Picking No-Fuss Solutions Of Krishna Subramanyan

CEO of Bruc Bond Singapore Krishna Subramanyan, Country Manager for Poland Krzysztof “Kris” Matuszewski, and Board Member Eyal Nachum in a chat with Konstantin Bodragin, Brüc + Bond Magazine’s Editor-in-Chief.
KB: Hi guys, appreciate your making the time. To start, what advice are you able to give a young fintech startup?
Eyal Nachum: Focus on time-to-market. Forget about any devices. You have to get a product on the market. 80% of your working technique is better than 100% of nothing. Once you really have something working, speak with the people using it. Talk to your customers. They will understand that you’re only starting out and will be more forgiving at the start. They will give you the feedback you must have. You can build the other 20% using that knowledge. At Bruc Bond , we are still always actually talking to our customers. It allows us to always improve within the ways our clients need.
Krishna Subramanyan: I would give you a fintech startup the identical advice in terms of any start-up. It would be incorrect to concentrate on your own product or idea, although it is tempting to take action. First, identify a client population to get served, and work to comprehend their pain points. Product follows the pain sensation points driven by the decision to serve to this client population.
Krzysztof Matuszewski: You need being methodical. First, find your niche. This will be your market opportunity. Then, survey. Check out the competitors to find out whether somebody’s already doing what you want to do. Find technical partners to help you avoid hasty decision-making also to meet your time-to-market goals. Do customer development well. Always check your assumptions and become ready to pivot, to alter the course of your products development to fulfil the customers’ needs. Then get feedback again. With each era, new update, every change, you should get feedback. Keep the development/marketing balance healthy. In the early stages, you need to keep your products just sufficient, but without marketing you may miss your market fit. Oh, and locate investors. You will need funds to expand.
KB: Getting the infrastructure right can make or break a project. What should young fintechs think of when it comes to their banking/payments infrastructure?
EN: Approach it in three stages. First, the infrastructure doesn’t matter to customers, just obtain the product out. Second, do basic infrastructure, to help you have a proof concept. The third stage may be the hardest from an infrastructure perspective. You have to achieve scale. How? You need a clear customer funnel. Even if it feels like it would slow you down, for scale you have to accomplish it. You also have to use a good grasp from the rules and stay with them. If you do crypto and want an account for payroll, your bank could play nice at stage one, although not stage three. Don’t board any toes. Set up infrastructure in a way that doesn’t break anybody’s rules.
KM: Use credible operational systems and conform to regulations strictly. If you don’t, you might lose your infrastructure. Be rigid with security, and take advantage of integrations when you are able. Open banking and also the PSD2 in Europe opened a whole whole world of possibilities with API connections – explore it.
KS: Infrastructure must be flexible to adapt to adjustments to understanding and environment. Real-time abilities for future innovation are key. It is becoming harder to retain customers. What is helpful may be the ability to reveal to customers that we have been listening all time. Therefore, there has to be something new, exciting being offered that sets the pace inside the first few weeks, months, quarters around the back of client feedback. New architectures must leverage APIs and micro-services to support this pace.
KB: Krishna, is there specific issues in relation to Singapore and Asia most importantly?
KS: Fintechs here want to do a lot with very little inside a very short period of time. The teams are very capable but limited in resources. Firms that can thrive inside a mutually supportive environment are the type that win. So, collaborate to have the pace and the vision. For example, when operated banking isn’t set in law, even the biggest banking players are attempting to reach out towards the smallest fintechs to interact and collaborate.
KB: Kris, how about the EU?
KM: There is very good competition in the EU, both among payments fintechs themselves and with banks. The market is well regulated, but there are a great deal of regulations to follow along with. In the EU, you need to take data rights into consideration. You need to meet the requirements in the GDPR, the legislation made to protect individuals and legal entities from new risks inherent for the data economy. These can be hard to adhere to. On another hand, Brexit offers a chance to attract customers leaving the UK, so there are opportunities everywhere.
KB: B2B [business-to-business] and B2C [business-to-consumer] are two different modes of business. What sort of unique payments/banking challenges do startups of these spheres face how the others wouldn’t? How can they overcome them?
KM: Fintech companies fall into either a business-to-consumer sales model or business-to-business model. Each model features its own challenges, even though B2C sales cycle tends to be much shorter compared to the B2B sales cycle, as businesses are slower to consider new technology. For B2B there is a couple of major challenges. One is that banks give you a set of similar payment products and curently have an extensive subscriber base. The second is that companies usually have very complicated and extensive product needs, so payment fintech must offer good service and operational excellence to compete around the corporate market. Therefore, companies from the SME sector become frequent clients of payment fintechs. With B2C, other challenges rise towards the top. First of all, there’s money laundering. The importance of regulatory compliance in this is more than anything else. There is competition from small business credit cards, cryptocurrencies and digital cash, and from money transfer and remittances as a developing niche.
EN: The B2B world wastes about 7 weeks annually on audits and accounting. That’s why you see lots of ideas about lowering the headache. With B2C you can’t wait that long. There’s always movement and change. There isn’t a real challenge to stability inside B2C sphere due for the number of players, and costs are pretty fixed because of competition. The biggest challenges right this moment are cultural. There are language barriers between banker and customer. What we need are solutions for specific niches: the unbankable or refugees, immigrants, banking in languages, student-specific services, etc.
KS: Selection of global banking partnerships remains the key. Depending about the regulatory climate, banking challenges can vary significantly. Banks react to this climate and price of retaining business diversely. Fintechs must spend considerable time to understand almost every partner’s direction. Ability to match target growth segments of banking partners to their own have to be an ongoing, daily activity.