Congratulations on your recent investment funding. What do you plan to do with the money?

Thank you. Following a successful beta period of Neat Business, we will use the new capital injection to focus on enhanced customer onboarding and service, increasing and improving product features and attracting talented people to the team.

Can you explain a bit about ‘Neat’ and why you started the business?

We are a Hong Kong-based financial technology company that provides an alternative to a corporate bank account to individuals, startups & SMEs. The most important features of our product include fully online account opening; from around the world; a dedicated Hong Kong bank account number to receive payments from customers and disbursements from e-commerce platforms (e.g. Stripe, PayPal, Amazon); worldwide bank transfers; and corporate MasterCards for companies and their teams. Young companies and entrepreneurs with little credit history are usually seen as unprofitable customers for incumbent banks with very high-cost structures. As a result, it is very hard for a startup to open a corporate bank account or get a credit card to make online purchases, which greatly affects its ability to operate in countries where they do not have a permanent presence in. Neat is essentially about filling that gap that traditional banks have yet been able to fill for young, agile small and midsize businesses that are rapidly expanding globally.

What can you offer entrepreneurs and startups?

Neat Business follows Neat’s initial personal offering launched in 2017, which offers global business owners and entrepreneurs with a fully digital current account without the need to go to a physical branch. It helps small and growing businesses establish their financial processes much more quickly and seamlessly than with a traditional bank. Our product offers business owners a multi-user account and corporate debt MasterCards for multiple users. The platform’s dashboard provides entrepreneurs and startups with a simple overview of the state of all finances and features mechanisms for sending and receiving payments, payroll, expense management and settling invoices worldwide. Thus, ensuring the company has better oversight of their spending and fund movements. Neat Business’ service offers these growing group of businesses global financial access and agility to run their business anywhere around the world without the need for a permanent address.

What challenges have you faced while developing Neat?

Getting our fully digital KYC (Know Your Customer) compliance solution accepted by business partners. As our innovative solution was new in the market, this was challenging at first, however, it is now embraced by our business partners and the digital KYC solution has also won us an award by the Hong Kong government. This catapulted us into a period of hyper-growth.

As you work primarily is in the e-commerce, IT and business consulting sectors what advice do you have for startups in these fields and what are your predictions for the future regarding these sectors?

It is now easier than ever to set up an e-commerce business. One thing we always recommend entrepreneurs is to take care of the administrative side of things from the start. It doesn’t have to be difficult or time-consuming. The basics are to legally register a company - Hong Kong is an excellent place for digital businesses to incorporate - and separate your personal finances from your business transactions. Doing so will save you hours later on, when it comes to for example bookkeeping and tax filing.

What advice do you have for tech or Fintech startups seeking investment?

The same advice I would offer to any startup, Fintech or not: make sure you solve a real pain point.

What are the plans for the future at ‘Neat’?

Neat users will soon be able to integrate their Neat financial accounts with their own accounting system. While customers can already make transfers worldwide, later this year we also plan to add multi-currency accounts to meet the demands of our global customer base. We are constantly looking ahead to ensure that we have the financial capacity and capability to meet the growing demands and expectations of our customers.

Bio of Neat:

https://www.neat.hk/about

Once you clear all the noise, traditional finance is based on making money by lending money to people. So instead of making money from getting you into debt, we want to be radically different: we want to empower you to stay on top of your finances.