This week we’ve been researching the digital payments industry to understand what new innovations are taking place specifically to help digital entrepreneurs, e-commerce and affiliate businesses become more efficient with their business finance and everyday banking. Affiliate Marketing is a unique industry and often receiving or making payments cross borders can be an expensive and tedious process. From receiving commission and losing out on FX to ensuring your remote workforce is paid on time in other locations. It can all get a bit confusing, costly, and also difficult to manage – but we’ve found an innovative new solution for business owners in this industry to consider in Juni.co and have sat down with CEO and Co-founder, Samir El-Sabini to talk through their service and proposition in more detail.
AI: Juni is a brand new financial companion for digital entrepreneurs. Tell us about the history of the business and why it’s crucial for affiliates and content curators and agencies – to know about it?
SE-S: Juni was founded in Sweden in 2020 by myself, CTO Anders Orsedal and COO Jonathan Sanders. We have a combination of ecommerce, media buying, martech, fintech and technical developer experience between us, which we think will greatly benefit our customers.
When starting the company, we set out to solve the problems that come with managing your finances as an ecommerce entrepreneur or media buyer. Juni wants to be the financial companion for ecommerce and help internet-first businesses succeed every step of the way. We all have personal experience in running these types of businesses, as we used to be in the industry we cater to today.
My background is in affiliate marketing and ecommerce, and I personally used to take care of all the administrative work myself, so I know first-hand how much time and energy can be wasted doing things that could be automated. With Juni, I wanted to change the game by automating all the boring stuff and create a platform that allows entrepreneurs to spend less time on admin and more time on what matters, growing their business.
We recently announced a follow-on Series A round, bringing the total funding to $76M. Investors include Partners of DST Global, Felix Capital, Cherry Ventures and EQT Ventures. We’re really excited about what’s to come for Juni, and our customers, and we are proud to have been ranked as the number one fastest-growing fintech by Sifted earlier this week!
AI: What are some of the biggest benefits digital entrepreneurs such as media buyers, affiliate marketers and e-commerce businesses can take advantage of, using Juni right now?
SE-S: With Juni, you get unlimited Virtual VISA Platinum Cards, with high spend limits (up to $1M per 7 days) and 1% cashback on all spending. Our Juni VISA cards are made for online ad spending, and you can track your funds in one dashboard, having a centralised overview of all your bank accounts, networks and payment services.
You can also create IBAN accounts in EUR and GBP to avoid unwanted currency conversion fees. Exclusive perks from Juni partners also allow businesses to scale quicker and find new solutions to improve and grow their businesses.
AI: There are a number of barriers businesses need to face when it comes to payments for digital ad spend and receiving commissions earned, how does Juni help its customers overcome this?
SE-S: As mentioned above, our Juni VISA cards are built for media buying. We offer 1% cashback on all spend, bespoke daily and monthly spend limits and unlimited number of virtual cards, and physical cards are now also available. The cashback offer is very strong, our customers can use this to boost their media campaigns or invest it back in their business.
You can also create Juni cards for different currencies including EUR and GBP, with USD coming soon, and pay your suppliers with the correct currency. From an affiliates perspective, if you receive commission payments for different accounts and payment gateways like PayPal or other eWallets, you can integrate them to one dashboard and get the full picture of your commission earnings. This will also allow you to plan your marketing activities long-term and improve your business cash flow.
AI: Why is it important to track your spend when you’re starting out as a digital entrepreneur?
SE-S: You want to ensure your digital marketing campaigns are profitable and that you maintain a good ROAS (Return on Ad Spend) but also that you’re investing your budgets in the right channels.
AI: What are some of the key integrations Juni has thought of to keep digital and affiliate marketing businesses operating efficiently?
SE-S: We’re integrating with key digital marketing platforms including Google Ads and Facebook. These will fetch invoices and match them with transactions, replacing the need to do this manually. This will also help our customers to schedule payments automatically and maximise liquidity. Our product is still in beta stage so more integrations will be available in 2022. We’re also in the process of adding more currencies to the platform in order to cater better for international businesses.
We also just announced our integration with Xero. This new integration allows our customers to save time and hassle by automatically syncing their transactions from Juni directly into their Xero accounting software. All transactions, including card payments and transfers, will be synched every hour and can be set to go as far back as 12 months from your Juni transaction history. Additional integration points between our two platforms, such as invoices and receipts syncing, will roll-out in the coming months. Again, new features like the Xero integration allow our customers to spend less time on managing their finances and give them more time to focus on building and growing their businesses.
AI: Why should affiliates look at accessing Juni right now?
SE-S: Affiliates are a key target customer group for us as they do a lot of media buying and often use several payment gateways to get their commission payments. They also usually work with several affiliate networks, so having one dashboard for all their finances to monitor cash flow and payments will help give them a better understanding of their total commission earnings and help them to run their businesses more efficiently over time.
To find out more about Juni and the product offering visit their website today to find out more.
