IBS Journal September 2016
41
Furthermore, tools like our Activity Feed give SMEs a holistic view of everything that’s going on in their account. Lastly, our Smart Transactions bring more security by offering them a smart escrow account where they can decide the terms and conditions with another party over the Penta platform. By morphing data-driven services with an intuitive and actionable UI in addition to a modern bank account, we’re letting businesses get more done in a fraction of the time that it would normally take.
IBS Journal: You have been up and running since earlier this year. What have been the highlights thus far?
LI: In our previous businesses, we first ran after raising money and then after the users. We’ve learned from our mistakes by taking the opposite approach where we’re first aiming to onboard businesses and understand their needs. As we’re doing this, we’re learning and forming an experience that’s being built with businesses for businesses.
We officially launched our website at the end of May and we’ve been very fortunate to have had some good results. At the moment we have over a hundred businesses signed up, over 700 Twitter followers and interest from investors as well as incubators and accelerators. As mentioned, we’re currently doing lots of research into the features and UI that businesses want to use, giving us a headstart over others. This will hopefully allow us to reach our goal of launching by spring 2017.
IBS Journal: What are the biggest challenges you have faced?
LI: Some of the challenges that we’ve faced have revolved around regulation, software and finding the right partners to help us accelerate. Regulation has been tough as we have to understand what we’re allowed to do and how we can do it. We’re lucky to have a great team of advisors that have experienced this over the past few years. They’ve been leading us in the right direction on that front.
In our quest to minimise friction, we are looking for ways to make opening an account a fast and smooth online process. The KYC regulation for onboarding companies is more complex compared to individuals, which can be relatively trivial.
However, many of the challenges have already been solved by incumbents. From KYC to finding a white-label banking partner or applying for a banking licence. We don’t need to reinvent
the wheel so we’re looking around and seeing how others are doing it and learning from them.
IBS Journal: What sort of businesses are you targeting?
LI: We’re targeting cashless businesses that make below €10 million in revenue per year. In Germany, about 90% of businesses are cashless, not including catering, hospitality and fragments of other industries. Our initial target businesses will be online orientated, like tech companies. From there, as we’re gathering data and receiving feedback, we’ll aim to expand to various data- driven services that tailor the banking experience for specific industries, like consulting, law, manufacturing, logistics as well as cashless Mom and Pop shops.
IBS Journal: What can you tell us about the technology underpinning the bank?
LI: We’re currently in talks with several white-label banks as well as core banking software providers. We plan to use existing infrastructure to build a great, fast and flexible experience for our members. A lot of the functions, however, will have to be custom built, like Smart Transactions or Penta’s Activity feed.
Our potential partner banks and service providers offer a REST API that we can communicate with to leverage and build a reliable user experience on. By the time we launch in spring 2017, we’ll have mobile and web versions available for our members. We’re also very picky in choosing our technologies and partner services as we have to be certain that the security and reliability is at the highest level.
IBS Journal: There are quite a few digital banks out there, looking to disrupt the banking establishment. How do you see your vision playing out against those guys?
LI: Online banking is quickly becoming commoditised. Penta is trying to create value by building frictionless processes, a great user experience, integration of third party software as well as our own innovations like Smart Transactions.
We want to empower businesses to make more data-driven decisions when growing their business. Like knowing when it’s best to take out a loan, how to balance liquidity in order to have access to more cash. Penta’s Activity Feed allows business owners to take actions on important matters, so that they can do their banking more efficiently and in a fraction of the time that it would normally take.
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