Scrap Connection uses crowd-funding to help counter fraud

The Netherlands – Tech start-up Scrap Connection is fighting to minimise risks encountered by buyers, sellers and brokers of scrap materials – a mission that is backed by a ‘highly successful’ crowd-funding campaign that has raised over US$ 340 000 to date.

‘Scrap companies lose over US$ 200 million a year because of fraud, contract cancellations and material quality issues,’ says Chris Yerbey, founder and ceo of Scrap Connection. ‘These losses are unnecessary, but there’s currently no way to avoid them entirely.’

The entrepreneur adds that 80% of the scrap industry professionals he has encountered say it is difficult to find trustworthy trading partners. Yerbey hopes to counter these problems by developing a new ‘trade reputation’ service designed to ‘massively reduce risk of losses, while at the same time improving accountability in the market’.

He explains: ‘We will take the guesswork out of scrap transactions and replace it with transparency and hard data.’ A ‘reputation report’ will provide a trader with critical information on whether a potential business partner consistently meets the terms of contracts, whether it pays on time, whether it ships on time and whether it reports its material quality accurately, as well as its import/export history.

Scrap Connection is hosting its crowd-funding campaign on Wefunder. The company argues that crowd-funding is no longer just for consumer products and that equity-based crowd-funding has recently become an ‘exciting funding method’, with legislative changes in a number of countries opening up investment to everybody, not just professional investors.

Scrap Connection is a web-based platform for buyers, sellers and brokers of scrap materials to: manage trade; form and maintain business relationships; and access in-depth market data.

The company is headquartered in Amsterdam, with sales offices in India and Pakistan.

More information about the crowdfunding campaign can be found @ www.wefunder.com/scrapconnectioninc