Funding helps FinTech specialist Yimba to accelerate growth

The personalisation of digital wallets is transforming the way businesses can market to customers, with more consumers moving toward mobile devices to make financial transactions. Yimba has developed a personalised digital wallet service enabling banks and financial firms to create compelling propositions for its consumers across this channel.

Yimba raised £500,000 last year through NPIF Maven Equity Finance, a regional growth fund managed by Maven, to invest in product development and grow its team to meet the increasing demand for its services from a diverse range of clients, including Banks, Payment Processors and Content Creators.

Watch Robert Dowd, CEO at Yimba, and Alex Rothwell, Investment Director at Maven, discuss the investment, the importance of funding the right 'fit' between the company and the investor, and the importance of tailoring a funding package that works for the business now as well as its long term growth objectives.  

Robert Dowd: Yimba is a one of a kind marketing platform that allows consumers to engage with brands and organisations that they love. We do this through the integration of our service into mobile wallets and into payment wallets, Apple Pay, Samsung Pay and Google Pay.

Alex Rothwell: Primarily, Yimba attracted me as a business opportunity through the strength of their management team. I think it's the number one attraction for any business you invest in or should be the number one attraction for any business you
invest in and Yimba has a particularly strong team. Aside from that, they've got a great piece of software in a niche sector and are showing really good traction, with the sector of the market they are going for.

RD: We considered a number of options including debt financing as well as additional Private Equity, however, for us, the importance of working with an organisation was that they could help our organisation grow, they had connections within the space but they also had experience with similar organisations to ours.

AR: Maven has supported Yimba in the early stage of their commerciality both through increasing the number of people in the team allowing them to increase the size of their premises and also allowing them to pursuit the commercial sales into large banks and institutions which, admittedly do take some time to complete.

RD: We were introduced to a number of Private Equity and investment organisations, of which one of them was Maven. We made the decision to go with Maven because they had some experience working with our prior investors. They had also worked with a number of organisations that we were familiar with in the FinTech space. Being in the North West, they were an organisation we wanted to partner with because of the proximity as well.

Getting any investment requires at least three to six months of time in order to be able to get it on board and our investment was no different so I think the process was one that we were familiar with having already received investment from another party but as I say, I think the process with Maven was a good one and was as short as it could be.

AR: Maven invested relatively recently in Yimba in February 2022. Since then we have seen great progress in the business and we hope to continue supporting them through further investment going forward. The plan with Yimba is a long term plan. We feel there is great potential, they are at early stage at present but in the future, they can be a really strong and big business.

RD: We have been working with Alex Rothwell at Maven. He's introduced us to a number of other strategic investments that they've made as a company, which has helped us to be able to sell our proposition into more organisations and Maven overall has been very helpful in terms of their guidance, through our board meetings and our interactions on a monthly basis.