Member Article

A festive chat with… Martin Campbell, managing director of fintech startup Ormsby Street

As part of our ‘festive favourites’ series on Bdaily South East, we spoke to Old Street’s Ormsby Street. Throughout 2015, the fintech startup continued to develop its free, online tool CreditHQ. Working with 25,000 small business, the small business credit-checking tool helps businesses that may have difficulties with currency markets.

I had a spoke to managing director, Martin Campbell about his highlights from this year and his plans for 2016.

2015 – Looking back

What were the highlights for your business in 2015?

“We truly had an amazing 2015 at Ormsby Street, and are counting towards 30,000 users of our small business credit-checking tool, CreditHQ. Our numerous highlights included: representing UKTI at the prestigious SXSW event in the US; launching our next generation version of CreditHQ’s Insight Engine at TheNextWeb Europe to an audience of investors and business leaders; being selected to demonstrate CreditHQ at the Finovate Fall event in New York; and being selected as one of the European finalists in the BBVA Open Talent 2015 Competition.

“But the overall highlight would have to be our launch of CreditHQ in Italy, in partnership with a major European bank. Late invoice payment is an issue for small businesses all over the world and there is a significant opportunity for us in Europe and beyond.”

Looking back, is there anything you would have done differently this year?

“Definitely, we took a careful approach in developing this new version of CreditHQ and we’ve been carefully checking each of our key feature areas with a test MVP (Minimum Viable Product) before releasing them fully into the product. It doesn’t feel like it’s slowed us down, but I looking back I wonder if we could have found a way to go faster. Over the second half of the year we’ve signed deals with major banks in several countries and are having to scale up really fast whilst still completing the full feature set required to deliver on all parts of our vision. “

How has your industry changed in the last year?

“The biggest change has been the relatively rapid approval of open data standards for the banking industry. This gives a really open playing field for software developers and brings the banking industry into line with the rest of the software as a service industry where APIs which allow a user’s account on one platform to link with their account on another are the norm. We thought that it would happen and so we’ve built the product with the right capabilities, but it’s great to see it happening so fast and getting good support from across the industry.”

2016 – Moving forward

What are your key focuses for next year?

“The problems of late invoice payment and cash-flow are not simply going to vanish and we want to help as many UK small businesses address this as we can. There are a number of ways that we’ll be approaching this, but it will particularly mean an increased focus on partnerships with banks. That is the most effective way to reach small businesses and having successfully launched CreditHQ in Italy this year in partnership with a major European bank, this route is the best way to achieve our UK goals too.

“We’ve got some really exciting developments in the pipeline both here and overseas. We aren’t ready to announce them yet, but just as we shifted the market by being the first to launch free access to industry standard credit scoring for SMEs, expect to see further market-shifting developments over 2016, with new data, new value propositions and new bank partnerships allowing us to help even more small business leaders get a good night’s sleep knowing their cash-flow is on track.”

What are you most looking forward to in 2016?

Whilst I’m not a big fan of racking up the air-miles, we’ve had a really warm response from partners in the US to the product this year, and so what I’m really looking forward to is building our beach-head partnership with a US bank who’s ready to give their small business customer base a step-change boost in cash flow performance. The sheer size and dynamism of the US market makes it a great fit for the next stage of our growth.

What do you expect will be your biggest challenge in the coming year?

Rapid expansion is always challenging and we’re making the transition over the coming couple of months from a startup that’s been trialling different ideas at a relatively small scale with a few tens of thousands of users, to growing rapidly through several orders of magnitude. Whilst ours is an inherently scalable business, we’re under no illusions about the challenges of rapidly increasing our growth rate and - most importantly - building further on the quality of both the product and the user experience - that’s going to be the real challenge in 2016.

The softer stuff

If you could go back in time, which piece of advice would you give your younger self?

Don’t be cautious. Scale can only happen if you plan for it so plan for rapid growth and don’t be surprised when you have to raise your expectations even more.

How will you be celebrating the festive period?

“Getting my feet up in front of the fire will be a highlight, as will catching up with friends and family and playing some music. I suspect I’ll probably be assembling various robots and baffling gadgets for my girls at some point as well! Hopefully they won’t mind too much if I sneak off for a snooze!”

Missed our previous feature? Check out our festive catch-up with Salman Iftekhar and Michael Gadsby, co-founders of Staffing Match

If you’d like to take part in our festive series, please get in touch direct - ellen.forster@bdaily.co.uk

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Ellen Forster .