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Pastures new Rabobank is ploughing its own fintech furrow and playing to its core strengths with the launch of Rabo Frontier Ventures. Harrie Vollard discusses innovation in finance and agrifood
Rabobank was founded by Dutch farmers and horticulturists in the late nineteenth century. Those whisker-muzzled entrepreneurs wouldn’t recognise much of the bank today, but it’s stayed true to its roots – and is now fertilising them through the appliance of fintech science. Earlier this year it launched Rabo Frontier Ventures (RFV), a €60million investment fund focussed specifically on fintech and agrifood startups and scaleups that harness data to improve business performance. It’s the bank’s way of putting a metaphorical stake in the ground. “Customers want services rather than products,” says Harry Vollard, who heads up the fund. “And these services must be directly related to their needs. So, the challenge is to transform ourselves from
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a product-oriented company into a service-oriented company. Beyond that, we must differentiate the service and I think this is the case in the crossover between financial services and food and agriculture.” With a €92.3billion agrifood loan portfolio and supporting 85 per cent of Dutch farmers – some of the most advanced and productive in the world – Rabobank is the global leader in food and agriculture financing. It is also a cooperative, which, says Vollard, gives it another key strength and competitive advantage, the cooperative ethic complementing the Netherlands’ startup and incubator culture. Cooperation is also a strategy for countering the threat from tech giants such as Alibaba, Tencents, Amazon and Facebook, which appear intent on a landgrab from traditional regulated institutions. Rabo Frontier Ventures’ aim is to help
internal and external fintech, and food and agri ventures, to grow their businesses through investment and non-financial support, such as access to Rabobank’s customers, knowledge and global network. The main focus areas are ‘financial cruise control’, platform banking, emerging technologies and Data4Food. The last is fertile territory for the bank. The Netherlands is a frontrunner in the global food and agri sector – Wageningen University & Research, one of the world’s leading agrifood research institutions, is based there – but promising startups are often insufficiently visible to investors. Worldwide, agritech startups raised $10.1billion in 2017, a 29 per cent year-on-year increase. But it’s still not enough if we are to meet a 60 per cent increase in demand for food by 2050. Vollard says that agriculture is often www.fintech.finance