🔎Market Validation

Partners

The auto-repair sector is an essential sector with a shortage of user-friendly and easily accessible split-payment options offered at the "point of repair". With Fabio's experience in the application and management of these services together with his existing partnership network, makes auto-repairs the right sector to start with.

Initial focus is on Italy & UK markets

The experience of Andrew and Fabio in these countries is decisive. Italy and the UK are two of the European countries with the greatest demand, this is due to strong independent repair sectors.

Mature consumer markets with high usage & acceptance levels of financial solutions.

Analytics

The market size is 118,500 independent businesses with 115 million customer interactions per annum with an average repair bill of €1,000, equates to a total addressable market of €57.5 billion. Average customer interaction estimations for each workshop. 20 average unique customer interactions per business per week. 48 of working weeks per annum. 960 average unique customer interactions per business per annum.

The reason that this sector is attractive to FixxFi, is because it is an incredibly large market, combined with our market knowledge of vendor, industry pain-points and customer feedback

What we learnt

We conducted an extensive market validation over the last 9 months through 50+ auto-repair partners in Torino, Italy. We facilitated loans to the value of €150,000. Our data shows that 85% of the loans had a value of €2,500 or less, with 50% of loans lower than €1,000 or under. The success of our market validation shows that there is a strong desire from customers to use an alternative payment solution that is easily available at the "point of repair". Also repair professionals see the benefits in offering an embedded finance solution as a value-added & customer retention solution.

The market validation was conducted with a conventional bank in a very traditional paper-based format, with choke-points and customer interaction required through the banking partner's inability to offer an API. We identified the need to digitize the process, identify & integrate with a lender through API's, allow the customer to privately apply and to give the customer a fund rather than, a one-time transaction loan, all done through a centralized touchpoint with a one-time application process.