Monet: The £200K Mistake That Taught Jacob Casson How to Build a Fintech Nobody Else Could

Jacob Casson had just sent two emails to his shareholders in the same summer.

The first said the funding round was sorted. Have a great summer. The second came weeks later. The round had collapsed. A hostile party was moving on the business. But there was a way out — if everyone moved together.

It was July or August 2023. The Ukraine war had worn people down. Shareholders were fatigued. Many had 25 other investments to protect. Jacob needed them to act.

"I just kind of realized how to... everyone needs a common enemy," he said. "You're not just losing your investment, but these people are trying to take from you too."

It worked. The recapitalization held. Jacob kept control. And Monet — his financial back office and lending platform for media and entertainment businesses — survived what could have ended it.

In a recent episode of BUILDERS, Jacob shared the full journey: the early mistakes, the hostile takeover attempt, and the strategic logic that's finally making the model work after years of near-misses.

The £200K Lesson in Sequencing

Jacob's first serious mistake was funding the business himself before proving investors would follow.

He had a cash-generating business, a background in marketing and growth, and a conviction that signing up customers before raising money would make the round easy. Using Facebook groups, he recruited roughly 7,500 content creators to the platform before the product was built. The demand signal was real.

"I thought holy shit, there's a real business here," he said.

So he spent around £200,000 of his own money on development, consultants, legal, and financial services infrastructure. Then he tried to raise.

"Not really," he said, when asked whether the personal investment moved investors. "I really thought it would. I really thought it would."

The lesson wasn't that founder commitment doesn't matter to investors. It's that spending your own capital before closing external money removes your negotiating runway and your financial cushion at the same time. When the product hit structural issues — a European banking partner that didn't fit the GBP use case — Jacob had already burned what he needed to fix it.

Why Monet Stopped Targeting Creators

The original thesis was creator-facing banking with a credit product weighted against the quality of the creators' clients — major brands, not the creators themselves. The underwriting logic was sound. The go-to-market wasn't.

When Monet onboarded its first serious customer in the current version of the business — a company doing just under £50 million in annual revenue — Jacob didn't have the debt facility in place to actually fund them yet.

"I had taken onboarding fees and we were in the middle of closing a debt facility," he said. "It was sort of just ridiculous. It was like herding cats."

That experience forced a rethink on customer sequencing. Rather than chasing large customers he couldn't yet serve or individual creators at too thin a margin, Jacob moved to mid-sized agencies — the operators sitting between major brands and the freelancers those brands don't want to manage directly.

The structural insight: Nike and Samsung don't want payment relationships with thousands of individual creators. "They pay an agency and the agency can figure it out," Jacob said. Whoever owns the agency's financial infrastructure sits inside every downstream transaction. That's the leverage point — and it's one the creator-facing model never reached.

Underwriting What Traditional Lenders Get Wrong

Influencer agencies look like large businesses on paper. An agency billing £1 million a month to a major brand appears to turn over £12 million a year.

Strip out the £800,000 owed to the creators underneath and the agency is running on £200,000 of real revenue — with lumpy, project-based cash flows and no hard assets to secure against. Traditional lenders see the gross number, hit the lumpiness, and walk away.

"A traditional lender looks at that and goes ooh," Jacob said. "And then they look at the lumpiness of it and it's project based and it's kind of tricky to really get an understanding of because they don't really have any assets."

Monet's underwriting inverts the problem. Rather than assessing the agency's own financials, it prices risk against the quality of the obligors — the brands paying the invoices. Samsung's credit quality is a more reliable signal than the agency's balance sheet.

This logic also drove the product shift away from invoice-level factoring. When Jacob went to banks in December to understand what debt allocators actually want, the answer was consistent: they don't want granular decisions on individual invoices. "They want to give you a bunch of money and they want to trust that you're going to look after it for a two or three year term and not really think about it much," he said. Matching the product structure to what the capital provider actually wants — not just what the borrower needs — unlocked the facility conversations.

Managing Information When You're Outgunned

Jacob is direct about how he operates when Monet is the smaller party in a high-stakes situation.

"If I'm dealing with parties who are much bigger than me, I can't puff out my chest and pretend I'm even bigger than them because I'm not," he said. "The only really thing you can do is allow people to believe that they're in control of the situation whilst you work on your plan and buy yourself time."

The mechanism here is deliberate information asymmetry. In the 2023 recapitalization, Jacob didn't disclose his hand to shareholders immediately. He used the time that the hostile party's confidence bought him to identify which shareholders had both the resources and the motivation to act, then framed the threat in a way that aligned their interests with his. The goal wasn't to appear powerful — it was to keep the decision timeline in his control long enough to line up the right people.

What Patience Costs in Relationship-Led Markets

Monet is not going to the US yet. Jacob is deliberate about this.

Entertainment Partners — the incumbent in film and TV financial tooling — generates an estimated $400 to $700 million a year in that market. Jacob has inbound from US agencies. He's choosing not to pursue it.

The reasoning is specific: entertainment runs on relationships, not product. Monet's network is in the UK. Entering the US without established relationships means getting outcompeted by incumbents before trust can be built. "If I go there now I get butchered," he said. "So I have to bide my time."

This isn't a resourcing constraint dressed up as strategy. It's a recognition that in industries where deals flow through personal networks, distribution isn't a sales problem — it's a time problem. Capital can't compress the years required to build the relationships that move deals in media. Going early just burns the capital needed to go properly.