Join me as I sit down with Rob Straathof, the visionary CEO of Liberis. Rob Straathof's journey from an aspiring astronaut to a fintech trailblazer is a narrative of determination and ingenuity. Tune in to discover how Liberis is transforming the financial landscape for small businesses by seamlessly embedding pre-approved funding within payment ecosystems. Delving into Liberis's partnerships with behemoths like Worldpay, Klarna, and Barclays, we'll unwrap how their platform is not only accelerating growth for startups but also reinventing the approach to merchant financing.
The discussion delves into the core of embedded finance, tracing Liberis's evolution from its nascent stages to the powerhouse digital platform it is today. The episode doesn't shy away from discussing the hurdles faced, particularly during the pandemic. As the conversation unfolds, we gain an understanding of the strategies driving merchant adoption and the essential role of omnichannel platforms in the finance sector.
Join me as I sit down with Rob Straathof, the visionary CEO of Liberis. Rob Straathof's journey from an aspiring astronaut to a fintech trailblazer is a narrative of determination and ingenuity. Tune in to discover how Liberis is transforming the financial landscape for small businesses by seamlessly embedding pre-approved funding within payment ecosystems. Delving into Liberis's partnerships with behemoths like Worldpay, Klarna, and Barclays, we'll unwrap how their platform is not only accelerating growth for startups but also reinventing the approach to merchant financing.
The discussion delves into the core of embedded finance, tracing Liberis's evolution from its nascent stages to the powerhouse digital platform it is today. The episode doesn't shy away from discussing the hurdles faced, particularly during the pandemic. As the conversation unfolds, we gain an understanding of the strategies driving merchant adoption and the essential role of omnichannel platforms in the finance sector.
Welcome to the Leaders in Payments podcast, where we talk to C-level leaders from across the payments landscape. We'll be discussing the products and services that impact the payment space today, as well as trends and predictions for the future of payments. We will also hear stories from our guests about their journeys to the top.
Speaker 2:The trend isn't as pronounced yet in Europe and the UK, but that's a matter of time. So we're prepping for rapid onboarding of all those partners in all the countries that we're live in and, while we being ahead of the curve and being able to switch our platform very rapidly, we can now onboard a partner in less than 48 hours onto either of our solutions and that's where we spend a lot of time in the last year on is to make sure that once all those ISVs come to do the same conclusion as you and I have, greg, that isn't fine, as it's going to be a huge driver of their value of service. That's when we can onboard them in 48 hours.
Speaker 3:That was Rob Strathoff, the CEO of Libris, and he's my special guest on this episode, episode 297 of the Leaders in Payments podcast and I'm your host, Greg Myers. Libris is a leading global embedded finance platform with a mission to provide small businesses with accessible and responsible finance. Rob and I talked about his initial desire to become an astronaut and how his professional journey led him to Libris. We also talked about how they provide funding through partners like Worldpay, Klarna and Barclays. We've got a great episode ahead, so let's get started. Hi, Rob, Thank you for being here and welcome to the Leaders in Payments podcast. Thanks, Greg, for having me.
Speaker 2:I'm looking forward to this one, yeah me too.
Speaker 3:So let's go ahead and dive right in, If you don't mind. Tell our audience a little bit about yourself, maybe where you grew up, where you went to school, where you currently live, a few things like that, and then we'll dive into your professional journey in a few minutes. Great.
Speaker 2:So I'm Rob Strathoff. I'm the CEO at Libris. I'm originally from the Netherlands, as you can undoubtedly tell from the accent. I live currently in London, in Fulham, with my wife and three kids. Having spent a lot of time traveling around the world lived in San Francisco, florida, new York, tiny bit in Madrid spent most of my time in the Netherlands, but almost getting there in terms of years abroad 20 years in London right now.
Speaker 3:Okay, great. Well, let's talk about Libris, so tell the audience what Libris does.
