Welcome to Scayl and to our blog! My name is Medjit and I’m the CEO and co-founder of Scayl. This blog will be focused on primarily my and Scayl’s insights about Fintech lending in general and financing loan origination in particular. I’ll try to give you the latest news and trends of the lending market, but also share some about what’s going on at the company and what life as a startup founder really is.
Before we get into the details, what is Scayl?
If I met you for the first time in a bar and you asked me what the company I co-founded does I’d probably say; “Banks lend money to us, we lend it to Fintechs and finally, Fintechs lend it to small businesses or consumers”.
On the contrary, if you’re an experienced credit investor or a bank professional I’d say; “We allocate and deploy capital through our proprietary technology platform into a down-side protected and well-diversified portfolio of European credit assets originated by Fintechs and other alternative lenders”.
Like all tech start-ups, you can make the business sound as simple or complex as you want.
The truth is probably somewhere in the middle. In short, we aggregate loan portfolios (or loan books) by connecting multiple Fintech lenders to our technical platform using APIs, the loans then get funded by our Financing Partners. This means that several Fintechs share the same Financing Partner instead of individually trying to secure funding for their loan books.
As with everything, strength is in numbers, the larger the order, the more likely you are to get a discount. That’s where we come in, we can provide cheaper sources of funding to Fintechs if they join the Scayl platform. But not only that, we’re faster to provide funding, think a couple of weeks instead of months or quarters. We also automate the boring and tedious tasks of reporting, help our customers become better lenders by dynamic and helpful covenants, and so on – you could call it Capital Markets-as-a-Service.
So why start Scayl?
Before venturing out into the Private Credit space, I was a pre-Seed to Series A VC-investor focusing on Fintech. Being used to quick decision making and trying to keep up with the speed startups move at I was completely shocked about what I encountered on the “debt side”.
That’s when things started to fall into place, the Private Credit market had taken their old-school financial product and ancient processes, and frankly just applied it to a market segment where it doesn’t belong.
We had agreed a term sheet with a Fintech lender in Spain and were about to draft up the loan documentation. Naïve as I was, I was expecting a swift process, more or less standard clauses as in the case of VC investments where documents are drafted in a day or two. I couldn’t have been more wrong…
Lawyers came back 2-3 weeks later and shared over 10 documents. In total, 600 pages and an invoice of over €100k. This can’t be right? Our commitment was only €10m…?
I asked my colleague if there’s a mistake, and he answered; “This is how it’s always been done”. That’s when things started to fall into place, the Private Credit market had taken their old-school financial product and ancient processes, and frankly just applied it to a market segment where it doesn’t belong.
The cardinal sin of start-ups, horrible product-market-fit. But it was working? Or was it…? And if so, for whom…? This is the beginning of a journey that became Scayl.