British fintech SteadyPay has closed a $3 million Seed round
N1 fintech fund has invested in SteadyPay, a British progressive lending platform with a co-founder from Ukraine. European venture funds such as Ascension, The Future Fund and others have already invested in this fintech.
“We have seen a progressive lending product for the new generation, supported by well-built AI technology. It is great that Ukrainians all over the world are helping to create innovations. It makes you want to invest in such startups. The decision was unanimous in the team.” – says Nykyta Izmailov, CEO and founder of N1.
Steadypay is a fintech startup founded by John Downie, from the UK and Ivan Istomin, from the Ukraine.
SteadyPay co-founder John Downie has spent most of his career developing technical solutions for banks and realized that existing lending solutions needed to meet the needs of irregular income workers, such as freelancers. And the “gig economy” brings more and more of them into the labor market.
“The demand for loans to people with irregular income is growing, so we have created a solution” – says John Downie.
Ivan Istomin is a Ukrainian co-founder of SteadyPay and an experienced payments and lending entrepreneur. At start-up, he develops white-label embedded finance and lending-as-a-service: “We see the huge demand for the integration of the SteadyPay lending platform under the own branding of neobanks and marketplaces for their customers requesting financing”
How does it work?
SteadyPay is a UK-based progressive lending platform for people with unstable incomes.
The AI-based solution analyzes open user data to predict their creditworthiness. According to these forecasts, Steadypay replenishes the bank account of a reliable and trustworthy platform user if their income falls below the average monthly income. The algorithm calculates how much money can be lent to a particular client. The average monthly top-up per person is approximately £250 and the maximum balance a user can have on SteadyPay at any one time does not exceed £1,000. The platform operates on a subscription model. The financiers describe it as “Netflix for credit”.
Users are charged a monthly fee of £7 per week for the service. They can top up without interest and only have to repay SteadyPay when they exceed their average income in a given month. The platform currently has 12,000 active users, most of whom are between 22 and 40 years old.
