Date: 30 March 2023
Author: FINTECH Circle

Qokoon is on a mission to protect businesses by helping them understand their finances and make the best use of their financial data.

How would you describe your business in one sentence?

Qokoon has automated financial analysis of company accounts (P&L, BS and CF) and reporting for sophisticated financial analysts and professionals performing financial due diligence, auditing, investing/lending, monitoring portfolio companies, and financial management.

Qokoon is an ESG company focusing on the “G”.

Tell us why your company is a game changer for our industry?

Qokoon will not replace you BUT  a person using Qokoon will.

By automating financial analysis and reporting not only Qokoon conducts a better and more thorough analysis of all three financial statements but it also does it instantly.

A better and instant financial analysis results in faster and better decisions in the following areas:

• Lending
• Equity investing
• Equity and debt trading
• Auditing
• Portfolio monitoring and value creation
• Financial management and FP&A

Better and faster decisions in the above areas result in:

• Reduced risks
• Reduced failures
• More proactive management
• Improved profits
• Efficiencies and cost reductions

Automating manual, cognitive and reasoning tasks empowers finance professionals and allows them to focus on value creation tasks. At the institutional level (e.g. lending banks) efficiencies are hugely increased, profits improved and risks reduced.

WHAT HAS BEEN YOUR BIGGEST ACHIEVEMENT TO DATE?

After three yeas of software development we have created a truly powerful software. I am still amazed how fast I understand I new company when I upload it to Qokoon. Monitoring companies on a monthly basis becomes very easy too. 

Our key features/achievements and true differentiators are:

• Generated sentences explaining performance (e.g. “why” your profits are increasing or decreasing
• Cost alerts and profit improvement suggestions
• Anomaly detection (we have detected fraud in a couple of occasions)
• Instant generation of financial reports, including written commentary

We often hear “I have never seen anything like this”.

What has been the greatest challenge leading a start-up so far?

Our biggest challenge is to try to explain our benefits to startups and SMEs and their accountants. Qokoon is too sophisticated for the knowledge and skills.

This is why we pivoted and are now targeting users with more sophisticated users: Banks, VCs, PEs. Debt Funds, CLOs, Investment Banks, Leveraged Finance, Equity Analysis and traders.

What is your typical day like?

My marketing lead tells me “I have never seen anyone raise equity as easy as you” (even our office landlord has invested in Qokoon…).

Now what we have almost used our low hanging fruit in terms of F&F and I am talking to an extended circle of angels and some VCs, what I have learnt is that attention span and understanding is quite limited. Focus tends to be on pre-money valuation without really trying to understand the vision and future prospects.

From my experience, I have started to realise that the best and worst thing about a vision are the same thing: the fact that not many people see your vision, which gives you a head start to implement it but it is also very frustrating when tyring to explain it to others.

Your advice to anyone starting out as an entrepreneur?

Get ready for one of the busiest, most frustrating and scariest periods of your life… also one of the best periods of your life, especially if you do it with the right people.

Alfonso Fernandez Stuyck, CEO and Founder of Qokoon

You can connect with Alfonso Fernandez Stuyck on LinkedIn