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Shreya Dhanasekaran · · 5 min readFintech builder shows why being profitable – and some gray hair – helps you snag big clients
“When all the founders can code, pitch, and sell their technology product, you don’t need any other resources,” Olivier Berthier, co-founder and CEO of Singapore-based fintech firm Moneythor, tells Tech in Asia.
Berthier, Stéphane Nouy, and Thibault Weintraub had known each other for about two decades when they started the company in 2013.
Origin stories
While working together as bankers in the late ’90s, the three founders noticed that banks didn’t use the internet to offer trade and supply chain solutions to their clients.
To solve this issue, they left their jobs and created NEOMAlogic, a web-based trade finance solutions firm. It was the only internet banking solution for the segment at the time.
NEOMAlogic was later acquired by Misys Banking Systems, a UK-based banking software vendor. The founders then worked at Misys for about six years, where they realized the issues banks faced in engaging their online customers.
Mobile and internet banking were already popular then but the bank’s services weren’t relevant or personalized. They also didn’t help digital customers monitor or improve their financial performance.
“It was a poor transactional relationship, almost like connecting to an Excel spreadsheet online. Boring internet banking,” Berthier recalls.
The founders wanted to use technology to help banks make their digital services engaging, not just aiming to ensure a customer’s loyalty and trust but also increasing the bank’s revenue.
To make this vision a reality, they left Misys and started Moneythor.
It took almost 10 months to build the core engine for the firm’s solutions and pitch them to potential banking clients.
Moneythor is now the rare startup that has been bootstrapped, debt-free, and profitable since its inception.
Moneythor co-founder and CEO Olivier Berthier / Photo credit: Moneythor
“I knew how to talk to bankers. We could deliver a convincing story. Nothing would have happened without knowing how to talk to them. We never would have been taken seriously,” Berthier says.
“And I have a gray beard,” he adds. “It’s a little bit of a gimmick. They see that, they know that I have seen problems and have experience. I have had a gray beard for the last 10 years.”
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Singapore-based Moneythor has been debt-free since its inception a decade ago. We look at how the founders did it.
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