Therefore, we are happy to announce our major sponsorhip in the best student-organized German startup fair in Germany – The Ebrpreneurship Forum taking place on October, 24th to October 25th at the campus of the European Business Schook. Schloss Reichartshaussen.

As part of this sponsorship; Kreditech will be involved in various ways:

• Our CEO, Sebastian Diemer (ex-ebs 2009 Bachelor) will share his entrepreneurial experience from working at Rocket Internet, Groupon China, founding Gigalocal and Kreditech and exiting his university project (predictx.org – acquired by a German investment bank in 2012). Topic of the speech to be announced.
• Kreditech will run on-campus interviews for highly qualified and motivated students / participants. We love to hire EBS students and ex EBS folks, as a major part of our management and overall team is run by former EBS students. If you dont want to wait until we find you, find us in the meantime: http://www.kreditech.com/working-with-us. We hired several top master and Bachelor students for summer interships already.
• We will provide some nice presents to your event bag
• Some surprises
• We will totally buy you a beer if you bump into us on the legendary party

About Ebspreneurship:

Ebspreneurship is an annual startup fair, organized by students of the European Business School. Last year, reputable speakers, such as Dr. Alexander von Frankenberg (MD Hightech Gründerfonds), Dr. Cornelius Böersch (Founer&Director Mountain Partners), Sebastian Siemiatowski (Founder/CEO klarna), Sven Schmidt (Partner Accel), Andreas Thümmler (Founder7CEO Corporate Finance Partners), Thomas Hessler (CEO Zanox) and many more have contributed to the ever growing reputation, quality and scale of the event. If you are a founder, a starrtup CEO, a frustrated investment banker or consulting guy – this is the event you should attend.

The European Business School is proud to present EBSpreneurship, the most innovative student initiative at our university.

In 2007  Lukas von Ingelheim, Patrice Deckert, and Patrick Raab founded a student intiative called Ebspreneurshi that has turned into an important part of EBS students initiatives ever since.Gloria Seibert and Lennart Börner in 2009 organized the first EBS Entrepreneurship Conference. In 2010, the event was renbranded to EBSpreneurship Forum and taken to the next level by Rupert Hoffschmidt and Steffen Boller. The focus was shifted to seed / early stage startups and the team introduced new and innovative formats. Maurice Mauser, Aydogan Ali Schosswald and Joschka Koestelin 2011, not only scaled the team and reach of the event, but also excelled speaker quality, event organization and corporate involvement to a new level. Owing to their joint effort, they could turn the EBSpreneurship Forum into Germany’s largest conference for young entrepreneurs with participants from all fields of study and from over 30 nations. Over the course of only three years, the EBSpreneurship Forum re-invented events on campus and massively increased the awareness on the core topics entrepreneurship and innovation.

• Samwer’s new Global Founder Capital announces Kreditech as one of the first investments out of the newly launched 150M global fund

• Silicon Valley based Blumberg Capital, Point Nine Capital and Heiko Hubertz increase their shares

• Funds will be used as equity base for growth debt in aggressive global roll-out to emerging markets

Hamburg, 22.04.2013 – Kreditech, the fast growing big data scoring technology provider, today announced the closing of a “mid-7-digit” financing round from Munich-based Global Founders Capital, Silicon Valley-based Blumberg Capital, Berlin-based Point Nine Capital and Hamburg-based H2 Investments.

The investment will be used for an aggressive global roll out of the profitable B2C microlending plattforms as well as the development of the B2B “Scoring as a Service” technology, which will be launched in 2014. “When it comes to scaling a profitable multinational company to a global category leader, Global Founders Capital, which is managed by the Samwers and Fabian Siegel are the support you want to have on board”, says Sebastian Diemer, CEO and co-founder of Kreditech. “We have turned down every other equity offer we have received, as we are currently fully focused on leveraging our profitable business with alternative financing instruments. As the money itself is not needed currently, we took the equity offer primarily for the strategic value the new investors bring to the table and to optimize our corporate finances for leveraging working capital,”, adds Oliver Schimek, CFO of Kreditech.

