Venture is a people business, and I’ve loved working with my team at OMERS… but when the chance unexpectedly came to start Eurazeo’s Early Stage Venture Capital team in London, I just couldn’t stop thinking about it. The combination of getting in the weeds to start something new, hiring a team, and helping to build a European franchise with wonderful investors with a 20 year track record was too hard to resist. So I’m delighted to announce that I have joined the Eurazeo Venture team as a Managing Director in London as of Sept 1.

Stage & Sectors

As a generalist VC firm, we primarly invest at Series A & B in:

• Entreprise & SMB software
• Fintech & Insurtech
• Digital Health
• Adtech & Martech
• Ecommerce & Marketplaces

So if you’re building a tech enabled business in those sectors, please get in touch :-)

A Storied Portfolio

Eurazeo is the new name of the ex-IDinvest team. Originally from Paris, they are some of the best venture investors in Europe (the best ones in 2019 actually — at least according to Crunchbase!) with a storied portfolio that includes Criteo, SoRare, WeFox, Grab, Vestiare Collective, Bird, and many others. In fact, 17 of the Next 40 and 25 of the Fastrack 120 are in the portfolio, forming a rich and cross-fertile ecosystem.

Exceptional Support

Eurazeo has a portfolio of $23B across the group, tightly knit across venture, growth and buy out (and private debt and real estate and infra…) . This depth allows them to support companies from series A all the way through to exit (42 so far!). A case in point, they invested pre-seed in Criteo for a 24% stake and still held 23% at floatation. They also have an extraordinary network of operational support people across their 11 offices, especially accross talent and sales.

A Real Commitment to Sustainability and Inclusion

Although not an ESG fund, Eurazeo cares deeply about sustainability and inclusion. The are rated A+ by the PIR, a UN-supported network of investors who incorporate ESG principles into their investment decisions, are participants to the UN Global Compact, and are signatories to The Shift’s Manifesto to Decarbonise Europe. And while there is always more to do, it’s not just lip service: as a group, Eurazeo’s carbon footprint was down 27% in 2020 compared to the previous year.

On the inclusion side, they have made public commitments to Sista 2.0 in order to fund more female entrepreneurs. Eurazeo’s management team is 44% female — and of course, so is our CEO.

Long Europe

Per Dealroom, Euopean venture investment has increased 5.5x from 2010 to 2020, with $41B invested in venture and growth last year. There were 22 $1B+venture backed tech unicorns in Europe in 2014 — there are more than 100 today; and whereas only 3 european countries had attracted more than $1B of venture capital per year by 2014, Europe now has 7 “unicountries”. As the first generation of European startups enrich and mature and the second generation of early employees and founders start new business, there’s never been a better time to invest across Europe.

The UK continues to be one of Europe’s richest startup ecosystem, and Eurazeo has been investing here for years, with portfolio companies like SecretEscapes, ThoughtMachine, OnFido, Lifebit, Ogury and others. And now, with a new team on the ground in London, we’re only just getting started!

Farewell, OMERS Ventures

My ex-team at OMERS have been beyond gracious as I moved on, and I know we will be sitting on cap tables and working together in the future. I couldn’t be more grateful to them, and to the wonderful entrepreneurs we’ve worked with.

And now, en avant marche!

For the past year, I’ve been spending time in the Fintech Capital Markets space. Capital markets are the oil of modern commerce, with trading volumes and fees that dwarf anything I’ve ever seen in consumer and SME banking space… yet innovation lags far behind it, and the sector has attracted relatively little VC investment. A case in point is today’s announcement that the S&P has made an offer to buy IHS Markit for $44B, and the company has never taken a penny of VC funding.

CB insights has written an excellent primer on the disruption of investment banking, but inspired by Pietro at Stride’s brilliant Future of Work piece, here’s a more personal list of unique companies & ideas alongside a market map and selected investors.

If you’re building a company in this space that you think should be included, please let me know!

1. Startups shaping “the new capital markets tech stack”

If you’d rather look at the spreadsheet that informed this piece of work, please click here to access the full list, which includes investors, company descriptions and links to Crunchbase*.

*in the OMERS Ventures portfolio

1.1 Roboadvisors

The oldest “-gen” category in this space. A lot of companies are still cropping up, spurred by the great generational wealth transfer from Baby Boomers and the large advice gap for mass affluents customers.

Notable examples:

• Indexa Capital, InbestMe, Finizens, MoneyFarm, Moneybox; Fundler, Nord.Investments, Nutmeg — Low cost index funds, cheap diversification and automated savings with a focus on UX
• Rosecut, Fina Technologies, Scaleable Capital, BetterWealth, SigFig — focused on financial planning and tailored advice

1.2 Neobrokers

Robinhood led the way, but a new generation of European neobrokers is capitalising on a wave of retail interest in stock trading, particularly among younger age groups.

