Lending

Venture Leaders Fintech Interview: Meet Ben James of Tradeplus24

Tradeplus24 is on the Venture Leaders Fintech team heading to New York in September. The startup’s automated platform brings structured lending within reach of SMEs needing more funding than is usually available at their scale, thanks to reduced costs.

This is the 9th part of the Fintech Startup Interview serial powered by Venturelab.

Venturelab brings this autumn 10 Swiss Fintech Startups to New York.

Ben James

Who are you, and what’s your big idea?

Tradeplus24 has a founding team of four, bringing diverse experience at executive level in banking and insurance from companies such as GE, ABB, Credit Suisse, UBS and Marsh.

At amounts under CHF 250,000 credit lines are typically unsecured and available from many sources. But above this level there becomes a need to provide security. This is hard for smaller firms, which usually don’t have un-leveraged real estate or other assets.

Tradeplus24 offers structured secured lending solutions to SMEs andmid-market companies that would normally not be able to access such products,owing to their low ticket size (CHF 250,000-CHF 10million). Our competitive advantage is that we run our securitisation solution with an automated low-touch system, thereby heavily reducing costs for structuring and monitoring.

Unlike manyfintechs, we are focused on enabling banks, not working against them, as with our solution, the existing market players can offer their customers attractive solutions that would have not been financially viable before.

What is pushing you towards international expansion?

A natural need for our product. Banks across the world face the same cost issues when dealing with small tickets, and in the main have limited ability to evaluate receivables risk, meaning they cannot rely on it as security.

What do you see as the greatest obstacle to expansion into the global market?

Finding the right bank partner, one that looks at fintech as an enabling partner to move faster and leaner, not as competition.

What attracts you to New York as a business development destination?

The US in general is an attractive market, but also a very diverse one.Having an on-the-ground partner who can help us traverse that is critical to entering the market. New York is a natural hub for these type of partners.

How is the Venture Leaders program beneficial for your startup?

Venture Leaders offers us a first-class,world-recognised program to develop our international business. It also gives us access to experts in the field, previous alumni and many co-leaders in the program.

Source: https://www.venturelab.ch/