Your Tech Story

finance

azimo

Azimo: Unveiling the experience of Faster and Cheaper Fund Transfers Across the World!

Leave a Comment / start-up, Tech Story / By

In the present scenario, digitization mapping all the sectors. In fact, it changed every aspect of life. Thus, financial services also adapted these changes to stand in today’s world. Azimo is one of the financial start-ups that provide services for digital international money transfer. However, the company made it possible to stand out amongst tough competitors like Fintech and WorldRemit. Also, the company enables simple, fast, and secure way to transfer money globally. In fact, Azimo’s service is cost-effective and available in 125+ countries around the world. Michael Kent, Marta Krupinska, Ricky Knox, and Marek Wawro establish it in 2012. Since then the company delivering the best financial service.

Azimo- New way of financial service

Michael Kent, Marta Krupinska, Ricky Knox, and Marek Wawro started the new era of financial service with Azimo establishment in 2012. In a short period, Azimo enabled a faster and safer way of online money transfer. However, it uses technology to democratize financial services. So that everyone has access to the service, no matter wherever it is. Its headquarters is located in London, UK. Also, the company has offices in Poland.

Vision and Mission of the company

The vision of the company is to democratize financial services so that it is affordable and available to all. While providing a better way to share money around the world is the mission of the company. As well, improving the lives of millions of people with its best financial service is also the mission of Azimo. With Azimo, the user can receive or send money to any bank. However, to speed up the process they can use social media accounts along with a debit card or bank account. So, it is possible to send money to over 125 countries via PC or mobile using a social media account.

How Azimo works?

Azimo has partners in around 195 plus countries. Also, they work with the world’s largest payment companies. To achieve the motto to enable safe money transfer, FCA and HMRC regulate the Azimo’s transactions. However, to speed up the transactions it holds funds in most currencies around the world. So that Azimo users can transfer funds instantly to over 60 countries. Furthermore, the company acquired half a million users and offers 270,000+ cash pick-up locations on the earth. Besides, the company often updates its app with new features to offer the best user experience.

Founders of Azimo

Michael Kent

He is the co-founder as well as CEO of Azimo. Michael is also the founder of a small world financial services group. This is a well-known European money provider. However, he is an experienced FinTech entrepreneur, an expert in deal-making and business transformation.

Education and Career

From 1994 to 1997, he attended Cambridge University to study Land Economy. After that, he studied an MBA at INSEAD.

Michael is the founder of Tandem Bank where he also served for 5 years. Furthermore, he is one of the partners at Hexagon Partners in the last 15 years. Hexagon partner is a well-known equity investment company. Also, he is an investor as well as an advisor at Curve ltd and Complies advantage. Presently, Michael is CEO at Azimo.

Marta Krupinska

Marta is a tech entrepreneur and diversity advocate. She named in the list of Forbes in 30Under30 in 2016. Also, she was on the list of London’s Most Influential People 2017 and 2018 by Evening Standard. In 2018, Krupinska honored as Forbes top 60 Female Tech Executives globally.

Presently, she is working at GovTech. Krupinska helped in the establishment of Azimo and FreeUp. Apart from that, Marta is Head of Google for Startups UK.

Education

She attended Columbia University for an executive development program. Also, she attended the center for Leadership for a degree in Leadership Academy for Poland. Marta pursued MA in psychology from Jagiellonian University, where she also studied Organisational psychology.

Ricky Knox

He is a serial entrepreneur and has built miscellaneous successful businesses. Ricky has built five technology disruptors. Especially in telecoms and fintech. Also, he co-founded Tandem and Azimo. In 2003, he also co-founded the GSM system. However, he is the director of the Small World Financial Services Group. At Azimo, he is serving as a Non-Executive Director. Apart from that, Knox is also one of the Managing Partners at Hexagon Partners.

He attended INSEAD for MBA.

