“Big banks are back”: An interview with Teo Blidarus, CEO of Fintech OS

AltFi talks to the CEO and co-founder of FintechOS about the future of financial technology innovation, ChatGPT and more.

Image source: Teo Blidarus/Fintech OS

After a decade of fintech disruption, the game will change in 2023 as banks and fintechs switch places.

Fintechs have had a rocky ride over the past 18 months or so, asked to focus more on profitability over growth to stabilize the macro-induced turbulence. Regulatory requirements across consumer protection, lending and crypto are also increasing.

Big banks, however, until recently, when the collapse of SVB and Credit Suisse exposed systemic balance sheet risk, were turning a long-term corner on digitizing legacy technology systems with profits boosted by higher interest rates.

As fintech focuses on the fundamentals, banks have a window of opportunity for more cash to resist the fintech challenge.

These bold predictions, made just before the recent banking crisis, come from one of Europe’s biggest B2B fintech bosses.

“We make it possible for everyone. The new guys and the old, says Teo Blidarus, CEO and co-founder of Fintech OS, which wants to bring the idea of ​​simplification and lower entry barriers to innovation in financial services and banking.

This comes from letting people “serve themselves” when they use fintech infrastructure to build products or design customer journeys through low-code platforms that reduce developer costs.

“We consider that any company can be a fintech, this these days in terms of innovation and speed of innovation with financial products and services, but also in terms of operational efficiency, which has obviously become very, very important,” he said.

Instead of the more expensive route of hiring endless software developers, Blidarus says future financial companies will be able to launch new products in a day.

“Low code and general artificial intelligence will become more of the norm. Pretty much everyone is going to use them the same way everyone uses social media tools. That way, a creative economy is going to become more prevalent in the financial sector,” he said.

Blidarus is betting that B2B fintech infrastructure will be the biggest winner when it comes to financial services innovation, in part as larger firms reinvent themselves, as well as through ever-lowering barriers to entry for fintech startups.

“The traditional players have returned. It is a fact. JP Morgan, HSBC, Societe Generale – they have a whole new division focused on e-commerce and banking-as-a-service products.”

“You can’t just come into this space and say we’re a bank-as-a-service startup. Because you’re going up against a monster with a lot of money, power, distribution and infrastructure when it comes to risk management and regulation. They has returned.”

Artificial fintech intelligence

One area where Blidarus sees big changes is how generative artificial intelligence, through platforms like ChatGPT, can further lower barriers to entry when it comes to the lifeblood of fintech disruption. Software development.

Over the past 10 to 15 years, he says, the rapidly rising costs have “become a problem.”

“There aren’t enough developers, there aren’t enough technicians in this world, to take advantage of all the possibilities,” he said.

“What’s happening with artificial intelligence and no code, low code, it’s pretty obvious that we’re tearing down those barriers and we’re saying, no, you don’t have to be a genius with five years of Java development to have an innovative fintech – startup,” he said.

Fintech OS was founded in 2017 by the Romanian entrepreneurs Teodor Blidarus and Sergiu Negut and has joint headquarters between London and New York. Products include embedded loans, embedded credit cards and embedded insurance products.

Their customers are large financial institutions such as banks and insurance companies as well as other fintech companies.

This includes the likes of Groupe Societe Generale, BPC, in Europe, Admiral here in the UK, Scotiabank in Canada and insurance broker Howden.

For both markets, it helps these other companies launch and roll out new products by providing a “low code” platform focused on speed.

“There are two or three things that are going to be really prevalent in this market. One is going to be a golden year for fintech infrastructure. there is going to be a lot of investment. There are now fintech startups. here are traditional financial service providers. These companies glue the whole market together.”

This has been something of a passion for Blidarus, who has worked for 25 years with financial IT in various forms. At the age of 30, he founded a technology consulting company, moved three years later to London and ran it until 2017.

“Sometimes it takes 300 developers to launch a product or service.”

From an early stage, we pushed into this idea of ​​self-service, which gives people access to a very complex infrastructure that allows them to operate in regulated markets or allows them to deal with issues like data, bringing that data together, but also empowering them to do things easier and faster, without an army of developers.

“We worked with insurers and with lenders to help them establish a more customer-centric backbone in their operational approach to building to market,” he said.

This included working with the likes of Salesforce and Microsoft to serve larger players.

“That’s when we started to learn how cumbersome technology adoption is in that area,” he said.

“There is a lot of promise around the deployment of this kind of technology, the technology was quite expensive. But the overall progress was very slow, which made the whole approach quite impossible,” he added.

Fintech OS grew rapidly in Central and Eastern Europe, and soon moved to London. Four years later, it opened a store in North America, where it then had its headquarters. The two financial centers are still the strong focus.

Blidarus says he is in the long term, despite the fact that he is looking at a possible IPO and that this is his third company.

“The most important thing for me is to build a company that will fundamentally change the industry for good and that will last 10 to 20 years from now. I want this company to last.”