Meet Ali Hamriti, CEO and co-founder of Rollee

I am Ali Hamriti, a 31-year old Moroccan and French Entrepreneur who is passionate about technology and football - also the CEO and co-founder of Rollee.

There’s always a lightbulb moment before the beginning of a new venture. What was that moment for you?

I used to be Head of Data for a Fintech company that provided loans to small businesses and self-employed workers, and I was responsible for developing their credit scoring model. During my time there, I saw how painful it is for self-employed workers to access the relevant data they need for financial institutions to accurately assess and score their employment and income records.

As a result, I witnessed those self-employed workers being denied loans and miss out on opportunities. I realised the system needed to evolve as legacy traditional systems had become unfair decision-making processes as they weren’t able to consider all the data records and, therefore, the truth of an individual’s solvency. I set on a mission to create a solution that not only helps with lending, but also helps provide self-employed workers with fair access to all essential financial services. I created an API platform for the whole Fintech landscape so they can securely access income and employment data to enable them to make more informed, fairer decisions.

What inspired you to launch your business and what is the end goal?

I wanted to give back power to self-employed workers to share their data with financial institutions. Whether you have one job or multiple income sources, everyone deserves to access financial services whether it be a loan or a mortgage etc and to be in control of their data in the process. We’re on a mission to help securely streamline approaches to data access to avoid banks, for example, spending hours manually searching through dispersed data records to grant a service. In the process, we’re enabling financial institutions to minimise the risk of fraud and the chances of finding biased data through forged documents.

How did you conquer those moments of doubt that so often affect entrepreneurs or stop many with great ideas – what pushes you through?

It’s really helped me to surround myself with a brilliant team who share my mindset and vision to tackle industry challenges, and who want to grow the business as much as I do.

I am also lucky to have an amazing co-founder - we never met each other before, so at the beginning of Rollee we set up a trial phase to see if we would get along and I couldn’t be happier with our relationship.

What are your thoughts on failure?

Failure is the starting point of success. We encourage each other to have a fearless approach to trialling an idea so we can learn from it as long as the decision is based on a strong conviction. Whilst we don’t celebrate failures, we accept and welcome them as an opportunity to grow and share feedback to improve ourselves. In an early-stage start-up, we need to be open-minded enough to accept failure fast, and to get up and try something else even faster. One of our values is ownership: we encourage everyone to own their work and try new things even without a guarantee of success. If we fail, at least we take time to analyse the reasons of the failure and set up next steps to align to our objectives. We say, “I don’t fail, I learn”.

What’s the most common problem your customers approach you with?

Our customer’s mostly struggle with an overwhelming amount of data that is unstructured, unverified and can only be processed manually. This is keeping them away from valuable business opportunities and from scaling their business. Our API is setting business owners up for success by providing them with reliable, standardised and user-permissioned access to income and employment data of workers.

How do you set yourself apart from other businesses in your industry?

We decided from the very first day to operate fully remotely. We have onboarded a diverse team of 22 people, across 17 nationalities who live in many different countries. We celebrate our diversity and are proof that working remotely is not a challenge to producing quality work. As a seed start-up, we invested very early in marketing, our people, and security to understand our philosophy better and ensure our growth from very early on. This meant that our company’s growth is not linear as we aimed to invest early on in strategic topics that other start-ups don’t take up before their series B.

With all the success stories around entrepreneurship and how innovative people must be to take the leap. How do you think you’ve innovated your sector and why?

We offer the only API platform which provides access to all workers’ employment and income data with valuable insights to understand them. In doing so, we are tackling the issue of data fragmentation to enable financial institutions to do business with its growing customer base of the future – gig workers. Data is available everywhere around us, on many different devices, in many different ways. We help concentrate all those different data sources in a single place and transform and standardise it into a single format, that can adapt to all different uses out there. It enables businesses to access the data they need with the user’s permission to be fully GDPR compliant whilst at the same time giving businesses the confidence that the data is 100% reliable because it comes directly from the data source itself.

How important is company culture and what is your top tip to get it right?

Listen to your team, and they will listen to you. Spend as much time as needed exchanging ideas until topics are clear and decisions are made. Make it easy to start a conversation.

What are your thoughts on automation and how it could impact our economy?

Automation can save businesses a lot of time and effort spent manually doing work which can be allocated to other revenue-driving efforts. For example, if you have a work routine of retrieving data from many different apps every day, automation of those tasks can reduce that time spent to a minimum. One of our customers, a fleet manager, is saving 3 hours per day since she automated the data collection from driver apps. She can now fully focus on analysing the data and optimising her business.

What advice would you give to early-stage founders wanting to harness the power of technology to create a positive impact?

Start simple. Identify a pain that you experienced yourself and you wanted to solve even just for yourself. Think about a simple solution which drives maximum impact both now and into the future to drive long-term success.