Marek Wawro

He is the co-founder of Azimo. Presently, he is serving as a CTO at Future Finance. Also, work as Google Launchpad Mentor. Marek is an experienced technical leader having a strong background in Requirements Engineering as well as Software Architecture. Wawro studied at the University of the West of England.

Successes of the Azimo

The company enables innovative money transfer service which is affordable and available to all. After one year of formation, the company had raised 31 million USD in funding from several investors. Includes, Greycroft, Frog capital, Quona capital, etc. Also, to explore the service in Asia, Japanese company Rakuten showed interest and invested in Azimo.

Awards and recognition of the company

In 2018, Azimo won the Remittances award at United Nations. Also, it marked the name in Britain’s 100 private companies with the fastest-growing sales. Azimo also honored as the Best Global Money Transfer Company in 2017. It also named the Fastest Growing Companies in the UK in the same year. Further, it honored as a Best Remittance Service to Africa in 2016. As well, awarded for Innovation on money transfers. The company also became Judge’s Overall Favourite for Ease of Use and Adoption in financial service. However, the company ranked first in the list of Top 10 money-saving apps.

LoanSnap

LOANSNAP- THE SMART LOAN SYSTEM FOR EVERY AMERICAN

Leave a Comment / Tech Story / By

Both the social and economic status of a nation is equally important for the growth of a country. There will always be people from different financial categories, but the entire nation’s well-being is a big responsibility. The necessities are everyone’s right. Moreover, the loaning system has become very easier and simpler these days. So, whenever you are ready with your plan, there’s one or the other company arriving at your doorsteps with lucrative offers. But, most of the time the interest is too high and things become complicated. In these situations, we feel like having a customized deal with a company. Wouldn’t that be great to have a smart loan agreement for yourself keeping in mind your financial and another status? LoanSnap, a loan company founded in 2017 provides you with loans that are exceptionally made for you. Karl Jacob and Allan Carroll founded the company to improve the financial well-being of every American start-up. LoanSnap has a very strong founding team which turned the start-up to a huge success in three years.

About the Founders

Karl Jacob graduated from high school in 1986 and then went to the University of Southern California. He acquired his bachelor’s degree in computer science and graduated in 1992. Karl had an ample of experience before founding LoanSnap. He did a summer internship at Apple during his graduation.

In 1991, Karl joined Sun Microsystems as a manager and continued for two years. Apart from LoanSnap, he also founded Dimension X, Wallop, Coveroo, and Hangtime Inc. He is also a former Microsoft employee and served as the CEO at companies like Ingenio, Keen, Cloudmark. Karl is also a board member at Mayvenn and currently serves as the CEO of LoanSnap.

Allan went to Brigham Young University and studied computer engineering. He also went to the University of Washington and completed his master’s in computer science as well. Allan was an intern at Microsoft for four months.

Allan co-founded Familylink.com which came under the acquisition of Ancestry.com in 2011. He has also founded Piick and Hangtime Inc. Before co-founding LoanSnap he was an Advisor at VidAngel. He is currently the CEO of the company, LoanSnap.

The Aim

Both Karl and Allan are from a computer science background. They wanted to implement some strategies from their field that would help improve the financial condition of America. Karl noticed that most of the Americans lost money as they didn’t move their credit card debt at a high-interest rate. In 2017, this happened to many Americans resulting in a loss of $58 million.

This bewildered Karl and he realized Americans can’t visualize their financial condition and thus fail to plan accordingly. So, what can be better than someone analyzing the financial condition taking into account the American financial system?

Karl decided to make use of AI and ML and thus launching a tool to help Americans make better financial decisions and make them debt-free.

The Beginning

The co-founders realized that the loan market was running only on the basis of who can bring customers thereby providing loans at the lowest interest. The loan officers were only interested in this part and hence there was neither security nor proper future planning for the customers. This led them to establish LoanSnap and improve the loan market and make it more productive and efficient.

