Venture Leader Fintech facilitates interactions with blockchain resources – Venturelab

An expert jury recently selected ten startups for the Venture Leaders Fintech program that will join the Swiss startup team. In anticipation of the Venture Leaders Fintech roadshow at the end of November, we would like to introduce our community to each of the Venture Leaders Fintech 2022. Meet Kristina Morf, Head of Customer Experience at nobank.

Name: Kristina Morf
Placement: Zurich, Switzerland
Nationality: Swiss
Graduated from: Université Paris 3 – Sorbonne Nouvelle in 2014 with a master’s degree
Job title: Head of CX
Team size: 6 people
Money raised: CHF 1.3 million
First point of contact with Venturelab: 2022, Venture Leaders Fintech

What does your startup do and why?
nobank believes that non-custodial wallets are crucial for the future of Web3. Existing wallets are still too complicated to accommodate the next billion users, which is why nobank is making Web3 accessible and genuinely useful for everyone by offering the easiest way to directly interact with assets on the blockchain.

How and where was the idea for your start-up born?
We have different levels of Web3 and crypto experience in our team. What we all found was that existing wallets set up too many roadblocks; usually you need a lot of technical knowledge, a lot of Web3 expertise, and most of all, a lot of resilience to deal with awkward user experiences. So from bad experiences with startup phrases, gas fees and many other issues, grew the shared vision to create a wallet that is simple, intuitive and makes Web3 truly accessible to everyone.

What do you expect from the Venture Leaders roadshow and how do you think it will help you achieve your vision?
Since nobank makes Web3 available to everyone, our market is global. Although COVID made remote connection much more common, building a network and spreading ideas still has a completely different quality when done in person. So I’m really looking forward to meeting people in London, having conversations and making connections. Since our app is publicly available, we want to expand our customer base, directly or with partners, wherever a simple and intuitive wallet experience is needed. As we plan our next funding round, we also want to arrange some meetings.

Who does your product or solution help, and how?
nobank is a great solution for anyone who wants to access Web3 easily and comfortably. The need for such easy access is especially pronounced among the “crypto-curious,” that is, people interested in blockchain and digital assets and looking for exposure to it. Smart contracts (self-executing contracts whose terms are written into the code) enable nobank to mask technical complexity to the user without limiting functionality. This is a challenge that only a few current providers have solved. Using wallet names instead of 40-digit wallet addresses, or the Authenticator app and social recovery instead of complicated 12-word seed phrases are just some of the innovations introduced by nobank.

“Although COVID made remote connection much more common, building a network and spreading ideas still has a completely different quality when done in person.”

What are you most looking forward to at work right now?
Right now, I’m excited to go out and show our product to people. Having interactions with existing and potential users, seeing how people use the app and receiving feedback are all incredibly valuable. It is also very exciting to see more use cases for our application open. That our product has been embraced by user groups that we had not initially considered is incredible.

How was your team built?
Me and the co-founders, Andras and Mario, grew up in Zug and went to the same high school. The two also worked together in the fintech company Avaloq. I was looking for an opportunity to go deeper into technology after working in a digital agency in Zurich, and that’s how we decided to join forces. Steffi, Raphael and Oleh are all extremely skilled professionals whom we knew through previous collaborations or our network. We are very grateful to have a small but powerful team where everyone contributes both a deep expertise in their field and an exceptional understanding and appreciation of each other’s work.

Which market are you targeting and what is the potential of your startup?
We cater to both B2C customers (people looking to gain exposure to blockchain and digital assets) and B2B customers looking to start their Web3 journey and need an easy way to deliver it to their customers. For B2C users, nobank lowers the entry barrier to crypto and allows investment, participation and transactions on the blockchain easily and cheaply. For businesses, nobank offers its wallet platform to partners and companies that require a user-friendly wallet and Web3 onboarding. The target markets for both models are Europe and North America, but can be expanded to the rest of the world as the blockchain and crypto markets are global.

What are your most important achievements so far?
On the product side, there is the public launch of the nobank BETA app, the introduction of our first 2,000 users, and the shortlisting for both Europe’s and Best of Swiss App awards. We are also very happy to have entered into good partnerships: From B2B partnerships for NFT and token projects to network partnerships with Swissnex, Venture Lab and S-GE, which chose nobank for participation in a Market Validation Camp in San Francisco, Fintech Connect in London and CES 2023 in Las Vegas. The interim investment with the Silicon Valley VC Plug and Play Tech Center of over CHF 200,000 marks another key achievement.

“Making something from scratch is a fantastic challenge – both in terms of the product and the company that makes it.”

What is one thing not many people know about you?
One thing that often surprises people is that although I usually approach things in a very structured way, I’m actually quite an erratic thinker. I greatly appreciate the combination of these two aspects, as they enable me to see things from different perspectives while allowing me to execute them rigorously and efficiently.

What is your favorite podcast and why?
When I listen to so many of them, it’s hard for me to choose just one. But Revisionist history by Malcolm Gladwell is definitely one of my favorites. I love the premise of the show that just because we’re used to looking at things a certain way doesn’t mean this way is true. In general, I love podcasts that challenge my thinking and satisfy my curiosity about all kinds of subjects, from physics to history or business and technology.

What is the most challenging thing about working in a startup?
Creating something from scratch is a fantastic challenge – both in terms of the product and the company that makes it. It’s amazing because there’s no strict path to follow, and of course that’s also what makes it challenging. At nobank, we’re really lucky to have a really well-coordinated team – in terms of the product, the way we build it and the way we share it with people.

How do you stay on top of industry trends?
I think we all do it the same way: Meeting people, reading articles and whitepapers, listening to podcasts, etc. Translating this knowledge and incorporating it into our product is what I find much more interesting. To do this, I have many conversations with people from outside our “bubble”; the relationship with them and their needs is what allows us to create a great product and keep improving it.

How do you foster creative thinking among your team members?
We do this in a few different ways, the most obvious being coffee or lunch breaks where brainstorming happens quite naturally. We are a very interdisciplinary team, so when one of us gets stuck somewhere, we usually involve the team and work through issues together. Just last week we had an offsite in the Swiss mountains of Davos where we took things offline and worked through ideas on pen and paper. The manual work went as far as making pizza together in a stone oven in the forest!

The Swiss startup team roadshow in London is organized by Venturelab in collaboration with Swissnex and supported by EPFL, ETH Zürich and Walder Wyss.

nobank offers a smart contract-based, non-custodial wallet, which is distributed on multiple blockchains. Users benefit from advanced security features that are easy to use. nobank offers a safe p… Read more