2022
Website: www.thepowermba.com
Industry: E-learning
Stage: Scale up, 200+ employees
Headquarters: Spain
Product used: Payments
ThePower Business School has been providing educational technology services, or EdTech, since January 2020, trying to democratise education and make it accessible for as many people as possible. People are responding, too; the school was voted Spainâs top start up on LinkedIn in 2020, and came second the following year.
âWeâre trying to give people the ability to learn from world-renowned business experts,â said Ignacio Marcos PerĂ©z, the CFO, âbut in a far more affordable way than traditional institutions. Here, you can get tips directly from the founder of Netflix for a comparably tiny cost.â
Of course, the pandemic presented challenges for ThePower Business School, but so did the teamâs rapid expansion. When Ignacio started, the team was 40-strong; now, theyâre more than 150, with over 95,000 students â more than half of which are experienced professionals looking to refresh their ideas â worldwide.
But this globalisation, as PerĂ©z discovered pretty early on, brings its own financial challenges. And thatâs where Revolut Business comes in.
Challenge: what were their growing pains?
First off, itâs important to get an idea of what life was like before. What did a typical month look like for the finance department?
âAt that time, we were using five different banks, all of them based in Spain. Every time we had to deal in another currency, we had to ask those banks to provide us with a budget and then weâd need to negotiate a fair price on a case-by-case basis.
âThen, weâd have to manually input bank statement numbers because the formats didnât align across banks, markets and currencies. The technology just couldnât do it â the whole process was horrible.â
The impact was soon felt across the entire business, and it was only aggravated by their growth. Invoices that werenât submitted in EUR were blocked, or suppliers were paid late. Others, those that required a fee in advance, were adhered to â but at an FX rate that left the business worse off.
Month-to-month, PerĂ©z estimates they had outgoings of more than EUR 500,000 â and that doesnât include the hours wasted by the team performing manual tasks, or negotiating rates. As a growing business, this was unsustainable. Something had to change.
Solution: how did they fix it?
Peréz was (and still is!) using Revolut for his personal finances, so when Revolut Business launched, it was an easy decision to make the move.
âOpening the account was a mind-blowing changeâ, he says, âand it helped us combat our toughest challenge: making payments all over the world.â Revolut Businessâs multi-currency accounts and exchanges in 28+ currencies made this easier and cheaper than the high-cost barter system the school was forced to engage with previously.
It wasnât just money they were saving, either. âRevolut Business lets us integrate with Sage, our accounting software. Instead of all that time spent manually inputting data, extracting key information became easy.â
Results: what did they get out of it?
From there, ThePower Business School was able to launch its global programme, breaking into 50 new markets for a completely international business â something PerĂ©z believes is its âbiggest milestoneâ to date.
By the end of 2021, revenue was almost 10x greater than when PerĂ©z started, positioning the organisation well to compete in whatâs now a fiercely competitive EdTech market.
And as for Revolut Business? âItâs been with us through all our changes; itâs the only solution that helped us with going globalâ, PerĂ©z says, adding, âItâs changed the business finance model entirelyâ, he says. âThereâs no going back from here.â
do you know how much longer until the FCA respond?
