Credit, Collections & Insolvency News
Fintech start-up Ophelos has raised £1.6 million from Connect Ventures and Fly Ventures to continue development on its platform and scale the engineering and customer operations teams.
The startup says that it is building a customer-centric debt collection process powered by Artificial Intelligence (AI) that will reimagine the debt collection industry to improve financial health for consumers and businesses. By using AI and behavioural science the company is aiming to optimise and digitise customer communications, offer more affordable debt repayment plans and achieve more accurate vulnerability detection, the company improves financial health for both consumers and businesses, with customers more likely to engage and businesses more likely to recoup overdue debts.
Ophelos is authorised and regulated by the FCA for debt collection activities and counts a leading renewable energy supplier and a challenger broadband company amongst its launch clients. The startup is also registered as a Pending B Corp. Ophelos’s wider mission is to help create a world where everyone is financially educated, empowered and equal. By starting with debt collection today, the company aims to understand and diagnose many of the underlying issues surrounding financial health for both consumers and businesses and build more products that address these issues in the future.
Stuart McFadden joined the leadership team in late 2020 as head of customer operations. McFadden was formerly head of financial difficulties at Monzo where he pioneered products such as allowing vulnerable customers to block gambling transactions. This combination of AI expertise and customer experience speciality is driving Ophelos’s customer-centric product culture and social impact mission.
Amon Ghaiumy, Co-Founder & CEO at Ophelos said “We started Ophelos to create customer-centric products and services that nurture financially healthy and trusted relationships between consumers and businesses. The debt collection industry felt like a natural starting point because it allows us to understand, diagnose and address many of the underlying issues surrounding financial health. It’s also an industry in desperate need of change towards a more technology-driven, and most importantly, customer-centric approach. We want to create a world where everyone is financially educated, empowered and equal — reimagining the debt collection industry is just a first step towards our larger goal.”
Rory Stirling, General Partner at Connect Ventures said “Credit is a fundamental and growing part of our consumer economy. Fintech has given us many great innovations, including improved access to credit, but debt management has so far remained largely untouched and unloved. We see a very large opportunity to build superior digital products for consumers to understand and manage their personal debts. And at the same time it provides a strong customer-centric approach that enterprises expect to offer in all other parts of their business. Ophelos is the company that is going to make a difference here. It has a brilliant team that is re-thinking debt collection for the 21st Century and I look forward to working with them on this journey.”
Matt Wichrowski, Partner at Fly Ventures said “The debt collection industry is in dire need of a shake-up but until now, we haven’t seen anyone come along with the passion and insight to make a difference until Ophelos. Despite commanding billions of dollars every year this sector has been slow to adopt technology or modern product thinking. We felt that this was a unique opportunity to create a new category of tech-first, transparent and empathetic recovery. The combination of the founding team’s incredible backgrounds and social impact mission will be integral to Ophelos’s success and we are delighted to be backing Amon, Paul and Qingchen as they transform debt management.”
