How RIABU got its name

Getting customers to pay their bills on time is critical to the survival and success of every business. This is even more so for small and medium enterprises (SMEs).

When SMEs supply goods and services to larger companies, these customers are often able to influence the price, delivery date and terms of payment because of their relative size and power. And when these larger companies don’t stick to the agreement they have made, cash flow problems may arise for their SME suppliers. Sometimes, this even causes them to go bust.

Mark Laudi and Simon Littlewood started RIABU to tackle exactly this problem — how to help SMEs get paid on time.

Initially, they wanted to name this platform CreditMark. But to their dismay, they realised that there were lots of other companies already registered with this name.

They then tried to find another name that could express how they were addressing and redressing the lack of fairness in the relationship between powerful companies and the SMEs.

Coincidentally, Simon’s daughter Grace was sitting in our Singapore office at the time. A student of ancient Middle Eastern languages, she was well-versed in the 4,000-year-old Akkadian language, which was once the lingua franca of the Ancient Near East.

And she suggested an Akkadian word “riābu”, which is a verb meaning "to requite". Grace had first come across this word in a poem called The Poor Man of Nippur, which probably dates back to before 700 B.C. The Nippur of the title refers to a city in Babylonia, which was in a region that is presently Iraq.

In the poem, a poor man brings a goat (which is his last possession) to the mayor of Nippur, hoping that the mayor will prepare a feast with the goat. The mayor does so, but he gives the poor man only the gristle and bone of the feast before throwing him out of his house. The rest of the poem is all about how this poor man seeks revenge on the mayor. (You can read the poemhere or watch a student enactment of it here.)

Back in the present day,Mark and Simon looked at each other upon hearing the word "riābu” and its meaning. They had never heard this word before (after all, they were not ancient Babylonians). But it sounded powerful and was able to communicate the company's core ideology of helping smaller companies get paid on time. And best of all, it appeared in a historical text that was all about the notion of fairness in a relationship between the powerful and the less powerful.

And that’s how RIABU was born!