TransferWise
Auto Added by WPeMatico
Acapela, from the founder of Dubsmash, hopes ‘asynchronous meetings’ can end Zoom fatigue
Acapela, a new startup co-founded by Dubsmash founder Roland Grenke, is breaking cover today in a bid to re-imagine online meetings for remote teams.
Hoping to put an end to video meeting fatigue, the product is described as an “asynchronous meeting platform,” which Grenke and Acapela’s other co-founder, ex-Googler Heiki Riesenkampf (who has a deep learning computer science background), believe could be the key to unlock better and more efficient collaboration. In some ways the product can be thought of as the antithesis to Zoom and Slack’s real-time and attention-hogging downsides.
To launch, the Berlin -based and “remote friendly” company has raised €2.5 million in funding. The round is led by Visionaries Club with participation from various angel investors, including Christian Reber (founder of Pitch and Wunderlist) and Taavet Hinrikus (founder of TransferWise). I also understand Entrepreneur First is a backer and has assigned EF venture partner Benedict Evans to work on the problem. If you’ve seen the ex-Andreessen Horowitz analyst writing about a post-Zoom world lately, now you know why.
Specifically, Acapela says it will use the injection of cash to expand the core team, focusing on product, design and engineering as it continues to build out its offering.
“Our mission is to make remote teams work together more effectively by having fewer but better meetings,” Grenke tells me. “With Acapela, we aim to define a new category of team collaboration that provides more structure and personality than written messages (Slack or email) and more flexibility than video conferencing (Zoom or Google Meet)”.
Grenke believes some form of asynchronous meetings is the answer, where participants don’t have to interact in real-time but the meeting still has an agenda, goals, a deadline and — if successfully run — actionable outcomes.
“Instead of sitting through hours of video calls on a daily basis, users can connect their calendars and select meetings they would like to discuss asynchronously,” he says. “So, as an alternative to everyone being in the same call at the same time, team members contribute to conversations more flexibly over time. Like communication apps in the consumer space, Acapela allows rich media formats to be used to express your opinion with voice or video messages while integrating deeply with existing productivity tools (like GSuite, Atlassian, Asana, Trello, Notion, etc.)”.
In addition, Acapela will utilise what Grenke says is the latest machine learning techniques to help automate repetitive meeting tasks as well as to summarise the contents of a meeting and any decisions taken. If made to work, that in itself could be significant.
“Initially, we are targeting high-growth tech companies which have a high willingness to try out new tools while having an increasing need for better processes as their teams grow,” adds the Acapela founder. “In addition to that, they tend to have a technical global workforce across multiple time zones which makes synchronous communication much more costly. In the long run we see a great potential tapping into the space of SMEs and larger enterprises, since COVID has been a significant driver of the decentralization of work also in the more traditional industrial sectors. Those companies make up more than 90% of our European market and many of them have not switched to new communication tools yet”.
Powered by WPeMatico
TransferWise reports accelerating revenue growth to 70% in its March, 2020 fiscal year
TransferWise, a European fintech unicorn, announced the financial results of its fiscal year ending March, 2020.
The company posted strong growth, continued profit and new customer records. TransferWise was most recently valued at $5 billion during a secondary sale worth $319 million in July of this year.
On the results front, we can compare the company’s March 2020 year to its March 2019 year, the results of which we also have available. Here are the nuts and bolts, picking from the provided metrics to share the most material:
- TransferWise fiscal 2020 revenue: £302.6 million, up 70% from its fiscal 2019 result of £179 million. That’s a venture-level revenue result from a mature company that is self-powering.
- TransferWise grew more quickly in its March 2020 year than in its March 2019 year, when it managed a slower 53% growth rate per the company. Accelerating revenue growth at this scale is very valuable.
- TransferWise managed a fourth year of consecutive profitability, generating £21.3 million in “net profit after tax” for the March 2020 fiscal year. The company first started generating profit “since 2017” per its own release, which we presume means the year ending March 2017.
- The company reported that it now has 8 million worldwide customers, up from 6 million in the preceding fiscal year. That’s 33% growth.
- The pace at which business customers sign up for TransferWise appeared to include slower growth, moving from 10,000 per month in the March 2019 year to “over 10,000” in its most recent release.
- TransferWise processed £42 billion in “cross currency transfers,” or around 63% of its total processing volume of £67 billion.
Instead of merely shouting at this point that TransferWise should go public, as it is providing granular data on its performance we’re already somewhat sated. More notes on gross margins would be good, for example, but this level of transparency is still welcome.