Speaker 2:So Libris is an embedded finance platform and that means a lot of different things to a lot of different people, but let me explain what we exactly do. So when you're a small business, you interact with a lot of different platforms and ecosystems. Now, this could be your bank, it could be your online payment provider, it could be your POS system, your payment system that you use, your ordering system, and what Libris does is we integrate into those ecosystems. So it could be your marketplace that we integrate with, like a shop circle or a clarna. It could be your POS system, like a vagaro, that we integrate with. Or it could be an acquire or a bank, like a tide or a rope, or a Barclay card that we integrate into their dashboards or into their POS systems.
Speaker 2:We analyze the data from small businesses and what we do is we bring a pre-approved business finance offer to those small business owners right where they transact every single day. So, greg, if you run a great company, you sell online t-shirts and goods, you're integrated into multiple platforms and within one of those platforms, like a vagaro or a shop circle, you see a little widget that says dear Greg, you are pre-approved for $25,000 of working capital. Click here. Now what Libris has done is we've already analyzed all your data from the platform on an anonymous basis. We know approximately how much you qualify for. We've already done all the background checks at the point that you click. We do that in.3 seconds. We pull all the information from companies' house credit data, et cetera, and we give you a pre-approved offer in less than a second. That basically says dear Greg, you are eligible for 25,000 pounds of business finance.
Speaker 2:Click here and within three minutes we can have that funding into your account. So you can make that purchase for inventory, you can use it for marketing or you can pay your employees. We're here to support those businesses and we collect it as a percentage of your daily cash flow. So every single day we take, let's say, a 5% or 10% cut of that to repay your advance, and that means that you don't even notice that you're repaying. It's like a pension. It just disappears out of your account and when you don't see it in your account, you also don't spend it. So from that perspective, it's a win-win-win for the partner, for Libris and for the small business owner.
Speaker 3:So is your end customer the small business or the partners?
Speaker 2:That is a great question. I would say we lead with. The end customer is a small business. We are passionate about serving small businesses with the relevant funding to help them grow and help them survive and thrive, but we work through our partners. So, needless to say, to engage with those small businesses, we have to partners as our customers as well. The way I see it is, it's a B2B2B company.
Speaker 3:You kind of said this on double click on it. So you your white labeled, so they're not gonna see your brand name. It's usually branded that your partner's name.
Speaker 2:Correct, so that names you can think about is a role play, working capital, clarin business finance, barley cards, business finance. So we work under a brand names to provide those brands with those brands customers, small businesses with instant access to funding and how big is the company. So over the past few years we've expanded rapidly. We're now live in twelve countries, including most of Europe, uk and the US and Canada. We are 220 people and we have been 220 people for basic past two and a half three years, whilst tripling revenues over the same time. From a size perspective, we will be one of the largest embedded business finance platforms in the world at this point.
Speaker 3:Are there certain verticals that are more kind of app for this solution, or is it really You're more concerned with the partner relationship and then it's based on sort of their small business portfolio?
Speaker 2:So it's very much based on their small business portfolio. So the ideal partner for us has hundreds of thousands of small businesses that are highly entrepreneurial, needless say, it can be offline, can be online and they use their ecosystem on a daily basis. So what do you think about? Is the likes of small merchants selling selling t-shirts or selling goods online? We analyze that data through the platforms. Those platforms could be could be the likes of Amazon, ebay, can be the shop circle those kind of platforms. We analyze the data and we bring them with a pre approved offer. What sets liberus apart from the competition is we pull the data up from those partners. We see the insights before the merchant even knows that they need funding. We analyze those numbers and we bring a pre approved offer back to the merchant.
Speaker 2:So, in a very easy, understandable way is, let's say, greg, you run a shop online, you transact through a role pay or to Clarina and you log on to your dashboard and you see, today I've done a thousand transactions, I've done five thousand pounds of revenues, and you see a little widget in that dashboard that basically says dear Greg, you run an incredibly good company, here is fifty thousand pounds worth of working capital.
Speaker 2:Click here and whilst you see that little widget, you click on it. We explain you how the product works. We run you through the season season, needless say and within three minutes you can have the money in your account and you start repaying as a percentage of the revenues coming through the platform from the day after. So you repay as a percentage of your actual transactions. That means that if you go on holidays for a week, you don't pay, and that means, for small businesses, the difference between being able to go on holidays and closing their business for that week or not being able to go on holidays because you have to make it a fixed repayment at the month end.
