Startup Q&A: Supermoney
With over 25 years of experience as a highly skilled Insurance Broker and more recently as a founder of two fintech startups, Mark Abbott adores his work. In particular, building value into networks and delivering powerful block-chain solutions in automotive, healthcare, financial services and logistics sectors.
Mark also happens to be the COO of Supermoney, a UK-based startup that provides a suite of products, tools and services for the creation of business networks, using distributed ledger technologies. Supermoney improves business process efficiency and creates opportunities for new business models within use cases like asset tracking, self-sovereign identity, closed loop payments, loyalty programs and escrow. In addition, the company has worked with multi-national corporations in a number of sectors including automotive finance, recruitment retail, financial services and healthcare.
— In a single sentence, what does Supermoney do?
Supermoney is a next generation accounting ledger, distributed to facilitate the creation and management of hyper efficient business networks.
– How did Supermoney come to be? What was the problem you found and the ‘aha’ moment?
In 2018 and after a number of years of running a successful International Payments Company, the Founders, Joel Smalley and Mark Abbott realised that conventional legacy IT Infrastructures and legacy manually intervened processes within most businesses were significantly affecting the levels of business process efficiency.
Utilising the powerful capabilities of Distributed Ledger Technologies (DLT), Supermoney developed a unique business model whereby the transacting of tokenized goods, services, money and all other real-world assets, created a huge gain in business process efficiency through the integration of Payments, Logistics, Asset Tracking/Provenance and Loyalty on the ledger.
The “aha” moment was realising that the opportunity for Supermoney was to build a simple, flexible and scaleable toolkit to allow businesses to build blockchain networks and solutions quickly and cheaply, in order to verify and validate whatever use-case was required within their own businesses. Digital transformation is key — that is Supermoney’s core USP!
— What sets Supermoney apart in the market?
Supermoney is the only company in the market that is able to create a Proof of Concept (PoC) deployed in live environment, within a matter of hours and at a price-point that is accessible to any business in any sector.
Our customers love our flexibility and ability to realise their PoC’s, whilst employing our lean product development methodologies to get quickly and cheaply to Minimum Viable Product (MVP).
— What are people most excited by when they first see Supermoney ?
Partnering with Oracle and Oracle for Startups in 2019. That was huge for Supermoney!
— Have you pursued funding and if so, what steps did you take?
We have successfully raised in excess of £1.2m through a private HNW/UHNW personal network.
— What KPIs are you tracking that you think will lead to revenue generation/growth?
With over 25 current PoC’s in play and plenty more in the pipeline, across such a wide industry-sector base, let alone use-cases, the key is to migrate as many of these into MVP/Full Production deployments as possible.
— How do you build and develop talent?
Very careful selection for our Internal Tech Resource — we now have a robust, highly skilled and dedicated team.
Our most recent Board appointments are:
— What are the biggest challenges for the team?
Choosing the right people to join the company. Working in a startup presents a world of challenges and one normally has to wear many “caps” initially due to scant resource and hence demonstrate a deep level of intuition, role flexibility and an enormous amount of hard work and dedication.
It is not uncommon that high-flyers from previous successful employments within large global companies, struggle to succeed within the startup environment. They may have strong skill-sets in certain defined areas, but quite often, are not able to adapt into the much more challenging environment of a startup, where they are on their “own” and not supported with additional and significant departmental resource.
Continued belief and passion will always help you get through the tough times!
— What’s been the biggest success for the team and how did you celebrate?
Our biggest win at the moment is a partnership with HSBC, via Oracle, who have agreed to provide the payment structure for all of our solutions.
We have some big names in automotive finance, too.
And as for how we celebrated? Probably a selection of celebratory emoji’s on Whats-App between the team!
— What’s something you’re constantly thinking about?
Other than my beautifully amazing family, Supermoney is always in the forefront of my mind (and probably conversation, too). Most likely because I’m so excited about it and people love hearing about the clever stuff we do. I love it!
Being a petrol-head, Formula 1, and MotoGP are somewhere up there, too.
— What advice would you give to other founders?
Be true to yourself, always.
— Have you been or are you part of a corporate startup program or accelerator? If so, which ones and what have been the benefits?
We are part of Oracle for Startups. Two Collaboration Labs through L Marks — we were finalists at both BMW Financial Services North America and Volvo Financial Services North America in 2018/2019. It provided hugely valuable insight into that industry sector and the business challenges they face. In both cases, very valuable and on-going engagements.
— Who is your cloud provider?
Oracle — OCI
— Is there any question you wished we’d asked you?
Do we believe that Supermoney will gain the coveted Unicorn Status? Answer is yes!
You can learn more about Supermoney by visiting their website here.
