Romanian fintech Beez, which offers online shoppers services like cash-back and interest free credit, has launched in the UK. The Beez platform provides an alternative to the “buy now, pay later” model with no interest, no late fees and no commission to users, according to ProlificLondon.co.uk.
Beez, which has its UK base in London’s Canary Wharf, announced its plan to expand into the UK following a successful €250,000 funding round in June this year.
Co-Founders Lucian Cramba and Vasile Tamas had both started their careers in marketing, and so were aware of the large budgets allocated to acquire customers and keep them loyal.
“At the same time, we saw 70% of credit card owners end up paying interest and often at eye-watering levels in order to buy products from these same retailers.
“We believed there was a way to help retailers decrease their marketing spend, and at the same time help their customers reduce the cost of financing,” says Lucian Cramba, Co-Founder, Beez.
Beez, which has over 110,000 users and more than €2.5m in transactions completed through the platform to date, raised finance to support its international expansion, with the UK as its first target market.
The startup has already established partnerships with over 2,000 shops [including Asos, booking.com, Ali Express, Qatar Airways and Kauffmann] in the UK and from its base at Level 39, Canary Wharf, the team are in the process of raising a new round of UK funding with the ambition of becoming a Romanian unicorn such as UIPath.
The firm said the UK was the obvious choice for its next stage expansion.
Beez was founded in September 2018 in Alba Iulia, the historical capital of Transylvania (Romania), with many contributing factors: a mature ecosystem in terms of e-commerce and credit card usage; the growth of online spending, driven by the proliferation of smartphones and tablets; card payments overtaking cash as the most popular form of payment and the growing use of credit cards to shop online, which is estimated to be worth £220 billion, the firm said.
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