Turning to future growth, TransferWise stated in a release that APAC is the company’s “fastest growing region.” Its U.S. business was worth around a fourth of its March 2020 year’s revenue. Europe was just over half for the same period.
The company’s ability to pay for its own growth means that it has not raised money for some time. Indeed, the last equity round that we have on the company is its November, 2017 investment. That capital was $280 million raised at a $1.3 billion pre-money valuation in a deal led by Merian Global Investors and IVP. Since then the company has sold secondary shares from time to time.
That should lessen internal demands for a traditional liquidity event, but not quash them altogether. The unavoidable question is why not go public when the firm already reports so much public performance data. On the other hand, when a company needs no capital, it need not accept advice, either.
Regardless, TransferWise shows that fintech can make money after all.
Powered by WPeMatico
Plum raises $10M for its ‘smart’ money management app
Plum, the London and Athens-based fintech that offers a “smart” money management app to help you improve your “financial resilience,” has raised a further $10 million in funding as it gears up for European expansion.
The new round is led by Japan’s Global Brain and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, which has participated in previous Plum funding rounds.
In addition, the company has received further funding from early backer VentureFriends, matched by the U.K. taxpayer via the U.K. government’s Future Fund scheme. Plum has raised $19.3 million in total since being founded by Victor Trokoudes (an early TransferWise employee) and Alex Michael in 2016.
Launched in the U.K. the following year, Plum is one of a number of fintech startups that is vying to become a user’s financial hub or control centre, in a way that goes far beyond the first generation of personal finance manager apps and bank account aggregators.
You link the app to your bank account and gain access to a range of functionality, including savings, investments and analysis of your utility bills to help you make better purchasing decisions. Like similar apps, Plum’s “artificial intelligence” also deems what you can afford to save by analysing your bank transactions. It then puts money away each month in the form of round-ups and/or regular savings.
You can open an ISA investment account and invest based on themes, such as only in “ethical companies” or technology. Another related feature is “Splitter,” which, as the name suggests, lets you split your automatic savings between Plum savings pots and investments, selecting the percentage amounts to go into each pot, from 0-100%.
In a call with Trokoudes, he talked me through a few recent Plum updates that he says bring it much closer to fulfilling its financial control centre mission and being a candidate to replace your individual banking apps.
Crucially, you can now link all of your accounts to Plum, whereas previously Plum only let you access a single linked bank account. This gives you “full visibility” of your saving, spending and investments all in a single app.
On the roadmap is also the ability to make payments via Open Banking — and Trokoudes doesn’t rule out a Plum card in the future as a complementary feature with additional benefits, not a core offering, unlike numerous competitors.
More immediately, Plum is launching interest for savers who use Plum to set money aside but don’t want to invest any or all of it. Paid users are being offered an interest rate of 0.6% for instant access savings and 0.75% for 95 days’ notice. Plum users on its free tier can earn 0.35% interest.
Trokoudes explained that there’s also the option to split a percentage of the money put aside automatically, allocating deposits between the new interest-bearing account and Plum-powered investments.
Meanwhile, armed with fresh capital, Plum plans to launch in Spain and France by the end of 2020. The company claims 1 million registered users in the U.K., and now employs more than 60 people split across London, U.K. and Athens, Greece. Trokoudes tells me it will scale up further to 80 employees by the end of 2020 and is aiming for 5 million users across Europe by the end of 2021.
Adds Naoki Kamimaeda, partner and Europe office representative at Global Brain Corporation: “More users have started using fintech apps and personal financial management apps across the globe, to be more efficient and be better off. Among these fintech apps, Plum has a very unique position and very bold ambition to be a partner of individuals to save more money and manage their financial life in an easier and more effective manner.”
Powered by WPeMatico
TransferWise to offer investment products but has ‘no plans’ to become a bank
TransferWise, the London-headquartered international money transfer service recently valued at $3.5 billion, has secured an additional license with U.K. regulators to enable it to offer investment products in the future.
This will mean that U.K. customers who have money deposited in a TransferWise multi-currency or so-called “borderless” account will be given the option to make that money work harder on their behalf. Total deposits currently sit at £2 billion, so there is quite a lot of customer cash potentially idle.
However, the company isn’t revealing much detail on its future investments product, except to say that it will initially offer “simple, affordable funds from reputable providers” so that customers can earn a return on their balances. Up to £85,000 of money held as investments within a TransferWise account per customer will be protected under the Financial Services Compensation Scheme. The new offering is still in development and will launch “in the next 12 months.”