Notable examples:

• Freetrade, TradeRepublic — focused on fractional shares
• Trade212, Bux, Nextmarket — started with CFDs, moving into shares

1.3 Access to institutional assets for small investors

Retail and smaller institutions have typically been unable to access institutional assets, from IPO allocations to top-class private equity funds. The companies below are changing that:

• PrimaryBid*, IPOHub — access to primary equity issuance in the public markets
• WiseAlpha — access to institutional grade corporate bonds
• Eleven, Moonfare, BITE Investments — access to closed shop top quartile private equity and hedge funds
• Artinvest, CRED Investments — access to alternatives (investing in artworks and top tier athletes’ career earnings respectively)
• Flagstone*, Raisin, Deposit Solutions — access to best in markets treasury / saving rates
• Seeders/Crowdcube/Kickstarter — crowdfunding
• Equify, Pulley , Seedlegals - next gen competitors to Carta and SecondMarket

*in the OMERS Ventures portfolio

1.4. NeoExchanges

Most of the world’s assets, from infrastructure bonds to commodities are still traded bilaterally (vs. on a regulated exchange). The startups below are using technology to bring the advantages of exchanges — liquidity, price discovery, multiple participants and smaller bid-ask spreads — to more asset classes.

Notable examples:

• Metalshub, Goldex — commodities / gold trading
• EIX — new infrastructure bond exchange
• Akinova — exchange for reinsurance capacity
• Enmacc — energy trading platform
• CrossLend, TreasurySpring, Acatus — institutional grade debt
• Alternative Derivatives Exchange — digital asset /atlcoin futures

1.5 Trading efficiency

Once the strategy and a decision to make a trade has been made, the process of routing and executing the order can be done efficiently by software. These cloud-based businesses are making the case that they can help execute complex trades trades faster, more cheaply, and with less exposure to regulatory risk.

Notable examples:

• Capitolis, Cobalt — focused on cost-effective post trade execution
• OpenGamma — focused on automated margin management
• DerivativePath — focused on managing client derivative and hedging programs
• Kayenta, DriveWealth: focused on hedge fund treasury and stock clearing and lending

These startups are simplifying the connectivity required to trade on multiple venues via one-to-many API integrations. This saves time and effort on the technical integration side, and also helps drive better pricing with access to multiple outlets.

• Transficc, Axe trading — connecting traders to multiple fixed income execution venues and data sources
• Alpaca — APIs connecting all the software tools needed for large scale stock trading
• Calastone — tackling the mutual fund supermarket industry, with connectivity to thousands of trading counterparties

1.6 Compliance

For many, the idea that asset managers would be able to trade from home over the cloud would have been unthinkable just a year ago. It’s a compliance nightmare — monitoring financial services employees remotely while making sure they have the tools they need to do their jobs. The startups below are either helping employees on the trade execution side, or else on-boarding new customers in a compliant way.

Notable examples:

• Symphony, SteelEye, FeedStock — compliance tools for monitoring remote workers as well as secure, rapid team communications.
• Salv, Pibisi, Arachnys, ComplyAdvantage, Veriff — automated KYC and AML monitoring for financial companies

1.7 Data

In the last couple of years, equities holdings across the UK and the US have just flipped to more than half of them being held in passive investments (largely ETFs and mutual funds).

• BITA is providing an indexation platform that allows any passive investment house to define, maintain and scale index operations.

Active managers will argue that they can justify their fees by beating their index. To do this all active managers need legal, compliant and clean data advantages. Every active manager is now in the data business. These startups are ones to watch:

• Du.co, dvo1, Finbourne, Mosaic Smart Data, Intrinio — focussed on improving data usability via standardisation, cleansing, and recon
• Ticksmith, Harbr, Privitar — focussed on allowing FIs to share or sell anonymized data
• Credit Benchmark: credit risk data
• Simudyne: large scale trade simulation
• Kayrros: satellite data feeds and analytics for commodities
• DataBento: lower barriers to access live market data

1.8 Modular digitisation for Financial Institutions

Larger financial institutions are aware that they need to improve the digital UX experience for the end customers and their employees. This crop of start-ups is focused on low code digitisation for the enterprise.

Focused on the end customer experience:

• FintechOS, Abaka, D1g1t, Alpima — low code digital customer experience platforms for large FIs.
• Tumelo — focused on providing look through to underlying asset ownership for customers with assets in pension plans, mutual funds, etc.

Focused on the professional trader experience:

• GenesisGlobal, OpenFin — low code customer desktop applications for capital markets traders
• Essentia Analitics, Limina Financial Systems, Velox — intuitive, cloud-based portfolio management and/or order management systems

2. Start-up ideas

2.1 Startup idea no 1: neo Prime Brokerage (“PB”)

Prime Brokerages are highly valuable parts of the investment bank, generating north of $30bln annually in fees. They help hedge funds and other big investments clients handle large investment transactions. Their customers typically trade on margin or need to borrow securities or cash. PBs generate fees by internally netting off their customers’ positions against each other while charging customers gross fees, leading to higher costs for their users. A neo-PB, set up for netting on day 1, will be able to dramatically reduce cost for their customers.

