Two engineers, Juan Lobato and Salvador García, founded a fintech (financial company with strong technology support) in London in 2009 to support SMEs around the world in their foreign trade activities: international payments and debt collection, currency exchange. in over 130 currencies, cash management, commercial lending and risk management. Ebury was born, a name taken from a street in the City of London where these entrepreneurs opened their first office.
“We initially started in the UK this year [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 set up an operations center in Malaga where 300 people currently work. In 2010, a venture capital fund called Vitruvian joined and we managed to be present in all European capitals,” explains Juan Lobato, founder and CEO of Ebury.
The idea of creating this fintech arose from the poor service that large banks offered to SMEs in their foreign operations, a part of their activity that increased due to the rise of electronic commerce, which allows them to sell in many more markets has. As examples of these movements, Lobato recalls that one of his customers, dedicated to the production of grills, increased his sales tenfold in a few years. “Furthermore, these are complex operations, as a company from the Netherlands can, for example, 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 came with the entry into the capital of Banco Santander, which acquired 54% of the shares in 2019 and 2020, a package for which it paid 400 million euros. Currently, capital is distributed between the entity led by Ana Botín, two venture capital funds and the Ebury management team. “Santander brings us its knowledge of financial markets outside Europe. Without Santander's analytical capabilities, we may not have been able to acquire Brazilian bank Bexs. Everything is accelerating: from the moment we enter, our size quadruples,” 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. The company also completed several acquisition transactions. In addition to Brazilian bank Bexs, Ebury bought Trans Skills Investment in the Middle East, which provides payroll capabilities, and Prime Financial in South Africa, a company specializing in financial market advisory and treasury brokerage services.
“We want to strengthen our presence in Africa. The population growth estimates for countries like Nigeria are impressive and we need to prepare the enterprise for the next 20 years. For example, on this continent, the average cost of currency exchange for an SME is 12% of the transaction volume. We try to offer our customers the most favorable exchange rate. “The currency inefficiency in international markets is very significant for international trade,” emphasizes Lobato.
Ebury's customers include companies with a turnover between 5 and 100 million euros that are not well covered by traditional banks in their international trade operations. These are very entrepreneurial companies – explains the CEO – with annual growth of 20% or 30%. “Sometimes we fear that when our customers grow up and start charging even 1,000 million euros, they will switch to traditional banking, but we are working to ensure that they stay with us. 94% of our business is digital and only 6% is done over the phone.” The weight of technology is key in a fintech. Ebury employs 1,800 people with an average age of 33, of whom 400 are computer developers and 600 are commercial, spread across 40 offices around the world.
The company provides its customers with a platform that processed a transaction volume of 29,159 million euros in the last 12 months of the year. The customer receives advice and has personalized and other general notifications to make the best decisions, especially regarding the exchange rate.
balance
Lobato reiterates its desire to continue to grow, but also aims for a more balanced profile between investments and profits. “I would like to invest more, but the market wants to see good data on Ebury's balance sheet: now growth is valued less, although we continue our investments in Mexico, Shenzhen and Sweden,” he suggests. A good argument for this change in strategy is the IPO planned for 2025. In the financial year ending in April, sales rose 85% to £204m (€233m). They also finished with an EBITDA of £16m, which contrasts with operating losses of £34.1m the previous year.
The CEO sees the stock market as a financing opportunity and emphasizes growth before the dividend as attractive for shareholders. “Our financing will now be easier. We have credit lines of 300 million euros, of which we are now using less than a third. We use some lines to buy other companies,” explains Lobato.
And at the premiere on the trading floor, he reiterated his desire to continue to grow. “The stock market allows for improved financing, but I also believe that a large company needs to be on the market. We need to find the most suitable market time for the premiere. At this point, the size of Ebury will be more important than the price we set for the IPO,” he says. The internal valuation currently suggests 2,000 million euros.
The digital euro pillow
Juan Lobato, a 54-year-old León native, telecommunications engineer and economist, does not hesitate to criticize traditional banking, even though Santander is Ebury's majority shareholder. His company's business arose from banks' poor service to SMEs, but he sees the digital euro as a great opportunity for financial institutions to no longer burden the state treasury with their cyclical crises. “It’s very positive for us. It would make transferring coins to companies cheaper and help us. But it has other advantages as it would change the world of banking. Greater control of central banks to see how money is moved and spent. This would mean eliminating much of banking’s so-called systemic risk, thereby avoiding the public costs of its crises.”
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