Zetl is Asia-Pacific’s first financing company for asset-light businesses and is also one of the few embedded lending FinTechs in the region.
Providing non-dilutive financing to startups & SMEs for growth, payroll & working capital.
I was born in Hong Kong, and spent time living in Malaysia, the UK and Shanghai, before settling back in HK. Most of my career had been within the HR/staffing space, before launching my first venture (Silverstrand Executive Search) in 2012, followed by another (Cleverly Search) in 2017.
It was while scaling those businesses that I saw a gap in the market to provide financing to asset-light businesses, who are typically too small or don’t have enough physical assets to post as collateral, that would allow them to secure bank financing.
Using my contacts from headhunting, I approached Shan Han, who had worked for a number of hedge funds and banks, bringing a strong understanding of finance and product. He was the one of the co-founders for our business.
We then got introduced to our third co-founder Matt Roberts, via a Japanese venture capital firm in Singapore, quickly identifying that his experience in structured finance & private credit would complement our existing skillsets.
With that the founding team of Zetl was born!
We are “On a mission to finance the next generation of businesses in APAC”.
Everything can be done within our web app, https://www.zetl.com/, with the onboarding process typically taking around 10-15 minutes, with integrations to cloud accounting software such as Xero & Quickbooks, automated allocation of collection accounts, open banking APIs, electronic direct debit capabilities, plus a machine learning algorithm.
We offer a number of products including Invoice Financing, Secured Credit Lines, Term Loans plus Revenue Based Financing.
The whole process is conducted online, primarily through our web app, with the underwriting process a combination of our proprietary machine learning credit scoring model and a fundamental manual overlay from the team.
Proposals are then completed via e-signatures with funds disbursed digitally.
The biggest developments in our space have been the adoption of Machine Learning/AI to the credit scoring and underwriting processes to speed up approval times. In addition, we now also have OCR (optical character recognition) tools that can review bank statement data automatically. Lastly, the growth of embedded lending, of which we are one the few firms in Asia, who are actively pursuing this strategy. It allows us to use our technology, underwriting capabilities, plus access to debt capital, to enable our partners to provide white-label loans/financing to their customers & merchants.
We’ve now got a number of pilots in place across Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaysia & the Philippines with payments processors and POS (point of sale) systems.
I think being a truly tech-enabled business is one of our clear differentials. Zetl went live in 2019, so we needed to be clever in using relatively limited resources, to compete with larger alternative lenders and/or well financed banks.
We were also a fully distributed team before Covid hit, which meant we weren’t particularly impacted by the WFH adjustments, as all our processes were set up for remote working.
Being one of Asias’ few embedded lending fintechs is a major USP for our business. There aren’t many API-enabled lenders currently in the APAC market.
We’ve got plenty to keep us busy with the embedded lending pilots, but in addition to that, we have further expansion planned across the region, to complement our existing activities in Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaysia & the Philippines.
Through our embedded lending partners you’ll hopefully be seeing a lot more of Zetl soon!
