Fintex Capital unveils buy now, pay later facility for SMEs

After five years at Tide, the SME banking provider’s UK CEO Laurence Krieger announced his departure yesterday.

Krieger has been Tide’s UK CEO since January 2021, and joined Tide from Revolut in 2017 as chief operating officer.

Tide’s UK CEO departs after a year in-post

In a post on LinkedIn, Krieger said that he was “extremely grateful” to the team at Tide, but that he had decided to move on.

With all the buy now, pay later excitement around fintechs like Klarna and AfterPay, it can sometimes feel like ordinary merchants are missing out on the action.

Enter alternative credit investor Fintex Capital, which today is launching a buy now, pay later (BNPL) credit facility for businesses to offer their own pay later credit options.

BNPL is opening new horizons, and this is the first-ever BNPL program of its kind,” said Fintech Capital CEO Robert Stafler. 

“In B2B land, BNPL is still quite young, and Fintex is leading the way, delivering innovative forms of debt finance to help our borrowers—and their customers—grow their business and unlock value.”

We’ve seen growing interest in buy now, pay later options for SMEs in the last few months, both Funding Circle and Iwoca have launched products, although these are mainly focused on helping spread the cost of large purchases.

Vlad Yatsenko, co-founder and chief technology officer of one of the UK’s most valuable fintech companies Revolut, has labelled Russia’s leader Vladimir Putin a “brazen liar”.

Together with Nik Storonsky, its CEO and himself a Russian national, Revolut has grown to be one of Europe’s most valuable startups with a valuation of £24bn at its last fundraise in July of 2021.

The billionaire duo founded Revolut in 2015. Storonsky emigrated to the UK when he was 20 years old and is a UK passport holder. In 2019 he hit back at media reports that he had links to the Kremlin through his father's role as a director of the Russian energy giant Gazprom.