From working at Seat for eight years and almost another two at Ford in England to being one of the co-founders of a leading rental marketplace for individuals, freelancers and companies. This is how the professional career of Julio Ribes, one of the co-founders of Swipcar, could be summed up.
The company, founded at the beginning of 2018 by Ribes himself, Blas Gil and Pablo Pascual, is responsible for bringing together rental offers from the main financial institutions, vehicle manufacturers and dealers on the same platform. The pandemic has also reinforced the transfer of clients from property to renting. This situation, as Ribes acknowledges, did not have a negative effect during the months of confinement. “From the point of view of marketing, we were unemployed for two months and the boomerang effect came to us after the fact. All the people who had not consumed and who wanted to change their car, in June we had a sales record that we carried throughout the year There were two factors that benefited us a lot last year: on the one hand, with Covid, people have wanted to use private vehicles more, and, on the other, the effect of cities with environmental regulation, which is causing nervousness when buying a vehicle,” says Ribes.
As he acknowledges, “the individual is being the great star of the world of renting. Right now the individual does not want to decapitalize, but rather prefers a vehicle with everything included as a subscription”.
And he is not without reason. According to data from the Spanish Association of Vehicle Renting (AER), the self-employed and individuals accounted for 49.25% of renting customers in the first quarter of the year, almost four points more than in the same period. of the previous year, with a total of 113,369 clients. According to what the president of the employer’s association assured this newspaper at the end of April, José-Martín Castro Acebes, .
In three years, Swipcar has managed to start operations in Italy, Portugal and France. Before the arrival of the pandemic, the company started operations in France, but “they have been on stand-by because the confinement forced us to stop because they were not being profitable operations.”
investment round
This situation has been possible thanks to an investment round in September last year, with an injection of 1.5 million euros led by the Inveready fund, which has allowed them to consolidate the business in the Spanish market, replicate the model on the outside and duplicate the equipment. And it is that Swipcar currently has a workforce of 80 workers and they expect to double the team and sales next year.
Among the company’s short-term plans, it highlights being “very representative in Italy in the next two years.” The company managed to close the 2020 financial year with a break even, a situation that allows it to enter debt financing “much more attractive than what we had before,” explains Ribes.
Asked about the possibility of starting operations in other markets, Ribes affirms that they are doing a market study in Germany and England, “but to date we have not yet made a decision.”
On the other hand, Ribes considers that one of its main competitors in the offline world is La Caixa, since “they have managed to post spectacular numbers in 2019 and 2020. We are also aware that the merger between CaixaBank and Bankia has a very strong enough to make clients”.
Among the objectives set for this year, Ribes says he wants to consolidate the global figure to be above 6,000 cars per year. A figure that is in line with the closing data for the first quarter of the year, where Swipcar reached more than 500 monthly vehicle subscriptions.
Regarding the client profile that Swipcar has, Ribes points to a client with an average age of 40 years, which is divided equally between men and women. In addition, “the most attractive average price is the one that ranges between 280 and 320 euros per month, which is a good model that can give you mobility at an attractive price and in which the customer is not so interested in personalizing the same”.
Integration in the German mobile bank N26
At the beginning of the year, Swipcar signed a collaboration agreement with the German mobile bank N26, through which the entity integrated the vehicle platform into its portfolio of services. In just over a month, more than 1,000 N26 customers requested information to access Swipcar’s services and benefits. And it is that with this agreement, the company can access a pool of up to 600,000 clients that the German bank has in Spain.
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