“We are impressed by the performance of Kreditech – something that cannot easily replicated. The team has fine-tuned and optimized the scoring technology to a level that gives them an edge in regards to their competitors.. Going forward, we are excited to help the team to built a leading company in this industry by providing access to our global network.”, explains Fabian Siegel, managing the new Global Founders Capital together with Oliver and Marc Samwer.

In addition, Kreditech announces the expansion to Czech Republic, Russia and 4 additional emerging markets throughout the next months.“The cutting edge of our technology is that we don’t require any external credit bureau data in our risk model, but can make very precise identification, fraud detection and scoring decisions based on globally available data sources. This allows us to service the unbanked and expand into markets that cannot be reached with tradtional credit scoring technology”, comments Alexander Graubner-Müller, CTO and co-founder of Kreditech.

About Kreditech:

Kreditech (www.kreditech.com) is a real-time scoring technology that applies big data to many thousand data points in credit applications by individuals. This technology is applied in B2C for issuing online, SMS and facebook microloans  (www.kredito24.pl , www.kredito24.es, www.kredito24.cz, zaimo.ru) in real-time as well as for the establishment of a global “Scoring as a Service” database that provides scoring data without technical integration or contracts to third parties.

Kreditech operates offices in Hamburg, Warsaw, Barcelona, Moscow, Prague and Kharkov and employes 25 professionals from 12 nationalities.

About Global Founders Capital:

Global Founders Capital (www.globalfounderscapital.com) is a global, stage agnostic venture fund based in Munich. The fund consists out of three partners, Oliver Samwer an accomplished European Internet entrepreneur who was honored with the Young Global Leader designation at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Marc Samwer a startup entrepreneur who received the Eisenhower Fellowship Award and Fabian Siegel, who amongst other ventures built Delivery Hero for the past 2 years into a global leader in its industry.

About Blumberg Capital:

Blumberg Capital (www.blumbergcapital.com) is a classic, early-stage venture capital firm focused on investing in innovative and disruptive Digital and Social Media, SaaS/Technology Enabled Services, Mobile Technology and Internet companies. Blumberg Capital has closed a fund of $100M USD in July 2012, which is used for financing lifecycles of portfolio companies. Blumberg, together with Accel Partners, invested 8M USD last year in lenddo,which uses social reputation for issuing loans in emerging markets.

About Point Nine Capital:

Point Nine Capital, the Angel-VC, is a Berlin-based early-stage venture capital firm, primarily investing in Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), marketplace, lead generation and eCommerce startups. The fund and its managers have backed a number of highly successful Internet companies in Germany, Poland and other countries, including inFakt, Brainly, Zendesk, DeliveryHero and DaWanda. More information can be found atwww.pointninecap.com.

Press Contact:

Sarah-Louise Koch
- Head of Brand, PR, HR Management -

Kreditech Holding SSL GmbH

sarah@kreditech.com

+49 160 96606049

• Blumberg Capital and a German investment bank invest in Kreditech
• Point Nine Capital also participates and increases its stake
• Funds will be used for scaling B2C business in Poland and expanding to other (European) markets to break even
• “Scoring as a Service” database for disruptive, global, online scoring will launch in 2014

Hamburg, 17.12.2012 – The 2012 founded tech start-up Kreditech attracts further prominent investors: Blumberg Capital and the management of a German investment bank join the prominent list of investors in Kreditech with Point Nine Capital (also participating and increasing their stake).  Michael Brehm (founder studivz), Heiko Hubertz (founder Bigpoint), Felix Haas (founder amiando), Stefan Glaenzer, Greycorp, YoungBrains, Digital Pioneers N.V., and H2 Investments GmbH invested in Kreditech earlier in 2012. In total Kreditech has raised 4m USD, which, according to CEO Sebastian Diemer, will be sufficient to scale the B2C business to break-even in Q1 2013. In addition, Kreditech plans the international launch of its B2B product “Scoring as a Service” in 2014.

“Kreditech has developed an innovative approach to scoring by analyzing a much larger amount of online data for credit applications than has been done before”, says Jon Soberg, Managing Director of Blumberg. Kreditech developed a self-learning algorithm as well as completely automated workflows that apply machine-learning and big data to credit scoring. “This scoring system works country- and credit-bureau-independent, leveraging big data scoring layers and enabling lending in places where credit bureaus such as Experian and Transunion are not operating. It gives them a unique cost and technology advantage”, adds Soberg.

