Paul Aitken AKA “The Pawn King” is the founder of Borro.com, a UK-US online pawnbroker that offers short-term loans secured against collateral and personal assets such as jewellery, watches, gold, art, boat, cars, fine wine and other valuables. Prior to Borro, Paul founded and was the MD of Movota, a provider of mobile solutions to leading media companies, which he sold to Bertelsmann in 2005.
In addition to this, Paul has extensive senior operations, supply chain, marketing, & strategy experience in the Retail and IT sectors from his time working with DSG International and RM plc. Paul also holds an MBA from IMD, Lausanne, Switzerland. –
Thankfully we had a chance to interview the man behind Borro. Here are our questions:
1. Tell us about your background
Post university I worked for a company called RM traveling around the far east buying components for manufactured hardware. I worked in marketing for a while and then went to IMD in Switzerland to complete my MBA following that I worked at Dixons for a year and then left to start my first business Movota.
2. You have years of experience working in startups. How did that help you to grow Borro?
Well I’ve been doing my own businesses for around 10 years, I founded Movota in 2004 which created mobile apps for interacting with TV and Radio which I sold in 2005. We had deals with Fremantle, & RTL so I continued to work with the business for a year before taking a year off to take some time out, travel and plan my next business.
3. What gave you the idea for Borro?
The idea of Borro came to me post northern rock and credit crunch when I was exploring moving into the venture capital space, it felt very clear the UK had been on a spending spree for some time and I knew there was an opportunity to take the principles of the oldest form of lending and create a new category of lending. After reading a few articles on the art and luxury goods market I did some research on the auction house average throughput of art etc and realized there were a lot of high net worth individuals selling luxury goods which meant they needed liquidity.
4. Do you think services like Borro will become more common or will you remain a specialty high-end service?
I created the business to fill the gap in financial offerings for the mass-affluent client-for high net worth individuals that need liquidity quickly. Why would they choose us over anything else? Well verses other forms of credit its easy, discreet and doesn’t require any assessment of credit or personal circumstances. Our average loan value is $13K meaning we simply don’t appeal to mass market but there are other people out there offering a similar service with an average loan value of $250, we have no plans to move into this space.
5. What is the average net worth of your clients?
Typical demographic of a Borro client is that they are male, they own a property way above average house prices & are often an entrepreneur and city based. We don’t take any details on our clients personal finances-we don’t need to as the asset gives us all the security we need.
6. Can you give us some revenue specifics? Top line revenue, margins, growth you expect over the next five years?
Last year we had revenues of $17.5M from over $60M of lending. We are growing at 90 percent a year and are on track for close to $34M revenues this year from around $100M of lending.
7. Got any celebrity clients? Can you tell us who?
Discretion is key with our clients, there are many clients we will never even meet due to the high caliber of the individuals we deal with so we would never release names of our clients or give any details on assets that could lead to their identification. However, we have seen Olympic medals, Super Bowl rings, academy awards and more come through Borro.
8. What is the most expensive thing you’ve ever borrowed?
We loaned $2M against a selection of artwork.
9. If you could loan one item, what would it be?
I would use my OMEGA watch as collateral. It would probably be the easiest one of my assets to part with.
10. Where do you see yourself in 5 years?
I would expect to have grown Borro into a business with in excess of $350M of revenue and be sitting on a beach planning my next business.
