Meet the co-founder of Crezco
Ralph Rogge is the CEO and co-founder of Crezco, an open banking account-to-account API for domestic and cross-border payments. Ralph is responsible for product development and international expansion, assuring open banking and other innovative payment stacks are easily accessed and employed by developers and end-customers everywhere.
Prior to Crezco, Ralph was COO and founding shareholder at YouLend, a revenue-based-financing start-up sold to payment giant Banking Circle. Ralph studied at Cambridge University and Columbia University, where his co-founder Igor Pikovsky taught Mathematics and Statistics.
There’s always a lightbulb moment before the beginning of a new venture. What was that moment for you?
When I was working at my last company, I used to pay invoices. I noticed that paying for coffees with contactless cards in the morning and paying for invoices later in the day were two completely different experiences.
Card payments are expensive for receiving merchants, they’re slow to process, and are subject to fraud, such as chargebacks. Yet, they are accepted by consumer-facing businesses (B2C) due to the increased convenience at checkout. Business facing businesses (B2B) aren’t willing to accept these costs, so payments are processed manually with 30 day or more payment terms. This is a huge problem for businesses who need a large amount of working capital, especially those who sell consumer goods. My co-founder and I saw open banking as an opportunity to provide B2B payments, domestic and international, with the same level of convenience as B2C card payments, while bypassing the costs associated with cards.
How did you fund the business in the early stages?
We were fortunate to raise a £3million seed round which we successfully closed in September 2021. Our investors included angels, venture capital funds and payment specialists. We were lucky to receive financial support from established individuals and companies already in the Fintech space such as UFP Fintech, one of the early investors in Revolut. The money was used to build out our B2B payment platform and expand into cross-border B2B payments. We also used this money to hire an amazing, talented team.
What does your business offer its target audience?
Crezco is a business-to-business open banking payments platform that makes B2B invoice payments as frictionless as card payments, without the associated costs. Crezco can process account-to-account payments up to £1 million in real-time for free. We typically work with UK and EU small businesses, many of whom have connected our payment processing API with their accounting software, such as QuickBooks and Xero. Others use our app directly or connect to us through some of our integrated booking and supply-chain platforms.
What’s the most common problem your customers approach you with?
The greatest problem our customers face is the time it takes to get paid when issuing B2B invoices. We save time for these customers by providing a more convenient and faster checkout solution. Faster payment times and greater convenience make it easier for our customers to get paid sooner, improving cash flow and saving them time from chasing late payments. We also provide greater visibility and clarity to both the payee (our customers) and the payers (our customers’ customers) by providing certainty of payment and handling account reconciliation.
How do you set yourself apart from other businesses in your industry?
We are the only checkout solution that can process up to £1 million instantly and for free - without any hidden costs.
With all the success stories around entrepreneurship and how innovative people have to be to take the leap. How do you think you’ve innovated your sector and why?
Crezco has leveraged the Open Banking account-to-account real-time payment initiative to embed checkout solutions on invoices. If you receive an invoice via an accounting software provider like Xero or QuickBooks, you’ll be able to pay using Crezco’s embedded payment link. This provides a more seamless and secure checkout that uses Open Banking’s Faster Payments rails.
How is digitisation empowering your business?
The innovation of open banking faster payment rails allows us to bring the convenient consumer checkout experience to the B2B market. Open banking technology has changed what is possible: giving merchants like us access to the fastest payment rails previously only reserved for banks. This means that customers can checkout within a few clicks, with their payees receiving 100% of the funds instantly, in real time.
Hiring the right team is vital in any business. What are your top three tips for hiring and developing engineering talent?
Company culture! It isn’t created overnight nor lost in a second. It’s something that has to be continually worked at and enforced, otherwise we lose it, just like that. We need to remember that we’re all human and can only thrive together so we need to work together for the best possible outcome for everyone.
Remember that your first hires are the most important. Recruitment is difficult, expensive and time consuming, but we recognise that our first 20 or 30 hires will build the foundations of our company and will determine our growth in the next ten-years. This is why we invest in making sure our recruitment processes are fit to help bring on board the right people.
Eliminate bias with data driven recruitment. When hiring, we ask the same questions to all candidates who are scored independently across various variables, both professional and personal, by multiple people. This helps us to eliminate bias within the recruitment process, meaning we end up hiring the person who is the best fit for the job, not the person who is necessarily the most confident or gives us the best impression.
Keeping an eye on the numbers in any business is important. How do you ensure that you’re always up to date?
Reconcile, reconcile, reconcile: A stitch in time saves nine. Stay on top of your outstanding invoices. This is easiest done when paid invoices reconcile automatically within your accounting software, companies like Xero and QuickBooks. This is the quickest and most efficient way to gauge your cash flow and potential problems. Without this you’re flying in the dark and suddenly things become a lot less clear. Furthermore, if paid invoices reconcile automatically, you’ll save a lot of time manually handling this process and life will be a lot more pleasant.
How do you believe the evolution of tech will impact your industry over the next 10 years?
The pace of technological adoption is at breakneck speed. It took decades for the telephone to reach 50% of households in the early 20th century. It took less than five years for mobile phones to hit the same penetration rate. Contactless credit and debit cards were launched in 2007, accepted on London buses in 2012 and the underground in 2014, but the threat of COVID-19 was still needed to see full universal adoption of contactless payments across the country. We hope that the adoption of faster, account-to-account payments won’t take so long and the data so far is positive.
What plans do you have for Crezco over the next two years?
Our focus is to build a product and service that solves one of the biggest headaches for small businesses. Crezco is pioneering B2B invoice payments - and is the only checkout solution which can process up to £1 million instantly for free. It is important for us to ensure that we continue delivering value for all our stakeholders, for as long as possible. In the future, we’re hoping to expand into buy-now, pay-later (BNPL), SME lending, insurance, banking and other financial services.
