charmlessly I have written in a previous post about the business model challenge facing all challenger banks. Today I am moving to the next big problem – customers. A successful business model describes a way of making money and be eventually profitable, and for a retail bank it also means people, customers ready to use the […]
Tag: banks
Fintech Disruption?
I have been talking about Moven for a while now on the conference circuit, to an audience that included bankers and investors in fintech. Here are my main talking points, in a more elaborate version than what I say on stage, where time slots are tighter. What is Moven? Moven is a “fintech” “neo-bank” early […]
Do Cool S*it
I’ve been reading recently an interview with one of the big banks CEO, saying, essentially, that fintech startups have no chance of success, as banks have both the resources and the know-how to change themselves, flawlessly execute their digital transformation plans, and leave all startups eating dust. Of course he is right, as it is […]
Focus on Moven
A word I constantly hear these days is “focus”. It comes in many forms, from advisors insisting the company should focus on this or that aspect of the business, from experts that have focused their career on a narrow field, to behavioral experts explaining that multitasking is “killing our brains” and we should focus on […]
Back to the (Fintech) Future
Another Career Switch I have spent three years of my life as a venture capital investor, talking with over a thousand fintech startup teams, looking for outstanding teams, excellent ideas, and good enough execution – in this order. My previous experience as entrepreneur, software executive, and internal innovation promoter has helped – many times too […]
The New Age of Algorithms
I come from an engineering background, for me computers were, for a long time, calculators, a tool to perform either complex calculations, or on large data sets. Otherwise a handheld calculator – standard in my university years – would have been more than enough. Computers were expensive, data entry was a pain, and output was […]
Q&A with SBT Venture Capital
1.What is your definition of fintech? My view is that fintech is a misnomer, but good as a shortcut name. What we really mean is the disruption of financial services through technologies like mobile, cloud, social, big data analytics, crypto, etc — and whatever will be invented in the years to come. While financial services companies […]
Getting To Know You, or Why We Invested in IdentityMind
We have recently announced our investment in IdentityMind Global, a software-as-a-service company that provides technology solutions for mitigation against financial crimes like identity fraud and money laundering. The problem of fraud and financial crime has always been with us, before computers and the internet. And as the financial system evolved, so has financial crime. In the age of e-commerce, with an […]
Why We Don’t Invest…
In our work at STB Venture Capital we see hundreds of financial technology (“fintech”) companies. We ask all companies to submit their startup profile through the Gust web site — our submission page is here. Most of the time, we have to reject a proposal because it does not fit our preferred profile – we […]
Innovation Teams and Innovation Culture
In a sense, life is simpler in a startup — you have an idea, you select a team, you get some money to start, build the product, launch, and try to make money from customers that love your product. If you fail at any of those steps, you learn and start over. The innovation culture […]