(L-R) Flow COO Artem Rafaielian, Co-founder and CEO Tomasz Borowski, and Chief Strategy Officer Arun Pai
Flow (formerly AsiaCollect), a Singapore-headquartered credit management startup, announced today it has raised a round of debt capital from Genesis Alternative Ventures, a private lender to venture- and growth-stage companies in Southeast Asia.
This round comes less than four months after the fintech startup secured US$6 million in Series A investment, led by DEG (a subsidiary of KfW Group of Germany), Dymon Asia Ventures, SIG Asia, and SCB10X (the venture arm of Thailand’s Siam Commercial Bank).
As per a press statement, the venture loan will help Flow to execute multiple portfolio acquisition plans in Vietnam, Indonesia and other select countries where there are anticipated strong growth trajectories.
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“This funding from Genesis is another major milestone for Flow and for our debt portfolio purchase business in particular. In keeping with our mission, we can reach out to further support consumers in overcoming financial difficulties,” said Co-founder and CEO Tomasz Borowski.
Flow was founded in 2016 by banker-turned-entrepreneur Borowski. The idea occurred to him when he noticed the unprofessional practices that conventional debt collection agencies utilised to retrieve outstanding balances. He joined hands with Artem Rafaelyan and Sergei Popov to tackle this issue using tech.
The startup utilises Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning to create debtor profiles to help banks and non-banking lenders recover their non-performing loans (NPLs) through mediums such as automatically-generated SMS, interactive voice recordings and predictive dialling systems.
Redefining debt collection begins with creating personalised, digital-first experiences that help consumers overcome their financial difficulties. Flow’s data-driven collection strategies have supported over 2.8 million consumers to date.
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The firm launched its first operations in Vietnam in 2016 and has since expanded to Indonesia and India.
The firm said that as it continues to grow and experience higher month-over-month revenues during the pandemic, acquiring debt capital at an attractive rate is key for it to scale up its acquisition of NPL portfolios.
According to Dr Jeremy Loh, Genesis Co-founder and Managing Partner, a growing business needs to balance the use of debt and equity to optimise its cost of capital.
“Genesis is a returns-first, scaled impact venture lender who wants to back growth-stage companies with impact objectives such as financial inclusion, sustainable food production, small business digitisation and gender diversity, that are looking to scale across Southeast Asia,” Loh added.
As per an International Finance report, banks across Southeast Asia are preparing for a surge in bad loans due to the COVID-19 outbreak.
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