Mr. Maurice McMonagle:

We are slightly unusual in so far as we are a business to business rather than a business to consumer type business. Our business is supplying medical technology to veterinary surgeons for equine and small animal use. We take a great deal of human surgical technology and move it across to the animal side. It is a type of technical sell. It is a business to business type operation.

I believe we were the third loan with LinkedFinance. I met Mr. Conor McAleese, who is not with us today, at an enterprise show in the RDS. As it happened, we had known each other many years previously but we got chatting. At the time we were in the process of developing our facility in Sandyford and ploughing money back into the business. In the best traditions of enthusiastic entrepreneurs we had done all the work. We decided that as we had put all our work and capital into this investment we had better put a few bob back into liquidity. We borrowed the money. We had talked to our own bank, which shall remain nameless, about it. We had a good deal of love-bombing, so to speak, but no results. We put in an application. It was sent back to these anonymous underwriters, the people who live in the IFSC who do not have names or faces in the way bank personnel used to have names and faces. In the meantime, I met Mr. McAleese. We were vetted as thoroughly as the bank vetted us but it was within a number of days. The loan went up on the site and within two weeks we had the €18,000 we required at a rate better than the bank would have given us. I did not have to give my first-born son as security although the way he is behaving at the moment, perhaps I should have. We got the money within a couple of days. We continued on with our business.

One of the critical aspects, and I come from a corporate background originally so I am used to being the guy who has all the resources around me, of setting up one's own small business is that it makes one realise there is the corporate world and there is a small and medium enterprise, SME, world. We are an SME dealing with an SME. One can get the people on the phone when one wants to talk to them. If one has a problem, they will talk one through it. It is not a question of going through layers of people who have jobs for the sake of jobs. They are dealing with people who are as enthusiastic about their business succeeding as one is about one's own business.

As it happens, we have just finalised our second loan on the site - I think ours is the second or third business to arrange a second loan - to develop the business. We could have obtained the money from the banks, but why would we pay the banks interest when we can pay it to our friends and family who loaned to the business and give something back to the community and the people who visit vets and buy my equipment? Call me a socialist, but this is keeping money in the economy. SMEs keep and spend their profits in the economy and this is what will drag the economy out of the mess it is in. As far as I am concerned, all the Googles in the world will not do this, even if saying this is popular or not. That is our experience.