Zooming out further, TransferWise says an increasing number of its 8 million customers are using the borderless account as an international banking solution. Around one million TransferWise debit cards have been issued since 2018, and the TransferWise account now also supports direct debits, instant international payments to friends, and Apple and Google Pay. With the addition of savings and investments, TransferWise says its vision is for the borderless account to replace “expensive, old-world international banking” for expats, freelancers and travelers.
“You and I have been talking since 2011, when you first reported that TransferWise was going live, and I think you’ll appreciate that over time we’ve expanded the features that TransferWise offers our customers, for sure,” co-founder and current CEO Kristo Käärmann tells me on a call. “We launched the borderless account to let people receive money in-roads and to hold money. We added the debit cards so that they can use that money that they hold in places where they can use the card. And this is, in some ways, no different.”
Sticking to broad brush strokes rather than specific product details (despite my persistent questioning), Käärmann says that after listening to customers TransferWise wants to help them hold their balance in a smarter way.
“Clearly they’ve already figured out that TransferWise works for them,” he says. “And not merely as a medium of sending money from one country to another but also to get paid internationally, to kind of run their international part of banking, if you like. For businesses, for freelancers, for ex-pats, for people that have just moved countries. So this is another feature along the same string of things that people want us to do for them.”
That, of course, begs the question: Does TransferWise have any plans to become an actual bank, with a full banking license, further adding to its existing permissions from regulators. Käärmann gives a pretty emphatic answer.
“No, we don’t have any plans to apply for a banking license,” he says. “We haven’t applied for any banking licenses anywhere in the world… The only thing that the banking license in Europe lets banks do is lend out the deposits that customers give them, and that’s not what our customers are asking for. They’re not asking us, you know, can you please lend out our deposits?”
In fact, Käärmann confesses to not being a huge fan of the predominant current account business model, which he believes serves the interests of banks, not account-holding customers. “I do think the way current accounts work with banks is not sustainable in the long term. That the money we keep in banks is being lent out to mortgages and business loans and overdrafts and so on, yet the customers holding that money, they’re not really getting much benefit from it. So why do it?” he asks, somewhat rhetorically.
Returning to the forthcoming investment product — and after a little more prodding from me — he says to expect it to have the same transparency as the company’s core money exchange offering, with clear pricing and working as hard for customers as possible. In line with TransferWise’s existing modus operandi, I would also expect it to be financially sustainable, rather than being cross-subsidised in order to pull customers in or grab easy headlines, which is common practice amongst many investments and savings products.
Adds the TransferWise CEO: “We want to be clear what the problem is we’re solving. [It] comes back to giving people a choice of where and how they hold their balances. And that might give you a hint of the product that we’re building. I can say now that we’re not building an active trading product, that’s not the goal. Our customers aren’t asking how can they speculate on the markets. There are tools for this, and they are increasingly [getting] better for this purpose. What we’re solving with the investments product is going to be a much more passive way of choosing where your balances sit.”
Powered by WPeMatico
Fintech startups amass war chests for the economic downturn
Consumer fintech startups were massively successful in 2019, attracting millions of new users and disrupting traditional retail banks and financial services with mobile-first, consumer-oriented products. Despite the economic downturn in public markets and the massive wave of cuts at public and private companies in recent weeks, fintech startups have been raising a ton of money.
It feels like they’re all building a war chest to survive the economic winter as traditional banks continue to iterate so they can catch up and offer more user-friendly services. This is not the time to raise fees, slow down on product development or plans to acquire new users.
Nine-figure rounds
Back in January, I looked at challenger banks and their growth trajectories, but since then, they have managed to attract even more customers. According to the most recent figures:
- Nubank has 20 million customers;
- Revolut has 10 million users;
- Chime has 8 million users;
- N26 has 5 million users;
- Monzo has 4 million users.
And that’s without mentioning Starling Bank, Atom Bank, Bunq, Bnext, Paysend, etc. At some point, there will be as many challenger banks as non-challenger banks — perhaps we shouldn’t call them challenger banks anymore.
Beyond these startups, trading app Robinhood recently reached 13 million users, international payments startup TransferWise has 7 million customers and cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase has 30 million users.
Powered by WPeMatico
TransferWise partners with Alipay for international money transfers
TransferWise, the London-headquartered international money transfer service most recently valued by investors at $3.5 billion, has partnered with China’s Aliplay for international transfers.
The launch enables TransferWise’s now 7 million-plus users to be able to send Chinese yuan from 17 currencies to users of Alipay, which serves more than 1.2 billion people worldwide including via its local e-wallet partners.
Promising “instant” money transfers — under 20 seconds, apparently — TransferWise users simply need the recipient’s name and Alipay ID to initiate a money transfer. The money will then be sent to the bank account linked to the recipient’s Alipay profile.
