NewTech Friday: Finqware – Reducing banks’ operational costs

What led to the creation of Finqware?
 
Finqware is a Romanian start-up specialized in integration and open banking applications, founded in 2018 by three Romanian entrepreneurs, Dumitru Ţârâianu, Dănuţ Covălciuc and myself.

I started to work in the financial and banking sector in 2005 when I opened a franchise of one of the local banks. I'm not basically a banker or an economist, I graduated from the Faculty of Philosophy, and as a philosopher you think a lot about the things around you. And one of my observations was that, in banking, you're walking around with papers unnecessarily. At a bank branch, people carry or take papers. Ever since then, I was thinking that the time will come when you will not have to do this.

In 2017, after a period in which I worked in several banks, I learned of the European initiative on open banking, through which users can manage all their bank accounts in a single application. That's how Finqware came about.

Could you present Finqware's offer?

Nowadays, so many people interact with banks based on their profession. Daily, millions of accountants, treasurers, reporting experts, and other finance professionals across the EU struggle to get their companies’ bank statements, match and process dozens of data formats, download and upload files. This is not only cumbersome in terms of the amount of manual workload invested in such accessing and processing of data files, but also poses great risks of mistakes and fraud.

Let’s take for example the challenges of an accountant working for a company that has relationships with about 10 different banks. Every morning, they will open 10 different banking apps, log in, check the closing and the opening balances in 10 different ways, match it against their cash ledger accounts in the ERP or accounting system, download the statements and upload them in those systems. If they also need to provide a cash report to their CFO, they will need to put together all those balances, by bank, entity, currency, and destination of bank account. That will most probably happen in an excel file, through repetitive copy and paste operations. Throughout the rest of the day, they will probably need to log into the 10 different banking apps a number of times in order to check incoming or outgoing payments for colleagues in the supply chain, ordering or collection activities. In those days in which they need to execute payments to suppliers or partners, they will generate and export payment files from the supply chain systems, make sure they are in the appropriate format for the bank through which they need to execute those payments, import the list in the banking application and only afterwards start the sign-off flow.

This is a full-time job consisting almost entirely of manual, repetitive tasks of checking, matching and organizing files and data formats, subject to mistakes. Open banking and open finance should be able to make all that workload utterly invisible, through API technology.

Finqware is simply providing a solution for automating and embedding all these manual tasks into the corporate systems for treasury, accounting, collection, and supply chain that the company is already using. The solution is based on open banking APIs for pulling and pushing data from and to banks, in near-real time, with many layers of data quality improvements and security on top.