After nine years of a dry spell in Poland’s finance sector, 2019 has brought three new institutions looking to enter the market, according to ThefirstNews.
First of them, Horum Bank is one of the new finance start-ups, led by the former head of Poland’s largest bank, PKO BP, Jacek Obłękowski. The company is looking to raise 500 million zlotys before beginning operations.
Obłękowski left PKO in 2016 with the idea of building a modern digital bank. Horum was officially registered this May. It doesn’t have a banking license in Poland but is looking to receive one in Lithuania. The company is still seeking financial backers but will start testing their platform by the end of the year and could launch commercial operations at the beginning of 2020.
Another finance institution in the pipeline, Golden Sand Bank, is a new pan-European private banking and wealth management company. Created by Sławomir Lachowski, the founder of mBank (now a branch of a German lender Commerzbank), the company received its registration in Gibraltar and is inviting visitors who visit its website to sign up for early access.
It is still not open to the public as it is completing its testing phase but is expected to launch in the second half of 2019. The all in one mobile app is built on technology from IBM.
The last one is a new financial services company which is being spearheaded by the ex-head of Alior Bank (now controlled by Poland’s No. 3 lender, Pekao SA), Wojciech Sobieraj. The new institution has been registered under the name Vodeno in April 2018. Yet, it is still unclear if that will be the name the company uses. The idea of the company will be to offer banking services – like IT and back office – to other banks across the EU.
These three banks will join a plethora of fintech start-ups operating from Poland or powered by Polish ingenuity. A Deloitte report in 2016 put the value of the Polish fintech market at EUR 856 million.
While there is no data on the value of the market in 2019, most major banks established on the Polish market have embraced fintech and artificial intelligence (AI) with projects such as PKO Bank Polski’s ‘Talk to IKO’, Robot Factory in Alior Bank and Santander Bank Polska announce that in Q2 2019 one and a half million mobile clients conducted 31.6 million transactions.
Banking 4.0 – „how was the experience for you”
„So many people are coming here to Bucharest, people that I see and interact on linkedin and now I get the change to meet them in person. It was like being to the Football World Cup but this was the World Cup on linkedin in payments and open banking.”
Many more interesting quotes in the video below:
