Trust and Scale – How these FinTech firms are globalizing fast

By James Radford, Product Manager Natterbox

Opening new markets in the financial sector whether they are geographic or demographic demands more than just product innovation.  Success requires building trust, the ability to scale and a healthy appetite to disrupt an established industry.  Today we will look at three local FinTech firms and how they achieved their success.

N26 is a fantastic new bank based out of Berlin. It is designed for the 21st century and optimized for the smartphone generation. N26 customers can complete their account signup, via the website, in just 8 minutes and access innovative personal banking features in security, transaction management and communications.

Funding Circle is at the forefront of the fast-growing Peer-Peer marketplace to bring together small businesses looking for loans with individuals and organizations who are looking for investment opportunities. In 6 short years, they have funded over £2.5 Billion in loans.

SumUp is the leading mobile point-of-sale (mPOS) company in Europe with 14 global sites including the UK, Germany, Russia and Brazil, allows merchants to accept credit and debit cards, using their smartphones or tablets. Started in 2012, SumUp was the first company in its industry sector to reach profitability.

Trust the Telephone in Order to Gain and Keep Trust

What each of these Fin Tech firms have in common are new and innovative products in the financial services sector which requires establishing a high level of trust that can only be achieved by speaking to customers.

“For our business to work we have to establish trust with our customers and for us this can only be done on the phone.”  Said Alex Weber Head of International Markets @ N26

Paul Ebert, Global Head of Sales Funding Circle echoed this sentiment “Personal contact over the phone is key to success for building the relationship with small businesses.”

The other thing these firms have on common is their adoption of Salesforce the customer success platform.

For firms like SumUp who were planning rapid expansion from two countries to multiple countries within six months, telecoms presented an additional complication. SumUp not only wanted to rapidly deploy a globally unified telecoms solution to these offices but they also had a core requirement to automate logging of all calls into their CRM. Via Salesforce, SumUp needed to tack all of their call statistics and decide, based on the location of the contact, what language the call should be answered in. These are just some of the tools that SumUp have used to provide an industry-leading customer experience on the phone that is reproducible and homogeneous across every country they operate in.

Scalable Personal Customer Service

Natterbox provides a Global Telephony Service integrated into Salesforce solves scalability challenges.

“Natterbox implemented the solution across all offices in a matter of days and have provided reliable support throughout the whole process.”  Martin Blenke Head of CRM Infrastructure at SumUp.

Achieving scale and efficiency does not have to be at the expense of customer experience either.

“As we further expand internationally the scalability, routing, language support and call cost management of the Natterbox cloud service will ensure that we will maintain our incredible customer experience and run our business effectively.” Weber

Funding Circle saw an increase of 50% in agent productivity. “Both our business and the customer experience has improved since we deployed Natterbox”.  Ebert

Martin Blenke SumUp “Natterbox increased our agent’s productivity by 33%. The implementation easy and came along with a lot of advantages: call routing, click-to-dial, different outbound numbers, wrapup codes, tracking & reporting. We are using it in several countries, and it is easy to manage even from a distance.

Details about how these companies employed Natterbox technology

• N26 Case Study

Photo Credit: Cafe Credit via Flickr, under the Creative Commons License