Point Nine Capital, the Angel-VC, is a Berlin-based early-stage venture capital firm, primarily investing in Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), marketplace, lead generation and eCommerce startups. The fund and its managers have backed a number of highly successful Internet companies in Germany, Poland and other countries, including inFakt, Brainly, Zendesk, DeliveryHero and DaWanda. More information can be found at www.pointninecap.com.

Kreditech will present the next era of scoring technology as part of the renowned investor and start-up event, NOAH. On November 7th founder and CEO Sebastian Diemer, will be speaking about early game changers structurally transforming the credit industry.

“The credit issuance business has existed nearly as long as mankind itself. We are playing one of the oldest games, which has not undergone the same dramatic shifts and technological liberation that has become a reality in other sectors. Simplyput, the profitability is still high, due to regulations and capital barriers of entry that the industry does not feel a painful need for innovation. Whereas most industries have been pressured to innovate through the online paradigmshift, credit products are still being issued the same way they were 50 years ago. Although most banks have added the internet, as distribution channel, the scoring and the processes remain unchanged and rely mostly on basic credit bureau data and manual approval.”

Kreditech has developed a new approach to scoring with a simple vision: Make scoring faster, fairer and more sustainable to the use of big data.

Kreditech is able to process 8.000 data points per seconds and thus yield an instant credit decision. Based on that decision, payments and repayments are triggered. “The entire process is managed
100 % automatically and is scalable into any volume, geographical region orindustry sector”.
The data points that are relevant for scoring are derived from social media, e-commerce patterns, mobile usage, location statistics, behavioural data and many more. The underlying data is 85 % country-independent and empowers a 100 % objective decision.

This system allows for the generation of better credit decisions that will only grants loans to individuals that have the power to repay at that at significantly lower cost and higher scalability. “It’s a no brainer that automated big data decisions benefits all involved stakeholders when compared to manual decisions that are based on static data collected by a credit bureaus”.

How this technology works and how banks and customers can benefit from this, will be revealed on November 7th.

About NOAH
The NOAH Conference has become the preeminent European event for Internet entrepreneurs, executives and investors. Attendees share insights into the latest proven concepts, network with senior executives, and establish lasting business relationships. In 2011, over 1.200 participants attended the event, which featured over 90 speakers from 17 countries.

Applying for a small loan trough one of our subsidiaries is very simple. There is no unnecessary paperwork to do, documents to fax or annoying hold music, because our services are provided 100% online from start to the end. Customers can use our sliders to decide exactly how much money they want to borrow and how many days they need to pay back the small loan. We show the full cost of repayment and, once our customers have chosen how much they want to lend, they just click to apply. We’ll then ask for some personal details and banking information and run our fully automatized scoring technology to check their credit worthiness. We usually provide our decision in a few seconds and, if approved, we send the cash to the bank-accounts within 15 minutes. That makes us the fastest 24/7 small loan lender in each of the countries we operate. We don’t want to keep our customers in debt. Our subsidiaries provide small loans for a few weeks. Our customers are always free to make an early repayment and with no hidden fees. We will always tell the potential customers what the full cost of repayment will be upfront. There are no catches or hidden extra costs. If you ask yourself, why we are issuing small loans in so many countries, the answer is clear. Based on the repayments we are able to create our big data scoring model, which can be used in each country!

The first 4 weeks of activity on the Polish market are behind us. The scale of interest in our services, even for us was a big surprise. Undoubtedly, it was the intense period for each Kreditech’s employee in order to meet the expectations of our customers. Loan applications which we received came across from all over Poland. Applicants came from different educational backgrounds, professions and age groups. We got a lot of email and phone inquiries who we are, what marks us out from the competition and what is the process of granting loans.

We would like to disclose a bit of the secret and reveal who is under the name Kreditech.

We are a team of young, dynamic people of Polish, German and British origins. All of us aqcuired extensive professional experience in finance, services, marketing, IT, across various business types of family-owned companies,  small /medium enterprises as well as the corporates and conglomerates. 90% of our staff has experience in international environment, both educational and profesional in countries around the world, starting from the west in USA, via UK, France, Poland, Switzerland, the Republic of South Africa, in China and South Korea ending.

