Building a fintech scale-up, female founders and raising investment. Listen to the podcast interview with Sabrina Del Prete

May 07, 2023

Welcome to our #177 weekly newsletter.

“For women taking control of their financial future”

-Jana Hlistova

From The Purse

In this week’s newsletter, we highlight a short extract from The Purse Podcast interview with Sabrina Del Prete, founder and CEO of Kore Labs, a fintech scale-up based in London.

Sabrina shares her journey as a female founder and her experience fundraising, also from women investors. We talk about how to find investors who align with your goals and values and how more women can invest in startups.

Listen to the full interview here.

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And you can review the news in brief so you stay on top of global financial, economic and investing trends.

I hope you enjoy this week’s newsletter.

Until next week,

Jana

Building a fintech scale-up, female founders and raising investment.

Sabrina Del Prete joins us on The Purse Podcast to talk about her fintech scale-up, her journey as a female founder and how women can invest in startups.

Sabrina Del Prete joined us on The Purse Podcast.

Sabrina is the founder and CEO of Kore, a financial technology company based in London. She has over 25 years’ experience in financial markets, business transformation and application of new technologies in banking.

Throughout her career, Sabrina has held senior roles at JP Morgan Chase, Barclays, Coutts and RBS.

In this podcast interview we talk about: Sabrina’s fintech scale-up, how she pivoted from her corporate career into the world of startups, fundraising and her experience as a female founder, finding investors who align with your values and goals, how more women can start angel investing and more.

Here is a short extract from the podcast interview:

Jana: …just going back to the conversation around your initial investors-what were those conversations like? How did you engage them before you had your MVP (minimum viable product)?

Sabrina Del Prete’s response:

“So my first 10 investors, all of them were people I worked with. Or they knew someone I’d worked with.

So it was colleagues really, and they invested mostly because the first money I raised was much funding for my grant.

So really my first investor ever was Innovate UK.
And then with that, it was easy to convert them. I had ideas. I had a business plan. One of my investors didn't even want to look at the business plan.

They just said: oh, you're doing something. I think that's great. Let's do it. The investment came off the back of my reputation and the reputation of the grant that I won.

After that starting is much more difficult. Because (after the initial funding), you need to build something.

You need to have proper plan.

There's not a vision anymore for the business. It's a plan for the business. Even if you're small, you need to have infrastructure and a level of scale to be able to attract investors.

The way I did it then was with a very, very clear business plan. And there wasn't much fluff around the business plan.

…Somehow going from the vision to how I'm going to implement it, women are good at this actually.

And whilst I may encounter unconscious bias, I believe women are entrepreneurial in general. We are quite good at being practical about what we are going to do. So my plan was straight to the point.

It was very ambitious, but at the same time it was practical and it was quite scientific in the way I was proposing an opportunity to investors.

It means that you can not simply say: ‘I'm going to do all of this and it's going to be fantastic and there're going to be a lots of stars and we are going to become billionaire’.

No. It was, ‘okay, every pound I invest here, you give me some money and this is what I'm going to do with your money. And if the money got invested into marketing, then the revenue you're going to get is going to be X time, what you invest’.

We had a lots of assumptions in our business plan that were well thought through. And the assumptions were realistically how many licenses can I implement without having to increase people?

There was a lot of thinking and revisiting our assumptions, and checking our assumptions with people that knew more than us.

So our business plan was a result of us having some very clear ideas about what were the KPIs (key performance indicators) that we needed to reach the targets, how to measure them, how to achieve them, and then we prepared the business plan.

And we really only have 10 KPIs in our company. Even there, when I say you have to be quite clear, you cannot go to an investor and say, I want to do a hundred things and these are my million KPIs.

It was more like: I want to do one thing, these are the 10 levers I have. This is how they link to each other and this what happens when you throw one pound of investment to these levers, this is what you get out.

Investors do buy into your vision, but they also have something tangible that they can refer to.

And that's how we got our investment…”

Listen to the full interview here

Financial news

Investors poured $50bn+ into money market funds last week as investors enter the sell-in-May-and-go-away period.
US Bank run in slow motion continues: US Bank Deposits fell by $12.5bn in latest week.
The Federal Reserve approved its 10th interest rate increase (by 0.25%) in just a little over a year and dropped a tentative hint that the current tightening cycle is at an end.
Looks as if the Fed just ended one of the most aggressive tightening cycles in history: At least markets expect Fed to cut rates from now on. Sees Fed rates 75 basis points lower at end-2023.
US job gains and wages pick up, really not the direction the Federal Reserve wanted to see things. US economy adds 253,000 jobs in April vs 185,000 expectations, showing labour market resilience. Unemployment rate declined to historic low 3.4%, & monthly wage gains accelerated to fastest rate since July.
European Central Bank’s (ECB) Christine Lagarde says: we are not pausing. We know we have more ground to cover. Markets price in two more 25 basis point rate increases.
ECB slows pace of interest rate hike to 25 basis points as expected. Hints at more still to come: Main refi rate now at 3.75%, Depo rate at 3.25%, highest in almost a decade. Rate decision to be based on inflation outlook.

Crypto: bitcoin, ethereum, DeFi & NFTs

Bitcoin continues to hover around $28,800- a decrease of about 5% from its April high of $30,979 set nearly three weeks ago.
Ethereum is currently trading at approximately $1,900+, but is down from its high at $2,219 in April.
Ethereum staking deposits outpace withdrawals by $189m in ETH. Since Shanghai was executed last month, the network has shown that most Ethereum enthusiasts are still very eager to start staking.
Pepe memecoin tops $1 billion market cap even as Binance flags lack of utility. The token has surged more than 10-fold over the past week, making pepe the 45th largest by market value.
NFT sales see modest increase of 1.46% to reach $149m in past week. The number of NFT buyers has risen by 22.48%, the number of NFT transactions has decreased by 8.78% compared to the previous week.
Coinbase jumps 17% post-earnings; analysts praise results but worry about regulatory uncertainty.

The Purse Podcast

We cover the following in our conversation:

Sabrina talks about her scale-up
Her journey from the corporate world in financial services to the world of startups
Why start the business
How Sabrina was able to get her startup off the ground
Fundraising and her experience as a female founder
Sabrina shares her vision for success
Finding investors who align with your values and goals
Female investors
And how women can start angel investing.

Coffee Break? Read This

We’d love to hear from you. Get in touch with Jana via the The Purse website or tweet @jointhepurse and janicka.

The Purse provides content for informational purposes only, we do not provide investment advice. Please do your own research or speak to a financial adviser.

The Purse