Meet the founder and CEO of Sweep
Billel, what is your background and how did you make the move to setting up your own business?
Prior to setting up Sweep, I was responsible for planning and managing European marketing campaigns for some of the world’s biggest brands including Coca-Cola, Shell, eBay and PlayStation.
However, I’ve always been curious about technology and its potential to change the way we live and the way we work. Working in marketing, business travel ended up being a big part of the job and the subsequent filing expenses meant I was continually dealing with piles of receipts every Friday. I saw an opportunity and started thinking about better ways to do this. At the time Open Banking was really starting to take shape, and it was then that things just clicked.
Tell us about Sweep and the challenge it’s solving for small and medium sized businesses?
Most companies still manage a lot of their internal processes manually, processes that could easily be automated. Sweep is a series of automation tools for SME’s that takes away the pain of admin-heavy travel bookings and arduous expense management and instead allows them to focus on the things that matter to their business. It means that employees can focus on more meaningful tasks, and employers can focus on growing their business!
How do you set yourself apart from other businesses in your industry?
Our current product suite includes Sweep Expenses and Sweep Travel.
Sweep Expenses is the first expenses management tool built on the Open Banking Framework, this tool works by plugging directly into your bank account and automatically fetching all the necessary information to create your expense directly from it, meaning its always 100% accurate, secure and complete. It’s also the first tool of its kind that can detect 100% of fraud cases, which can save companies thousands of pounds per year.
Sweep Travel is our business travel booking platform, it’s a one-stop-shop for booking, managing and reconciling all business trips. Sweep Travel allows companies to create bespoke travel policies, integrate their accounting system and billing systems to the platform, manage teams, permission levels and approve trips all from within the app, helping increase compliance all while gaining in efficiency.
For both tools we’ve created a completely new technology, and in doing so we are able to bring benefits to SMEs that other tools out there simply can’t.
What’s the most common problem your customers approach you with?
Fraud and error detection are big issues in finance teams, who often spend hours going through expense reports making sure they are all compliant, as well as managing every other aspect of finance in companies that often have very limited resources.
The same goes with travel management. Although 2020 hasn’t been the year for travelling businesses – it will come back! Organisations need to start thinking about the future and how they will operate in a post COVID-19 economy, simply letting your employees book their own trips without any controls won’t cut it anymore as the loss of cash will be even more hard felt.
What plans or launches do you have for Sweep over the next year?
Our Sweep Travel launch has been delayed to January 2021 due to lockdown so we’re very much looking forward to that. I think as businesses start to trade again and look at business travel, having the right tool to manage that efficiently is going to be on every manager’s mind.
On top of that we also are building an exciting new platform that will join our existing products at the hip - providing new automation features, specifically around automating financial processes such as VAT/PAYE, financial reporting, Accounts Payable/Receivable, with the aim to help SMEs be more efficient and make more of their data.
How do you believe the evolution of tech will affect your industry over the next 10 years?
If we have learned one thing from COVID-19 is that no business is ready enough for what may happen in the future. Technology is not only a way to be more profitable, it is most importantly an opportunity to build resilience and agility during tough times.
Open Banking is one of these new opportunities to build tools that can provide huge benefits to SMEs. Finance not only lies at the core of a business’ operations, it also permeates every other vertical. By building new tools and new technologies on Open Banking we can leverage the huge amount of financial data SMEs hold to their benefit. We can help them understand it, find new opportunities for savings and sales, all the while automating all the recurrent and highly manual processes they still deal with.
Why is automation in business so important right now?
Automation does two things, it drastically reduces human error, which is said to cost organizations over $62.4 million every year, and it also allows business leaders to re-allocate resources to more value-added tasks.
Instead of having your finance director bogged down on expense reports, VAT return forms and quarterly finance reports they could be actively participating in the growth of the company by strategizing new ways of generating revenue, bringing you strong market insight and pushing your other teams forward.
Where do you see Sweep, and the market it operates in, in 5 years?
I think the best time to be in our sector is now, business travel (and expenses as a result) can only do better from now on. We saw major companies come out of the 2008 crisis and this one is no different, there will be an end to it and the upside will be huge.
We are very lucky to have been able to survive this year, not like the 1000’s of startups that have already liquidated in the UK, and we have two incredible products that will see a lot of demand in the next 6 – 12 months, that on top of the other amazing RPA features we are currently building makes our future look very bright.
With challenging economic times ahead, what would be your advice to start-ups?
Any challenge can also be an opportunity, I actually wrote an article a few weeks back about this. My main advice is be agile. Don’t be afraid to pivot when you see the opportunity to do so. Also, nurture your employees as they are your biggest resource now.
Also, keep looking for support. Last month Innovate UK announced Sweep as one of the winning companies for the January 2020 SMART grant, this was the highlight of our year and is going to help us build the first RPA platform for UK SMEs.
What has been your biggest learning at Sweep so far?
2020 has been full of learnings. I’d say the biggest take out for me has been to learn the value of persistence. It has been a trying year for everyone and filled with many occasions to give up, to lose perspective or doubt our product.
Having a team that believes in the value of your company and is willing to work with you during these times is the best motivator you can have, so learning how to carefully recruit these first few people and keeping them engaged is paramount.
What would be your top tip for building and growing a business?
Your idea is only a small part of the potential success of your company, spend a good amount of time finding the right people to work with, and as a rule of thumbs look for people that have more qualifications and experience than you do.