Our mission is to provide consumers with fast, fair and responsible loans basing on the latest scoring technology. By our daily, diligent work we aim to achieve our vision – to provide our services to 5 million customers in 12 countries in Europe and around the world in a variety of business areas by 2015. The values that underlie our actions are: speed, honesty and responsibility.

The first weeks in Poland proved to be a remarkable success. To satisfy the curiosity of who are customers of Kreditech we prepared statistical models based on the first month of our activity.

As shown in the charts below, most of our customers are men and account for 55%. When analyzing marital status can be observed that 86% of our clients are married (43%) or single (43%) equally. Only 10% are divorcees, and 4% of the widows.

With regard to the age of our applicants the biggest group were people of age between 25-35 years, and the lowest – people above 50 years old. The low percentage of people above a certain age can be explained by no experience in “surfing” on the Internet or simply no Internet at all. Second large group, with almost 30% of total, were people with age between 35-50. Because majority of people up to age 25 are usually students, often dependent on family income, it was a big surprise to observe much interest in this age group.

As for the amount of loans, statistics are underestimated due to the applied rule with maxiumum amount of 500 zł for the first time customers (due to launching operations in August, this accounted for 100% of the customers). Some people have requested a higher amount hence the average height of a loan application increased to 565 zł. After a thorough examination by a fully automized system awarded loans, tailored to meet the individual creditworthiness of applicant, amounted to average height of 390 zł. The average income of our cosumers reached 1,996 zł.

And now it’s time to have a closer look what people think about Kreditech. Based on entries on Facebook, e-mails received and 119 reviews on our website (valid on 29/08/2012) we believe that services provided by Kreditech met consumers expectations. At the same time we have learned a few lessons from the first weeks of activity, and thanks to some customers who had written frank opinions explaining why they were disappointed (mainly technical problems) we managed to make an extra effort to learn the lessons and improve our services.

To sum up our first customers rated us with the VERY GOOD grade:

What are our plans for the future? Develop, continuously improve our technology and grant loans to broader range of customers. In order to achieve our goals we have launched new dynamic Help Desk platfort: Centrum Pomocy and we have started, unique on Polish market, cooperation with the leader of online payments Dotpay.

Regards to customers who trusted us so far.

Yours sincerely,

Kreditech Team

Traditional credit scoring used in banks and provided by credit bureaus as such is based on five scoring factors including past credit applications, on time payments, types of credit used, length of credit history and capacity used. This method is being used for many years now with little or none innovation. Kreditech, an innovative fintech scoring company, founded in Hamburg (Germany) is providing a newly developed big data scoring service.
The credit decisions are derived in seconds using a completely automatized and self-developed process with a self-learning algorithm. For each credit decision, the system collects data from a broad range of external data sources ranging from social networks, e-commerce data, economic databases, micro geographical statistics and other sources. Kreditech’s innovative big data scoring uses 8,000 data points in real-time to asses a customer’s creditworthiness, which other fintech companies are not able to do!
As one of the leading innovative fintech scoring companies using big data scoring, Kreditech provides scoring-as-a-service as one-stop-shop for online credit decisions. The service is provided to banks, debt collectors, e-commerce stores, leasing and other financial companies. The customer can choose from various modules such as Credit Scoring, Fraud Detection, KYC Identification, Payouts, Workflow and CRM or can combine them together. All the modules are easy to implement and integrate into the customer’s system and/or website. The customer does not have to sign long term contracts and can book the modules on demand.

If your business model implies a big stack of customer requests you need to know about CRM, VoIP phone Systems, live chat services and ticket management / help Desk. When composed properly, these tools enable even small teams to offer high quality customer support (CS) to a large customer base with the possibility to scale up virtually without boundaries. At Kreditech we chose to do so from the start.

A professional CS is data driven: KPIs like response times, average time until tickets are resolved, average call duration, and percentage of calls answered should be tracked to increase operational efficiency. The CS tools produce easy to grasp reports in numbers and diagrams, making your CS division transparent. Below you can find an example of a statistic from the Live Chat Tool snapengage.

