Swoop founder won’t take fintech success for granted 

Swoop founder won’t take fintech success for grantedINTERVIEWAndrea Reynolds, youngest daughter of late taoiseach Albert, is helping SMEs access funding — and is scathing about support for the sector at home in IrelandAndrea Reynolds credits her father for her entrepreneurial spirit, describing him as an “accidental politician”BRYAN MEADE FOR THE SUNDAY TIMESSunday February 09 2025, 12.01am, The Sunday TimesIn the world of bootstrapping start-ups, there’s a certain cachet and mystique attached to founders who build an enterprise to solve their own problems. Airbnb is the classic example: two broke guys in their twenties needed extra money to make rent, so they started offering mattress space in their San Francisco apartment.For Andrea Reynolds it was watching billions in UK grant funding go untapped in a country that was crying out for indigenous investment and growth amid the disruption of Brexit. Other funding sources — from banks, venture capitalists, asset managers and other non-bank lenders — were fragmented, siloed and difficult for small businesses to access without expensive corporate finance advisers. “I was looking after small and medium businesses as a corporate finance adviser, and just looking at the amount of friction involved and the heavy lift for a business owner who doesn’t have a minute in the day,” she said.“I just honestly couldn’t believe that no one else was seeing it. How is everyone just accepting that this is how it should be for business owners? I just couldn’t understand it.”An accountant by profession, Reynolds set about quantifying the problem by preparing — what else? — an audit to present to the UK’s Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy. It turned out that 70 per cent of British businesses never applied for a grant. Worse, the cost to the UK taxpayer of creating a job through the grant system was £1 million.AdvertisementWith the help of two Google coders who bartered their labour in exchange for financing that Reynolds raised — from a grant agency — to fund a game they were developing, she built a prototype to solve the problem. Essentially the brief was to match lenders with borrowers. While this broker model is common in the world of consumer finance, there wasn’t a simple solution for SMEs to access the right products from a complex funding menu.“I took that in and presented it,” she said. “They said, ‘This is a great idea, but who’s going to build it?’ Before you know it, you’re doing it.”Thus, Swoop was born in 2018. And with it, the company’s first case study: Swoop itself. Using its own tools, Swoop has utilised “every form of funding”, from start-up loans to grants to venture capital to EIIS funding. It is the poster child for SME fintechs looking for growth capital.• How taoiseach’s daughter is funding small businesses in one fell SwoopEnterprise Ireland was an early backer of the Dublin-headquartered firm, and retains an