2.2 Startup idea no 2: neo Clearer (DriveWealth for Europe)

DriveWealth is a US based neoclearer that powers Robinhood, Revolut, Freetrade, Moneylion and others. There is no European equivalent that I know of — yet!

2.3 Startup idea no 3: IPO readiness consultancy + software

Banks typically help companies get their reporting and forecasting “IPO-ready” for “free” in exchange for the IPO mandate down the line. However, direct listings and SPACS (by some measures, 40% of the IPOs in the last year have been via SPAC) are disrupting the process. BUT companies still need to get ready for listing, and are willing to pay for the help. A mix of ultra-discreet consultancy and forecasting software that integrates with companies ERPs and ingests their data to help companies get ready for listing would be highly valuable and additive to the ecosystem.

2.4 Startup idea no 4: Snowflake for financial data and applications

From my colleague Dan Childs: Startups in capital markets spend vast amounts of time, money and resources on integrating to market data sets and applications. These integrations are table stakes to even start building product. We see a need for a single stop service that removes the integration pain for these firms, a snowflake for financial data and applications.

3. Investors in the space

The same names come up pretty frequently in the linked spreadsheet. Specialist VC firms like Illuminate Financial, P3, Anthemis, FSIV (ex Eight Roads), Augmentum, Draper and HambroPerks are well-represented, as well as the Accels, Indexes and Sequoias of the world. The angels are a much more diverse bunch, probably because there’s a large group of wealthy bankers and asset managers who tend to back ex-colleagues in the space. A few names do tend to come up, such as Chris Conde, Chris Adselbach, Charlie Songhurst, and specialist incubators like Level 39. As the space hots up, I expect to see many more.

4. Thanks and disclaimers

I owe huge thanks to my brilliant OMERS colleagues Dan Childs and Will Dufton who have been working with me on our capital markets tech thesis over the past few months, to Harry Briggs for suggesting I write this piece, and to my colleagues Elodie and Meri Beckwith for their help with putting this together.

Disclaimer 1 : This is not an attempt at including every single business in these categories. I’m sure I’ve not included tonnes, but rather this is a selection of (usually VC backed) companies I find compelling.

Disclaimer 2: While I’ve included some North American players, this is a European heavy list.

Disclaimer 3: Most of these businesses fit across categories, but I’ve picked the one that seems most relevant to me.

Disclaimer 4: This is definitely not an exhaustive list, rather it’s a group of companies (usually pretty early stage and VC backed) that I find compelling.

Disclaimer 5: This piece doesn’t particularly focus on blockchain companies (or it would be way too long)

Finally, if you’re building a company in this space or would like to be added to the list of companies in this post, please get in touch!

Mapping the Future of the Capital Markets tech stack was originally published in OMERS Ventures on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The Science Museum

Fun & Educational Toys, Gifts & Science Sets | Science Museum Shop

Incredible place for older kids’ presents, highly recommend!

The V&A

V&A Shop

Gorgeous jewelry and homeware, and some fab Christmas ornaments.

The Tate

https://shop.tate.org.uk

I especially love the fashion and kids sections, and they do a great line in arty face-masks. Also an excellent book selection.

The William Morris Galley

William Morris Gallery Shop

Especially good for small gifts under £5 or £10, stationery and their iconic prints.

The Design Museum

https://designmuseumshop.com

Everything here is beautifully designed, as you’d expect :-). I especially love their Conscious Living range, for gorgeous, eco-friendly presents.

The Postal Museum

https://shop.postalmuseum.org

The website isn’t the easiest to navigate, but worth persisting as the selection is especially good for younger kids.

The British Library

https://shop.bl.uk

Superb book curation, as you’d expect, and some wonderful activity kits for children and adults.

The Natural History Museum

https://www.nhmshop.co.uk

Perfect for my dinosaur mad toddler

Jane Austen’s House

Jane Austen's House Museum Shop

I bought Darcy and Elizabeth Christmas decorations here for my Pride & Prejudice obsessed friend. Great to see the museum shop set up online via a Shopify link a few months ago after having to close due to Covid.

The British Museum

British Museum shop

The great dame of British museums. Particularly good selection of men’s gifts.

The Royal Albert Hall

Royal Albert Hall Online Shop

Smaller selection, but the Christmas decorations and the musical automata kits for older children are well worth a visit.

This is a mostly London focused as that’s where I live, but would love to collate suggestions to support other museums up and down the country, so if there’s a museum you’d like to add to the list, please do let me know in the comments.

I’m hugely excited to announce that OMERS Ventures has led an investment in PrimaryBid’s Series B. We couldn’t be more thrilled to support co-founders Anand, Kieran, James and Eric in their mission to democratise access to public market primary issuance.

Public market primary issuance, you say?

Every year, companies go public, typically via an IPO. Public companies can also issue additional shares later on, in what’s known as a follow-on placement or accelerated book builds. We don’t hear much about follow-on placements, but they typically dwarf IPOs in terms of equity issuance.

With very rare exceptions, the man or woman on the street doesn’t get to participate in these transactions, despite forming a significant minority of share ownership throughout Europe (rising to c. 40% in the States).

