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Q1: What is the most engaging or satisfying aspect of your role as CTO and Founder at credi2?
The part I love about my work is that there is always something new to learn. A new business problem or a customer's need and all the things that need to be uncovered and understood to come up with a proper solution.
Q2: What is the most challenging aspect of your role?
One of the most challenging things is to say no at the right moment. To turn down a project or – even harder – to stop a project/product that is already running. This is especially true as a co-founder.
«AI is here to support, and not to run your life.»
—Michael Handler
Q3: In the broader aspect of Pay Later space and Fintech Industry, what would be the definition of 2024 in 3 words.
CAN AI HELP?
It certainly has valid use cases in customer service, fraud prevention and beyond. But if it really has the profound effect onto a whole industry as some people expect is still to be seen. On the one hand everyone loves to use AI as a buzzword to attract attention, on the other hand a lot of people are afraid of it. People don't fully trust AI yet. And this is a major thing for the finance industry. You are dealing with people's money. Money they had to work hard for. Money, they put to the side so they can afford a vacation or a larger investment or something else.
So you have to make sure, that any use of AI is safe and compliant. Which is no simple task, especially due to the sheer complexity of AI technology and the fact that even its creators often don't understand what exactly is causing a certain behavior of their AI models. I guess that is the reason, why the areas where we see a lot of dynamic are customer service and company internal processes. Both heavily profit from the latest improvements of generative AI. In customer service we see a bit of an arms race between customers leveraging AI to create higher profile requests - often using AI to make their requests more formal, almost as if written by a lawyer and companies using AI to improve efficiency and generate a better and more meaningful support experience for their customers. A lot of traditional truths are re-negotiated here at the moment - so this is certainly an area where any company in the finance space needs to focus on in the near future.
On the internal process side the finance industry is just as affected by the impact of generative AI, as other industries and it is imperative to educate the workforce about the potential benefits and pitfalls of AI and to provide the necessary tools for them to leverage the possible productivity gains.
Q4: How do you think AI can be integrated in the BNPL world?
There are already a lot of things happening that are handled by AI. From fraud protection to scalability. You will be able to find patterns you did not expect when using AI. You can work with this data to create a safer and better product. Cashflow analysis can help to offer a BNPL split at the most meaningful moment for a customer. This helps the client stay afloat and keeps risk lower for the banks. Obviously none of this should happen without the customers approval – AI is here to support, and not to run your life.
Q5: How do you balance innovation with operational stability?
I think in the financial industry the focus always needs to be on operational stability when it comes to the core services. On these you simply can't work fast and break things. Yet everything outside these critical core services can absolutely change fast. Companies, who are good at this differentiation have a clear advantage on the market.
Q6: What qualities do you value most in your technical hires?
Willingness to learn about the domain and a gain a good feeling for the product. I think it is absolutely key that whoever works on a product is both interested in it and truly tries to understand how a it will interact with customers and the outside world and which implications their work has.
Q7: What is the most recent product you have developed with your team?
Together with Visa, we have built a white label pay later solution for Banks and Issuers. Value proposition of the solution is essentially the fact that you can add transaction splitting feature to any existing or new card or account product. Most profound benefit is that a Bank for example can offer an instalment feature to their existing customer without changing their usual customer interface or user experience journey, as we seamlessly integrate with existing customer facing channels.
Q8: What benefits do banks get from it?
An attractive revenue stream at low operating costs. A short time to market, while still having flexibility to adapt the product through building blocks. In other words: The Partner Bank picks and chooses which modules to enable for the full end to end process including origination, transaction splitting and management as well as payment collection.
Q9: As you said before some things can be very fast. How long does it take to implement this solution?
Depending on the Partners technical setup and resources availability the integration can take 3-6 months. We prefer to involve the partner from day 1 with active participation in solution design, integration and testing. This helps us to move very fast and work as one team with our partner, which has proven to be a very successful practice.