Florence Finance and Caple provide the first €1.0M in loans to the Dutch healthcare SME market
Florence Finance & Caple fund the first €1.0M in real-world loans:
We are pleased to announce that we have provided two loans in the form of 12-month working capital facilities to two distinct SME players in the Dutch healthcare market with clearly defined business strategies. The first €500k was granted to Co-Med, a fast-growing consolidator in the Dutch medical practitioner sector. The second €500k went to Sandstep, a private hospital group that specializes in relatively straightforward medical operations and provides operating theatres as a service to large hospitals.
The healthcare market in the Netherlands is a large, highly regulated market with good underlying growth fundamentals. Healthcare insurance is compulsory in the Netherlands and is offered by commercial insurance companies. These companies procure healthcare services for their patients from selected hospitals and practitioners, providing a very stable market with good underlying growth prospects.
Co-Med participates in GP/MD practices across the country to offer centralized systems and back-office support so that local doctors can concentrate on their patients. Co-meds participation facilitates generational transition in practices and thereby helps to address the growing shortage of qualified GPs & MDs willing to enter the sector. There is plenty of room for further expansion, Co-Med expects to reach 25 practices by the end of this year and grow to 150 practices over the next couple of years.
Sandstep offers small-scale private medical operations in disciplines with strong growth due to an aging population and increased demand; hip and knee operations, medical plastic surgery, and treatment of hand & wrist ailments. More than 85% of all these operations are covered by Dutch health insurers which guarantees the turnover. Furthermore, fully staffed operating rooms are rented out to hospitals as a service. Hospitals perform complex operations in their own operating rooms and the less complex operations are outsourced.
Both companies are in an attractive and stable sector and generate solid relatively secure cash flows from their respective operations. Gross interest levels have been set at attractive levels for 12 months of financing taking into consideration good Moody’s ratings. We are pleased to note that the first interest payments have been made in fiat currency and distributed back to Florence Finance platform in crypto.
These two loans represent a breakthrough in SME financing in the Netherlands. Utilizing stablecoin liquidity to fund the mainstream SME fiat economy with our funding partner Caple is a first of its kind in the Netherlands. Caple sees plenty of good quality demand in the Dutch SME segment and notes that yields are gradually rising due to general market conditions. This presents a stable and attractive risk/reward opportunity for the crypto space that is uncorrelated to underlying crypto volatility.
