This is the Arcus Pitch Deck used to raise a $3m series-b round. That figure make any sense, so I question the reporting data.
About Arcus
Arcus is the leading payments-as-a-service platform making fintech possible for everyone. Arcus helps businesses fuel smarter, faster, integrated, and more accessible financial services. Some of the world’s most popular mobile payment apps including Santander, BBVA, Walmart, 7-Eleven, RappiPay, and more, are powered by Arcus’ infrastructure.
If you are interested, their 2019 description was: Arcus is a financial technology company based in New York and Mexico. The company builds platforms that leverage financial institutions by helping their users manage and pay all recurring services such as bills, credit cards, and subscriptions. The platform focuses on pushing programmatic payments and card updates, as well as pulling data, all from any biller.
While Arcus CEO Edrizio De La Cruz was studying at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton Business School, he was also trying to come up with startup idea that he could pursue upon graduation. Through his brainstorming sessions, De La Cruz kept returning to the same, central theme that he had faced throughout his life — trying to make ends meet financially.
Moving from the Dominican Republic to New York City’s Harlem neighborhood at age 12, De La Cruz would eventually drop out of city college to become a car mechanic so he could help support his parents. De La Cruz made it back to college at age 21 and upon graduation, landed an investment banking job at JP Morgan. But with hefty tuition fees at Wharton, De La Cruz was again faced with massive bills.
“The one constant theme in my life was making ends meet by virtue of paying the bills on time,” De La Cruz told Business Insider in a recent interview. “It was only appropriate that I would build a company around helping people make ends meet easier.”
His first startup idea out of business school was called Regalii, which helped immigrants support those back home with an easy-to-use and secure method for bill paying across the border.
In 2016, that business pivoted to become what Arcus is today — the digital payments infrastructure behind some of the most popular banking, fintech, and retail applications across the US and Latin America. Specifically, Arcus makes reoccurring payments easier.
“We see recurring payments as the wedge into financial health for the average American and Latin American consumers,” said De La Cruz, whose fintech startup of just over 60 employees has duel headquarters in New York City and Mexico City.
Earlier this year, in Mexico, Santander Bank integrated Arcus’ payment technology into its mobile app. Now users can toggle auto-pay options “on” or “off” for reoccurring bills, like electricity bills or cell phone bills, all from one, central place within the Santander banking app. The previous process for setting up auto-pay, De La Cruz said, was incredibly arduous.
“The difference is between having a remote control and going to change the channel manually,” the chief exec said. “We’re the remote control for your financial life.”
Today, Barclays, Walmart, Marqeta, Santander, Scotiabank, and more are using Arcus to make recurring payments easier for their customers. De La Cruz said his company makes money off licensing its APIs these partners, as well as usage fees — the more data pushed through its “pipes” the more partners are charged.
To date, Arcus says it has raised nearly $13 million from investors like Day One Ventures, Winklevoss Capital, and Andreessen Horowitz. Pitchbook, a database that tracks venture capital funding, pegs the company’s total funding at $19 million. Arcus says this is a mistake, and that including convertible notes and traditional equity funding, the total amount it has raised is roughly $13 million.
De La Cruz says that Arcus has signed some of the biggest banks in the US and Mexico, and so over the next year, the company will be focused on successful launches with those partners. The chief exec also said Arcus plans to raise “a big round” of capital to “more aggressively” help support those larger partners.
As for fundraising advice, De La Cruz says telling a compelling story about your business is probably the most important thing an entrepreneur can do to sway would-be VCs.
“People undermine how important storytelling is — being able to very specifically describe what you’re building, who you’re building it for, and why it’s valuable,” De La Cruz said. “I think a lot of times entrepreneurs are so busy in the weeds of operating their business that they forget that storytelling is part of the process.”
Source: BI and CrunchBase
Raises
I’m confused about their funding history.
When I first posted this blog it was:
Now it is this on CrunchBase.
| Announced Date | Transaction Name | Number of Investors | Money Raised | Lead Investors |
| Nov 2, 2020 | Series A – Arcus | 2 | — | — |
| Apr 1, 2020 | Series A – Arcus | 4 | $9.8M | IGNIA |
| Dec 1, 2018 | Series A – Arcus | 7 | $7.9M | IGNIA |
| Jan 1, 2014 | Pre Seed Round – Arcus | 12 | $2M | — |
Pitch deck review summary
Arcus have the foundation for a solid deck, but the slide structure is poor which really holds them back. A lot of slides have the opportunity to be improved through examples.