PrimaryBid is on a mission to change that.

For the most part, primary stock issuance has not changed since the 90s. It’s expensive for companies because:

1) Primary issuance is virtually untouched by tech, and fees to list are high, and

2) Pricing an IPO or a follow-on placement is a function of an exclusive process, managed by the banks, where there are other incentives at play beyond getting the best price for the company. This, among other market factors, has resulted in the phenomenon of the IPO “pop,” which has come under fire from lots of private market investors in recent years.

The result is that the system penalises:

1) successful individual companies — because the pop is meaningless to the company’s overall raise.

2) smaller investors — who simply don’t have privileged access to the same opportunities to generate investment returns. Worse, if they are existing shareholders of a business, they get diluted without having the chance to have their pre-emption rights (i.e. rights to maintain ownership) respected.

It’s not fair.

And it’s increasingly bad business.

Boards and banks have typically shied away from retail investors in primary placements, however much they may have wanted to include them, because it’s such a hassle to deal with multiple small checks. PrimaryBid has made access to retail investors simple, thereby opening up a large pool of untapped capital. PB acts as speedily and simply as an institutional buyer of stock, and participates on the same terms. For the issuer and the bank, it’s as easy as dealing with any other counter-party.

This means that boards don’t have to choose between expediency, or diversifying their shareholder registry and respecting pre-emption rights. It’s a win-win for small investors and for the companies, especially as retail investors overwhelmingly tend to buy and hold, which reduces volatility.

As a team, we’ve known PrimaryBid since 2019, and watched them execute their plan during these unprecedented times. It’s a testament to their vision and deep relationships that they have continued to gain the confidence of the market over the past year, participating in both the UK’s largest follow-on placement (Compass Group) and its largest IPO (The Hut Group) by equity issuance, all in the last 6 months. They have built a strong, API-first, tech moat to manage the digital order books and proven to be a trusted partner to stock exchanges, banks, issuers and investors

Unsurprisingly, they’ve built a strong syndicate for this round. We’re delighted to be investing alongside our friends at Draper Esprit, Fidelity Strategic Ventures, the London Stock Exchange Group , ABN AMRO, and existing investors Pentech, Outward VC and HambroPerks.

We’ve rarely met such a mission driven team who feel so passionately about fair access to the capital markets. We can’t wait to watch them grow — this is just the beginning!

Primary Bid: why we’re backing the team on a mission to democratise capital markets access. was originally published in OMERS Ventures on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

OMERS Ventures recently hosted its first roundtable over Zoom. We focused on the Capital Markets Infrastructure stack alongside our Capital Markets colleagues and heard from smart, senior and opinionated people for 2 hours. I

It was so much better that we hoped (huge thanks to Will, Nicole, Dan, Gabbi and Harry), so I thought we’d share a few tips on how to hold a good roundtable event over Zoom. We’d really love to hear from others as well about what has worked for them, especially since we’re all figuring this out right now.

Harry Briggs on Twitter

Amazing virtual roundtable on innovation in Capital Markets - thank you @tarareeves for superb hosting and the 30+ contributors from @CreditBenchmark @PrimaryBid @bux @ducotweets @DriveWealth @ABNAmro @Barclays etc etc

1. Curate the attendees

We had a great mix of experienced and knowledgeable people, from parts of the sector that might not necessarily interact (retail vs. wholesale, starups vs. banks, buy-side vs. sell-side) and it led to a richer discussion.

We also turned Zoom into a positive, with attendees from London, Cambridge, Toronto, New York and Amsterdam. If we’d been able to stick to our original plan to host breakfast for 20–30 people, we wouldn’t have been able have them over.

2. Prep Work!

We prepared a long list of questions ahead of time and people earmarked for them. It took a lot of work but was well worth it — (thanks for all the prep work Dan Childs). We didn’t necessarily use the Qs but it made us feel confident hosting and able to keep the conversation flowing.

3. Attendees vs. Panellists

We spent a a couple of hours playing with Zoom features ahead of time, figuring out how to 1) spotlight the speakers, 2) whether people should be panellists or attendees. We picked making everyone a panelist as it meant everyone (roughly 25 people) would be on video and able to speak without being “promoted”. This wouldn’t work for larger events but was perfect for what we wanted.

4. Have an agenda with times attached and refer back to it frequently

Thanks Harry Briggs for the suggestion here. We flashed the agenda up regularly so people knew how long we were going to be, and when they might expect to be called on. It meant that people stayed on and engaged all the way through.

5. Moderate the conversation.

The way to keep chaos (aka. smart curious and knowledgeable people with a LOT of opinions) under control was to make sure as hosts, we called on specific people and prepped the next response. e.g. “Jane, we know you have a tonne of experience on this from your work in X, so we’d love to get your thoughts on Y question, and then Peter, would be great to get your reaction as you’re in the same space” . We lost some spontaneity but it made sure that almost everyone spoke and we were able to cover all the topics we wanted.

6. Allow people to use the chat function to ask questions.

We found out midstream that the Zoom Q&A function only works for attendees, not panellists. We’d made the decision not to promote people during the talk but the chat function works really well here too as chat has public and private functionality.

