Interim Head of New Ventures

We're on a mission to finance 1 million small businesses. Over the last decade we have built an amazing tech stack and systems that make financing available within minutes rather than months, raised more than £1 billion across debt and equity to fuel the machine and financed nearly 100,000 businesses across the UK and Germany. We're now some 500 iwocans and all systems go towards achieving our mission.

So what's next? With excess capital building up, we have the opportunity to take on new bets outside our current 'business as usual' SME lending activities. Therefore we want to build the muscle that enables us to systematically identify new customer problems we could solve and put the right team and structure in place to do so.

As rough guidance, we could invest as much as £50m over the coming 5 years across one or several bets. The amount will be a function of the profitability we generate in coming years and the attractiveness of each bet.

These bets should also increase our overall brand awareness among SMEs which remains stubbornly low despite iwoca being one of the largest lenders in our current markets.

Your mission will be to help us identify and assess the strategic options we have and narrow them down to a manageable number for which we can establish a business case and execution plan. You would have the opportunity to recruit 1-2 iwocans from across the team for this project or bring your own external analysts if you have any.

Your responsibilities

1. In a first phase: run an ideation process that sources ideas that are worth exploring (from customers, iwocans, investors, advisors, news or any other relevant source). If attractive enough those ideas should progress to the second phase.
2. In a second phase: conceptualize high-potential bets, including go-to market plans, financial modeling and MVP.
3. Deliver a detailed memo with your findings and recommendations for each phase.

Broad guidelines for selecting new ventures

1. iwoca should have the right to solve this problem, i.e. new ventures should leverage the competitive advantages, skills and expertise that iwoca already has.
2. While it's an advantage, it's not a hard requirement for the bet to be in line with our mission to fund 1 million small businesses; for now nothing is off the table.
3. Ideally it should be in line with our company-wide objective to boost our brand awareness, and/or help us acquire SMEs that we can cross-sell other products to.
4. Organic implementation preferred but M&A is within scope.
5. We'd aim for a 10x ROI on invested capital for speculative projects after 5 years.

You

1. are a strategic thinker with an entrepreneurial mindset with 10y+ work experience across tier 1 consulting, incubators, corp dev & innovation teams.
2. have proven experience conceptualizing and developing high-potential ventures, ideally within the SME space. Ideally this includes developing and testing concepts and MVPs in the real world, either first-hand or working closely with product people.
3. are ideally a fintech native and/or familiar with the challenges SMEs face on a day-to-day basis.
4. have proven project management skills with the ability to manage budgets, timelines, and resources.
5. are able to attract great talent, build high-performing teams and build trusting relationships across the company.
6. have a strong background in financial analysis and modeling.
7. are curious and love problem solving, you update and refresh your own knowledge regularly, you tend to be among the early adopters of new technologies.
8. are commercial savvy, you cut through noise and distinguish hype from substance.

Total compensation: up to £100k for a 3 months project.