Family Finances, design-driven mobile banking solutions for banks
Family Finances has raised €641K in total. We talk with Iván Muck, its CEO.
PetaCrunch: How would you describe Family Finances in a single tweet?
Iván Muck: Family Finances offers design-driven mobile banking solutions for banks with a special focus on younger customers, including off-the-shelf solutions that are all easy to integrate & white-label as well as an E2E service from UX research, through UX/UI design to implementation.
PC: How did it all start and why?
IM: While graduating from their university studies, two of our co-founders started to work together at a management consulting firm as Fintech Analysts, where they got to know more and more the fascinating world of fintechs. Once we went to have a glass of beer after work, we had a heated discussion on the low level of financial consciousness of the Gen Z students, and how this was the fault of the educational system. All of us in the co-founder team had been volunteering in non-profit organisations for several years, dedicated to prepare high-school students for their final exams, so we had seen how serious this issue truly was. So right there, we decided to take this matter in our own hands and try to revolutionise financial education by founding our own company. That’s where the idea of Family Finances was born.
Also, we believe, that youngsters are disconnected from banks and are using or at least tried out fancier fintech solutions, and they are not the only ones switching.
Traditional retail banks are experiencing enormous churn rates, before their younger customers would actually generate revenues for them.
To have a greater social impact we decided to help banks become Gen Z and Millennial compliant, since they at the end of the day require their financial institutions to increase their financial consciousness and literacy.
PC: What have you achieved so far?
IM: In 2018, we were focusing on closing our banking sales processes and our seed investment round. We managed to triple our revenues from last year until May 2019 by serving three major banks, IT vendors of banks and fintech startups with our design-driven and youth-centred mobile banking solutions. We also secured €550k seed investment from a Hungarian venture capital fund in February.
In the past six months we had the opportunity to participate in various prestigious conferences, like Money 20/20 Asia and Money 20/20 Europe or EBAday organised by Finextra, got into amazing accelerator programs and won at bank-backed hackathons.
Although we were only a team of 3 a year ago, we are happy to say that the Family Finances team now has 10 employees on board!
PC: How will you use your recent funding round?
IM: We consider business development highly important, especially in the B2B fintech space, therefore we are planning to invest in this area in order to acquire even more clients and partnerships.
We are also expanding internationally, currently we are co-selling with several prestigious organizations, like PwC in the CEE region.
We hope to establish international presence beyond the CEE region soon with the help of these outstanding opportunities and our recent investment.
In order to be able to keep up with the growing number of clients and interested financial institutions, it is also important to focus on scaling up our team. We create all of our solutions in-house, including UX research, UX/UI design as well as native iOS and Android development, therefore we are constantly growing our team of even more distinguished professionals in these areas.
PC: What do you plan to achieve in the next 2–3 years?
IM: As we are a multi-product startup we are working on expanding our digital product portfolio in order to — alongside with customized solutions — also be able to provide financial institutions with an even broader mobile banking one-stop-shop. In order to do so, we are working on developing more easy-to-implement, white-label solutions, continuously improving our existing solutions in terms of the available functions as well as UX and UI to stay ahead of competition and be able to meet the rapidly changing expectations of younger generations. To reach our product development related goals, we are constantly validating our new ideas with members of the target group through our own research panel, a local NGO and by partnering up with other research institutes.
We are planning to implement design-driven mobile banking solutions at 15+ financial institutions in the upcoming years.
We are also working on scaling up our team of 10 to 22 in order to contribute to as many banking engagements as possible to help them provide the right customer experience for digital natives, compete with fintech and bigtech challengers and speak the same language, younger generations do!
