Fintechlab Company Spotlight: FintechX
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.
Before our national holiday and the long weekend we brought to you another interesting point of view by György Mudri, co-founder & CEO of FintechX, who shared his thoughts about open banking, the merging of the three fintech solutions and how he imagine the future of financial mobile apps.
Where did the idea of FintechX come from?
We did not started with FintechX, we started with Wyze. Later on Aggreg8 and FintechBlocks. FintechX was founded only in 2019 via the merger of Wyze, Aggreg8 and FintechBlocks.
The idea of Wyze came up during my previous works. I was always forced to track my expenses in Excel, so we start thinking with our later co-founder, because our vision was to create an automated cost tracking solution that is free for our end users, can sync the users’ bank account history, it can automatically categorize these datas and from these information you can get a picture of how much is your income and how much you spent — a European mint.com. We would have liked to make money from sales lead, offering different financial and non-financial products based on the endusers’ financial data. But we’ve realized that our vision is a less viable option due to high user acquisition costs, so finally we had moved on to another B2B business model, we sell white label financial applications as Wyzeand provide a financial data aggregator service as Aggreg8. Later on we founded FintechBlocks which is an API based innovation platform that also fulfils PSD2 compliance.
Can you tell us about the company and what are you focusing on?
We’ve started to deal with fintech in 2015, under the name of Wyze, We have founded Aggreg8 and FintechBlocks in 2017. MKB Fintechlab was an investor in FintechBlocks in 2017.
In late 2019, with the aim of a next round of investment we merged the three companies into one, called FintechX, which now owns 100% of the other three companies.
With every project in FintechX we are focusing on open banking, all aspects of it, from how PSD2 transforms the market to what transformation is needed within a bank over a 3–5 year period. Wyze deals with application development, i.e. what needs may arise on the end user’s side. Aggreg8 is the first account information service provider (AISP) supervised by the Central Bank of Hungary. It operates according to the strongest security requirements in line with the prevailing regulation set by the central bank (MNB). FintechBlocks’ value proposition is faster digital product development capability and PSD2 compliance with our existing product call FintechBlocks Open API Platform.
With the merger of FintechX our aim was not only to raise our next round of investment but to realize a much bigger integrated vision that is a mobile app, a fully tailor-made financial app that can be composed modularly for the customers’ individual needs. I believe the questions around banking are changing. Soon you will ask your customers which mobile app they use to manage their finances, rather than at which bank they has their account. Where the user has its account and where manages it, will be separated.
The key is the channel and in this case, the channel is the mobile application. Mobile apps will compete with each other in the market, and the competition is about whose application can automatically answer the most problems affecting as many financial areas as possible and focus will be shifted to problem solving. The financial app of the future will have some preinstalled widgets and an appstore. From the appstore every user will have the opportunity to fully individualize their own app to their own financial needs.
FintechX solution would have some preinstalled and some other prebuilt apps in its appstore (like PFM, invoicing, pocket money, utility bill payment, etc), but the vision is that fintechX partner banks will easily be able to develop / improve their own app stores with further app solutions, which will help their own end users to collect what they need.
And now we come to the topic that has had a huge impact on every company’s life these past few months. How has COVID-19 affected FF.Next?
In the terms of our office life, although we worked mostly in the office before COVID-19, our development processes made it possible for us to easily switch to home office. These days we have a hybrid solution. I believe that a personal interaction can alleviate many situations, unlike if there is only online collaboration. I’m not saying we haven’t perceived a change in team dynamics, and that’s why we intend to have a partial rearrangement so we can pay much more attention to the workflow, but staying in the office isn’t entirely mandatory. Although we can even develop faster under covid, we need to find the golden mean and keep the balance.
In the terms of the market segment, it felt less of an impact, because we worked on and carried on mostly existing projects. Of course, we had jobs that we had to postpone like other companies.
What are your short-term goals?
Our short-term goal is a next round investment, to put more energy in the implementation of the FintechX vision, but this process is in a very early phase. We are on a straight line with the preparation of the materials, after that we can start searching for possible investors, assess the possibilities of the international and domestic market, and then we consider which source moves us forward.
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We hope you enjoyed this intro into FintechX! To learn more and check their solutions visit their website here: https://fintechx.digital/