It could be a potentially smart bit of business by TransferWise, which has sometimes struggled to secure the kind of partnerships that can accelerate its customer base and increase transaction volume. According to a 2019 report, the fintech is citing, China is projected to be one of the top remittance recipient countries in the world, with £54bn expected to be sent back home by Chinese expats and migrants living abroad.
“The partnership is a major expansion for TransferWise as it reaches a new, additional market of people managing their money via the Alipay platform,” says the company.
With that said, Alipay is the second meaningful partnership that TransferWise has announced in the last few months. In November, it joined forces with GoCardless, the London fintech that lets customers pay via recurring bank payments (known as Direct Debits in the U.K.). GoCardless is used by more than 50,000 businesses worldwide, spanning multinational corporations to SMBs, and the partnership sees its own FX functionality powered by TransferWise.
Powered by WPeMatico
Startup founders are building companies on WhatsApp
Lisa Enckell is a partner at Antler, an early-stage venture capital firm and startup generator.
In Asia, where I work as a partner at an early-stage VC firm, startups are regularly rolling out a minimum viable product (MVP) and then transacting on messaging apps.
Companies like shoe brand Portblue, AI e-commerce company Sorabel and Sama, an online recruitment platform for migrant workers, all started life using WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger to communicate with customers, onboard users and raise brand awareness.
For many years, WeChat has been the default app for daily life and business in China. It’s estimated that more than 30% of all internet traffic in China is through WeChat, and in 2017 they introduced “mini-programs,” where businesses could build apps inside WeChat. Now you never have to download any apps or go to a browser to access millions of services and businesses in WeChat.
We now see a similar trend in Southeast Asia. Here, WhatsApp is the dominant social platform and, while it has not built the same infrastructure for building apps, startups have found a way around that and now run many services on top of WhatsApp, validating with customers quickly and cheaply. These companies are not only mobile-first, but they are also WhatsApp-first.
Sampingan, an Antler portfolio company founded here in Singapore, provides an on-demand workforce to businesses in Indonesia. The first version of the product was on WhatsApp. The team sourced and managed more than 2,000 blue-collar workers in Indonesia who completed 25,000 jobs in the company’s first three months.
Lisa Enckell is a partner at Antler, an early-stage venture capital firm and startup generator.
Powered by WPeMatico
Dutch startup Meatable is developing lab-grown pork and has $10 million in new financing to do it
Meatable, the Dutch startup developing cruelty-free technologies for manufacturing cultured meat, is pivoting to pork production as a swine flu epidemic ravages one quarter of the world’s pork supply — and has raised $10 million in financing to support its new direction.
When the company unveiled its technology last year, it was one of several companies working on the production of meat derived from animal cells — a method of meat production that theoretically has a far smaller carbon emissions footprint and is better for the environment than traditional animal farming.
At the time, it was one of several companies — including Memphis Meats, Future Meat Technologies, Aleph Farms, HigherSteaks and many, many pursuing technologies — to bring cultured beef to market. Now, as pork prices rise globally, Meatable becomes one of the first companies to publicly shift gears and turn its attention to the other white meat.
That’s not the only way the company is setting itself apart from its peers in the market. Meatable is also an early claimant to a commercially viable, patented process for manufacturing meat cells without the need to kill an animal as a prerequisite for cell differentiation and growth.
Other companies have relied on fetal bovine serum or Chinese hamster ovaries to stimulate cell division and production, but Meatable says it has developed a process where it can sample tissue from an animal, revert that tissue to a pluripotent stem cell, then culture that cell sample into muscle and fat to produce the pork products that palates around the world crave.
“We know which DNA sequence is responsible for moving an early-stage cell to a muscle cell,” says Meatable chief executive Krijn De Nood.
To pursue its new path, the company has raised $7 million from a slew of angel and institutional investors and a $3 million grant from the European Commission . Angel investors include Taavet Hinrikus, the chief executive and co-founder of TransferWise, and Albert Wenger, a managing partner at the New York-based venture firm Union Square Ventures.
Meatable’s De Nood says that the new cash will be used to accelerate the development of its prototype. The small-scale bioreactor the company had initially targeted for development in 2021 will now be ready by 2020 and the company is hoping to have an industry-scale plant online manufacturing thousands of kilograms of meat by 2025, according to De Nood.
Industrial farming is responsible for between 14% and 18% of the greenhouse gas emissions linked to global climate change and Meatable argues that cultured (lab-grown) meat has the potential to use 96% less water and 99% less land than industrial farming. Powering facilities using renewable energy could further reduce emissions associated with meat production, according to Meatable.