7. Don’t use a virtual background unless you have to.

This might be just personal preference but there was more immediacy and connection without some of the novelty virtual backgrounds we’ve been seeing lately. It’s not always possible (I’ve been working from my bedroom for some of the time lately and it doesn’t look super professional so I have a great background for that, but overall, I prefer not to use one if not necessary).

It turns out that there’s some research that shows that people with virtual backgrounds come across as less trustworthy than those with real backgrounds (thanks @Nicole_kelly). Nicole, who does a tonne of OMERS Community work suggested the next level tip of uploading a photo of your room when it’s spotlessly tidy so you can use that as background at all times ;-)

8. Use a desk not your lap to balance your laptop.

Do not ask me how I know this… but trust me, it’s normal to fidget and it looks very distracting to others if the whole image box (rather than your head) is moving.

9. Keep a separate chat going for the hosting team.

The OMERS crew used Whatsapp on our phones as we found that using Whatsapp Web or the internal chat tool on Zoom via laptop meant others could hear typing if you weren’t muted. Keeping it on a separate device meant it was quieter and less risk of attendees seeing something you’d prefer they didn’t.

10. Offer to make follow up intros upfront for those attending the event.

Many of the attendees have asked for intros to others which we’ve been happy to facilitate (with permission of course). It’s a nice way to keep the conversation going.

11. We’re sharing LinkedIn profiles of/to all the attendees in our thank you note.

It’s a nice way to put people in touch without sharing contact details and introduces that little bit of distance, braAnd of course, thank yous are important!

12. Please share your own suggestions!

While we all hope lockdown ends safely soon, we know virtual events are going to be a big part of doing business in the future. We’re still figuring this out and would love to hear your tips.

And if you’re building an awesome business in the capital markets infrastructure stack, please come talk to us :-)

Tips for holding a roundtable over Zoom was originally published in OMERS Ventures on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

After nearly 4 amazing years at LocalGlobe, the news is out that I’ve just left to join the newly formed OMERS Ventures Europe, alongside my new colleagues Harry Briggs, Henry Gladwyn and Damien Steel, focusing on Series A investments and above. OMERS (the Ontario Municipal Employees Retirement System) is a sophisticated source of capital, managing nearly CAD$100B as a direct investing organisation to secure the pensions of the municipal employees and retirees of Ontario.

OMERS’s capital is split between capital markets; infrastructure investments, with assets such as London City Airport, Thames Water, Associated British Ports; private equity, with c. $15 billion assets under management and a particular strength in healthcare and business services; and Oxford Properties, which manages $50B of property assets across the world. OMERS is not new to venture capital — as part of private equity, OMERS Ventures’ North American team has invested in some hugely exciting companies, such as Hootsuite, Hopper, Shopify and DuckDuckGo among others. I’m excited to take what I’ve learned at LocalGlobe and combine it with OMERS’ broad network and experience.

For those of you who know me well, you know that I love the early stages of a business, from co-founding Turo.com, then being an early employee at Wonga.com during the scale up years to being part of LocalGlobe’s early journey from Robin and Saul’s angel investment vehicle to one of the top seed funds in the world. VC is an apprenticeship business, and I’m hugely grateful to my partners at LocalGlobe for their time and expertise turning me from an operator to an investor. They’ve caused me to raise my game every day and I’m proud to be a LocalGlobe alumna. I like to think of this next step as my own personal series A as an investor, and I couldn’t have asked for a better “seed”.

As you know, LocalGlobe plays total football : the investment & operations teams are fully integrated, and the full team contributes to investments and company support. That means that each founder will have multiple touch-points across the firm, and I’ve been working closely with the team making sure handover is as smooth as possible. As ever, if you have any questions or concerns, please know you can always reach out to anyone at LocalGlobe.

It’s been a rare pleasure to work with such intellectually-rigorous, high-integrity, down-to-earth and passionate people. Thank you to LocalGlobe’s amazing founders, all my partners, and the wider LocalGlobe & Latitude family. I look forward to working with them in my new capacity, and until then, it’s au revoir not goodbye.

My personal “series A” was originally published in OMERS Ventures Europe on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Life insurance. It’s a huge market — c. £10B of premium spent in the UK annually. It’s also boring, undifferentiated and old fashioned. Plus the process of buying coverage is often full of friction, paper-based and time-consuming. 75% of buyers in a recent ABI survey want to be able to buy direct but it’s really hard for insurers to innovate on the sales side without alienating their biggest distributers: offline brokers and price comparison sites. It’s classic channel conflict — in other words, a sector ripe for disruption. We’re delighted that yulife, (a Localglobe portfolio company which we backed with our friends at Anthemis and OurCrowd), is launching their life insurance product today to do just that.

