COMMENTARY: PARTNERSHIPS Partnerships have come to define neobanks. But how do you ensure it’s a happy marriage? We asked Norris Koppel, Founder & CEO of Monese, and Ray Brash, CEO of its supplier PPS In the banking space, real innovation doesn’t just improve the technology; it fundamentally rethinks the model in order to build something completely new.
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ThePaytechMagazine | Issue 7
In many cases, that means decoupling from the infrastructure that legacy banks thought it was essential to own and control, but which, when regulation bust open the data vault, proved to be a prison. Even though technology had handed banks the key to the cells, the monkey-in-a-cage mindset made it difficult sometimes for those banks to walk out and start a new life. But fintechs were born into a global village, an extended family of solutions providers, all coming together to build and maintain the proposition of a neobank. Such fraternity and ‘openness’ brings with it risks, too, of course. The most recent example of how things can go spectacularly wrong when you rely on a strategically important partner that then lets you down, was the Wirecard collapse of 2020. It doesn’t appear to have been a reset moment, though. Rather, it served to demonstrate how critical partnership working and the ‘as-a-service’ model has become, and how the challengers’ approach to it must be mature to protect both them and their customers. Norris Koppel, founder of challenger banking app Monese, says that, if anything, fintechs are being compelled to seek out these more strategic, long-term relationships at unprecedented rates. “There is less now of the quick and dirty kind of partnering,” says Koppel, for whom partnerships were fundamental in getting Monese off the ground in 2015. Looking back, he admits that, during its early years, Monese chose partner companies that ‘roughly ticked a box’, and that Monese could ‘actually afford’. But it’s www.fintechf.com