There has been so much talk in recent weeks about B2C v B2B. The general thrust of the writing is twofold.

First, that there has been too much attention and investment going into the consumer internet market and that it’s become over-heated as a result. This is likely to lead to a market ‘correction’ as the hype dies down, leaving many of the start-ups fighting for survival as they struggle to raise another round of funding.

Second, that the flip side of this is that the B2B market has been under-served, is generally performing better and is therefore where you should be putting your money.

Notion has just completed an investment in Shutl – you can read the full press release here. I wanted to write about why we made this investment and why we think the business has a very bright future.

In a nutshell, Shutl enables ecommerce companies to offer immediate or one-hour window deliveries to their customers through a network of local point-to-point couriers. Ecommerce has historically utilised the hub-and-spoke delivery model making it virtually impossible to offer such an immediate or precise service. The ecommerce market has been innovating non-stop for more than fifteen years now and yet there has really been little meaningful innovation in delivery. The result has been widespread consumer dissatisfaction which loses retailers sales.

Shutl’s service represents real innovation, Their technology integrates with local courier companies and identifies available capacity to provide ecommerce customers in real time with a same day delivery time and cost. The service has delivered products in as little as 15 minutes! Customers can actually see their products winging their way towards them using GPS and they can then rate the service such that the best couriers will be more likely to be selected the next time. Like all the best propositions it’s really that simple but it has taken a great deal of R&D to deliver the kind of seamless experience that brand’s would want for their customers.

The global ecommerce market is around $500bn today and is expected to reach $1tr by 2016. This is clearly a massive market and it seems very likely that a good percentage of these customers would select a more immediate, flexible and precise delivery service if given the choice.

Tom Allason, Shutl’s founder and CEO, is probably the reason I was drawn to the opportunity in the first place. Tom has already had an exit in the courier market and knows the industry inside out. But more importantly, Tom has a really clear and compelling vision for Shutl and you just know he is not going to stop until he gets there. Tom is also building a really strong team around him and you can tell just by looking the piles of CV’s on his desk the importance he places on finding great people.

We are thrilled to be making a £2m investment in The Currency Cloud. Notion wants to invest in Europe’s best and most high potential start-ups in the B2B Cloud Computing space and we think this investment is a great example of this.

The Currency Cloud provides a web-based currency conversion and international payments service for businesses. There are more than $200bn cross-border payments made everyday and it’s a market that is dominated by the banks. The problem is that the banks make the process pretty complicated and charge around 4% in fees to all but their largest customers. In researching this market, we have rarely seen so much pain and frustration from customers and such a strong desire for an alternative.

This is where The Currency Cloud comes in - their service is easy to use, has a transparent fee of around 0.5% and you can manage and track the process from end to end. The company is already doing multiple millions in transactions everyday and growing very quickly. Additionally, the team has great experience of both the FX market and also of taking start-ups through to big exits. So we are very excited about this investment – they are a company that belongs in London as the centre of the FX world and, at the same time, can expand on a global scale.

More broadly, The Currency Cloud are part of a new generation of ‘Finance 2.0’ companies that are taking specific markets where banks have traditionally dominated and using the internet to innovate and offer a real alternative. The internet enables the democratization of services that were previously only available to the big guys and leaves large companies with nowhere to hide anymore. Traditional banks will be forced to provide better and more transparent services or risk losing their dominance across numerous markets. All this has to be good for the consumer, the smaller business and The Currency Cloud.