Funding and Investors

This AI-driven start-up raised $8 million in July 2018. The company also launched a service for military personnel in the same year. This was a huge step for LoanSnap as they started expanding their options and giving more than just conventional mortgages. Since then LoanSnap has received enormous positive feedback from its customers and also from many business tycoons. In 2018, LoanSnap also acquired Costa Mesa, a California-based start-up.

In January 2019, the company raised another $4.7 million from major investors such as Thomvest Ventures, Baseline Ventures, Branson’s Virgin Group, OVO Fund, Core Innovation Partners, and many more. After this funding round, the total capital raised by the company summed up to $17 million.

Success

Apart from the company making a lump sum amount of profit, it is highly dedicated toward making Americans take better decisions. So, it is not just a random loan company working at its best interest but also a community thinking about the well-being of its nation. They proved how technology can revolutionize every single product to a helpful asset in life.

Capital One logo

Richard Dana Fairbank : The Founder of One of the Largest Banks in the U.S.

Leave a Comment / Founder, start-up, Story, Tech Story / By

One of the most influential and financially predominant individual with quality of great leadership is what defines Richard Dana Fairbank. Banking business can make a profit like a spreading wildfire, and that is how Fairbank turned the wheel of his life.

Richard Fairbank, a billionaire in addition to the successful American businessmen, is the founder and owner of the bank holding company, Capital One Financial Corporation. He founded the company in 1994, along with Nigel Morris, an English businessman. Fairbank’s new strategies for credit models changed the entire face of the banking industry, thus, entering into a new era of entrepreneurship.

Education

Fairbank was born in 18th September 1950. In 1972, he graduated from Stanford University with a bachelor’s degree in economics. Later, in 1981, he completed his MBA from Stanford Graduate School of Business. Almost 12 years after founding Capital One, he received an award on excellent leadership from his university.

Career Before Capital One Happened

Before founding Capital One, Fairbank worked in a few different companies. He worked as a partner and consultant in Strategic Planning Associates (1985-1990), followed by the head of the credit card unit in Signet-Banking Corporation (1990-1994).

Richard Dana Fairbank
Image Source: knownetworth.com

It was in the 1980s when Fairbank met Morris in a consulting firm, their mutual workplace. Since then, the idea of implementing new technologies to amend credit card plans hovered over their minds. Both Fairbank and Morris wanted to change the entire idea of charging an annual fee for credit cards holders, replacing it with different schemes for a different segment of the population. This is where they needed the contribution of information technology to manipulate data of consumers and their purchase list.

With the help of data management software, they were able to divide the entire population of credit card users into different categories, followed by offering them different plans and offers. They pitched Oracle Corporation for the job of database management, and they agreed to the new strategy of the company. It was due to this credit card model, both of them got hired by Signet-Banking Corp, in 1990.

Soon after the two economists joined Signet, the bank offered around three hundred different credit plans to its customers, charging the interest rate according to the divided categories. This was a breakthrough for both of them, but this was just the beginning. Fairbank along with Morris also developed a new strategy of transferring money from one credit card to another, with a relatively much lower rate of interest. This attracted quite a robust number of new customers, hiking the profit to an unexpected level.

And, in 27th July 1994, Signet announced the credit card division split-off, renaming it as Capital One. Richard Dana Fairbank was made the CEO of the company, and currently, it is the seventh-largest U.S commercial bank by assets.

The success of Capital One

The success of Capital One became so enormous that it superseded the sale and profit of Signet, its parent company. Fairbank made Capital One look like a massive credit card business in partnership with a bank rather than a spun-off segment of a banking business.

By 1995, Capital One completely became an independent business whereas Signet came under the acquisition of First Union Corporation. Within a single year of its establishment, Capital One made a 25% increase in the net income of the company, making it to the list of top 10 credit card issuers in the U.S.

Capital One is an ideal banking company, where excellent business models are backed up by strong database manipulating software. The company first analyses the needs of a customer and then build credit card plans accordingly.