Besides quantitative measures qualitative aspects have to be taken into account if you want to deliver a premium service. For quality assurance your CS agents require coaching sessions from time to time. A coaching session requires call monitoring for at least 30 minutes, together with an agent. Afterwards the calls get discussed to help the agent improve his communication skills. Additionally you can use sample mystery calls to review the performance. If you want to show your customers ratings and reviews publicly, trustedshops is a simple solution. In the picture you can see a snapshot taken from our Polish website, which for better understanding is translated into English.

When it comes to making the decision, you won’t get around checking different providers to find the best setup for your company. Highrise CRM, by 37signals, for example focuses on easy, intuitive handling, while companies with special requirements might be looking for a highly configurable CRM like Sugar CRM, which is available as a hosted version.

Placetel, nfon and sipbase offer VoIP services around the world. Whether one of these or another provider suits you best depends on your companies specifications, such as the country where your headquarters are located. For US-based start-ups a local provider like onsip.com will fit better than the German-based firms mentioned above. And if you want to internationalize you have to make sure that the services you are using are multilingual and work in your desired markets.

Ticket Management as a part of Help Desk software like Zendesk or kayako let you track and solve the requests of your customers. This way you will always be able to see, what requests a customer had, who helped him and if there are open requests that are currently unresolved.

The goal should be to get all the customer interaction integrated and logged in the CRM: mails, calls, live chats and customer documents. Most of the CS Tools come with add-ons to smoothly exchange data, but it can be interesting as well to use different services from one Provider, in order to keep complexity low. Whichever solution you choose to implement, these services are an investment in your relationship with your customers and can help you to distinguish yourself from your competitors.

Not entirely linked to the cloud topic, but still business critical, is how you handle your customer
data. The worst case scenario would be for customer data to get leaked to the internet. In order to
avoid this you should consult professional services to adopt your IT and operational processes. The
key points here are limiting access to the designated people and assigning user roles in the systems,
data encryption, passwords, SSL, and nondisclosure agreements for your employees.

For more in depth knowledge, the sales person from any provider mentioned in the article will be happy to help you.

Countries like Poland, Spain and the Czech Republic are already entered by the Kreditech-Ship. One of the next interesting countries to enter is Ukraine. We are working on a universal and unique scoring-model for credit-decision, for which we gain data from our payday lender activities, which are issuing short term payday loans in several European countries. The Kreditech algorithm makes credit-bureaus obsolete. It doesn’t need the additional information the other payday lenders need to do their scoring. Our algorithm takes advantage of every payday loan we issue. No comparable or payday lender technology is available in the whole world, which is able to score in such a short time, more flexible and more precise, than we can do it. Based on our country-researches, Ukraine is one of the most interesting countries for getting data and issuing payday loans. We are very excited about entering and “conquering” each country, which seems to be interesting for us and to our data-base. Kreditech grows fast and our scoring model learns and grows with us. The entering of Ukraine enables us to extend our global reach a lot and also our database used for our self-developed scoring algorithm. The maket-size according to payday lenders in Ukraine gives us the great opportunity to easily gain the market-leadership in this big and very interesting country. Growing at such a high speed as we do in so many countries gives us the opportunity to learn from mistakes and develop faster, safer and more reliable processes to enter new markets, like Ukraine and offer payday loans much faster and better than any other payday lender in a given country.

We at Kreditech provide micro loans and micro credits through our subsidiaries Kredito24 and Zaimo. Our subsidiaries in Poland, Spain, Czech Republic and Russia operate like a microfinance bank offering short term micro loans / credits.
Customers can apply for micro loans / credits trough one of our subsidiaries. There is no unnecessary paperwork to do, documents to fax or annoying hold music, since we provide our services 100% online. Using our sliders to decide exactly how much money the customer wants to borrow and for how long they want to take the micro loans / credits.
We are always transparent about the full cost of repayment and once our customers have chosen how much they want to lend, they just click to apply. We’ll then ask for some personal details and banking information and run our fully automatized scoring technology to check their credit worthiness like any other microfinance bank would do.
We usually provide our decision in a few seconds and if the application is approved, we send the cash to the bank account within 15 minutes. That makes us the fastest 24/7 microfinance bank/lender in each of the countries we operate in. Our customers are always free to make an early repayment of micro loans / credits with no hidden fees. There are no catches or hidden extra costs. We operate as a responsible microfinance bank and provide micro loans / credits only to people we are sure can pay back and won’t fall into a debt trap.