ABN Amro invests four million in Receeve, the platform for debt collection and recovery

ABN Amro, the third largest bank in the Netherlands, has invested four million euros in German fintech receeve, an all-in-one platform for debt collection and recovery. The bank, which becomes not only a shareholder but also a client of the startup, will start working with this cloud-native platform “to improve the future of its most vulnerable customers and support the execution of the receivables strategy in international markets”.

Both companies have announced a strategic partnership to accelerate innovation, contributing to both the bank’s goals and receeve’s product development plan. This alliance will enable ABN Amro’s teams to make data rapidly actionable, unlocking new use cases across the bank and ensuring it optimizes its recovery efforts for the organization and its end customers. With this investment, the fintech, owned among others by Seaya Ventures, raises its total funding in the last two years to E16 million.

As explained from receeve, banking is undergoing a huge transformation and the way in which collection operations are addressed to customers and how they are measured is part of that change. “The attitude towards collections acceptance and integration has changed. No longer are projects dependent on time-consuming legacy technology to optimize strategies and add new methods of engagement and payment viable,” they note.

The company advocates that organizations need to adopt “agile underlying tools to leverage data, streamline and automate processes, optimize segmentation and reimbursement approaches”.

As context for the debt management industry targeted by its technology platform, Pedro Monteiro, head of receeve in Spain, Portugal and Latin America, points out that Spain today ranks third in Europe with an NPL of 76.9 billion and a 3% share of the total European market. “In addition, we are right in the post credit moratorium period, a tool widely used in the management of the pandemic. The main groups in the country deferred loans during the worst moments of the crisis for a combined value of more than 166,600 million euros, of which now, a year and a half after it began to implement this relief measure, only 10% remains in force”.

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According to the executive, all this makes 2022 and 2023 have a huge focus on the management of customers in financial difficulty but also to avoid a wave of default.

Monteiro details that since receeve was founded two years ago, the company has focused on banks and lenders for growth. “The goal was to become the best solution for this market segment before expanding into other areas (utilities, telecoms, insurance or retail) where our solution can also be implemented,” he says.

The fintech is currently in 19 countries and is landing in four more. “After arriving in Spain and Portugal, the next natural step, both for proximity and market needs, is Latin America,” continues the executive, who explains that receeve’s plan is to grow first with its current clients, multinationals that already have a presence in the region, and simultaneously, “present our value proposition in this market, where we have detected a lot of desire to incorporate our innovation.”

Monteiro says that since the company’s entry into Spain six months ago, they have expanded the Spanish market support team to 15 people and have acquired clients such as ID Finance. The Investment Director of Seaya Ventures, Aris Xenofontos, assures, for his part, that his investment in the German platform “reinforces our commitment to companies that, like receeve, want to have a positive impact and that put the most disruptive technology at the service of people, placing them at the center, in this case of financial processes, and improving their experience”.

Regarding the investment received by the fintech, Monteiro says that they have “more than enough funds for now” to continue its growth, “but it is very likely that we will raise a round later, in 2022 or early 2023, with the aim of achieving market leadership in the geographies where we are active, and significantly accelerate the growth of the company”.