A neobank – read a financial technology for the internet – aimed at micro-enterprises and the self-employed. In this structure has become Crealsa, a firm specializing in promissory note discounts and invoice advances that they constituted in 2009 in the Valencian town of Benifaió the lawyer Javier Chisvert and the economist Joseph Molinafriends since the age of three. The ‘fintech’ has made a considerable leap in these times of pandemic thanks to the commitment it has made for it Andrew Rubiothe banker who brought the US investment fund Apollo to Spain, which entered by buying Evo Banco and then also Altamira, Santander’s real estate manager. Blond launched a fund in London in 2018, Iman Capital, focused on the purchase of financial and real estate businesses throughout Europe and in 2020 it set its sights on Crealsa, to the point of investing in the Valencian firm and acquiring 50.1% of the capital .
The other 49.9% is shared equally by the founders of the company, who had turned their lives around in 2009, in the midst of the Great Recession: “I had a law firm and José a debt financial reunification firm of companies. With the mortgage crisis it was impossible to continue down this path of debt restructuring, but we saw that there was a business niche in entering the promissory note discount and we founded Crealsa”, recalls Chisvert.
“It worked quite well,” he adds, and points out that “we already saw that we could compete against the big banks and other ‘fintech’ with funds behind them. The key is to provide an agile solution to companies through the digital world. We started formalizing the discounts in 48 hours, then we went down to 24 and in 2014, already with the digital platform, the payments were immediate”.
Joseph Molina contextualizes the arrival of Iman Capital with the company’s need to grow, digitize and automate financing processes. In other words, “provide more services to have more contact with the client and that our relationship is not reduced only to when he came for a specific need”. In short, “provide digital bank operations so that users can also operate with money and use cards.” Here lies one of the novelties of Crealsa, which as it does not have a banking license has been linked to EML, an entity authorized to issue electronic money and which is supervised by the Bank of Spain.
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Molina assures that, with this structure, the neobank offers its clients the option of opening an account with a Spanish IBAN, sending and receiving money, direct debiting receipts, entering promissory notes and operating with a card. The co-founder adds that Crealsa “does not want to compete with the banks, but rather to complement them.” His model is hybrid. The main headquarters are divided between Valencia and Madrid and it has delegations in seven cities in Spain with a physical office, because there are clients “who want to do everything digitally and others who are looking for a more personalized contact”.
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What differentiates them from a traditional bank? Molina responds that the speed – “they take one or two days in a discount operation and we solve it in minutes” – and the cost: “our accounts are free and the banks charge between 5 and 10 euros per month”.
Crealsa currently has 55 workers and the forecast is to finish this 2022 reaching one hundred. Last year it ended with 73 million euros financed and this year it plans to reach 140. The clients -there are already 4,000- are SMEs with less than ten workers and the self-employed, fundamentally. “The niche most abandoned by the banks”, he concludes Chisvert.