The four-year-old startup operates in the UK, Germany, Spain and Poland and increased its lending to small businesses by more than 250 per cent year-on-year.
The Prime Minister is throwing his weight behind a new fintech manifesto [...] and is holding a roundtable in Indonesia to coincide with the manifesto's release. The roundtable features representatives from top British firms like [...] online business loan provider iwoca.
iwoca Founder and Chief Executive Officer Christoph Rieche discusses providing funding for small businesses in the U.K.
iwoca is a credit facility for small businesses, which has just partnered with Alibaba […] Christoph Rieche, CEO, discusses further.
The Chinese ecommerce company is partnering iwoca, set up in 2012 by two former investment bankers and backed by venture capital.
Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba […] is working with two British lending startups to offer financing to U.K. companies […] iwoca – which stands for instant working capital – expects to lend £100 million to businesses through the Alibaba partnership.
iwoca was featured on BBC Radio 4's Money Box Live with Emma Jones (Enterprise Nation) recommending it as a great website offering an alternative to the banks. The discussion starts 01:35 into the programme.
Early this week, I had the absolute pleasure of speaking with Christoph Rieche, the CEO and co-founder of iwoca, a start-up offering fast-growing ecommerce businesses access to the working capital needed to invest in stock, staff, infrastructure or technology.
The startup, which is based in London, says it will use its latest funding to scale up its UK operations and expand into Europe.
Coupled with the rise of social networking, technological changes are allowing 'fintech' entrepreneurs to cut out banks entirely. iwoca, for example, analyses all of the data available from marketplaces such as eBay and Amazon, and is able to determine whether an applicant is eligible for a loan or not within five minutes.
iwoca [...] won the attention and crucial votes of delegates at Wired's inaugural financial conference after pitching its business "Dragons' Den-style" to attendees, alongside over 20 competing startups.
Is it time for the Government to stand back and let the market open up to more competition and a greater array of alternative sources of finance?
