Amsterdam’s FinTech scene is as vibrant and thriving as the city’s culture, with new market entrants popping up across the city set on transforming how businesses and people manage their money. A pioneer in financial services, Dutch banks were the frontrunners in mobile and digital banking and the future is looking bright for Amsterdam’s young and flourishing start-ups.
These are the Amsterdam-born companies we’re keeping an eye on this year.
Maintaining a healthy cash flow can be one of the most stressful parts of running a business, and there’s nothing worse than a late invoice. For young companies, in particular, a late invoice isn’t just frustrating but also has the potential to hold larger scale repercussions in the form of late staff payments and bills. InvoiceFinance prevents this from happening, by giving companies advances of invoices on the same day they’re sent empowering businesses to focus on their growth, rather than worrying about cash flow. For only 1% of the invoice total, companies can have peace of mind that they can pay their precious staff and keep a roof over their head.
Founded in 2006, Adyen set on a mission to build a modern payments technology infrastructure capable of evolving with the needs of today’s growing global businesses. Adyen’s technology allows businesses of all kinds to accept e-commerce, mobile and point-of-sale payments all around the world. It’s completely adaptable to suit individual needs of each of their customers to ensure that customer satisfaction and revenue growth remains high. The company continues to show impressive growth with a client roster boasting Uber and eBay, who it recently partnered to become the online marketplace’s primary payment processing provider. In 2015, it achieved a valuation of $2.3bn and earned its title as the sixth largest European unicorn and Amsterdam’s first.
Digital bank, Bunq, is transforming how the Dutch bank, and manage their money. Founded in 2015, it originally started out in payments, expanded to deposit accounts and within its first year of trading, received its official banking license. The app now enables customers to have up to 25 accounts for a monthly fee, or one free transaction account; to save on plastic, cards have dual pins on a single card, with a different PIN linked to different accounts. Customers can split bills, request and make payments to friends instantaneously and create group accounts.
Gamification has increasingly found its place in modernising financial services. AdviceGames integrates gamification, machine learning and robo-advice to help prevent financial stress. Money is no longer a taboo subject, and companies like AdviceGames are helping remove the stigma associated with the stress and burden financial problems can cause. The Virtual Financial Assistants and Intelligent Agents are powered by scientific behavioral finance studies and customer analysis to get deep customer insight and predictive models to ensure that they can provide the best advice possible. The games are tailored to individuals constantly learning from their behaviour through personal motivations, financial rehaviour and risk index, for example.
Founded by Chris Zadeh in 2009, Ohpen provides a completely cloud-based banking platform based on Amazon Web Services (AWS). Its mission is to completely transform and liberate banks from the legacy systems that have failed them and their customers for so long. Instead, financial institutions will be based on a cloud-based administration factory freeing them from legacy, on-premises services. Ohpen provides core banking services to large scale clients in wealth management, retail banking and asset management across the Netherlands. Another successfully funded fintech company, it has a total €40m funding over two rounds.
The PHA Group’s Fintech team are looking forward to attending Money20/20 in Amsterdam from 4-5 June. Please get in touch if you would like to arrange a meeting to discuss your PR requirements.
