Obu: Fintech Platform
This is the story of how we helped two founders launch the UK’s first fintech platform designed to empower women and close the gender investment gap, for good.
"I love the culture at Distinction, their values are really clear and feel closely aligned to ours. They are genuinely excited about what we’re building and why, and they’re great fun to work with, even when there are gnarly conversations to have like bottoming out scope. We’ve had to throw several curveballs their way – which didn’t freak them out – and we appreciate their understanding of the startup environment we’re working in right now."
Claire Dunn.
COO & Cofounder
The Challenge.
Obu is on a mission to close the gender investment gap at scale; disrupting the financial services sector by launching an investment platform specifically designed to bring together women founders, women angels and innovative allies – and make investment happen.
When Obu approached us to build a fintech platform, “a bit like Bumble”, to match women founders with women and ally angel investors and create a fairer investment culture, we sat up and listened. It's just the sort of innovative and groundbreaking project we get excited about.
The Results.
We worked as one team with Obu to plan and deliver the Obu angel investment platform - the first of its kind and disrupting the status quo, serving an underserved market.
The MVP launched on 21 June 2023, meeting its Q2 target, and with that the Obu angel investment platform is live! Challenging expectations, blazing a trail and well on the way to creating meaningful change in a gender-imbalanced sector.
The Obu x Distinction team continues to working on future releases of the platform, so watch this space!
The Mission.
When Obu approached us to build a fintech platform, “a bit like Bumble”, to match women founders with women and ally angel investors and create a fairer investment culture, we sat up and listened.
Today in the UK, there’s a staggering inequality between men and women when it comes to raising and making investment. Women founders get just 2% of funding, Black women founders get just 0.02% of funding, and women make up just 14% of angel investors.
Not only is this broken system a huge barrier to equality which Obu is determined to break down, it’s also prohibiting the UK reaching its economic growth and sustainability potential.
And, at a macro level, the Obu angel investment platform will play a part in achieving the UN’s sustainable development goals, as what we’re seeing in the UK is replicated globally. Because when it comes to ensuring economic growth and sustainability, equality is the main driver, and empowering women to build businesses at the same rate as men is worth £250bn to the UK economy.
The Obu angel investment platform is the first of its kind and just the sort of innovative and groundbreaking project we get excited about – disrupting the status quo and serving an underserved market. This is the kind of digital product that will beat giants and make monsters.
The Goal.
It was when entrepreneurs and cofounders, Sarah and Claire, sought their first round of funding through the government’s SEIS (Seed Enterprise Investment Scheme) during pandemic lockdowns and the home-schooling/work struggle that they realised just how underserved women are in the UK’s male-dominated investment landscape.
And so the #OverBeingUnderFunded campaign was born which saw Obu (then named We are Radikl) successfully lobby Parliament to extend the SEIS business age limit from two to three years, which came into force in April 2023. These real-life experiences were a watershed moment for Sarah and Claire as they saw a gaping hole in the market which led them to pivot to purpose-led fintech founders.
The team’s hypothesis was that adopting an inclusive design approach would enable them to deliver what this underserved audience needed, driving their participation in financial services. They wanted to create a first-to-market, inclusively designed fintech platform that would empower women to come together, invest and be invested in.
Our mission? To get the platform to market before any competitors which meant an MVP launch date in Q2 2023, backed up by a product release roadmap adaptable to improvements and iterations learned from users’ data and insights.
Apporach.
Obu needed a trusted technical partner that could not only bring their concept to life but get their product to market quickly and then support them throughout the first 18-24 months of its lifecycle. This allowed them time to grow their business whilst considering whether to bring a product design and development team inhouse or not.
Just as we’d bought into their mission of closing the gender investment gap and making the startup ecosystem fairer for women, Obu bought into our beliefs and our agile approach to digital product development.
Discovery.
Aligned in our values from the get-go, we started with a period of discovery in the form of three workshops to make sure requirements gathering, user and technical research and platform architecture were covered.
We kicked off discovery with setting the scene with Obu’s brand vision, mission and value proposition to align the whole project team behind one north star goal. Doing so cements purpose and underpins our belief that the project team must go all in to achieve a successful outcome.
Then it was time to look at the business’ process flow maps which were separated into the angel and entrepreneur journeys for registration and login, and the raise lifecycle.
We brought all these into one end-to-end userflow diagram to bring clarity for the whole team and help map the user journey. Now it was clear what was done on and off-platform, where third party integrations were involved and what messaging via which channel the user would experience.
This in turn allowed us to write the epics and user stories to prioritise and estimate what was in scope for the MVP, what could go in the backlog, and validate (or adjust) the technical recommendations given previously.
At the end of discovery, we’d agreed the MVP scope and the must-haves for release one.
