Read all about our CEO, Andrea

Reynolds, in The Times

Here at Swoop it comes as no surprise that The Times chose to feature
Andrea’s amazing journey from trainee accountant to CEO of one of the
fastest growing FinTech businesses.

With 15 years’ experience in corporate financing, largely focused on matching

businesses with funding and investment opportunities, Andrea launched
Swoop in 2018 to help SMEs start up, scale up and finance their new ventures.

Arguably the UK’s number one expert in business funding, it’s not hard to see
why she is affectionately known to colleagues and industry peers as the
‘Martin Lewis of business finance’.

Andrea grew up in Ireland, the youngest daughter of the late former Irish
Taoiseach Albert Reynolds, and owner of Irish pet food company C&D Foods.
After graduating from University College Dublin with an Economics degree,
she joined KPMG where she qualified as a Chartered Accountant, working with
large corporate businesses such as Ryanair and Aircraft Leasing. She later
joined KPMG’s management consultancy division in London.

In 2004, she set up her own corporate finance consultancy, counting McLaren
Applied Technologies – a division of McLaren F1 – among her clients. Her role
was to help SMEs to understand the funding landscape, and match them with
suitable funding opportunities.

When the economy crashed in 2008, the funding landscape changed entirely
and it became even tougher for SMEs to navigate. They needed Andrea more
than ever.
By 2013 she had become a founding partner in business development
consultancy, Re.Fresch. While Andrea focused on start-ups, scale-ups and
innovations, her colleagues were focusing on larger corporations. She was
learning about even more funding opportunities from big corporate
businesses.

Andrea realised that if she could create a technology platform that would
compress the funding process for SMEs, she could reduce the admin, shorten
the decision-making time and intelligently match investors based on customer
profiles. So that’s what she did.

By 2017, following a lot of blood, sweat and tears, and with investment from
Enterprise Ireland, plus seed investment from a group of UK investors, Swoop
was born. By April 2018, it was ready to launch to the public.

Swoop is a platform that integrates a business’s bank accounts and data

sources in just a few clicks. Within seconds, Swoop gathers all the information
a business needs to apply for funding, and collects the decision-making
criteria from thousands of providers. Then it matches the business with
suitable funders.

As part of her work with Swoop, Andrea also runs regular funding
masterclasses, webinars and workshops for SMEs, to educate teams on the
funding landscape, product types, investment applications and investor
readiness, among other topics.

Get in touch with the Swoop team at https://swoopfunding.com.