How to Fund your Business? Video Interview with Paul Surtees Founder of Capitalise.com.
What do you need to do to fund your business and get the best possible capital and trade finance for your SME or StartUp? Do you feel prepared to use an alternative finance lender or business finance provider?
OpenBusinessCouncil interviewed Paul Surtees, who is, in partnership with with Ollie Maitland, the Managing Director and Co-Founder of Capitalise.com. The interview is a must for companies looking for funding, business finance, finance loans and other alternative finance solutions. In the interview, Paul Surtees offers a fantastic overview of the UK business finance market and gives the viewer excellent tips and advice on ways to finance SMEs and startups.
Paul Surtees is a dynamic thought leader and entrepreneur that is innovating and disrupting the business finance digital landscape with his innovative platform capitalise.com. With over 15 years banking and high profile finance experience, Surtees served as executive director on the Goldman Sachs interest rate trading floor and was also a senior manager in BNP Paribas. He started Capitalise to help SMEs gain easy access to lenders. In this insightful video interview we go through his journey – from employee, to employee/investor, from investor to founder.
Capitalise.com is a new fintech alternative finance platform that has the vision to unlock the loan supply for UK businesses. Created with the notion that 94% of businesses do not know there are independent and alternative financing available beyond the high street, the company brings technology and brokerage solutions to SMEs and startups looking to get trade finance or alternative funding alternatives. The company is conscious that there is a huge amount of capital waiting to be deployed into UK businesses but more often than not, a SME does not meet the right lender for its stage in life as it has issues with getting into debt or sometimes just thinks it can not make it.
The solution that Capitalise.com brings is to look at the best solutions that will match a given business with an appropriate alternative finance / lender provider.
Capitalise.com offers solid solutions / partnerships with high street banks, challengers, independents and alternative lenders, to the users of their platform. These players / alternative finance lenders offer their customised variety of funding products to ensure that a company using the platforms find the most suitable solution for its business. The company has a passionate team of people based in London, UK. The staff has solid personal profiles with background in finance and technology. It is a regulated company by the FCA.
The SME and startup world has still a lot to learn from the alternative finance ecosystem, as fintech solutions are rising as we speak. This will create new ways to grow businesses and find new solutions, products and services.
Capitalise.com is an excellent digital and business finance platform technology that tries to answer SMEs.
OpenBusinessCouncil’s questions to Paul Surtees:
1. Can you tell us about personal background and education?
2. Can you tell us about your trading background in Goldman Sachs trading floor and in BNP Paribas?
3. How did you shift from corporate finance and trading in big financial players to the entrepreneurial world?
4. Why Capitalise – what are your vision and goals?
5. What differentiates Capitalise from other SME lender platforms; having in consideration that there are over 54 alternative lenders out there?
6. What are your views about the SME industry – landscape in UK and how can SMEs be better served?
7. How can SMEs use and benefit from Capitalise platform? This bearing in mind that cashflow position is critical for any healthy business. That statistics disclose that around 90% of businesses, SMEs, do not know there are independent and alternative financing available beyond the high street conventional banks and lenders. Can you elaborate on this? smes statistics – matchmaking – 7 days remaining – 200 suppliers – big 4 or 5 banks represent huge part of that flow.
8. What specific advice do you give to SMEs and startups when looking for lending and finance?
9. What is the most important for a SME or startup when considering a loan or business finance? how do you have your house in order?
10. You have been working in big financial and banking organisations. Now that you are building a new online platform what is the advice you give to new entrepreneurs, startups and SMEs regarding money management and their finances?
11. How do you see the Financial industry with the growing of Fintech solutions and alternative finance solutions;
12. How do you see the relation between big banks / corporation and fintech lending platforms?
13. What are the costs for lending what advice, regulation / gaps what is coming to SME lending providers? Bearing in mind that there are about 130 application siting close to FCA companies waiting for regulation.
14. What are the regulation / gaps, what is coming to SME lending providers.
15. Last question: how to use Capitalise.com – step by step and the importance of behaviour analytics?
Maria Fonseca is the Editor and Infographic Artist for IntelligentHQ. She is also a thought leader writing about social innovation, sharing economy, social business, and the commons. Aside her work for IntelligentHQ, Maria Fonseca is a visual artist and filmmaker that has exhibited widely in international events such as Manifesta 5, Sao Paulo Biennial, Photo Espana, Moderna Museet in Stockholm, Joshibi University and many others. She concluded her PhD on essayistic filmmaking , taken at University of Westminster in London and is preparing her post doc that will explore the links between creativity and the sharing economy.