Welcome to Fintechlab’s Company Spotlight. In our newest series, we would like to introduce you to some of our portfolio companies via a short interview, covering topics such as where they have been since participating in our program, what milestones they’ve achieved so far, and a sneak peek at their plans for the near future.

New week, new company to introduce. This time we talked with Benjamin Berényi, CEO & Managing director of Péntech. Péntech is a digital factoring startup, where SMEs (small and medium enterprises) can finance their outstanding invoices through a completely online process. This way companies can increase their liquidity and working capital which enables them faster growth and more balanced operations.

What is the story behind the company, where did the company’s idea come from?

We saw a gap in the Hungarian market: even though average payment terms were long, there was no easy to use solution that could help SMEs in overcoming these problems. This is why we have founded Péntech, to help companies in their growth and become their partner supporting their growth.

Our founders team consists of three people: me, being the CEO of the company, dr. Bálint Réti, responsible for operations and legal matters and János Csák, CFA, FRM, responsible for matters of risk and finance.

What were last year’s most important milestones for you?

In October 2019 we launched with our smart factoring product in the Hungarian market. We onboarded our first customers and based on their feedback we developed and enhanced our product and added new functionalities. This is the reason why we offer debt collection, an online credit application process and a partner risk assessment tool integrated into our platform as well. These additional services make the lives of SME leaders much easier, since for instance by running a quick risk assessment on their potentially new or already existing partners they can make more informed decisions and thereby reduce their external risk.

Now we have more than 250 registered customers and have handled an application volume of over € 5mn. Overall we see a growing demand for our services, more and more companies learn about the benefits of digital factoring and recognize the potential they can unleash by receiving payments in 24 hours instead of 30–90 days.

As a recognition for the innovation that we are bringing to the world of factoring we won the Startup Europe Awards Hungary fintech category and won the FintechShow 2019 earlier last year.

Right now we are closing an investment round which will help us extend our market presence in Hungary and start our expansion within the CEE region.

How has COVID-19 affected on the company’s life? Have you experienced any positive or negative changes?

We do not see yet whether the COVID-19 crisis overall had a rather negative or rather positive impact on our company. We have seen more registrations and the number of inquiries increased substantially, but we saw that many of our customers did not get orders from their corporate clients. And if there are no orders, there are no invoices to factor. Over time we will see how soon the economy will get back to normal and what the overall impact for our company will be. However we see positive trends since the general perception of factoring is becoming more and more positive.

Currently we are working in a hybrid model, we have an office space but there is no strict policy for our team. If there is a meeting where it is useful to participate in person, we expect people to show up, but otherwise our home office policy is very flexible.

What projects do you work on in these days?

Right now we are working on integrations with various platforms (invoicing, reporting and accounting softwares). Through this we expect to reach more potential customers and at the same time make their lives easier. These integrations enable customers to submit the necessary information for a factoring application by just clicking a few buttons.
In the upcoming months we want to increase our market presence in the Hungarian market and build the fundamentals for our expansion in the CEE region.

What are your and long-term goals?

In the long term we want to enhance the scope of our services and the number of our integrations. Through this we aim to become a fully integrated platform enabling SMEs to manage all their financial inquiries in one place. This way we want to become a real and trustworthy partner of SME leader in the CEE region.