19th August 2021
Since launching our Reboot Britain campaign 9 months ago, we’ve received £2.3m in pledges towards our £10m target, from more than 300 investors into our convertible investment. We are in continuing discussions with multiple institutions and investors to ensure we will achieve our target. During this time we’ve not held back and have continued to focus on growing and developing the business for our investor community.
Last year posed a significant challenge for many businesses, and for tactical reasons we put a pause on listing any new businesses on our platform. During this period we decided to focus our energies on delivering several mission-critical projects - of which the benefits are now being realised for both our investors and lenders. We recommenced listing new businesses under a new, improved credit policy in January 2021, and in the first half of the year, we successfully brought the transaction volume back to around £700k per month with an on-average 20% month on month growth.
As well as bringing revenues back up towards pre-COVID levels, we’ve been making significant improvements to the platform. Later this year we’ll be launching a new website as part of our Reboot Britain campaign designed to significantly improve your investing experience.
Since launching the campaign we’ve been delivering the following projects.
- A new & improved platform (coming soon!)
We’ve redesigned the desktop version of the platform end-to-end. We aim to get the new desktop application available later in the year which will give you access to a great new investing experience and prepare us for launch in other Commonwealth markets. As part of our exclusive investor reward, we’ll be providing Reboot Britain investors early access to this platform and providing the opportunity for you to give feedback on the new approach which moves us towards a slicker online banking style approach to saving and investing.
- Compliance
We’ve undergone extensive redevelopment and enhancement of all our compliance procedures and controls, thus allowing us to operate a more streamlined and robust platform. These additional checks and controls will help protect you, your investments and enable the platform to scale more securely and quickly.
- Credit policy
We’ve audited all historical loans and captured learnings and from these allowing us to create a new, improved version of our credit policy. This will work to further protect and maximise your earnings while enabling us to better assess and list businesses that are growing post-pandemic. This policy also includes our new approach to credit risk grading.
- Proven financial model
Our revenue levels are recovering smoothly and we are working on a path to profitability. Based on our financial forecasts we aim to be listing around 37 deals per month and facilitating £2.6m in monthly investments by the second quarter of next year. These forecasts are based on the capital we’ve raised so far with the Reboot Britain campaign. This can of course be increased depending on how quickly we achieve the Reboot Britain £10m target.
- An enhanced Exchange
We have worked hard to develop an enhanced version of the Exchange that puts further protections in place for you. Crucially, it still gives you the control to select the price at which you want to list your investments on the Exchange, with floor and ceiling price mechanisms. As it stands, we are in the final testing stages before allowing trading to commence.
- Loan monitoring
As part of the Exchange, we’ve implemented a loan monitoring mechanism that allows us to carefully monitor all businesses who have active loans on the platform. This helps ensure that distressed loans are not listed on the Exchange and also acts as an early warning to us. If businesses start to struggle, we’re made aware very quickly and can take action to get them back on track.
- Recovery audit
We have reviewed our recovery process and all distressed loans that are undergoing recovery. These recoveries are continually being audited with an independent auditor. We continue to implement the recommendations, enhancing the process to maximise recoveries for investors. We’ve also brought on an additional recovery partner who is picking up the more complex loan recoveries.
- First international market progress
As well as working with our product and compliance teams in Australia to ensure the new Crowd2Fund platform will work internationally, we’re also seeking regulatory approval from ASIC, the Australian regulator, to allow us to start listing Australian businesses on the platform. We expect there to be many learnings from our first non-UK market launch and subsequent market launches should be more straightforward.
- Equity raise accelerator programme
We are hoping to raise further capital in the second half of this year, and to help us achieve this we’ve enrolled on a US accelerator programme. The programme involves mentorship and support to help ensure the platform is ready to receive institutional capital which will help us further scale and will be circulated to many VC investors.
Our primary focus is to increase the number of quality deals listed on the platform to allow us to achieve our targets and work towards profitability.
We believe the Crowd2Fund platform is perfectly placed to help support the global economic recovery effort that now stands before us. Forecasters are expecting the highest growth in the UK economy for a generation and at Crowd2Fund we aim to ride this wave of growth. We believe FinTech will be core to the global recovery effort and through the development of new credit models, in new areas such as the environment, we can help good entrepreneurs access capital and get you potentially higher returns.
Over the next six months we’ll continue to develop new functionality through the launch of our new desktop platform. We’ll continue to assess and enhance the performance of our technology to ensure scalability as well as potentially launching our payment services, allowing you to utilise your Crowd2Fund account for day-to-day payments and as a bank account.
Having successfully navigated these exceptionally challenging circumstances, we are more optimistic than ever and very excited to support the modernisation of the financial service sector to help stimulate prosperity for more people around the world.
Finally, we’re thrilled with the MoneyNet 2021 award for ‘Most innovative P2P platform’ and also to have been voted as a finalist in the British Bank awards for ‘Best Business Finance Provider.’
If you have any questions about our plans, please don’t hesitate to get in touch.
