 Marko Wenthin, CEO at Penta.
Hot on the heels of being acquired by company builder Finleap, German SME banking upstart Penta has appointed a new CEO. Marko Wenthin, who previously co-founded solarisBank (the banking-as-a-service used by Penta), is now heading up the company, having replaced outgoing CEO and Penta co-founder Lav Odorović. I understand Odorović left Penta last month after it was mutually agreed with new owner Finleap that a CEO with more experience scaling should be brought in. The Penta co-founder remains a shareholder in the SME banking fintech and is thought to be eyeing up his next venture. Wenthin stepped down from solarisBank’s executive team in late 2018 citing “health reasons” and saying that he needed to focus on his recovery. It’s not known what those health issues were, although, regardless, it’s good to see that he’s well-enough to take up a new role as Penta CEO. Asked to comment on Odorović’s departure, Penta issued the following statement: “Lav is still part of the shareholders at Penta. His step back from the operational management team was a decision taken by mutual agreement. Lav was the right fit during the building phase of Penta, but by entering a new step of growth, the company faces bigger challenges and needs therefore to position itself differently”. Penta says that in his new leadership role, Wenthin, who previously spent 16 years at Deutsche Bank, will lead international expansion ― next stop Italy ― and begin to market the fintech to larger SMEs in addition to its original focus on early-stage startups and other small digital companies. “In the future, the focus will be also on traditional medium-sized companies,” says Penta. Adds Wenthin in a statement: “I am very much looking forward to my new role at Penta. On the one hand, digital banking for small and medium-sized companies is very important to me, as they are the driver of the economy and I have spent most of my career in this segment. On the other hand, I have known Penta and the team for a long time as successful partners of solarisBank. Penta is the best example of how a very focused banking provider can create real, digital added value for an entire customer segment in cooperation with a banking-as-a-service platform”. Meanwhile, TechCrunch understands that Odorović’s departure and the appointment of Wenthin isn’t the only recent personnel change within Penta’s leadership team. According to LinkedIn, Aleksandar Orlic, who held the position of CTO, departed the company last month. “We are searching for a new CTO,” said a Penta spokesperson. Alongside Wenthin, that leaves Penta’s current management team as Jessica Holzbach (Chief Customer Officer), Luka Ivicevic (Chief of Staff), Lukas Zörner (Chief Product Officer (CPO) and Matteo Concas (Chief Marketing Officer). Marko Wenthin, CEO at Penta. Hot on the heels of being acquired by company builder Finleap, German SME banking upstart Penta has appointed a new CEO. Marko Wenthin, who previously co-founded solarisBank (the banking-as-a-service used by Penta), is now heading up the company, having replaced outgoing CEO and Penta co-founder Lav Odorović. I understand Odorović left Penta last month after it was mutually agreed with new owner Finleap that a CEO with more experience scaling should be brought in. The Penta co-founder remains a shareholder in the SME banking fintech and is thought to be eyeing up his next venture. Wenthin stepped down from solarisBank’s executive team in late 2018 citing “health reasons” and saying that he needed to focus on his recovery. It’s not known what those health issues were, although, regardless, it’s good to see that he’s well-enough to take up a new role as Penta CEO. Asked to comment on Odorović’s departure, Penta issued the following statement: “Lav is still part of the shareholders at Penta. His step back from the operational management team was a decision taken by mutual agreement. Lav was the right fit during the building phase of Penta, but by entering a new step of growth, the company faces bigger challenges and needs therefore to position itself differently”. Penta says that in his new leadership role, Wenthin, who previously spent 16 years at Deutsche Bank, will lead international expansion ― next stop Italy ― and begin to market the fintech to larger SMEs in addition to its original focus on early-stage startups and other small digital companies. “In the future, the focus will be also on traditional medium-sized companies,” says Penta. Adds Wenthin in a statement: “I am very much looking forward to my new role at Penta. On the one hand, digital banking for small and medium-sized companies is very important to me, as they are the driver of the economy and I have spent most of my career in this segment. On