Speaker 3:Okay and is the buzzword of the year? Probably AI involved in your kind of doing these pre offers.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I love that buzzword the gen AI and AI right.
Speaker 2:So we've been using AI and machine learning for the past eight years and we have a version three of our algorithm that selects Businesses on the basis of their transactions, based on the characteristics of their business Rather than just their credit score, and that machine learning algorithm is highly sophisticated in terms of we know Exactly what's a credit category they will fill it fall under.
Speaker 2:We know exactly which no verticals, the target. We know more about that business and often than the but the business order themselves at that point, which is great, and that means that the targeting is highly sophisticated, meaning that we can get between 70 and 100% of Pre-approved offers to those customers. Then, of course, from an underwriting and underwriting, kyc, kyb perspective, we use a lot of both AI and machine learning, as well as gen AI to assess the quality of the data to go through the people's websites, for example, and, interestingly, we use a lot of gen AI and our compliance and verification departments, where Normally you do spot checks next to you. With gen AI, we now have a system in place that does a continuous checking of every single sales call, every single email that goes out and Alerts us for a problem before it actually becomes a problem, which is, you know, immensely valuable for for a company like Liberus.
Speaker 3:Maybe talk about the relationship between you guys and the partners. What is that integration like? Is that a Technology thing? Is it a sticky part or is that friction-free Tell?
Speaker 2:maybe talk about that a little bit so our platform over the last three years has come a long way and I'll give you a bit of background about Liberus and over the last five years, six years, what we've done. Back in 2015, we decided that embedded finance was the way forward and we called it partnership led funding, which was roles of the tongue. Really, we really did the pioneers in terms of embedded finance. Then, from 2015 to 19, we onboarded about 10 different partners mostly payments and acquired acquiring companies, and our platform was relatively a single thread. I would say virtually every single partner got the same outcome. Now, 2019, we raised money from FTD capital and it allowed us to rebuild the platform into version 2.0. So December 19, investment was made needless.
Speaker 2:A March 2020 pandemic hit and, because of a whole host of reasons, business finance was absolutely the wrong place to be during the pandemic. I have the from a from Multiple perspectives. One, small businesses were all closed, especially in the UK when there were lockdowns. Number, two, the government started dishing out two and a half percent APR loans to every single small business, which was brilliant because all the small businesses survived. So from an economic perspective made a lot of sense. Or from a business lender perspective, I can't even borrow for two and a half percent. So you know it was pretty unfair competition for us. So basically, for two years we did pretty limited amount of deals, but what we managed to do was be cash flow break even by reducing our costs and just investing in digital and e-commerce Partners and more.
Speaker 2:So we built version 3.0 of our platform, where we have a liberal is create and liberal is core. Now I won't bore you with the details between those two, but what it basically means is that for every single partner we can integrate a very simple solution that is basically in their dashboard. They can make a quick widget that relates to our website and provides the business finance to those small businesses. There's also a version that is a P, a fully API driven, and it's two API endpoints that they can create their own application journey with. Now that's the most popular one. It takes a bit more development work from our partners, so it's not plug-and-play, but it takes about one to two weeks of development work and creates an entire journey in their ecosystem without having to hand it off to another website or without an iframe, and In their own language, in their own feel. Their own branding, with liver is completely in the background.
Speaker 2:Now, that is the future, needless to say, of embedded finance, where small businesses can just come to an ecosystem. Deal with Vagaro is a great example, where hairdressers have their bookings and the information for each of their clients through the Vagaro app and Can see exactly like okay, I've got 20 bookings today, I can schedule them all in. They make the payment through the Vagaro app and we can then provide those hairdressers or hair salons with with funding in the background and on a daily basis. They can see you pre-qualified for twenty thousand dollars of business finance. You're pre-qualified for thirty thousand dollars and provides them a backup line for whenever they need to buy an inventory or whenever they you know they have a cash flow issue.
Speaker 3:So do you do anything to help convert that portfolio or to? I mean, obviously you have the, the pre approved offers and they're served up through maybe a dashboard or whatever. Are there other things that partners do, or that you help partners do email campaigns or anything like that?
