Thought Leaders in Financial Technology: NorthOne CEO Eytan Bensoussan (Part 1)

FinTech companies are difficult to get off the ground. This case study is a deep dive into how Eytan managed to get to the seed funding round and marshal capital to go to the next level.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing our audience to yourself as well as NorthOne.

Thought Leaders in Financial Technology: My Digital Money CEO Guy Gotslak (Part 4)

Guy Gotslak: We’re interested in providing fractionalized metals like gold and silver. We have plans to put that on the platform. Especially in times like this, more people are buying metals. Gold is doing well. That will allow us to stay stable. From a client standpoint, it helps people get access to diversification.

Even if you talk about tokenizing real estate, a lot of people can’t buy a whole house. They don’t have enough for the down payment or maybe they don’t have good enough credit. By tokenizing real estate, you can buy a part of a house and you can do it at a click of a button.

Thought Leaders in Financial Technology: My Digital Money CEO Guy Gotslak (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: How many crypto traders are on the system?

Guy Gotslak: We’re in the thousands so far. Each individual contributes a good amount because the average IRA that comes in is $25,000 to $50,000. We’re already in the thousands of users and growing.

Sramana Mitra: What is your business model?

Guy Gotslak: We take a transaction fee. We’re looking to expand our products into other assets as well.

Thought Leaders in Financial Technology: My Digital Money CEO Guy Gotslak (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: To what extent did the consulting business help you in this new project?

Guy Gotslak: A lot. I was customer-focused. I wanted to get personalized services to our clients. We ended up getting acquired by a software company that does personalization where the idea is to help give personalized digital experiences. It can be on any channel. I just became passionate about being able to do that but still keep humans in the mix too.

Sramana Mitra: You stayed with the company that acquired you?

Thought Leaders in Financial Technology: My Digital Money CEO Guy Gotslak (Part 1)

Guy transitioned from being a hands-on developer to running a consulting company, and then eventually, to becoming a Crypto entrepreneur. In this interview, we discuss the nuances of his journey, as well as the trends in the Crypto world that are opening up opportunities.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing our audience to yourself as well as to the company.

Guy Gotslak: I’m the President and Co-Founder of My Digital Money. I’m originally from Israel. I moved to the States when I was eight years old. I ended up studying computer science and engineering at UCLA. Then I went on to be a programmer for over five years.

Thought Leaders in Financial Technology: Nectarine Credit CEO Alex Armitage (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: How did you get your first customers?

Alex Armitage: We have some other businesses. A couple of them are e-commerce companies. We knew that space quite well. We knew that this was a problem. We had hundreds of relationships with companies in various industries. We had hundreds of contacts in that space. We went to them and said, “We’ve done business in the past. We know this is a problem. How can we make this process easier?”

Thought Leaders in Financial Technology: Nectarine Credit CEO Alex Armitage (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: The trend that I’ve seen in this market is, people zero in on one set of data and develop a set of heuristics based on which they are making these decisions. You look at Kabbage for example. They weigh heavily on online transactions. They are willing to lend against that transaction volume. That’s their primary heuristic.

In the case of Intuit, they’re basically using QuickBooks data. You’re not a proprietary data provider. You’re basically bringing on a lot of data signals and then you’re offering heuristics on those data signals. I’m curious about how you got the company going. What was the MVP for a company like what you’re talking about?

Thought Leaders in Financial Technology: Nectarine Credit CEO Alex Armitage (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: You started with the dozen beta customers who ordered the product in advance. You built the product. They came on board as paying customers. They brought on 400 to 600 prospects. 

Alex Armitage: That’s a simplification of it, but that’s essentially how we’re moving forward. It’s a huge problem. Thousands of companies are sending out physical paper applications and are asking for credit verification over email. Dozens of emails are sent back and forth. Sometimes that process takes months. Our system takes minutes.