The CEO and co-founder of a new Danish investment app has likened the dynamic between his Y-Combinator-backed Pluto.markets and fellow Danish fintech Lunar to that of German trading app Trade Republic and German neobank N26.
Joakim Bruchmann, CEO & co-founder, Pluto.markets, was speaking on the Tech.eu podcast along with Ken Villum Klausen, the founder and CEO of Danish challenger bank Lunar.
The two executives discussed Denmark as a startup ecosystem, some of the country's virtues and the challenges of being headquartered in a country with a population of just under six million.
Lunar has over 950,000 banking customers across the Nordics and was last valued at around $2.2 billion.
Pluto.markets was founded in 2021 by Bruchmann, a former base metals trader at Goldman Sachs and Oscar Vingtoft, a software engineer.
Earlier this year, the Y-Combiantor-backed Pluto.markets raised $2.6 million in a funding round.
Pluto.markets is looking to disrupt the brokerage market in the Nordics and other markets but will have some way to go to match the success of Trade Republic.
Asked whether the success of Lunar -and other Danish trailblazers like Pleo- had inspired Pluto.markets, Bruchmann said:
“We see the Pluto, Lunar dynamic being a little bit like N26 and Trade Republic in Germany, we think there is room for both.
“We do have slight overlaps, but by and large we are going after a different vertical."
Questioned on given Denmark’s relatively small size, whether Danish fintech’s have to be built with global success in mind, the Lunar CEO said it depended on the particular vertical.
The Lunar CEO said:
"Take banking as an industry, which is the vertical we are operating in. The Nordic region is one of the most profitable banking regions on the planet, with less competition.
"The infrastructure is almost a monopoly, so if you are able to open that and push through you can build a significantly sized business.”
Bruchmann said:
“The playbook with building a fintech product for the entire world doesn’t really hold anymore, like very few people have managed to pull it off, so I am a big believer in localisation if you want to capture significant wallet.”
The executives also discussed Denmark’s different working hours to other European countries.
Bruchmann said:
“One of the big lessons I have had to learn as a leader is also to understand that people don’t put in the hours that I do, or that I used to do as a banker. But what I would say is good about the work ethic here is that people do more real work and less pseudo work."
Would you like to write the first comment?
Login to post comments