Speaker 2:So we are.
Speaker 2:We're only channel, we have built an only channel platform, and what I mean by that is it doesn't for us, it doesn't matter whether clients or merchants comes through the digital roots. Once a call us, once send us an email, we can, or even want to chat with us, we can open up every single journey there. So what we help our partners with is driving adoption, driving penetration into their portfolios, and we do that through combination of marketing, through combination of smart positioning, different messaging on the widget that we have on their websites. We provide sometimes provide incredible take up offers or offers for the partners to go out to their merchants and driving adoption, for example, of a new terminal, or you have a high outflow of cash at some point for purchasing you know purchasing inventory and the partner wants to give them a special offer. Now we work with our partners to do all those, those marketing campaigns and driving penetration, and over the past years we've become, I would say, experts in small business finance marketing and we know exactly what. What drives highest conversion at this point.
Speaker 3:So let's step back and look at the payments industry kind of more broadly, and where do you think it's headed? What are the trends we need to be looking out for? Obviously you can answer in terms that affect your business, but just curious your thoughts on the industry as a whole.
Speaker 2:Needless to say, it's an industry that touches every single facet of business around the world at this point. So there's a lot of turmoil happening in terms of the embedded payments, the bank to bank account payments, the, the acquiring networks. Every single aspect of that will, in my view, will change over the next four to five years and what I strongly believe is that eventually, acquiring is just going to be such a commodity that there's very limited margin to be made in that, but all the value added services around acquiring will be the drivers for the future growth. Now, what I mean by that is small businesses still struggle with the basic banking services in the US and in various other countries getting a bank account. It takes a lot of time for them to to obtain a bank account. Getting funding is, for 50% of businesses, not even a possibility. For the other 50% of businesses, they very often do not get the amount of funding they need or the speed that needed, or the terms are onerous. They have to. They have to even pledge their house or their personal assets. So what we, what we strongly believe, is that there's three items around acquiring that, over the next five to ten years, are going to drive.
Speaker 2:I would say that the majority of the of the profits for acquirers and payment companies, that is value added services like lending.
Speaker 2:It will be other value added services such as bank accounts, such as insurance, such as cards, and then spend cards and credit cards. And the third one will be around software. So it will be all the payments in the US. Sorry, all the growth in the US is currently around high SVs, independent software vendors, who integrate with payments. Now you can think about the toasts of this world, the vagueros of this world, businesses that integrate payments into their software offering or the ePOS offering or the POS offering to merchants where they control the entire ecosystem. So it could be software for inventory management, could be software for spend management, can be software for for bank account management, but inherently with payments integrated into it to make it incredibly smooth journey for those merchants. Now this is where you can see the likes of Square Stripe, addian toasts for Garo. They're all diving onto the ecosystem and 60% of all new merchants or all new businesses on board it in the US are now doing their payments through an ISV versus the acquire or the bank.
Speaker 3:Yeah, that's a huge trend and definitely something that I talk about a lot on these shows and across other conversations that I have. I think the whole embedded finance is kind of a broad term that I've used that covers payments and lending and payroll and all of those things. So I think that's definitely a trend that's going to continue and it sounds like you guys are well positioned with that, especially here in the US.
Speaker 2:What we see right now is just the growth of ISVs and the growth of the breadth of their offerings are growing day by day. I would almost say I think the trend isn't as pronounced yet in Europe and the UK, but that's a matter of time. So we're prepping for rapid onboarding of all those partners in all those countries they were live in and while we being ahead of the curve and being able to switch our platform very rapidly, we can now onboard a partner in less than 48 hours onto either of our solutions and that's where we spend a lot of time in the last year on is to make sure that once all those ISVs come to do the same conclusions you and I have, greg, that business finance is going to be a huge driver of their value of service. That's when we can onboard them in 48 hours.
Speaker 3:Great. Well, let's switch gears a little bit and talk about you. So tell us about your journey to your role there as the CEO. How did you get there? Kind of maybe your background story a little bit.
