Industry
Venture Capital
HQ
London
Employees
11
Key benefits
Virtual cards for software subscriptions, Real time savings, Direct integration with Xero
Connect Ventures streamlined expense management using Soldo for their Head of Finance while empowering staff to spend.
Venture Capital
London
11
Virtual cards for software subscriptions, Real time savings, Direct integration with Xero
The team at Connect Ventures is passionate about products and the impact they can have on the lives of customers. Investing in brands like Citymapper, Boiler Room and CharlieHR (among others), the VC (venture capital) knows a solid offering when it sees one. Their London-based team of five works with companies across the continent. This is how Soldo helps them do business.
Mark Pettit came on board to help bring the firm’s financial function in house. Inheriting Xero as the accounting platform from their former external accountants, Mark saw an opportunity to streamline the expense process that fed into the accounts.
Credit cards were unavailable to one of the partners and statements took too long, so Connect Ventures was reliant on a debit card for purchases. The result was lots of small payments hitting the management company finances, making a bit of a mess.
So, Mark deployed Soldo – the multi-user expense account – spotting its potential as a spend control and expense management solution. Since its launch in 2017, Soldo seemed like the perfect fit, matching the full gamut of the VC’s needs.
Soldo acts as an expense account, sitting on top of their business bank account – for Mark, the solution beats their old way of working hands down. Each member of the team has a physical Soldo card, they also have a virtual card that’s used for all software subscriptions and other general costs.
With 55% of their interests based in London and the rest spread across Europe, the Connect Ventures team is UK-centric but has international needs. Soldo allows users to have balances in euros, pounds and dollars which, and has low FX rates, making it a natural fit for global businesses.
As well as cleaning up management company finances, Soldo has also helped to simplify the finance workflow. The integration between Soldo and Xero has helped to streamline processes and Mark loves the fact he can select which transactions to send to the books.
The result is transformational, Mark says the integration has halved the flow of expense management, with much of the admin that finance had to process passed onto the user to complete when they make the transaction.
In fact, the team at Connect Ventures likes Soldo so much, they invested in it – recommendations don’t come much stronger than that.