After many years of successful business, during early 2000, people started questioning about the algorithms used by Capital One to access information about customers, and hence, the stock prices dropped. Though ultimately nothing risky was found in the algorithm, Fairbank and Morris saw it as a future threat to the company and decided to form an executive board to make decisions for the company.

Achievements of Fairbank

Richard Dana Fairbank was honoured with the award of Washingtonian’s “Business Leader of the Year” and Credit Card Management’s “Entrepreneur of the Year”. He is also listed among the top ten Bank CEOs, who became a billionaire and have achieved many other things.

Personal Life

Fairbank is married to Chris Fairbank, and they have eight children. They are settled in Virginia.

Robinhood

Robinhood : The Platform that is Democratizing American Financial System

Leave a Comment / Founder, Product, start-up, Story, Tech Story / By

Stock exchange and cryptocurrencies, both have proved to be the most beneficial financial industries, where people can invest and earn. But, it has always been tough for people to understand the whole process and make their investment wisely. Using some of the eCommerce platforms costs a big amount, and most of the time does not help the way it should do. This had always been the pain point, and the 2008 financial crisis also became the reasons for the two U.S. based immigrants, Vladimir Tenev and Baiju Bhatt, to work on a new platform that would allow users to buy and sell shares free of charge. The platform that they created is Robinhood.

Early Life

Vladimir Tenev was born in Bulgaria, in 1987. At the time, his father was studying at the University of Delaware, the U.S. After one year, when Tenev was four, he moved to the U.S. to live with his parents. He spent most of his childhood in Virginia, and later, moved to the Bay Area. The family was quite drawn towards studies, and Tenev himself loved to study maths and science.

In 2004, Tenev joined Stanford University, where he met his future co-founder Baiju Bhatt. Both had opted for physics and maths as their degree’s majors. Bhatt is also an immigrant from India. The two shared a common interest, i.e. maths, that helped in building the bond between the two, stronger.

Robinhood founders
Image Source: glassdoor.co.in

After graduating from the Standford University, Bhatt joined a finance firm as his first job in San Fransisco, whereas Tenev joined UCLA to complete a PhD in Mathematics. While working at the financial firm, Bhatt realized that there was a great business opportunity in hedge funds.

Entering into Entrepreneurship & Founding Robinhood

So the two started their first venture, Chronos Research, in 2011 and got a small apartment in San Fransisco, where they started working on their project. The business they started offered tools for hedge funds and banks to build automated trading strategies. While working for their first joint venture, the famous 2008 financial crisis took place. The Lehman Brothers went under, and the market got collapsed.

The financial crisis inspired the two to move to New York City and find a better solution for share market trading. Their joint venture was the first step for their new startup Robinhood. Thus, they brought their existing technology to the retail brokerage market and started Robinhood in 2013.

Being the Millenials, they knew that smartphones will play the prime role for their new ventures, so they worked on different layouts of a mobile app for the platform, and sent it for the regulatory approvals. Before the app, they launched their website, that would do the same work as the app. They wrote “commission-free trading, stop paying up to $10 per trade” on the front page of the app, and worked on a waitlist, that would show people their position among other traders.

The Biggest Turning Point

The waitlist got Robinhood a mention in the Hacker News, that too at third after news on China moon mission and Google in a single day. The specifying in Hacker News got the company its first maximum traffic. After one day, Robinhood had its press lunch, following which, the platform got 10,000 signups, and in the next week, the signup reached 50,000. The company offered free membership to the users for their sign-ups. It only charged the users with a monthly fee instead of charging a particular fee on every single transaction.

The next task was to get the investors on board. The company raised $3 million in its seed round, led by Index, Google Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz, after pitching their startup in front of about 75 investors. Even before the company launched an official app, it had gained over 1 million signups, in the first year of its launch. After a year and a half, the company launched its app in March 2015. The Robinhood app offered the easiest interface for the users, such that it got most of the users under the age of 35.

The app has helped people to recover 90 per cent of their investment in the trade market, which is impossible with the traditional method. By the beginning of 2017, the platform had carried out the transactions of over $30 billion. In April the same year, the company raised another $110 million through a funding round led by DST Globa that made the company value at $1.3 billion.