Speaker 2:So originally I never foreseen a career in finance, although mathematics and economics are definitely my two favorite topics at university and at high school.
Speaker 2:But what I always wanted to become was a astronaut and I started flying small planes at age 14. Since, basically for six years, I've been asking my dad that I want to become a pilot and an astronaut. Now, at age 14, started flying, started my career, thinking that I would either become an airline pilot and then potentially a astronaut or a fighter pilot. Having miserably failed all the exams at age 18, I decided that studying financial economics was probably a better career prospect. So that was my first journey of getting disappointed. I would say there's just many more disappointments coming forward. So, age 18, started studying, started with double masters in financial economics and financial law, and three months in, both my parents got very ill, unfortunately, so both had to go into hospital. Both recovered very well, but it took more than a year for them to actually get back into the family business. Now my entire family runs businesses, so they all had very entrepreneurial, all of their own small businesses. So I've seen the struggles of small business owners from up close and personal throughout my entire life and my parents have stepped back fully, but stepped back out of the business, and my brother actually has taken over the family business now. So I still see all the issues that that are happening with small businesses. In any case, coming back to the career, age 18, spent a year and a half running my parents catering and delicatessen business in Rotterdam alongside my studies. So, needless to say, my grades took a bit of a dip as I was working about 56 hours in my parents' company together with my brother, but did it for the greater good. Definitely learned a lot. As an 18 year old boy trying to lead a company of 20-odd people, it's quite a daunting task. We did quite well, if I say so myself, and within the next two years we started up our own entity, which was called Taste 2, which was a business to business catering platform, basically delivering catering to the local offices of Shell or Middle Steel and local police and universities in Rotterdam. That was our first foray, I would say, in entrepreneurship my brother and I and he's still running that and in 2004, I decided that the international world or 2006, actually it was that the international world of finance was much more interesting. So I went to work for JP Morgan in London and basically said to my brother look, you run it, let's see where it ends. And 20 and a bit years later he's still running it. So I'm quite proud of that.
Speaker 2:But fast forward. Jp Morgan learned a lot, traveled a lot, a lot of hours of work in New York, san Francisco and London, ended up back in London and saw the advent of Fintech coming up. So 2011, we were pitching for the IPO of a company called WONGA, which undoubtedly a lot of people in the UK still remember vividly. It was basically the UK's darling Fintech. In 2011 was held as the democratiser of finance and very rapidly was the most hated company in London or in the UK, as they were basically a payday lender. So through my four years that I've spent at WONGA around employee number 80 probably we went to 1400 people and down to 600 within two years time. So it was a bit of a roller coaster, learned a lot, especially what not to do with a company.
Speaker 2:And in 2015, we looked at selling a whole bunch of assets for WONGA. We sold a business finance company called Everline in the market and the data from there was very clear that partnership led funding at both a much higher conversion rate, a much better credit rating, and the clients were far more engaged than going direct or through brokers. So with that business plan, I got to know my current shareholders, lennem Chalkot, who basically back CEOs like myself who want to start up their own companies and their own ideas. They had an asset called Libris and they said, look, we like your plan and we have an asset. Why don't we combine the two? And you become CEO of Libris and you focus on that partnership led funding. Eight years later, libris has gone from about 2 million of revenues to about 100 million of revenues and we've been thriving over the past eight years. So the plan was solid. Now the execution needs to show whether we can survive for the next 20 years.
Speaker 3:No, thanks for that backstory and sorry you make it to the moon, but maybe in another life.
Speaker 2:I sure hope so. Well, actually I'm a firm believer that in my lifetime we're going to see colonization of the moon, so I keep that prediction.
Speaker 3:Yeah, there you go. Well, great. So what are some things you're passionate about? Maybe one work related passion and one personal passion From a work perspective.
Speaker 2:What I really love about Libris, and where I'm very, very passionate about, is helping small businesses thrive, and we see that every day within the company, within our communication. If you go to our website, we really care about the small business owners and helping them both survive and thrive, and I think the best example I can give you there is during the pandemic. We had one business owner actually multiple business owners but one of them, through LinkedIn, sent me a message and said thank you so much for the funding. You have saved not just the jobs of my employees, you also saved my job. And relating that to my own family and my own company, it just shows that having this funding available not only helps them, but it also keeps a lot of people in employment I need to say, smes have 60% of the UK's employment in any case but it's also helping on an individual basis and the small business owner, making sure that they see through the next year.