The yulife co-founding team marries deep insurance expertise with a deep customer focus: Sam Fromson, COO; Sammy Rubin, the founder and CEO is the ex-CEO of PruProtect; Jaco Oosthuizen, Head of Insurance and ex-Anthemis investor; Jonathan Roomer, former actuary and head of KPMG’s startup team, and Josh Hart, CTO and co-founder of Chelsea Apps Factory.

yulife’s founders passionately believe in their product, which rewards employees for making healthy financial, physical and mental choices. It combines an incredibly easy underwriting journey — a company can buy coverage online for their employees in a few clicks — with pricing spelled out upfront. Employees can answer 13 underwriting questions and get their policies immediately. This simple, friendly journey is a far cry from the long paper- based forms we filled in at not so long ago to get the team covered here at Localglobe. And with 8.5m breadwinners with dependents not covered by a life insurance policy in the UK and 1.2m businesses who don’t offer life coverage, we believe that making life insurance easy and compelling will significantly grow this market.

Unlike most insurers, the relationship doesn’t end with the transaction. yulife has teamed up with Dr Rangan Chatterjee, the well-known physician, presenter and author, who has taken a role as yulife’s Chief Wellbeing Officer.

His holistic wellbeing philosophy — that your mental wellbeing matters as much as your diet choices and physical fitness — has driven the design of yulife’s in-app game, which rewards healthy behaviour. Users play it to earn yucoin, which they can spend at Amazon, Avios, Garmin and NowTV among others. yulife is more than life insurance — it’s a wellness offering.

yulife’s founders have combined their deep knowledge of the insurance space with a laser focus on the customer. For example, they’ve put in place a simple sounding but revolutionary plan (in insurance terms…) to allow employees to top up their employer-offered coverage or take the policy with them when they change jobs. They’ve also been incredibly thoughtful about engaging with their customers post transaction via their games, rewards and content — it’s early days but the user engagement stats are remarkable. It’s clear that their product is resonating with employers and employees.

Bottom line, we’re huge fans of the yulife team, philosophy and product. We hope you will be too. Check it out here.

Life insurance with heart — on yulife’s product launch. was originally published in LocalGlobe Notes on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

We’re delighted to announce that LocalGlobe have invested in Zencargo’s seed round, completed earlier this year alongside our friends alongside our friends Samos and Picus Capital. The announcement coincides with the 1st anniversary of the launch of the Zencargo platform. It’s great to be working with co-founders Alex, Richard and Jan who have rapidly set about achieving their task of modernizing the logistics industry.

An industry built on paper

The international shipping business has changed little in the last century — it’s still slow and opaque, with many processes carried out manually and on paper and Zencargo saw a chance to change that. Most supply chain teams still rely on phone calls and emails to do their job. This reliance on one-to-one communication slows down processes, is cumbersome and prone to issues — the average shipper spends the equivalent of 7 working days just chasing all the various parties along their supply chain for information.

Zencargo understood that these problems are really the tip of the iceberg — masking the real issue at hand. Supply Chain data and information takes too long to filter down and often gets stuck in silos, on spreadsheets or in unconnected systems, necessitating human intervention to funnel data to the places and people who need it. Addressing this problem, Zencargo has built a logistics business centred around a web based dashboard that organises all of your supply chain data in one central hub.

This is a game changer in an industry which has traditionally provided little visibility. This lack of visibility creates enormous pressures on businesses as they have to react to problems as they happen and are forced to run large procurement teams to be able to manage a global strategy. With Zencargo’s end to end visibility, shippers can use the tracking information to forewarn where production issues will delay arrival in their home country and impact customers.

Zencargo’s digital platform creates a central workspace where information can be shared across all parties in an international transaction. Across their range of features they enable customers to gain real-time visibility into the progress of their goods from production all the way through to delivery to destination. In-app chat and cloud-based document storage means that all communication happens through the platform, making it quick and easy for any member of a team to jump into a shipment and be fully in context. Teams can collaborate with complete visibility into the latest developments and focus on unpicking those problems that are blocking their supply chain.

Collaborating in the Cloud

Zencargo’s digital platform creates a central workspace where information can be shared across all parties in an international transaction. Across their range of features they enable customers to gain real-time visibility into the progress of their goods from production all the way through to delivery to destination. In-app chat and cloud-based document storage means that all communication happens through the platform, making it quick and easy for any member of a team to jump into a shipment and be fully in context. Teams can collaborate with complete visibility into the latest developments and focus on unpicking those problems that are blocking their supply chain.

Supercharged Supply Chain Teams

Zencargo was built to modernise the Freight Forwarding industry and streamline the workflow for supply chain professionals. The platform includes an Instant Quotes and Bookings service, which reduces the time it takes to make a booking from days to a matter of seconds. All shipments are tracked in real-time with email notifications flagging issues as they arise.

Local and Global

Recently they released a Purchase Order Management feature which uses Virtual Local Offices to track the progress of manufactured goods around the world all from the moment the purchase order is raised, through production to delivery. Zencargo’s systems interface with factories and warehouses in multiple languages in order to deliver the up to date supply chain data customers need. This information is then transformed into searchable dashboards that give customers SKU level visibility into the status of their entire supply chain. With ZenCargo, shippers can use the tracking information to forewarn where production issues will delay arrival in their home country and impact customers, managing their most important relationships better. Companies can get a level of global connectedness and data accuracy across their supply chain that would usually require a huge procurement team with a physical presence around the world.