The next year, on January 25th the company started to trade in cryptocurrency and announced a commission-free waitlist for the users from California, Massachusetts, Missouri, and Montana. By the end of the day, the waitlist had over 1,250,000 names registered. In May 2018, Robinhood raised $363 million Series D financing round led by DST Global and valued at $5.6 billion.

The Company Today

The company partnered with the Ohio-based Sutton Bank, such that to provide its users with checking and savings accounts as well as debit cards. The company raised an additional $200 million in a round of funding in 2019, that has led the company to value between in the $7 billion to $10 billion.

The company is registered with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and headquartered in Menlo Park, California. Before 2019, the company’s primary source of revenue was from payment for order flow, but now, the source of revenue has been changed. The company earns its revenue from the interest earned on customers’ cash balances and margin lending.

Currently, the two co-founders are serving the company as the co-CEOs. Tenev was named among ‘30 Under 30’ in 2016, by Forbes. Robinhood became the first financial app to receive an Apple Design Award and was also listed among the top US FinTech startups of 2015 and various other rankings.

habito

Daniel Hegarty : The Founder of Habito, UK’s Digital Mortgage Broker

Leave a Comment / Founder, start-up, Story, Tech Story / By

Getting a lovely and comfortable house to live is still a dream for many, and it will continue to be one of the most required things for every person living. First, finding a house that goes with one’s requirements, and then buying that specific house is a quite a complicated task, as it takes a lot of efforts from finding the house, meeting the broker, finalising the price, and not to forget the tedious paperwork that everyone has to go through. To solve this very problem, a UK based musician, Daniel Hegarty, founded Habito- an online mortgage broker service.

Hegarty is a native of London, who left school at the age of sixteen to join a rock band as a guitarist. Though he was working locally with the band and was attending school alongside, after he became more involved in music, he got suspended by the school authorities for low attendance. His band name was Serum, and while touring with the band, he started earning good money. The band got signed by a record label, and his weekly earning reached £100.

Hegarty moved to LA, where he started playing with live bands. After working for over ten years with different artists, he started losing interest in the same kind of job. He returned to the UK in 2007 and started looking for a job other than in the music industry. He asked one of his friends about jobs in the UK, and she introduced him to the team of Wonga, an online loans lenders.

Habito Founder Daniel Hegarty-1
Image Source: businessinsider.in

The company was small and had been the centre of criticism for many reasons. But Hegarty liked his job, as he was in the designing, and the marketing team, at the company. In fact, while working with Wongo, he found out that there was something other than music that he could do well. To know the financial field, and also get better in web designing, he started taking online courses from Standford University and involved himself in mathematics. Hegarty continued to work with the firm for five years, and despite a lot of criticism, in 2013, the company had over 1000 employees.

After finding the job, it was the time to get that dream house that Hegarty and his wife always wanted. After looking for a few properties, the two finalised a house. But then, buying the house has never been so easy. The two had to go through a lot of paperwork filled with complex jargons. The legal work was going all wrong as the broker made the mistake with Hegarty’s wife’s name twice in the papers. The mistake by their broker lead them losing the house, and the couple was on the roads.

The thought of losing a house because of the mistake of the broker disgusted him, and he wanted to find out a better way to buy a house. This time, he was not ready to contact with a careless broker and lose the deal again.

So Hegarty decided to try his own hands in the same field. He started studying more about the mortgage and home loans. He even met many brokers and found out that these brokers always neglected the buyers. The only thing mattered to them was money. People had to waste a lot of their time and money to get a house for them. Buying even a small was like a nightmare for every person.

Hegarty finally founded Habito in January 2015 as a fee-free online mortgage broker with the help of investors Toby Coppel and Meyer Malka. In a year of its launch, the company was analysing over 60 applicants in seconds. The company launched a mortgage search and comparison service in April 2016 adjoining with over 70 mortgage lenders.

