Lex Gielen is the owner of Capilex. At Capilex, companies can take out a loan without the involvement of a bank.
After establishing several successful fintech companies, entrepreneur Lex Gielen and his business partner Luc van Laarhoven began looking for a new business adventure. His factoring company, Online Financiering, was performing well, but Gielen wanted to sink his teeth into something new. Together with Van Laarhoven, he decided to build a real estate portfolio, initially in Luxembourg where Van Laarhoven lives, but the focus soon shifted to the Dutch real estate market. Eventually, they decided that this wasn't what they were looking for either. As far as Gielen was concerned, owning houses involved too much "hassle," and the returns were too dependent on the market. However, through this real estate experience, Luc van Laarhoven and Lex Gielen stumbled upon a new business model: mortgage-backed business loans. This proved to be a smart move, given current developments in the real estate market.
Two factors led them to this idea: any natural or legal person in the Netherlands is permitted to provide a mortgage to businesses, and many small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) are looking for alternative forms of financing. The latter is due to a number of circumstances. Firstly, banks have been very cautious about lending money since the 2008 financial crisis. In addition, many SME owners have seen their reserves shrink significantly due to the coronavirus crisis, while the value of the real estate they hold has risen. This is capital they cannot liquidate because banks are unwilling to provide additional loans or have overly long approval processes. Gielen and Van Laarhoven saw the potential, and Capilex was born.
Capilex lends money to SME businesses, using the equity in their private homes or commercial real estate as collateral. By fully automating the application and assessment process, it is possible to provide entrepreneurs with a conditional proposal within a day and often deposit the loan amount into their business account within a week. In addition to this alternative financing for entrepreneurs, Capilex offers investors the opportunity to invest in these mortgage-backed loans. This requires a minimum investment of 100,000 euros, has a term of 3 years, and spreads the risk across a large number of different loans. This risk diversification of investments is fully automated, partly through the use of software that Lex Gielen developed himself. Within this software, it is also possible for investors to get a look behind the scenes at Capilex. For example, they can see what kind of company Capilex has provided a loan to and what collateral has been secured. This level of transparency fits perfectly with a company like Capilex, which is active in the fintech industry.
The software that Capilex uses was partly designed specifically for Capilex, but some of it was also previously developed by Lex Gielen for Online Financiering. One of these systems is Paylex, which allows for the creditworthiness of millions of companies worldwide to be mapped out in a short amount of time. Another system that Gielen previously developed is Customer Diligence, which allows companies to screen customers for involvement in money laundering or terrorist financing (under the Dutch Anti-Money Laundering and Anti-Terrorist Financing Act, or 'Wwft'). Normally, such research takes a lot of time, but this software screens dozens of databases at once. Both Paylex and Customer Diligence have grown into independent companies.
The Gielen Group now consists of eight companies operating in the fintech sector. Each company functions independently while benefiting from the collective knowledge and expertise of all eight. This unrestricted access to knowledge, software, and—most importantly—data, combined with the use of AI, allows Capilex to distinguish itself from traditional players as an alternative financier and investment opportunity.