Improving Productivity

The UK’s productivity has stagnated since the 2008 financial crisis. Economists call this the “productivity puzzle” and are divided about why the UK’s productivity has not recovered. It now lags c. 15% below the average of other G7 countries.

The reasons for this are unclear. Some is due to the UK’s culture of long working hours for full time workers, with diminishing returns for marginal hours worked. Other factors mooted are a lack of infrastructure investment, low interest rates keeping “zombie-companies” on life support, and a high proportion of school leavers without crucial literacy and numeracy skills.

What we DO know is that the UK is a mixed bag. On the one hand, our most dynamic firms are the most productive in Europe, but on the other hand, we have a long tail of less productive firms.

And while some believe that productivity (GDP/number of hours worked) doesn’t fully capture the contribution of digital technologies, it’s clear that the technology industry, and firms like ZenCargo, have a role to play in boosting the efficiency of the UK.

Zencargo estimates that UK businesses are losing over £500m per year due to inefficient communications — 4 million working days in the shipping industry alone. A company switching to ZenCargo can save over 40hrs a month — a full working week — of admin and chasing time as shippers go between their suppliers, freight forwarders and customs agents, leaving their employees to focus on more valuable tasks.

Supply Chain Intelligence

Zencargo break out the cause of any delays, and enables shippers to run analytics to reveal systematic issues that are hindering their supply chain. Shippers can use the data to optimise beyond the simple metric of price looking at the reliability of individual manufacturers as well as the impact of transit time variability on stock levels and working capital requirements.

An enormous and evolving market

The international shipping industry is responsible for the carriage of around 90% of world trade. It’s the lifeblood of the global economy. There is a growing demand for transparent logistics, changing industry mindsets, big data-technology and flexible supply chains. There are also more and more cross-border e-commerce transactions happening, which increases increasing. The businesses competing online will be looking to optimise their entire value chain and better tools to manage their logistics will help them to achieve this.

Zencargo brings more trust and transparency to this process. Becoming the ultimate platform for international trade is a bold ambition — we’re thrilled to have backed this team and be along for ride. Happy 1st birthday, Zencargo!

Our investment in ZenCargo was originally published in LocalGlobe Notes on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Cleo, the AI banking assistant we first invested in at seed in 2017, has just raised an additional $10m. We couldn’t be more delighted to welcome Balderton Capital, which is leading Cleo’s series A, as an investor.

Cleo is a banking chatbot, powered by Artificial Intelligence. It’s ridiculously engaging (with usage stats to match), and its tone of voice — wry, funny and full of personality — is something special. Cleo is your sensible, super-smart friend, who knows how things work and helps you manage your finances and spending habits through the Facebook Messenger channel. She can also tell you if you are paying more than the average customer for services like electricity and recommend providers to switch to for a better deal, help you save or give to charity, with other other services to come. Fundamentally, we fell in love with Cleo as a product. Try it here and let us know what you think.

Barney, Cleo’s dynamic CEO, is an ex data-scientist and is a graduate of Entrepreneur First. When we first started talking, the scale of his ambition was clear. The Cleo team are hugely hungry about where they want to take Cleo and rightly so since there is so much dissatisfaction with traditional banks and banking products, particularly amongst younger people.

Making sense of the financial picture

Personal debt is growing, according to official figures, and millennials in particular are more likely to go into their overdraft regularly, often without realising they have or what it costs them. More than a quarter of 24–35 year olds rely on credit cards and overdrafts for everyday spending, according to the Financial Conduct Authority.

Barney recognised that one cause of this problem was the inability to see exactly what was happening with your money, all in one place. He argues that if our finances are transparent, then managing spending will be, if not quite a cinch, easier.

Almost half of UK consumers have more than one bank account, the average number of credit cards per person is 1.7, and while individuals used look to their banks for all their financial needs, best in class providers for different financial services are emerging, e.g. Trussle or Habito for mortgages, TransferWise for FX. The regulatory backdrop is also changing. Open Banking is here and the Second Payments Directive Service (PSD2) is accelerating big industry shifts. There is a rising niche of products and technologies offering consumers very specific banking products or financial services.

This makes it even more likely that users will want to minimise the interfaces they use for dealing with their finances. By providing a platform aggregating your financial life, and allowing you to interrogate it, Cleo helps users make sense of their financial picture.

Rapid growth

Cleo has grown quickly in the UK and quietly launched in the US this spring, where it now has 350,000 users with 30,000 people a week signing up. Such brisk take-up suggests that Cleo has the potential to become the default banking interface for a generation. It’s really relevant to the “now” generation and we are so excited about their potential to become one of the world’s biggest fintech companies.

Banking has traditionally been a local, or at least national, business, because it relies on trust. But Cleo demonstrates that if you get the technology and tone right, then this is a model that is truly scalable. And because Cleo is not actually a bank, it is able to scale rapidly because it has no huge capital requirements or regulatory constraints.