the other hand, I have known Penta and the team for a long time as successful partners of solarisBank. Penta is the best example of how a very focused banking provider can create real, digital added value for an entire customer segment in cooperation with a banking-as-a-service platform”. Meanwhile, TechCrunch understands that Odorović’s departure and the appointment of Wenthin isn’t the only recent personnel change within Penta’s leadership team. According to LinkedIn, Aleksandar Orlic, who held the position of CTO, departed the company last month. “We are searching for a new CTO,” said a Penta spokesperson. Alongside Wenthin, that leaves Penta’s current management team as Jessica Holzbach (Chief Customer Officer), Luka Ivicevic (Chief of Staff), Lukas Zörner (Chief Product Officer (CPO) and Matteo Concas (Chief Marketing Officer). Steve O'Hear
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 Ken Villum Klausen, CEO at Copenhagen-based banking app Lunar Way has raised a €26 million round led by SEED Capital, while obtaining a European banking license from the Danish Financial Supervisory Authority. Founded in 2015, the banking app, which focuses exclusively on the Nordics, raised €13 million and expanded to Norway back in February. With the additional funding and the new banking license at hand, Lunar Way plans to accelerate the development of its Nordic bank, develop new products, and grow in the Danish, Swedish, and Norwegian markets. The app already offers several features such as budgeting, spending notifications, transfers, bill payment, and card freezing. The new banking license will open up even more possibilities, for instance loans, insurance, and multi-currency cards. “The funding and banking license is the preliminary culmination of years of hard work and dedication from the entire Lunar Way team,” said Lunar Way founder and CEO Ken Villum Klausen. “We have grown from a small startup to a fintech with close to 100 employees from Denmark, Sweden and Norway with users in all of Scandinavia – a market notoriously hard to penetrate. All the while challenging the status quo of banking in the Nordics and meeting the regulatory demands of becoming a bank. We’re the very first of our kind in the Nordics to get a banking license. We’ve done all this in four years. That in itself is an accomplishment. But our journey is only just starting now.” The Nordic market consists of only 27 million people but is the home of the most stable economies in the world, with some of the wealthiest and tech-savvy populations on the planet. Though the market is known for being hard to crack for new banking entrants due to the Nordic clearing systems, as well as demanding regulations for safety and payment infrastructures that vary greatly from country to country, Lunar Way has chosen to focus its efforts solely on the Nordics since day one. “Unlike other fintechs that have chosen to expand vertically, Lunar Way’s approach is to go deep in the Nordics, building not just a supplement for users to have when travelling or as an add-on to their other banking solutions, but as a 100% digital, innovative and true alternative to traditional banks,” said Villum Klausen. “We mean it when we say that the goal is to change the status quo of banking and to be the #1 banking app of the Nordics.” Where 90% of the population is digitally native and already has a mobile banking solution, the first challenge in the Nordics is to offer a product that is innovative and easy to manage. The next challenge is to launch a bank, unlike anything the users know. “The future belongs to those who offer the best user experience, and it’s our ambition to be the leading financial marketplace in the Nordics,” added Villum Klausen. “We already offer the users control of their entire personal finances, spending overview, savings, interactive budgets and up to 4% interest. The plan going forward is to collaborate with those who offer the best financial solutions out there and tie the whole thing together in the Lunar Way app. “From here the user can access, view and handle all their personal finance needs. We’ve already taken the first steps in Denmark and offers insurance, loans, multi-currency cards and so on with several different partners. Soon we’ll provide investments with Saxo Bank. The bank license will help us create similar marketplaces for our Swedish and Norwegian users faster. It will also enable us to build our own financial products.” Mary Loritz  Shachar Bialick, CEO at Curve, the London-based “over-the-top banking platform,” has raised $55 million in new funding. The startup lets you consolidate all of your bank cards into a single Curve card and app to make it easier to manage your spending and access other benefits.