By September 2017, the company had lent £250m to 50,000 borrowers, and by November 2018, over 150,000 people had used the company’s website to get mortgage advice and applications. Since the inception of Habito, it has been growing with a rate of 20 per cent every year. Today, the number of employees at Habito has raised from 4 people to 160 people.

The company has created the world’s first artificially intelligent Digital Mortgage Adviser (DMA) for regulated mortgage advice. That means the users get their advice from the bots and unless necessary, there no human interaction with the user. Though every employee of the company plays the role of customer support every in every two weeks to provide personalised solutions to the customers.

Due to the robot-assistance, the company has faced a lot of criticism, but the ability to provide a customer with a solution within 8-10 days has made it the most efficient mortgage advice platform, whereas with the normal brokers the application process takes minimum 20 days.

The unusual idea of online mortgage advice and application processing has helped the company raise a total of £8.2 million in capital money from investors, like TransferWise CEO Taavet Hinrikus, Funding Circle CEO Samir Desai, and Yuri Milner of DST Global, etc., in just four years.

The most basic reason for the success of the Habito is that the people in the UK wanted a service that could help them with the difficult process of finding the right house at the right price, without wasting much time, and without the risk of losing the deal. And, this is what Habito is providing to them.

Don Valentine : The Legendary Venture Capitalist of the Silicon Valley

Founder, start-up, Story, Tech Story / By

A start-up always is an unpredictable and a doubtful move for any of the founders as well as its investors. But taking risks is the key to innovations. To attract the investors the founders must have a convincing idea and a self-belief so that the investors can also trust them. Donald T. Valentine is one of the biggest venture capitalists in Silicon Valley, and the founder of Sequoia Capital, who has been the investor for various new ideas, resulting in the foundation of many famous multi-billion companies. According to Don, the start-ups are compelling, as the survival is the prime motivation for the people who are behind it.

Early Life

Donald T. Valentine spent his childhood in the suburbs of New York. He was born on 26 June 1932, in Yonkers, New York. His father was a minor official in labour unions in the Teamsters and worked all his life to earn his living. Donald joined a nearby Catholic school at the Fordham University, and himself is a Catholic. After completing the school, he entered the same university to pursue an undergraduate degree in Arts.

Founding Sequoia

In the early 50’s, Don got a chance to work for the military and was moved to California for some time. There he came to know the very first time that there are also some places in the world, where it did not snow. He liked the fact so much that he decided to move to such a place. After he was back in New York, he joined the Sylvania Electric, where he worked at various different projects. The company was the manufacturer of the cathode-ray tubes, semiconductor, and the vacuum tubes. Just after some time of working in the company, he was promoted to the sales engineering department and was transferred to California, the place, where he always intended to be.

Don Valentine
Image Source: alchetron.com

In California, Valentine was introduced to a bigger industry and was convinced that there is much more than vacuum tubes, and the future is all about the semiconductor. In 1959, he joined the start-up company, Fairchild Semiconductor, in Los Angeles, as one of the first West Coast salesmen of the company. After working in Fairchild for seven years, he left the company and subsequently, switched between almost ten other companies, before joining the National Semiconductor, as the senior sales and marketing executive, in 1967.

Valentine founded a venture capital firm Sequoia Capital, in 1972. The company was focussed on the investments to small, risky tech companies. The firm’s first investment was to the startup company Atari (1975). Sequoia has financed probably six hundred different companies, including LSI Logic, Oracle Corporation, Cisco, Electronic Arts, Google, YouTube, etc.

Don has served as a member of the boards of dozens of those companies, for a long time. Also, Sequoia was one of the original investors of Apple Computer. Valentine met Steve Jobs when he was a line engineer at Atari and financed Apple Inc., with $150,000 as its capital investment, in 1978. He is the former Chairman of NetApp and Traiana. He was featured in the 2011’s documentary film Something Ventured. He has also been called the “grandfather of Silicon Valley venture capital”.