Two engineers, Juan Lobato and Salvador García, set up a fintech (financial company with strong support in technology) to serve SMEs around the world in their foreign trade activities: international payments and collections, currency exchanges in more than 130 currencies, cash management, commercial loans and risk management . Ebury was born, a name taken from a street in the city London where these entrepreneurs set up their first office.
“We started that year, first in the United Kingdom [todavía dentro de la UE], then in Spain and Amsterdam, and it worked for us. Our support began with one million euros from the Junta de Andalucía and we established an operations center in Malaga where 300 people currently work. In 2010, a venture capital fund called Vitruvian entered and we managed to be present in all the capitals of Europe,” explains Juan Lobato, founder and CEO of Ebury.
The idea of creating this fintech It arose from the poor service that large banks gave to SMEs in their foreign operations, a part of their activity that has increased due to the rise of electronic commerce that allows them to sell in many more markets. As examples of these movements, Lobato remembers that one of his clients, dedicated to the manufacture of barbecues, multiplied his sales by 10 in a few years. “In addition, they are complex operations, since a company from the Netherlands, for example, can buy flowers in Johannesburg and then sell them around the world in countries with different currencies,” he adds.
But the big leap in the company occurred with the entry into the capital of Banco Santander, which in 2019 and 2020 acquired 54% of the shares, a package for which it paid 400 million euros. Currently, the capital is distributed between the entity chaired by Ana Botín, two venture capital funds and the Ebury management team. “Santander brings us its knowledge of financial markets outside Europe. Perhaps we would not have been able to acquire the Brazilian bank Bexs without Santander's analytical capabilities. Everything accelerates: from the moment we enter, our size multiplies by four,” explains the founder.
The company is in the process of expansion. In 2023 they opened a new global training center in Malaga. They also opened offices in Prague, Dublin, Stockholm, Santiago de Chile, Montreal and Shenzhen, China. Likewise, the company closed several acquisition transactions. In addition to Brazilian bank Bexs, Ebury bought Trans Skills Investment in the Middle East, which provides payroll processing capabilities, and Prime Financial in South Africa, an entity specializing in financial markets advisory and intermediation services in the treasury sector.
“We want to increase our presence in Africa. The population growth estimates for countries like Nigeria are impressive and we need to prepare the company for the next 20 years. On this continent, for example, the average cost of exchanging currencies for an SME reaches 12% of the transaction volume. We try to offer our client the most competitive exchange rate. The inefficiency in terms of currencies in international markets is very great for international trade,” Lobato points out.
Ebury's type of client are companies with a turnover between 5 and 100 million euros that are not well covered by traditional banking in their international trade operations. These are very entrepreneurial companies – explains the CEO – with annual growth of 20% or 30%. “Sometimes we worry that when our clients become large and begin to bill, even 1,000 million euros, they will go to traditional banking, but we work to ensure that they stay with us. 94% of our business is digital and only 6% is resolved by telephone.” The weight of technology is the key in a fintech. Ebury has 1,800 employees, with an average age of 33 years, of which 400 are computer developers and 600 are dedicated to commercial work, spread across 40 offices around the world.
The company makes available to its clients a platform that in the last 12 months of the year executed a transaction volume of 29,159 million euros. The client receives advice and has personalized and other general alerts to make their decisions – especially regarding the currency exchange rate – in the most advantageous way.
Balance
Lobato repeats its desire to grow and grow, although it also seeks a more balanced profile between investment and profits. “I would like to invest more, but the market wants to see good data in Ebury's balance sheet: now growth is valued less, although we will continue with our investments in Mexico, Shenzhen and Sweden,” he indicates. A good argument in this change in strategy is its listing on the stock market, scheduled for 2025. In the fiscal year ended in April, revenues increased by 85%, up to 204 million pounds (233 million euros). They have also closed with an ebitda of 16 million pounds, which contrasts with the operating losses of 34.1 million pounds recorded the previous year.
The CEO sees a financing opportunity in the stock market and highlights growth as attractive to shareholders before the dividend. “Our financing is now becoming easier. We have credit lines of 300 million euros, of which we now use less than a third. Some lines that we use to buy other companies,” explains Lobato.
And for the premiere on the trading floor he repeats his desire to continue growing. “The Stock Market allows for improved financing, but I also believe that a large business must be in the market. We will have to see the most appropriate market moment for the premiere. At that point, the size of Ebury will be more important than the price we set for the IPO,” he says. Currently, its internal valuation points to 2,000 million euros.
The digital euro cushion
Juan Lobato, a 54-year-old native of Leon and a telecommunications engineer and economist, does not hesitate to criticize traditional banking, despite having Santander as the majority shareholder of Ebury. The business of his company arose from the poor service of banks to SMEs, but he sees in the digital euro a great opportunity for financial entities to stop being a burden on the public treasury with their cyclical crises. “For us it is very positive. It would make the movement of coins to companies cheaper and help us. But it has other advantages, since it would change the world of banking. Greater control of central banks to see how money moves and is spent. This would mean removing a good part of the so-called systemic risk of banking and, therefore, avoiding the public costs of its crises.”
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