides a range of ISAs (cash, investments and the Lifetime ISA) and a General Investment Account for people who exceed their annual ISA allowance.

USP: Cushon has developed integration with payroll providers and benefits platforms for ease of administration for employers and a seamless user experience for employees. Cushon uses sophisticated algorithms to analyse over 1,000 funds, build ready-made risk-rated portfolios and comparison tables and then monitor each customer’s individual portfolio on a daily basis. Cushon owns all the tech and has full regulatory permissions to handle client money.

Experience: Founder Ben Pollard has been advising FTSE100 companies on their investment strategies for the last 15 years. Co-founder Phil Hollingdale has started, run and sold 5 tech businesses over the last 30 years, the most recent was VC backed Staffcare which served over 3m employees for workplace pensions and flexible benefits.

Traction: Cushon has key distribution partners in place (e.g. Aon, Neyber, Salary Finance and Willis Towers Watson). They have secured over 100 corporate clients (e.g. EY, BP, Morgan Stanley, Samsung and Rolls Royce) with their workplace ISA proposition and now intend to expand into pensions through an agreed acquisition of a pension Master Trust. The combined business will have over 67,000 customers, £210m of assets under management (AUM) and year one revenues of £2m. Cushon aims to be the first challenger provider to disrupt workplace savings, a market opportunity of £90bn p.a in private and public sector pensions.

£5.4mInvestment so far

NowNext looking to raise

Series AAmount to raise

£2mRevenue

20FTEs

25FTEs in 12 months

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