Rollee helps the self-employed to obtain financing

A British start-up, Rollee, offers a secure platform to facilitate the sharing of financial data of the self-employed. Its service is aimed at financial institutions to enable them to better assess the financial situation of workers. Its new round of funding should help it in its approach.

FACTS

• Rollee has just completed a second round of financing, for an amount of 4 million euros. Its main investors are Speedinvest, Seedcamp and 20VC.

• The start-up managed to convince with its Open Finance offer. It promises to give financial institutions secure access to data other than banking data.

• In particular, it is working towards the inclusion of self-employed and freelancers and is thus opening up access to their professional data (pay slips, list of earnings and other employment contracts).

• Rollee's API connects with services such as Heetch, Stuart, Uber, Deliveroo, FreeNow, Bolt and UberEats. It is then used by companies in various sectors: neo-banks, financial institutions, accountants, insurance companies and car fleet managers.

• After launching in France and the UK, Rollee intends to position itself on the German and Spanish markets.

CHALLENGES

• Renewing scoring in Europe: Rollee's promise is to renew standardised scoring models that are particularly unfavourable to the self-employed.

• Surfing on a booming market: The creation of the autoentrepreneur status in France in 2009 has resulted in a significant increase in the number of self-employed and freelance workers. There were more than 3.6 million self-employed people in France at the end of 2019 (compared with 2.59 million in 2009), according to a report by the central agency for social security bodies (Acoss).

• Facing up to the competition: Although Rollee's model is atypical, the start-up will nevertheless have to rely on already well-established competition to expand in its markets. In France, for example, FinTech Mansa has managed to make a place for its scoring tool for the self-employed.

MARKET PERSPECTIVE

• Open Finance is gaining a new flagship today. Rollee does not rely solely on banking data to justify the relevance and accuracy of its approach.

• This model also seems particularly well suited to integrating those left behind by traditional finance. Indeed, another Open Finance reference in France, Qard, seeks to optimise the KYC of financial services players in order to improve the financing of small and medium-sized enterprises.