Samir Desai0:03
I'm Samir Desai, I'm the co-founder and CEO of Funding Circle. We provide a platform that allows anyone—individuals, institutions, or government—to directly lend money to small businesses. It means that investors can get access to attractive returns, and small businesses can get access to the finance they need to grow and expand. Together, that means the economy can grow and prosper. We launched the business in 2010 in the UK, and since then we've originated over 5 billion pounds of loans through our platform, a billion of which came in the first half of 2018 alone. We operate in the UK, US, Germany, and the Netherlands, and we are the largest small business lending platform in all of those geographies. We started Funding Circle because we felt there was a big disconnect between how much banks care about this type of lending and how much society cares about it, because small businesses are 50% of the private sector GDP and expand the private sector workforce. We also saw that individuals and other investors were getting low returns on their money, increasingly losing trust and satisfaction with banks. We thought, could we bring together these disaffected parties and create a better deal for everyone? Funding Circle is defined by its repeat rate on both sides of our platform. On the borrower side, over 30% of the borrowing that goes through is from repeat customers. 85% of the loans funded in H1 2018 came from existing customers—those that joined in the previous calendar year. Over 40% of the revenue that Funding Circle generates is from existing customers. I'm a business owner myself, so I know that what small businesses want is access to fast, affordable finance with great levels of service. We let borrowers apply for a loan within 10 minutes, get a decision within 24 hours—which is markedly faster than what they would be able to achieve at a bank. They always have someone available to speak to on the phone, and we deliver levels of service that mean our Net Promoter scores are in the 80s. 85% of small business customers tell us they would always come back to Funding Circle first for a loan in the future rather than go back to their bank. In small business lending, it's very difficult to have data available on the creditworthiness of these businesses and also data to be able to target them. We've been able to develop vast proprietary data sets and credit risk models that allow us not just to better credit assess small businesses than a new entrant, but also to target those customers and market to them incredibly effectively. This data gives us a significant advantage over any potential competitor. In the first half of 2018, we had revenues of over 62 million pounds, up over 60% on H1 2017, which reflects the rapid growth of our business. Today, however, we still remain a very small part of the addressable market. 2.5 billion pounds of loans under management that Funding Circle has is just over half a percent of what we believe the addressable market is in the UK, US, Germany, and the Netherlands—around 470 billion pounds. Having internationalized our platform, we do believe that we can be taken to additional markets, and we would expect to do that in the future. Every employee at Funding Circle is a shareholder in our company and an owner. We have been ranked the 16th best company to work for in the UK according to The Sunday Times, and we have an aspiration to be the best fintech company to work for in the world. We believe that being a great company to work for is an end in itself and allows us to attract the best talent from both the technology and the finance world. At Funding Circle, our mission is to build a better financial world. To us, that means helping small businesses grow and expand, fulfill their dreams and ambitions, and it also means reinventing the financial system to secure a better deal for everyone.
