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INNOVATORS VS COVID 19

Accelerating SME Growth During Covid

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Jacob Pedersen Fellow Pay scaled

Jacob Pedersen of Fellow Pay tells us about how they help grow B2B SMEs in Construction, Real Estate, and more.

First of all, how are you and your family doing in these COVID-19 times? 

Jacob Pedersen: Thanks for asking, my family and I are doing great these days and staying safe. We’ve been fortunate not to have any coincidences of COVID-19. We’ve been minimizing physical contact throughout the pandemic and taking precautions.

Tell us about you, your career, how you founded Fellow Pay.

Jacob Pedersen: I have 12 years of leadership & management experience in Fintech, B2B & B2C sales, and software development, where I’ve founded multiple companies, e.g., a born-global booking and tracking platform.

I have a bachelor’s degree in Business Development engineering.

My co-Founders and I have worked in reconstruction, software Dev. and banking. Over our collective experience, we discovered that a lot of SME owners operate in a zero-sum game environment when it comes to getting finance and payment for the work they deliver. That’s why we founded Fellow Pay. We believe that everybody only wins when nobody loses. This is what we believe in when creating financial products – they have to be win/ win for everybody.

How does Fellow Pay innovate? 

Jacob Pedersen: Fellow Pay (formerly CreditStretcher) is a fintech company on a mission to solve long payment terms for SMEs. We built our product for SMEs who often find that 60 or 90 days payment terms strain their liquidity. They can apply in a couple of minutes on our platform and have the money the same day – often within hours. SMEs can now get paid faster when they’re selling and pay later when they’re buying- on-demand without financial interrogation and unnecessary questions upfront. It’s a very flexible tool for SME owners to be in more financial control whenever cash flow problems arise.

How the coronavirus pandemic affects your business, and how are you coping?

Jacob Pedersen: The coronavirus pandemic has increased the need for SMEs to get paid faster, and therefore it has had a good effect on our business as global cashflows are influenced a lot under the pandemic. We have experienced a larger increase in international requests. We experience our customers returning more often as we are a good alternative to a lot of the legacy financing solutions out there.

Did you have to make difficult choices regarding human resources, and what are the lessons learned?

Jacob Pedersen: We chose to go “remote first” as a company before the pandemic, so we haven’t experienced any difficult choices. We have experienced that parts of the financial industry are under pressure, and therefore things can take a longer time to execute than before the pandemic. We have learned to see this as an opportunity in disguise as well.

What specific tools, software, and management skills are you using to navigate this crisis?

Jacob Pedersen: We are using what we have always used where the main tools are: Basecamp, Trello, and Zoom. We always try to decrease the number of meetings as much as we can.

Who are your competitors? And how do you plan to stay in the game?

Jacob Pedersen: We believe that everybody only wins when nobody loses. We don’t focus on competitors, we focus on our customers and servicing them the best way we possibly can, always. We also focus on collaborating and hereby reaching our vision of enabling SME owners to be more financial, where everybody wins, and nobody loses.

Your final thoughts?

Jacob Pedersen: We never know when the Covid pandemic will be over and how the new work-life will look like afterward. Many experts say that the pandemic has made us all adapt to working remotely 5 years faster than expected. I would say to all the readers that it’s all a matter of perspective and how you view it. Personally, I see the Covid pandemic as a great opportunity to find new ways to work together with others and to do new collaborations with other companies.

On behalf of my team and I, we wish you good energy and good luck.

Your website?

https://www.fellowpay.com/

Kossi Adzo is the editor and author of Startup.info. He is software engineer. Innovation, Businesses and companies are his passion. He filled several patents in IT & Communication technologies. He manages the technical operations at Startup.info.

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