My Experience of Launching and Running a FinTech Startup in Hong Kong

Why I launched Paycelerate, and how I choose the market

Since leaving investment banking six years ago, I set up and invested in a number of businesses, and was always frustrated by the lack of fundraising options available to SMEs. Banks would say they have SME lending schemes but usually wouldn’t even bother talking to you. There was no flexible and inexpensive alternative for good companies with revenues and clients to obtain short term funding.

At the same time, we noticed that larger businesses were holding record cash but getting low returns from banks in the short-term. Together with my co-founder, Joe, we looked at ways to solve these problems and optimize the supply and demand balance for short-term funds. Most of them didn’t fundamentally change the credit/risk-based model that banks and others had been using for a long time. We came across the concept of dynamic discounting and really liked the dynamics so decided to launch Paycelerate.

Hong Kong was a natural first market. It ha ...