Curve’s Series B round is led by Gauss Ventures, the London-HQ’d fintech investor, alongside Creditease, IDC Ventures and previous backer Outward VC (formerly Investec’s INVC fund). A number of other early investors, including Santander InnoVentures, Breega, Seedcamp and Speedinvest also followed on. The new round of funding values Curve at $250 million (or one-quarter unicorn, so to speak), and will be used by the company to continue adding more features to its platform and for further European expansion. (It also plans to launch in the U.S. in 2020). To date, the company claims 500,000 users and says it is on track to reach 1 million by the end of the year. Curve is currently available in 31 countries across Europe, with around 30% of its customer base coming from outside the U.K. “We [have] identified a few countries where the organic pull is fantastic, and we are about to double down on them,” Curve founder and CEO Shachar Bialick tells me. Like a plethora of fintech startups, Curve is building a platform that essentially turns your mobile phone into a financial control centre that re-bundles disparate financial products or functionality to offer a single app to help you manage “all things money.” However, rather than building a new current account ― as is the case with the challenger banks such as Monzo, Starling and Revolut ― Curve’s “attack vector” is a card and app that lets you connect all of your other debit and credit cards (sans Amex) so you only ever have to carry a single card. Once you’ve added your cards to Curve, you use the app to switch which underlying debit or credit cards you wish the Curve Mastercard to spend from, and can track and see a single and consolidated view of your spending regardless of which card was charged (and therefore which of your bank accounts the money was pulled from). In other words, Curve isn’t asking to replace your existing bank accounts but is pitched as a cloud-based platform that runs “over-the-top” of existing banking and payments infrastructure. Historically, the over-the-top terminology has been used to describe the way video streaming services such as Netflix run “over-the-top” of existing broadband infrastructure. “For Curve to succeed in its mission of bringing banking to the cloud, we need [to continue] to build the product; tiny experiences that together create a whole new offering,” Bialick continues. “Our money is everywhere and the job of connecting it all together to one seamless experience requires many resources, and especially many talented people. The latest Series B will enable Curve to re-bundle more of your money: experiences such as Curve Send (peer-to-peer payments), and Curve Credit (post transaction installments for any payment, anywhere).” Alongside Curve’s all-your-cards-in-one functionality, the Curve app lets you lock your Curve card at a touch of a button, provides instant spend notifications, “zero FX fees” when spending abroad or in a foreign currency and the ability to switch payment sources retroactively. The latter is dubbed “Go Back in Time” and means if you make a purchase via Curve that gets charged to a card other than the one you intended, you have two weeks to change your mind. More recently, Curve has re-vamped its cashback feature in a bid to draw in more customers for the premium versions of the Curve card. With the new Curve Cash programme, customers get 1% instant cash back on top of any existing rewards cards that they have plugged into the app, potentially earning customers double rewards on purchases. You simply pick from the list of retailers supported for cashback ― you are allowed to choose between three and six retailers, depending on which Curve plan you are on ― and then get 1% cashback for any purchases made at those stores. Bialick claims that Curve’s over-the-top model is also producing higher engagement than many challenger banks, with customers spending on average ￡1,500 per month through the Curve platform. (As an imperfect reference point, challenger bank Monzo says that around 30% of its users top up their account by ￡1,000 or more per month). I’m also told that 15% of Curve’s users have added a challenger bank card to their Curve account, which also makes for an intriguing and even more nuanced comparison. And whilst Curve is arguably trying to define a new market category ― at least here in the West ― and therefore isn’t the easiest of products to explain, Bialick says that existing Curve customers are the startup’s biggest advocates. “There isn’t just one thing that pulls customers to Curve, there are as many pulls as [there are] the number of ‘money jobs’ one has. All your cards in one, fee-free spending abroad, ‘Go Back In Time,’ to name a few, all attract and retain our customer base. Indeed, awareness and brand building is key, especially amongst all the noise, but that’s where our customers are proving invaluable, telling their friends about Curve, which drives most of our adoption with 2,000 plus new accounts per day.” To win in this new category of banking, Bialick says the company needs to steadfastly stick to its mission to reduce the number of steps it takes to carry out everyday money-related tasks. “The winners will be the companies… [that] create the most seamless experience, removing as much friction between the customer and their money.” Steve O'Hear Paragraph. ここをクリックして編集する.  Barcelona-based Combine is a mobile financial assistant that lets you aggregate all your bank accounts from multiple countries simultaneously and use the app as a personal finance manager. It’s the perfect solution for expats around the world to stay in control of their finances, allowing users to view a balance from all their bank accounts in one currency, with unified transaction history and insights from statistics.
