History of Qred

In 2015, my business partners and I set out to change the old business of giving out loans, and more specifically to small business. Historically, the smallest businesses have been underbanked and poorly served by the old, traditional banks.We speak from experience, because we have been in the same situation that hundreds of small businesses face every day.

Let me tell you a short story: once a long, long time ago there was a relatively young and ambitious entrepreneur, let's call him Emil, who wanted to start his own business. There was much to learn, and much that was new, exciting and unknown. One of the first things Emil had to do was go to a bank to get a bank account for his company. After a 15-minute meeting in which he told the banker in a nice suit about his business plans, the entrepreneur was told that the bank did not think the business idea seemed well thought out and, unfortunately, he could not become a customer of the bank. Fortunately, the entrepreneur did not give up and eventually managed to find a bank that would accept his start-up business as a customer.Unfortunately, this is not a rare situation. Being taken seriously, getting time, advice and fair funding is unusual among small business owners.

That's why in 2015 we decided to launch Qred, to make financing easier and more accessible to entrepreneurs, which is nothing but fair, considering that 4 out of 5 new jobs are created by small business owners, and that Sweden's future prosperity largely depends on us creating new and ambitious companies. Today, Qred has operations in no less than six markets, is one of Sweden's fastest growing fintech companies and has been recognized on the Financial Times list of Europe's fastest growing companies for a full four years in a row. In addition, Qred is the leading source of financing for small businesses in the Nordic region, and from October 2023 we will also be one of Europe's newest banks.

We are now striving to become the premier small business bank in Europe. We want all companies to receive the treatment and respect they need and above all deserve. With the help of machine learning and artificial intelligence, we can make a thorough and adequate credit rating in seconds, and with our integrations to other platforms we can disburse the loans in minutes. So far, we have empowered more than 100,000 entrepreneurs and helped create over 40,000 jobs over the years. We have set out to empower the millions of severely underbanked entrepreneurs across Europe and make the old, traditional banks a little humbler.

Emil Sunvisson, CEO and co-founder

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