Powered by WPeMatico
TransferWise’s debit card launches in Australia and New Zealand, with Singapore to follow
International money transfer startup TransferWise’s debit card is now available in Australia and New Zealand, with a Singapore launch expected by the end of this year as the company expands its presence in the Asia-Pacific region. TransferWise’s debit card, which features low, transparent fees and exchange rates, first launched in the United Kingdom and Europe last year before arriving in the United States in June. Since its launch, the company claims the debit card has been used for 15 million transactions.
Australian and New Zealand customers will have access to the TransferWise Platinum debit Mastercard (a business debit card is also available). Cards are linked to TransferWise accounts, which give holders bank account numbers and details in multiple countries, making it easier and cheaper to send and receive multiple currencies. The company says that over the past year, customers have deposited more than $10 billion in their accounts.
TransferWise’s debit cards allow users to spend in more than 40 currencies at real exchange rates. In an email, co-founder and CEO Kristo Käärmann told TechCrunch that TransferWise decided to launch its debit card in Australia and New Zealand because its business there has already been growing quickly. “In addition to responding to customer demand, launching the card in Australia and New Zealand was also driven by the fact that Aussies and Kiwis are being overcharged by banks for using their own money abroad. It is expensive to use debit, travel and credit cards for spending or withdrawals,” he said.
Käärmann added that “independent research conducted by Capital Economics showed that Australians lost $2.14 billion last year alone just for using their bank-issued card abroad. This is because banks and other providers charge transaction fees every time someone uses their card abroad, plus an inflated exchange rate. Similarly, in New Zealand, Kiwis lost $1 billion simply for using their card abroad.”
One of TransferWise’s competitive advantages is that unlike most legacy banking and money transfer services, its accounts and cards were designed from the start to be used internationally. “While there are existing multi-currency cards that exist in Australia and New Zealand, they are prohibitively expensive to use. For example in Australia, the TransferWise Platinum debit Mastercard is on average 11 times cheaper than most travel, debit, prepaid and credit cards,” Käärmann said.
TransferWise cards don’t have transaction fees or exchange rate markups and cardholders are allowed to withdraw up to AUD $350 every 30 days for free at any ATM in the world.
The company is currently talking to regulators in several Asian countries, a process that can take up to two years, Käärmann said. It was recently granted a remittance license in Malaysia, and plans to make its remittance service available there by the end of this year.
Powered by WPeMatico
TransferWise partners with Dutch challenger bank Bunq
TransferWise, the European fintech unicorn that enables low-cost international money transfer, has always had ambitions of being a platform in the truest sense. In addition to its direct-to-consumer app, the company offers an API for integration with other fintechs and banks, although it is fair to say that third-party integrations of this kind have been quite slow to come by. With that said, the number of third-party integrations appears to be picking up pace.
The latest bank to offer TransferWise functionality is Dutch challenger Bunq, which is enabling customers to make “fast, low-cost international payments” powered by TransferWise. Similar to other third-party integrations, the TransferWise feature sits within Bunq’s own app, giving users the “real exchange rate”, in addition to a small, transparent fee. At launch, 15 currencies are supported, and over the coming weeks more currencies will be added.
Back in June when TransferWise unveiled its partnership with fast-growing U.K. challenger bank Monzo, I asked co-founder and CEO Kristo Käärmann how different the conversation is with the challenger banks compared to longer established incumbents who historically have made a lot of revenue from foreign exchange fees. Perhaps being diplomatic, he argued that those conversations are quite similar, and usually centres on the fact that customers are already using TransferWise and that if a bank wants to put those customers first it makes sense to offer TransferWise functionality within its own app.
“When we announced the large French bank [BPCE Groupe], which is clearly an incumbent — a massive incumbent — they were thinking about their customer,” he told me at the time. “That maybe does feel a little bit rare for banks to think this way, but they figured that ‘if we are going to do this, then why don’t we do it properly’. They were actually fully driven by their users and thinking about how to get the best user experience”.
Cue a statement from Bunq founder and CEO Ali Nikna: “Our mission is to free our users from borders and barriers in traditional banking, such as hidden fees. We think TransferWise is a valuable addition to solidify that mission. This is the next big step in bringing freedom to the traditional banking industry”.
Meanwhile, the Bunq tie-in is TransferWise’s fifth bank partnership. In addition to Monzo, and upcoming integration with France’s BPCE, the international money transfer service has partnered with Germany’s N26, and Estonia’s LHV. However, a previously announced partnership with the U.K.’s Starling Bank never materialised and has since been disbanded.
Powered by WPeMatico