Marcus Richards
Rebank’s platform helps founders track their runway and company spend in real-time. Keeping track of finances across multiple apps is painful – we organise the most popular apps to give you a single source of truth for your startup’s finances.
Tell us about yourself?
I started rebank after working for a GV-backed travel startup in London. It was the first time I had worked with a finance team and realised that spreadsheets and bank interfaces is where a lot of time was wasted. It felt like going back in time – there was next to no automation and data was siloed.
If you could go back in time a year or two, what piece of advice would you give yourself?
Lessons come thick and fast when you’re a small team working on a large problem. One of the pieces of advice I would give myself is to speak to more users. Everyone thinks they’re customer-focused, but it’s only in the last 6 months that we’ve really learned what that means.
What problem does your business solve?
Startup finances can be a distracting place to spend time as a founder – you should be building product and growing your company. Instead, most find that they’re using spreadsheets to calculate runway and company spend because accounting reports can be two weeks behind.
With more startups becoming international startups earlier, the problem has become harder to solve due to having multiple banks and finance apps.
What is the inspiration behind your business?
I spent my career building card products and working on many financial products to learn that banks hinder growth. When I learned how outdated corporate banking was, I saw an opportunity to help businesses with their growth.
What is your magic sauce?
Our competition is building great card and bank products but ignoring the siloed data they’re creating. We’re the first startup to tackle this problem head on, and we believe it’s the most critical one to helping startups avoid death due to poor management of finances
What is the plan for the next 5 years? What do you want to achieve?
Our plan in the next five years is to make it possible for startups to operate without a CFO. Achieving this means that we’ll help founders take control of their company’s finances without needing an accounting degree.
What is the biggest challenge you’ve faced so far?
Our biggest challenge right now is handling our growth as a small team. We’re having to make tougher prioritisation decision because we’ve kept the team at 8 people.
How do people get involved/buy into your vision?
Catch up with our latest finance advice for founders on our blog – rebanknow.com/blog