The Cleo team are an exciting journey and we’re thrilled to be along for the next stage of their growth.

Meet my financial friend — why we invested in AI assistant Cleo was originally published in LocalGlobe Notes on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

We first met Adam and Ian, the founders of FloodFlash, via Freddy, the CEO of Cuvva, one of LG’s portfolio companies (our favourite kind of intro) and were immediately struck with the potential of what they are building: no less than a category defining product, changing an opaque, poorly understood flood insurance market… and that’s only the beginning. We’re delighted to be backing them alongside our friends at Pentech and InsurTech Gateway.

Parametric Insurance: smart contracts (no blockchain involved)

Around 5m, or a sixth of the properties in England, are deemed to have a higher than normal risk of flooding but per the ABI, just 55% of those living in flood risk areas are aware that their home is at risk while an estimated 350,000 properties in the UK cannot obtain commercially viable flood insurance. FloodFlash’s proposition to businesses and consumers is simple. Choose a payout level and a water height. Play around with both of those until you’re happy with the premium. Get sent an easy-to-install sensor for your property. Then, if the Flood Flash sensor gets tripped at the agreed water height, payment is immediately made to your bank account. No loss adjustment, no delay, no uncertainty.

FloodFlash is a parametric insurance company. It effectively offers smart contracts. It’s attractive for insureds because:

• payout is immediate upon the sensor getting triggered — no need to even put in a claim
• you know exactly how much you’ll get in the event of a loss. No need to painstakingly claim for each item, find receipts, etc.
• you have control over the premium. If it’s too expensive at water level x, select (higher) water level y (and move your expensive equipment off the floor ;)).

It’s also very attractive for insurance companies:

• Most insurance contracts are designed to make you whole, i.e. pay out for exactly the damage you’ve suffered, less a deductible. With parametric insurance, the insured gets a pay out if the trigger is tripped, regardless of the damage they’ve actually suffered. Without the costs of loss adjustment and processing claims, insurers save money. FloodFlash is passing these savings on to consumers, and with lower costs, insurers can insure previously uninsurable areas.
• Parametric insurance reduces uncertainty, and therefore cost, for underwriters. That’s because a carrier can insure multiple properties on a street with a limit of £1m each. One gets flooded, and suffers a million pound loss (imagine it has just received a large stock of delicate machinery that got ruined), versus the same type of building next door that got flooded to the same height, but didn’t have any valuables in that day.

A massive market

Flood risk is only the beginning for FloodFlash. Flood losses worldwide are of the order of $50b, with less than 20% insured currently but the global premium market for property casualty coverage is north of £1T. Their model is uniquely suited to event driven coverage. In addition, reduction of cost and uncertainty is particularly important for insurers who want to do business in emerging markets, which traditionally don’t have hazard data going back hundreds of years. By removing uncertainty around pay-out amounts if a loss occurs, insurers can make better underwriting predictions and enter markets that were previously uneconomical.

A new model for insurance

Parametric insurance is not new. However, it’s traditionally been the province of large corporates, because it’s typically been structured as a catastrophe bond, structured by experts, issued by the insured and marketed by sell-side banks. Investors buy it because it’s uncorrelated with other equity or debt returns. By their nature, catastrophe bonds require a degree of sophistication and size from the insured.

Ian and Adam, the FloodFlash cofounders, spent years together at RMS, the risk modelling firm, structuring catastrophe bonds for large corporates. Adam has structured over $2B insurance linked securities, and Ian, who has a PhD in hydrology, has 5 years of experience is catastrophe risk modelling.Their vision — that this type of coverage should be made simple and available to businesses and consumers — is a compelling one. They are among a handful of people with the experience to create FloodFlash, and they are passionate about bringing this model to the mass-market.

Data is the new oil

My partner, Remus, who works closely with me on FloodFlash, has a data background. He is the co-founder and CEO of Finalta (now part of McKinsey), which combines performance benchmark data and best-practice knowledge from 350 banks, insurers, and Telcos. It was clear to him that the data that FloodFlash is collecting will enable even more accurate underwriting data over time.

At the same time, we were sold on the proposition, which benefits everyone in the ecosystem. These businesses, that are win-win-win, are the ones we want to back. FloodFlash gets new customers covered, the customer gets paid immediately upon a loss and the carrier saves on claims management, loss adjustment, and underwriting costs.

Tackling a changing market

Sadly, global warming is increasing the instances of extreme weather events, especially in coastal areas. Awareness of natural disasters is increasing. Parametric insurance is particularly applicable to natural catastrophes that can trigger a sensor, like flood, hurricane, fire or earthquake. We believe that parametric insurance aligns the interests of businesses and individuals for thoughtful risk management. Insurance is clearly not the only answer here, but for businesses and individuals in risk areas, parametric insurance is quite simply a better product. Policy makers, businesses and individuals have their role to play in tackling this complex problem and we are passionate about doing what we can to help.

Insurance 3.0 — our investment in FloodFlash was originally published in LocalGlobe Notes on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.