London-based FintechOS is a technology provider for banks, insurers, and other financial services companies. It has raised $10M (approx €8.5M) as part of its $60M (approx €51M) Series B round of funding. The capital was invested by IFC, a member of the World Bank Group.
The Series B round was led by Draper Esprit, and in addition to the IFC, existing investors Earlybird Digital East, Gapminder Ventures, LAUNCHub Ventures, and OTB Ventures also participated in the round.
According to Henrik Bläute, Investment Officer at IFC, “Digital financial services are critical to boosting financial inclusion and driving inclusive growth. While the pandemic has increased the use of these services, it has also highlighted that many financial institutions are struggling to overcome the digital transformation challenges necessary to include the financially excluded. IFC chose to invest in FintechOS to accelerate digitalisation, so that financial institutions will be able to serve more unbanked and underbanked individuals and communities.”
“Building the future of financial technology”
FintechOS empowers traditional banks and insurance companies to adapt to rapidly changing customer expectations and match the speed and flexibility of nimble technology-driven competitors.
The company was founded by Romanian entrepreneurs Sergiu Negut and Teodor Blidarus in 2017. It offers both multi-cloud SaaS deployments, helping client’s transition to the cloud, and on-premises deployments, working alongside the existing technology infrastructure.
Using the company’s technology, banks and insurers can launch data-driven, hyper personalised digital products and services with unprecedented speed – weeks rather than months or years.
Currently, institutions that run on FintechOS include Erste Bank, Societe Generale, Scotia bank, Hyperion Insurance Group, and Vienna Insurance Group, among others. The company’s reach spans 20 markets and four continents with offices in London, Amsterdam, Bucharest, Copenhagen, and Vienna.
How FintechOS helps institutions boost financial inclusion
According to the World Bank, 1.7 billion people are unbanked. This investment will help FintechOS bring agile and affordable technology solutions to all financial institutions, including those in the developing world, where IFC has a sizeable footprint, as per the press release.
Teodor Blidarus, co-founder and CEO at FintechOS, says, “Today, financial technology is too often an inhibitor rather than an enabler of inclusion. Financial institutions, both large and small, simply don’t have the right tools at the right price point to meet market demands. Powerful emerging technologies like low-code just aren’t being utilised. And this impacts those at the bottom of the pyramid most acutely.”
Hence, FintechOS’ approach helps institutions boost financial inclusion in the following ways:
Increase accessibility: By providing digital products using low-code technology, FintechOS can make financial services more accessible to those financially excluded.
Boost affordability: As financial services are often too expensive for small firms, by lowering the cost of technology and improving operational efficiencies, FintechOS helps institutions to build services cost-effectively and pass these savings onto customers.
Improve impact: To tackle a specific need of certain communities, businesses need specialised services, which have not been commercially viable for many institutions. FintechOS’ claims it makes building specialist products feasible. Its Evolutive Data Core can help institutions identify previously unknown customer issues specific to the unbanked and underbanked.
Capital utilisation
The proceeds from this round will enable FintechOS to help institutions improve access to financial services, make them more affordable, and boost their impact on unbanked and underbanked communities.
Moreover, investor IFC will support FintechOS’s expansion strategy by facilitating partnerships with its network of bank clients and partners.
It’s worth mentioning that FintechOS has customers in more than 20 countries and grew its Annual Recurring Revenue by 450 per cent during 2019.
