Trezeo

Provides financial stability for self-employed workers in the gig economy who struggle to access suitable financial products.

Trezeo provides financial stability for self-employed and independent gig based workers by turning unpredictable income into a regular pay cheque.

The way people work is changing fundamentally with a rapid shift to self-employment and gig based work in teh digital economy. While self-employment brings great flexibility, uncertainty and volatility of income are widely recognised as key challenges. They result in day-to-day financial anxiety and also act as a major barrier to accessing the financial products the self-employed need to support their families like life insurance, pensions and mortgages.

Trezeo is a smart business account that optimises customers' income and cash flow. It ensures they receive a consistent and predictable pay cheque into their main bank account. The account includes a credit limit that enables Trezeo to automatically top up the customers' pay cheque when necessary and repayment is automatically deducted from their future income. The account gives customers control of their finances and provides a strong foundation for them to access other financial products via direct deduction from their Trezeo account like insurance, pensions and other savings along with creating a track record to support access to loans and mortgages.

Trezeo charges a transparent subscription fee for the service and does not charge any hidden fees or interest on lending.

The main competitors in the space are banks, as well as loans from friends. Trezeo provides a tailored solution at an affordable cost that is accessible to self-employed workers. This is unlike generic overdraft or payday loan alternatives which can be expensive and difficult for the self-employed to access.

Many financial solutions have been developed to help employees better manage their income and access financial products but none are targetting the core challange around volitile and uncertain income.

We're entirely focused on creating financial sustainability for the self-employed so they can realize the benefits of working independently without losing their financial independence.

Trezeo has built a mobile-first technology platform enabling a dramatically lower cost to serve customers making it economically viable to provide essential financial products to enable independent workers to survive financially in the rapidly evolving digital economy.

We will leverage advanced analytics and machine learning to provide personalised financial products to an underserved customer base in a viable manner.

This combination of our mobile-first platform and advanced data analytics will enable us to deliver personised experiences to our customers across sectors and geographies as we scale the business beyond our initial pilot and this will form a key foundation for digital workers.

Our top three goals over the next year are:

1. Achieve positive customer outcomes in improving financial stability for independent and gig workers in the UK transportation sector.
2. Establish partnerships with 2-3 leading cab and delivery platforms and demonstrate the value of the partnerships for their workers.
3. Expand the products available to customers by introducing initial savings and income protection products to enable customers to build on the financial stability provided by the initial income smoothing service.

Trezeo's vision is to enable the growing number of self-employed workers to enjoy the benefits and flexibility of independent work without giving up access to essential financial services. A key foundation for this is addressing the challenge of volatile and uncertain income and providing access to financial products that work for independent workers.

For the good of our entire society, Trezeo's vision is to deliver financial products to underpin independent work and avoid a situation where a rapidly growing section of the workforce have no financial stability or safety net and must rely on government supports or family when things go wrong.

Trezeo is especially focused on using its technology solution to ensure that disadvantaged and underserved groups can benefit from the independent work in the digital economy.

These groups are the most poorly served by the financial system and working independently significantly increases their financial challenges as they do not have access to financial products that employees take for granted like income protection/disability insurance, pensions and this acts as a barrier to working in many digital economy activities or leaves them highly exposed financially if they are already working independently.

We are still at an early stage of deploying our product with customers but we have had strong and positive feedback from early customers and gig platforms on the relevance and importance of the solution we are offering and our roadmap for further financial products.

Trezeo will empower and enable people to work in the increasingly independent working model in the digital economy by enabling their financial stability and access to essential financial products that employees take for granted

Trezeo was founded by Garrett Cassidy and Flavien Charlon who continue to lead the business as CEO and CTO. Both founders had direct experience of the lack of appropriate financial products for self-employed and independent workers in the digital economy.
Team:
Garrett is CEO with over 20 years' financial services experience in technology, finance, payments and capital markets.
Flavien is CTO with over 10 years' engineering experience. Author of Blockchain Open Assets protocol, used by NASDAQ, Overstock, First Data.
Alysia Wanczyk, Head of Marketing with 8 years' marketing experience.
Sabya Mukherjee ‚ Risk Manager with 7 years' consumer credit experience.

Trezeo's initial product is an income smoothing solution that turns a self-employed worker's unpredictable income into a regular pay cheque and provides access to money in emergencies. This addresses two key issues for the self-employed which 44% of UK self-employed identifying in their top three workplace challenges.

Unpredictable incomes are also key barriers to accessing other financial products and Trezeo is working with partners to deliver savings, investment and lending products to customers. Customers will be able to opt into appropriate products via deduction from their Trezeo account in a way that is similar to an employer payroll deduction.

We are currently piloting our income smoothing solution with transportation workers in the UK including cab drivers, food delivery and couriers and plan to add savings and insurance products in late 2018 before expanding to service other self-employed sectors in the UK and other countries in Europe and beyond.
We have deployed a fully digital experience that enables us to quickly scale our customer reach and have engaged in research with the Centre for Advanced Data Analytics Research (CeADAR) in Dublin to support the development of our data and machine learning capability that is essential to service the rapidly growing market.

We would use Solve's help in two key ways:
1. To accelerate the development of our analytics and behavioural models to drive further value for independent digital workers
2. To accelerate go to market in further sectors and markets to support a wider population of digital workers.
This would include:
- Hiring additional two additional engineering and data science personnel
- Investing in further research and development with leading a technology research centre
- Allocating further funds to customer development, direct marketing and building our partnership proposition for gig and digital worker platforms.

Our key internal risks are having the funding and skilled resources required to deliver on our ambition. We are currently well advanced in raising the funding required to achieve our current goals and are constantly on the look-out for talented individuals who share our vision and could help us deliver our ambition.

Our key external risk is regulation. We operate in a highly regulated sector and regulatory requirements and risk are a key focus. Our approach is to pro-actively address regulatory risks and requirements for our business as demonstrated by our membership of the UK Financial Conduct Authority's Innovation Hub.