“With the help of our partners at Weavr, we’ve been able to get to market with verticalised banking much quicker than we initially anticipated. Weavr has given us a cost-effective BaaS solution to bring MONET to life for UK creators in a safe and regulatory compliant manner.” – Jake Casson, Founder and CEO of MONET
How can we support creators who excel at content creation but struggle to manage their cash flow? For MONET, the answer was to partner with an embedded-finance provider, Weavr, and help businesses in need of a platform to smoothen cash flow.
The Challenge
Despite the rapid rise of creators over the past five years, they are regularly left waiting for payment for their intellectual properties. Approximately 3 million individuals were excluded from financial support during the COVID-19 lockdowns, and unfortunately, many creators bore the brunt of this oversight. From artists to musicians, many were left struggling to make ends meet. Ultimately, this lack of income and support left as many as three-fifths of people considering whether pursuing their passion was worth the struggle.
Throughout the pandemic, creation tools evolved significantly, and the popularity of short-form video content hosted on platforms such as TikTok made content even easier to showcase. However, revenue management systems fell short of providing the infrastructure required to cater for the industry effectively.
In response, MONET began creating a world-first lending platform that would smoothen cash flow and offer unique business tools to manage multi-stream payments. However, to facilitate payments from client to creator and provide more money-management controls, it needed to employ embedded finance within the platform.
Powered by Weavr, MONET implemented:
- Worker Finance Plug-in
- Branded Creator Card enables instant payments
- Virtual bank accounts to store funds
The Solution
MONET identified that Weavr’s Worker Finance Plug-in could power the financial capabilities it needed through a quick-and-easy integration, complete with fully shouldering the regulatory compliance.
By deploying Weavr’s embedded-finance technology, MONET was able to build a platform that gave creators a virtual bank account to hold their earnings, as well as a Creator Card that provided instant access to their funds to make physical payments. Within the app, individuals can manage digital payments too.
The platform stands to support the large proportion of highly driven creative individuals within the space who are either excluded or mismatched from wider SME finance and business infrastructure. The platform offers truly useful finance and business tools, such as invoicing, virtual bank accounts and access to cashback, which will help more creators grow powerful businesses from their passions and skills.
Predictions
Over 300 creator businesses joined the beta launch in the first month and over 7.5k creative businesses are awaiting an invite from the waitlist.
The platform is set to offer immediate, transformative benefits for freelancers of all kinds, pushing funds straight into their bank accounts upfront to help smoothen cash flow and remove the need for time-consuming and laborious payment chasing. The creators will also benefit from 1% cashback on all business spending with their Creator Card. All of the financial services are powered by the Worker Finance Plug-in.
MONET’s solution, with Weavr’s support, will eradicate the long-endured pain points within the creator economy, allowing freelancers to better manage their finances and creation roadmaps, while more broadly facilitating stability across the sector.
Alex Mifsud, Co-Founder and CEO of Weavr:
“Jake’s plans for MONET are a much-needed solution for creators to realise their earning potential, serving the increasing number of individuals making a living as creators. I am thrilled that Jake and the MONET team have chosen Weavr embedded finance toolset to build a service that helps creators succeed.”
