Enabling Ciele Athletics To Run Faster 🏃‍♀️

Ciele Athletics™ is a new kind of athletic apparel company. The company’s mission is to move people to movement, to connection and to community through considered equipment and exceptional experiences. Their products are focused on both performance and protection to help everybody run. We spoke with Karine Corbeil, Ciele’s Director of Finance who first discovered Loop as a solution for Ciele.

How long have you been using Loop and what made you choose them?

We started using Loop in March 2022. As our business continued to grow, our spending in US dollars started to grow and our bank cards were charging us high FX fees on those transactions. Loop’s product appealed to us because they offered a card that allowed us to spend in either Canadian or US dollars without FX fees when we spent on either currencies.

Loop was also able to give our business a credit limit that reflects what we actually need to spend every month. With the banks, we had issues with the amount of money we could put on a card and had to ask for higher limits - Loop immediately understood the size of our company and gave us a credit limit that was reflective of our needs. Plus having 55 days to pay the card balance, versus only 30 or so day that we had with our old bank credit cards is a great added bonus for us.

What particular features of Loop are the most useful to your team and why? 

Initially, we signed up because we wanted to save on FX, which we immediately saw the benefits of - but as we started using Loop, we realized all of the other ways that Loop’s product is able to save us time. 

We’ve now been able to do things like issue and assign individual cards to employees. Before that, we had to share card numbers manually which made communication more challenging and also created risk for us because we had several team members using the same card numbers.

More recently, Loop has also created new features that our finance team absolutely loves, like automatically categorizing our transactions and syncing them to QuickBooks. We also got included on the test of Loop’s feature that lets you attach receipts via text message which we are super excited about.

Because of how easy Loop has been to use, we now plan to start using the product to manage more aspects of our business, including for our US accounts and our payments to vendors. Having all of this stuff in one place make our lives (as the finance team) so much easier - especially for things like month end accounting.

What would you say to other companies that are considering working with Loop?

Loop has been a fantastic partner to work with. I actually just referred a friend to Loop last week because they were also having issues with managing multiple currencies. 

The level of support that we get from Loop is unmatched and a breath of fresh air coming from working with the big banks. Working with the Loop team is amazing - they are extremely responsive to our needs and always fast to address any questions or issues.

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