IBS Journal January 2016


The Billon dollar man


David Putts, chairman and chief commercial officer of Polish blockchain software company Billon, talks exclusively to IBS Journal about disruption, MTV, and why it won ‘most inno- vative blockchain solution’ at the Citi Mobile Challenge EMEA Awards in Tel Aviv last year.


Billon’s ambition is to become the ‘Paypal without bank accounts’. It’s a succinct and dynamic way of


explaining what the company does. Putts believes the industry is dominat-


ed by ‘expensive and slow solutions owned by established players’ in times when tech- nology enables ‘much cheaper, leaner and more effective solution’. He says it is a very similar environment


to Paypal when it was entering the world of person-to-person (P2P) payments many years ago. Billon ‘disrupts’ banking and pay-


ments with free wallets. No bank account is required. Customers use its blockchain technology – and he says this cuts 80% of the cost to serve banks and e-money insti- tutions. And that is why Putts – ‘an entre- preneur who built three banks himself’ – wants to disrupt from within. The firm’s particular focus is on the


quickly growing segment of social media payments. At present, Putt says individuals, mostly people under 24 years old, who are on Twitch, Instagram, Twitter and Facebook are in trials with Billon to monetise content. According to Putts, the penetration of social media in that age group is over 75% globally, but bank account penetration averages about 46%, and can be as low as 7% in some markets. And when Billon white-labels its tech-


nology, it will be to partners focused on serving the ‘underbanked’ with loans,


40 Left to right: David Putts, Robert Katuźa, Maciej Łuczak, Andrej Horoszczak


online and mobile commerce solutions, and entry wallet products linked to existing ATMs and POS. In his opinion most mobile wallets are simply applications covering an ‘expensive’ bank account or some central pool of cash or value. As such, they are built on top of the existing financial system architecture, which is ‘very expensive’. He thinks banks could use its ‘rails’ to


serve both the merchant and the custom- er, without intermediaries, which will ‘sig- nificantly lower the cost or increase their margin’.


Billon is fully integrated with regulat- ed banks and its blockchain is a proprietary solution which enables a bank to generate and control digital currency and client wal- lets using national currencies. The firm is neither a third party crypto-


currency scheme, nor a money service broker.


Party doesn’t fear two The origins of Billon lie not at a formal business event, but at a party organised by the famous entertainment channel MTV. It’s a fairly long story and Putts explains


more. © IBS Intelligence 2016 www.ibsintelligence.com ‘As luck would have it, Andrzej Horosz-


czak [CEO and founder] and Maciej Luczak [chief product officer and founder] met there. ‘Those days, Maciej was head of strat-


egy for MTV Central and Eastern Europe, and was responsible for monetising view- ers online – namely making them pay for watching some TV series online, for exam- ple Jersey Shore or Pimp My Ride. ‘Andrzej was a successful CEO of a medical publishing business, and had the same job to do: make readers pay for his professional content online. They knew that ad-supported online revenue models were doomed. ‘Solving this challenge was a big prob-


lem. Andrzej was already a top program- mer and mathematician, and he saw a solu- tion in the promise of blockchain, but with- out the adoption risk of bitcoin.’


The masters and margaritas As people do, they move onto something new and Luczak left MTV to work for Mastercard, and Horoszczak reinvested his money from selling a business into solving the problem they had been ‘discussing over margaritas’.


spotlight: blockchain


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