There is a solid attempt at a narrative, which is better than most startups for sure. They would have hugely benefitted by having a sub-header that would explain the body of content which I find difficult to understand quickly. I don’t agonize analyzing slides when I review them. I look at them like an investor, which is rapid. I haven’t read most of the text in their deck. Take note of that when you consider writing paragraphs in your deck!
Structured summary review
Words
Slides with illustrations don’t have enough text. Slides without images have too much text, and many of those slides should have been illustrations.
Slide length
It’s 15 slides, but their execution section is clearly missing, so I’m inclined to believe this is only half of their deck.
Headers
Arcus has pretty solid headers compared to most pitch decks. They aren’t all perfect, but try only reading the headers as you flick through the slides and you will see what I mean. Have a go now and you’ll learn something useful.
Appearance
The logo should be on the bottom left. Logos are super low value add. The header is Manhatten real estate and no distractions should be there.
There is no need to write private and confidential on a slide. If some dick head wants to share, this is not going to stop them and you are not going to sue them. It has never happened.
Generally the deck is well designed, but it’s what a designer thinks is pretty rather than being designed to help investors comprehend.
Narrative
It took me a minute to notice but Arcus actually attempted to do their deck the way I do. It was just executed terribly. It’s like the first draft of writing a narrative. You go yeah, this story sort of makes sense to explain to investors. But then you need to work on it till it all comes together on the slides. They have a total mismatch between the narrative and how they construct the slides to support the narrative in terms of comprehension.
Structure
Generally the slides are structured well. The big no no is putting one slide header on the vertical so they can cram far too much information onto a slide.
Slides
They are missing the execution section of the deck, so there’s nothing about traction, financials, business model, ask etc.
Arcus Pitch Deck
The slide is best practice until they sneak in what I call the one-liner slide. I’m not actually totally against how they did the slide actually.
But understand what a startup does is so important for an investor triaging a deck to get the basics that I believe it should be a succinct slide.
I hate superlatives like “bank of the future”. Let me decide that.
What’s doing on with the weird capitalization? It’s not normal to start with lower case.
The deck was handed over to a designer. I can tell because the images are large and text is small.
I like headers on one line. I use a main header and a subheader, but the difference is clear. They haven’t decided what is what here.
Now when you have three images like this you have a header and a short description. They do this, but the text should be 30% larger so it is easier to read. I don’t care about the impact on the images. The text is what is important.
Generally, the slide structure so far is better than most startups.
The deck is pretty hard to follow. I have this concept of the flick test, which is critical to pitch decks. You need to be able to flick slide to slide and instantly get 60% comprehension.
The structure of the slide is off. They have a takeaway stuffed at the bottom but it’s hard to notice. There are huge gaps in the body of content which is the kind of thing a designer would prioritize over the text.
This slide has a tonne of potential, it’s just a little off. It takes too long to grok.
Again, notice. Huge ass images and there is a takeaway buried at the bottom.
The images should be 30% smaller and the notice at the bottom should be at the top.
Ok, I know hedge funds and some consultant firms have takeaways a the bottom but they are super obvious. I will add a collection of their decks so you understand.
What do you see when you look at the slide? Three numbers which you don’t understand. That’s not a takeaway.
Investors care about the so what. Do you think that they are doing that here? To understand the numbers you need to pull out your magnifying glass.
There is the potential for a good slide here, but it’s all designed wrong.
Wtf is this title. “ecom of today”. Read that and what do you know. Nada. Zilch.
You have to read the entire slide to start to try and comprehend the point.
This is why when I make decks there are two headers. The main header tells the story. The sub header explains the slide. This makes parsing decks so much faster. You’re doing the thinking for investors.
This slide is problematic because it is circular. This would normally imply that there is a process 1, 2, 3. But it isn’t- it is just a list of three points.
Now there is a circular element on this slide. The slide takes a bit too much time to understand what the point is.
Three points is always good though. Read about the rule of three.
Pay attention to grammar. In the third box, they are at the uncapitalized case, but they do it normally in the other two boxes.
It’s pretty boring to look at. Even an icon would make it a little more visually appealing. But why not have examples of companeies that do it this way, or use stats to prove points? I feel this could have been an illustration.
And then this slide has another illustration that shows how it is done differently.
Here we go. They are using illustrations now. A lot better.
What is xChange?
What is xPay? And there doesn’t seem to be anything different on this slide? Why not just write xPay and xChange push instructions and payments?
The arrows are super little. It’s hard to see which way they are pointed.
Never put your header on a vertical. It is super annoying to turn your head sidewards.
There is far too much going on with the slide. If they really need to show 7 points, split them up into two slides. Don’t think that slide count matters nearly as much as how easy it is to read the deck.
Don’t do this slide. It’s a waste of space. Summarise the investment opportunity.
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