Founded by Denis Moskalets and Irakli Agladze in 2016, the Combine team is a true example of a digital startup, with an international team of remote workers. The startup, which was part of the Startupbootcamp IoT & Data Tech programme in Barcelona, has raised over €200k from angel funding since their inception. Mark Asquith  Barnaby Hussey, CEO at CLEO, the London-based “digital assistant” that wants to replace your banking apps, has quietly taken venture debt from U.S.-based TriplePoint Capital, according to a regulatory filing.
The amount remains undisclosed, though I understand from sources that the figure is somewhere in the region of mid-“single-digit” millions and will bridge the gap before a larger Series B round later this year. Cleo declined to comment on the fundraising. However, sources tell me the need to raise debt financing is partly related to Cleo Plus, the startup’s stealthy premium offering that is currently being tested and set to launch more widely soon. The new product offers Cleo users a range of perks, including rewards and an optional ￡100 cash advance as an alternative to using your bank’s overdraft facility. The credit facility is, for the time bring at least, being financed from the startup’s own balance sheet, hence the need for additional capital. The new funding also relates to Cleo’s U.S. launch, which began tentatively around a year ago. This has been more successful than was expected, seeing Cleo add 650,000 active U.S. users to date. The U.S. currently makes up more than 90% of new users now, too. Overall, the fintech claims 1.3 million users have signed up to the Cleo chatbot and app, with 350,000 active in the U.K. Accessible via Facebook Messenger and the company’s iOS app, Cleo is an AI-powered chatbot that gives you insights into your spending across multiple accounts and credit cards, broken down by transaction, category or merchant. In addition, Cleo lets you take a number of actions based on the financial data it has gleaned. This includes choosing to put money aside for a rainy day or specific goal, sending money to your Facebook Messenger contacts, donating to charity and setting spending alerts and more. Meanwhile, alongside TriplePoint, Cleo is backed by some of the biggest VC names in the London tech scene ― including Balderton Capital, Entrepreneur First, Moonfruit co-founders Wendy Tan White and Joe White, Skype founder Niklas Zennström, Wonga founder Errol Damelin, TransferWise founder Taavet Hinrikus and LocalGlobe. Steve O'Hear  Max Bernardy is CTO and co-fouder of TITAN, the platform uses an algorithm to analyze 13-F disclosures from the leading hedge funds and formulates an equally-weighted portfolio of the top twenty companies held by those major funds. As for the hedging part of the portfolio, depending on an investor’s risk tolerance they can allocate up to 20 percent of their funds to shorting the S&P 500. Unlike Robinhood’s unsuccessful Checking and Saving accounts, Titan’s portfolio is SIPC insured up to $500,000.
Hedge funds are usually reserved for accredited and institutional investors with large sums of money ($500,000 minimum). Titan’s minimum investment is just $1,000 and only charges a 1 percent annual fee. Titan’s new approach to mobile-investing made it one of the hottest members of YC’s Spring 2018 batch. According to TechCrunch, it had about $10 million in assets under management four months ago when it graduated from the startup accelerator. I’m interested to see how Titan will fare in 2019 if the economy shifts into a recession. According to its fact sheet, Titan’s portfolio has a long-term focus so it’s investments stay largely the same from quarter-to-quarter. Robo-advisers like Wealthfront, Betterment and Acorns are in for a rough ride when the economy turns in the next few years. The algorithms that power these platforms and the entrepreneurs who started them have yet to experience a recession. That’s a danger for most of today’s young entrepreneurs and venture capitalists. Titan has the opportunity to grab up millennials looking for a safer place to put their money in 2019 thanks to its hedge-fund like investment philosophy. Everyone who invests with Titan is buying into the same portfolio of stocks. Titan also sends investors deep dives on specific companies and quarterly reports. As TechCrunch’s John Constine pointed out, Robinhood helped democratize access to stock trading, and Titan is doing that for a more advanced financial vehicle. Daniel Strauss |
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