From 0 to $1 billion. How did we do it?

It was September 7th, 2011. Just 3 months prior, Toni Rami, my co-founder, and I incorporated Kantox Limited in the UK. We were still waiting for our Financial Services Authority (now Financial Conduct Authority) approval to start carrying out trades but we didn’t want to wait to meet clients.

So we networked and pushed until we managed to schedule a meeting with the treasury team of the leading Spanish clothing store, Mango.

We explained our vision and what we wanted to do at Kantox – to bring transparency and fairness to the corporate FX market. We also learned a lot from the way they operate.

In particular, I remember one of my first questions for the treasury manager. “What is your annual FX turnover in Mango?”

“$1.1 billion”, he said!

I realised straight away that we wouldn’t be able to convince them to start trading through Kantox back then. $1.1bn is a huge amount of money. No sane CFO would channel it through a recently funded startup.

And yet, immediately I saw the route we had to take: start working for smaller clients, to provide excellent service and to earn their trust.

Kantox’s team celebrating surpassing the $100 million total trades mark in 2013

I thought, the more we grow, the better service we would provide, and the more clients we have, the more other companies would trust us and want to use our services.

Today at Kantox, a little over 4 years later, we are delighted and proud to have traded a total of $1 billion. What seemed like an impossibly huge volume is now a reality.

We have over 1,000 corporate clients from 20 countries. Some of them are small companies. Some of them float on the stock exchange. All of them now fully support and share our vision: to instil the virtues of transparency, efficiency and fairness in the finance sector.

This is what drives us at Kantox. To invert the traditional finance business model by putting our clients first and profits a distant second.

Such change, led by financial technology is inevitable and it will have a profound effect on the global finance sector and economy. At Kantox we aspire every day to drive this change.

The $1bn milestone is great news, but we also have more, possibly even better news. We generated the last $100 million in less than four weeks during the month of December 2014.

We are on track to reach the second billion in just a few months’ time as our growth is accelerating, boosted by hundreds of potential clients registering to try out our platform every month.

The mission

Yes, I am proud of the $1bn milestone. But billions is not what drives me. It’s not what is driving any of our talented team of 50 professionals from all over Europe and beyond.

It’s not what Kantox is about.

It’s not what Fintech is about.

Fintech is all about the mission.

The mission to bring transparency, efficiency and fairness to the financial industry and to society as a whole, ultimately.

When we started Kantox in 2011, Fintech was virtually nothing. It was a word that very few people had even heard. Investors had very low appetite for it but we found some crazy business angels to bet on us.

Some investors from the tech industry provided invaluable help, particularly the tech startup funding group, SeedRocket. People from HSBC and BNP also chipped in, which was surprising considering they worked in the traditional finance sector. Two of our former bosses at Deloitte also invested in the company.

At that time, people (and businesses especially) were also really cautious about Fintech. They had never used any alternative financial service. Only old-school banks and brokers.

It was completely natural to be worried about being one of the first to use our service.

We had to launch a true evangelisation process to convince the early adopters, get traction then grow and consolidate the business. INLEA Foundation were very helpful and they became our very first client.

There is no doubt that the recurring banking scandals that happened over the last few years (chiefly the FX rigging and LIBOR probes), the banking sector’s non-existent client focus and its culture of greed have helped Fintech to grow.

Belief, determination and good old-fashioned grit

The last four years have been an incredible ride toward our goal of hitting the billion. Sometimes it seemed so far away but we never stopped believing that we would achieve it.

From quitting our jobs and putting all our personal savings into Kantox, to raising a Series A funding round of €6.4 million two years later.

Our first office compared to the current Kantox offices in Barcelona

From toiling long hours in our first office, a tiny, backstreet space which was all we could afford, to moving into the plush Mapfre Tower with views of the Mediterranean sea.

From beginning as just the three of us – myself, Antonio Rami, now our COO, and John Carbajal, now our CTO – to growing to a team of 50 dedicated, skilled professionals.

Revival moment: one of the first photos of the 3 founders together

Trading $1 billion is not just a victory for Kantox, but for Fintech, for SMEs and businesses, and for the vision of a fair finance sector that puts the customer first.

After all, if customers are mistreated, they will be open to alternative solutions and in the long run they will go elsewhere.

We have taken $1 billion in trades of foreign exchange business from the banking sector, saving over 1,000 companies thousands of dollars in the process.

What started with a 1 minute pitch at Startup Weekend Barcelona 2010, thanks to its founder Frank Nouyrigat, we are now a fast growing company, with 250% growth in 2014. And we are just getting started.

Let’s do more together!

Ps. Mango is still not a Kantox client. But I believe our value proposition to be strong, our strategy sound, and our future bright. In the future, sooner or later, we will meet again and hopefully then we will be welcoming them to the Kantox family.