Buenos Aires, Argentina
The decisions that shape a financial business are taken before it has a single customer.
Digital banks, wallets and lenders taken from a business plan to a licensed, operating business.
The problem
Launching a regulated financial business is not a product problem. Before the first customer exists you have to choose a core platform, write origination policy without a portfolio to learn from, find funding, satisfy a regulator, hire the people who will run it, and defend the whole thing in front of shareholders who are being asked for money.
Most of those decisions are irreversible in practice, and they are taken in the months when the least is known.
What this involves
- The business case
- P&L, unit economics, cash burn and the investment deck — and defending them in front of the shareholders or the board that has to approve them.
- The platform
- Core selection through a real RFP, bureau integrations, payment rails, and the architecture that will either allow or prevent the roadmap three years out.
- Credit and risk
- Origination policy, scoring, collections and delinquency strategy, designed before there is any portfolio history to calibrate against.
- Funding structure
- Investment vehicles and trusts to fund a loan book that does not yet exist.
- The team
- Hiring the executives who will run it, including the incoming CTO, and the operating model they will run it with.
Selected work
Inception of a digital bank inside an insurance group
Initial business plan, core banking RFP across three platforms, selection of the first components and key hires, and defence of the plan in front of the group's shareholders.
Wallet as a joint venture between an energy group and a financial group
Led the strategy for a new wallet: cash-in and cash-out, monetisation, interest-bearing account, bill payment, alignment with the investment funds involved, the absorption of an acquired company, and the selection of the incoming CTO.
Two consumer and agricultural lenders from scratch
Direct debit operation, origination policy, core RFP, bureau integration, bank presentations, collections and delinquency strategy. For the agricultural lender, also the design of the investment vehicles and trusts that funded the book.
A digital wallet and a Banking-as-a-Service capability inside a traditional bank
Part of a four-year programme that built the group's first Banking-as-a-Service capability, its digital wallet, a new digital channel and an insurance company. The wallet went on to become the first in its market to offer remittance collection, a points programme and fully digital credit.
Contact
If you are building, rebuilding or rescuing a technology organisation, write to me at hernan@hernancurras.com. A first conversation costs nothing and usually takes thirty minutes.
Also on LinkedIn.