Three Guys On Mission To Provide FX Transparency
Ireland has been a good base for three Americans to source seed capital, though tapping venture funding is another matter, writes John Kinsella
Ireland has a long tradition of people leaving the country to find their fortune in America. Jacob Claflin and Blake Newman have come the other way, relocating here for their banking fintech startup Cambrist. The third co-founder, CTO Victor Mikhailov, is still in Austin, Texas, home to Rev Worldwide, where the trio used to work.
Before Cambrist, Claflin (45) was an ex-pat working for US companies in various European locations, and he persuaded Newman to uproot his young family and join him in Dublin for the venture.
The idea for Cambrist was prompted by Claflin’s frustration at sourcing real-time foreign exchange information when paying for things with his debit or credit card. Since Cambrist was established in 2016, new intermediaries such as Revolut have improved matters, but most high-street banks still have this forex information deficit for their customers. Cambrist is aiming to change this, though it won’t be easy and it takes time.
Claflin explains: “I'd be using my AIB card to pay for something in pounds or dollars or Hungarian forints, and have no clue what it was going to cost me in euros. Why can't our banks give us that information? When I looked into it I realised the legacy software these banks are running just didn't have the tools to compete with newcomers like Revolut. The gap we saw was to develop an online forex platform that the banks could plug into. That's where we started. It's been a bit of a journey but we're on a good path right now.”
Claflin’s former employer Rev Worldwide is in a similar space to Cambrist, with a proprietary multicurrency processing platform. So Claflin had the credibility to approach investors for seed funding. Loan funding of €220,000 was sourced from private investors in 2016 and this grew to €840,000 in 2017. Fintech enterprise is high on the agenda for Enterprise Ireland, and the state agency made a payment of €150,000 in 2017.
More equity funding followed in 2018. Claflin attended an Accenture fintech accelerator programme in Dublin and came into contact with Fexco.
The Kerry payments company saw an opportunity to deploy the Cambrist technology in its offering to financial institutions and merchants, and invested €500,000 in April 2018, in tandem with €340,000 equity investment from Kansas investor David Shewmaker.
The same investors parted with another €200,000 at the end of 2018, along with another €200,000 from taxpayers through Enterprise Ireland. Meanwhile, the original loan investors were paid back.