Speaker 2:And from a personal perspective, I got my flying licenses when I was 15 years old or 17 years old and I've always spent time in the air, and the way that I decompress and deal with stress is in three ways.
Speaker 2:One is spending some time with my kids. Recently, in the last six years, I would say spending some time doing sports. But what really brings my stress levels down and actually sorts my head out is whenever I take to the skies and I spend two to three hours flying a plane, because the only thing you can do is actually flying the plane, and it's my passion, I love it. I try to mix pleasure with business. So last week we had a big meeting in Germany with one of our partners and I took some of the team up in the skies with a little plane to fly out to Germany, did all the meetings out there at the dinner and then we flew back the next day. So I got the combination of spending time with my hobby that I love and doing the stuff I love best, which is helping small businesses thrive.
Speaker 3:That's awesome. Getting to combine the two is really cool, so that's awesome. One last question and I like to ask this, just to get different perspectives from people who have obviously different backgrounds is what advice would you give to someone that's just starting out in this space? Maybe they come to you and say hey, Rob, I'm interested in coming to work for you and I want to learn more about this payment space or this fintech ecosystem. What would you tell them to do to be successful?
Speaker 2:One thing I've noticed over the last 20 years of working, especially the last eight years of running Libras, is your company falls and rises by the quality and the motivation of your people, and with that I mean even even on the CEO basis. Your own motivation, your own drive, your own perseverance drives others. And coming from, I think I read the book from Tim Peake where he says about astronauts being very aware of how their own motivation, their own mental state, impacts everybody around them. That is also very, very true in a company where you work a lot of hours together. We work long hours, we work, we make tough decisions, we have very, very tough meetings at times where there's a lot of conflict that we need to resolve, and the way that people handle that drives how other people not only see them, but also how other people drive their own teams. So it starts at the top, but it also goes along every single layer of the company, where if you are negative about something, you'll see the rest of the team become negative about it. If you're positive about something, you'll see the rest of the team become positive about it. If you lack the focus and some people my team will will laugh about this because I'm notoriously bad in keeping focus, but I'm really determined in when I want something and when I need something, we're all aligned on that and that drives the focus of the company as well. So what I would tell to other people is if you want to learn more about the FinTech ecosystem, or you want to work in the startup or you want to work in the scale up, think about why you're doing it and think about what drives you. And if the goal is I want to be an entrepreneur because it sounds really great, then just don't do it.
Speaker 2:Look at Elon Musk, I think he said if you look at it rationally at entrepreneurship, you know one in a thousand about makes it. You shouldn't be doing it. So you have to be passionate about it, and if you're not passionate, then go do something else Separately. If you have a bad day or if you have a, something is happening. You just lost an RFP or you just won an RFP. That's going to reflect on the rest of your day, and the rest of your day and the rest of your decisions and the rest of your team as well. So have a real thought about that and how you motivate people and how you drive people because you can as an individual contributor, you can do a lot, but if you're a good leader of people and you can motivate people in a certain way and drive them to maximum performance without burning people out, you'll build the best company you can get. And that's basically what I would tell people is imagine you working for yourself. What would you want to see from yourself?
Speaker 3:OK, great Rob. So thank you so much for being on the show today. I know your time is very valuable, so I really appreciate you being here.
Speaker 2:Thank you very much, greg, and thank you for listening to all that I have to say. If you do like to comment on it, if you have questions about Libris, or if you think that's a brilliant company I want to work for it please do visit Libris dot com or send me a note at Rob at Libris dot com.
Speaker 3:OK, great, and to all you listeners out there, I thank you for your time as well, and until the next story.
Speaker 1:Thank you for joining us this week on the leaders in payments podcast. Make sure you visit our website at leaders in payments dot com where you can subscribe to the show and where you'll find our show notes. If you enjoyed listening, please share on your social channels as well.