Fintechlab Company Spotlight: Amon.Tech
Welcome to Fintechlab’s Company Spotlight. In our newest series, we would like to introduce you to some of our portfolio companies via a short interview, covering topics such as where they have been since participating in our program, what milestones they’ve achieved so far, and a sneak peek at their plans for the near future.
Our very first in line is Daniele Izzo, CEO and co-founder of Amon Tech, the start-up with the mission to make crypto easy to spend for everyone. Amon is launching an intelligent crypto debit card that uses an AI system that helps users to spend virtual and traditional assets efficiently. They created a Wallet, where users can buy, sell, and exchange crypto as well as traditional fiat currencies like Euro and GBP and use these interchangably in the European market.
First of all, the topic that has had a huge impact on every company’s life these past few months. How has COVID-19 affected Amon?
If we look at the industry, in the terms of fund raising, it definitely slowed down the processes a little bit. People are more concerned about the COVID-19 issue rather than the investments in Europe.
In the terms of working, our team was already kind of used to work remotely, it is the normal method for a long time. I would say, there is no big effect for now, thanks to the fact that we are a digital company, but as we are planning to grow, then it might can bring up some difficulties, when we will have more locations, more people.
Digital Magics, an Italian accelerator, has just joined the company, what can you tell us about the cooperation with them so far?
Digital Magics is a business incubator and accelerator in Italy. They mainly invest in fintech companies. We started to work with them at February in this year. They’re good investors, help us a lot with their connections and expertise in the fintech phase. The plan is our company gets more fund in the next round, which help us to grow and develop faster.
UnionPay has recently approved the issuance of the AMON bank card, and you are now working to create the conditions for it. What does it mean for you and your users if you could also issue a bank card?
It takes a long time to get approval for cards which are connected to crypto wallets. The process took more than a year, mainly because of there is a lot of compliance and requirements new participants have to get through and that is why this is a big milestone.
In the world there are not many cards which are connected to crypto wallets. It’s a really big achievement for us.
For our users it means they will be able to buy products anywhere UnionPay is accepted, and they can also use cryptocurrencies. The card is in EUR and GBP but if you want to spend one of your cryptos, we will enable this . Merchants receive EUR and GBP but users are spending their cryptos which are exchanged real time during the transaction. . This is an important point, not only for our users but generally for the industry, because digital assets like cryptocurrencies need to have .a base in the reality, and the card gives them a way to spend them. We are making a milestone for the industry where we are starting to unify the traditional currency role with crpyto. cryptocurrency world by giving customers a chance to sprend their digital assets in the real world.
What are your long-term goals for expanding your services?
It took us a long time to be approved for the EU and we want to focus on the EU for 2020 and then the next step would be the US and international market. We already have a list of potential countries where crypto coverage is very high and these are the cards where we will enter first. We have 3 important factors to look at: coverage from our card issuer, competition and crypto coverage.
In terms of the card, we are opening an investment system. It is basically a tool for users to understand better the cyrpto space. So the investment system is a tool with two sections. The first section is a statistycal analysis, it comperes the different cryptos. The second tool is a portfolio analysis tool where users can analyze the risk, and based on the risk level, they can decide which crpytos they want to hold.
You have two companies set up — what is the reason for this?
One of our compliance requirements is to have two entities, one for dealing with tradditional assets and one for crypto. The Estonian entity we have already be used for crypto. The UK one will be only for traditional currencies.
Licensing in Estonia it came into in one regulation 1st of July. You need to hold licences to work with cryptocurrencies. We comply with this framework.
In the United Kingdom there is not yet this regulatory framework, it will come into play next year. Estonia has already put in place these regulations, UK will enforce them from next year.
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We hope you enjoyed this intro into Amon.Tech! To learn more and sign up for your very own crypto Wallet and debit card, visit their website here: https://amon.tech/
