At the hybrid conference “FinTech 2021 – The Future of Embedded Finance” by Finanz und Wirtschaft, Rico Blaser, CEO of vestr, discussed the factors of successful corporate-startup collaboration.

In front of an exclusive audience in Rueschlikon (and online), a panel of financial experts discussed successful corporate-startup collaboration.

The panel comprised experts from a financial institution, a FinTech Venture Capital firm and accelerator, as well as a startup:

• Ludwig Ressner, Chief of Staff to the COO and Head Intermediaries at Bank Julius Baer,
• Senad Celebic, Executive Director at Bank Julius Baer
• Rico Blaser, Co-Founder and CEO at vestr
• Andreas Iten, Managing Director at SIX FinTech Ventures and Co-Founder at F10 FinTech Incubator & Accelerator

During the panel, the experts shared with moderator Lukas Ninck key insights about collaboration between startups and corporate partners.

Both Ludwig Ressner and Senad Celebic emphasised the importance of management commitment when entering a partnership with an early-stage startup like vestr. A clear innovation roadmap and vision for the growing sector (of active management) are of equal importance to committing financial and human resources to a long-term project with an external technology provider.

Rico Blaser highlighted that Julius Baer was a strong partner for vestr from day 1. “We shared the fundamental belief in a growing active management space and its need to be digitised.”

The private bank is one of the most successful players in issuing Actively Managed Certificates (AMCs). Therefore, synthesising this domain expertise on a technology platform was a natural move for Julius Baer.

vestr was chosen as one of the 15 Startups within the F10 Incubator Program Batch II in Zurich back in 2017. Andreas Iten and his team provided a neutral ground at the Incubator for initial discussions between vestr and Julius Baer.

In short, we identified 3 crucial factors that enable a successful partnership between a financial institution and a startup:

1. Julius Baer was already successfully issuing AMCs, vestr then enabled the digitisation of this process,
2. We share the fundamental belief in the growth of active management and its need for digitalisation,
3. The management of  Julius Baer conveyed profound commitment to our partnership at eye level; they stayed fully involved in the process, committed financial and human resources in addition to providing relevant domain inputs.

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Stay tuned for more updates about the collaboration between Bank Julius Baer and vestr – we have more exciting projects in store! In the meantime, feel free to reach out for any additional information about vestr and our end-to-end web-based platform. Get in touch and schedule a call here.

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