FinovateEurope in London was a veritable bonfire of fireside chats! And now, courtesy of Finovate TV, you can check out many of the conversations we had with leading fintech entrepreneurs and technologists.
Here’s our Fireside Chat conversation with Bianca Zwart, Chief of Staff to the CEO of Dutch neobank bunq. We talked about the innovative fintech’s origins in the wake of the financial crisis, the challenge and opportunity of “borderlessness” in Europe, and bunq’s goal of being the “global neobank for digital nomads and international people and businesses.”
On the origins of bunq
Zwart: We were founded just after the financial crisis of 2008. Our founder and CEO Ali Niknam looked around and he saw a lot of people hurt by what was happening. A lot of his friends couldn’t get a mortgage. They were forced to sell their houses – or they couldn’t get a loan as an entrepreneur. He looked around and he saw that people were just pointing fingers, blaming each other and nobody was actually fixing the problem.
On the uniqueness of bunq’s business model
Zwart: We were completely self-funded by our founder for nearly a decade, which gave us the independence to focus on what we wanted to focus on: building a product that people love to use, to bring a service model back to the banking industry. We were the first to introduce a subscription-based model because we were convinced that if you build a product that people love to use, they are willing to pay a fair price for it. By doing so, your commercial reality is directly linked to user happiness.
On the challenge of Europe’s borderless Millennial and Gen Z consumers
Zwart: We all look at Europe as a continent, but it’s just a mixture of so many different countries. Banking is super personal, super cultural. Consider the difference, for example, between the Netherlands and Germany in terms of how we look at money, how we deal with money payment infrastructure. It’s a completely different ballgame and we want our users to have access to financial services wherever they go without having to worry about that.