On October the 16th we celebrated the 5th anniversary of October, joined by 500 lenders, borrowers, partners, shareholders, journalists, friends and family who are following our adventure closely. We called it the OctoberFest 😉! In this letter we want to take the opportunity to share with those who were absent our word of thanks… and 3 scoops!
To all of you,
Thank you for being there for October’s 5th anniversary, our baby October.
“Our” baby, because it now has 106 moms and dads from the teams in Paris, Madrid, Milan, Amsterdam or Munich.
It’s still young, 5 years is not really the age of reason yet.
5 years is still too young to talk only about the past. In fact, at 5 years old, we mainly want to talk about the future. We are driven by the desire to see the world and go unknown places. We are excited! That’s why we’re sharing 3 announcements with you. 3 announcements that will change October. In 12 months you might not recognise us as the child we are today.
Nonetheless, 5 years is not yet the age of independence. At 5 years old, you still need your shareholders. We thank them all for helping us. All of them were there to celebrate our anniversary: Wormser Bank, Partech, Idinvest, the Decaux family, the De Benedetti family, Allianz, Matmut, CNP, Weber, Pascal Oddo… Don’t worry, dear shareholders, we understand that you don’t want the baby to stay at home until its 30. You’ll see, we won’t be ungrateful children. We’re doing everything we can to make it happen!
But who is this five-year-old child?
- First of all, it has good grades in school. We were even invited to a super class: the famous Next40 launched by the French government a few weeks ago. There are some impressive students in this class. Like Jacques-Antoine Granjon who went on stage to tell us about the incredible VeePee (ex- Ventes Privées) saga. Or other big companies with a turnover of 4 billion euros! We were humbled, but it pushes to our max to be among these gifted students.
- It’s a multilingual child. He speaks 5 languages. 5 years, 5 countries.
- When you think of many parents, you also think of many houses. We are all delighted to visit our German, Dutch, Spanish or Italian dads and moms.
- It’s is a very sociable child with a nice group of friends. Thank you to our tens of thousands of private lenders and all the major institutional lenders that actively support us: Groupama, Eiffel, Bpifrance, EIF/BEI, Zencap AM… Together they have funded more than €350.000.000, which was spread among 700 European SMEs. We can count on great enthusiasm: up to 90 loans per second are done on the platform!
- Finally, it’s an idealist child. Its dream is not to become a firefighter, but to make SME financing easier. It is his mission, his passion. Borrowing money becomes as simple as ordering a taxi and as pleasant as going to a restaurant. It’s important to know why we do things. We want people to remember, in a somewhat “megalomaniac” way, that in 10 or 20 years of October will have transformed the way companies finance themselves.
- Now it’s time for the game changing announcements, that will allow us to take a few more steps towards our ideal….
#Spoiler
We can only give a scoop. We will provide more information later in dedicated press releases:
1- The release of a brand new version of the loan application process for borrowers. The most important update since the creation of October.
2- The implementation of a new credit scoring algorithm based on 5 years of accumulated data. It allows us to better filter and target companies, and finance more of them.
3- At the beginning of the month we announced a dedicated fund of €30m for Italian SMEs. Now we can announce a new commitment of €100m to lend to European SMEs in our regular fund. The names of the investors will soon be announced….
See you soon…