Why I chose Holvi to help run my business — A Fireside chat with e-resident Matias
This is a guest post submitted by a company that’s growing by serving e-residents. Learn more about working in partnership with the e-Residency programme here.
The e-Residency programme empowers a global community of entrepreneurs to establish and run their business fully digitally, using a combination of Estonia’s governmental online infrastructure and digital services like Holvi for handling banking and business management tasks.
We’ve spoken to Berlin resident and Estonian e-resident Matias about his experience of establishing his own business lines, his learnings and his ambitions for the future.
Hi! Please tell us about yourself — what is your background, and what does your Estonian business do?
My name is Matias and I’m 35 years old. I was born and raised in Mallorca and in 2011 I emigrated to Germany. I have 15 years professional experience in working in IT and building startups from scratch. Lately (in fact, since I created my own company) I have expanded my professional horizon to tackle totally different challenges such as: running a sports club, and being a music promoter, a t-shirt designer, an hr-recruiter, a public speaker, etc.
When did you become an e-resident?
I started the process as soon as I decided to leave my former company, and have been officially registered as an e-resident since November 2017.
And how did you find out about the e-Residency programme? How long did it then take you to apply for e-Residency and to establish a company in Estonia?
The first time I heard about e-Residency was in 2015 through a tech article. During summer 2016 I visited Tallinn — driven by the curiosity of discovering a country that is world renowned for their Computer Science studies and their advanced software implementations. During this trip I got more familiar with the whole system and roughly a year later when the opportunity crossed I didn’t think twice and I gave a chance to this programme.
The process was really fast and the waiting time was exactly the one announced on the website; 4 weeks to get my e-Residency ID card and 48h to have an active and functional company. Actually, I managed to issue my first invoice 72h after I got my card.
What are, in your eyes, the big advantages of being an e-resident and establishing a company in Estonia? What influence does this have on how you can conduct your business?
1. Super important for me: everything’s online. I don’t have to waste time on queues, trying to understand which building I have to visit or which step I have to take. It’s as straightforward as filling out an online form and following the well-defined steps.
2. The process is super well defined and written, so it’s very easy to understand. I felt like I knew in every moment what I had to do, for how long I had to wait, and everything worked like a clock. I didn’t feel the need to write in or call to ask any follow-up questions.
3. The waiting time is rather short; only 4 weeks until you know if you have been accepted, so it’s not a long shot to try it out. If it doesn’t work for you, you can always fall back on traditional models.
4. It’s easy to run on a daily basis. I run it from everywhere in the world and I have customers all over Europe (Poland, Brussels, Germany, Spain…).
5. It’s totally paperless! Therefore it’s totally ecological, I don’t need to keep physical documents, e.g. my shareholder agreements of ventures would already fill 3 boxes of paper.
6. If you want to close down your company it’s pretty much as simple as it was to set it up, so you can leave the boat anytime if things get out of hand or you don’t feel comfortable.
The impact on how I can run my business is that thanks to this setup I can really focus on what is important for me: finding new customers, working for them and designing how I want to run my life instead of being worried about of bureaucracy.
How did you hear about Holvi? What made you decide on using the Holvi business account for e-residents?
I found out about Holvi through the list of recommended banking entities for e-Residency companies by the Estonian Government.
The service provider I decided to use for running my taxes and bookkeeping recommended to use Holvi because they had everything integrated through their API, so my bookkeeping is pretty much automatic. To me it was super important that my banking provider was nicely integrated with my bookkeeping system, and to have the option of having a debit/credit card to make online purchases.
What learnings have you made to-date that you wish you had known when you first began working on starting your business?
One thing that was quite difficult was my insurance situation since I was not employed by anybody anymore. How to arrange it was the biggest challenge, it took me almost 5 weeks, my insurance didn’t understand that my company is based in Estonia and I’m living in Berlin. Also the A1 form to avoid the double taxation was a strange process that not so many people know how to handle, plus the name of the form was changed (formerly known as E101).
Also, assigning the salary was something very sensitive and strange at first glance given all the options, so I exchanged countless emails about this with my tax and finance advisor, but in the end they were able to help me sort this out as well.
What are your plans and goals for the future?
Growing the company to the point of being able to hire people, and being able to live in any place in the world while running my business through my entity in Estonia. My wish would be to have a process that is as easy as it was to create my company in order to hire new employees, or better said e-employees.
Thank you for your answers and interesting insights, Matias! We wish you all the best for your business and look forward to hearing about more great things you’ll surely be getting up to in the future.
If you would like to find out more about the e-Residency programme, visit e-resident.gov.ee.
Find out more about the Holvi business banking account for e-residents.
