The traditional user still looks for a bank near home when it comes to depositing the life savings because he doesn’t trust online fintech but the fintech industry has reached more safe capital requirements than offline banking. For example, the largest Italian bank, San Paolo Intesa, has a market capitalization of Euro 29 billion meanwhile the fintech Revolut has one of the euros 33 billion. Just to mention that Revolut was founded only seven years ago by a 25-year-old student.
Which changes are happening in the finance market and how the end-user can benefit from them? We ask that of Mr. Aleo Christopher, CEO and founder of iSwiss, a Swiss deposit company.
Aleo, at 36, was born in Switzerland and has worked as a manager in London and Bulgarian financial companies, before founding the Lugano-based iSwiss, a deposit company active in the Fintech and DeFi sector. iSwiss, says Aleo, was born from the idea of making the banking sector easy, cheap, popular, and combined with the reliability of a solid Swiss company. Opening a current account must be simple and immediate and the relationship with the customer must be personalized. One of the flaws of fintech – continues Aleo – is the excessive depersonalization of online services. The customer may find his account blocked because the algorithms have deemed the operation performed “suspicious”, and then is directed to talk to automatic bots. Talking to human beings in fintech is a mirage and represents the biggest limitation compared to the traditional banking system. iSwiss is all about human relationships and therefore, as I like to call it, a human financial technology.
How are cryptocurrencies impacting the financial sector?
We live in a historical moment of changing – says Aleo – in which a perfect storm, the merge of fintech and cryptocurrencies – is changing the financial system before our eyes, shaping it for the next half-century.
Just think that the banks, to make international transfers, still use the RING system designed in 1970 and that Visa and Mastercard apply profit margins of 80% on each commission. The position rents are finished but the traditional financial system is struggling to notice it, it does business as usual. The alternative they are trying is to demonize cryptocurrencies by fearing money laundering risks without saying that the most used currency by criminals is the US dollar.
And so, even now, Visa and Mastercard, continue to apply an 80% margin on each commission while the banks continue to close on Friday afternoon, blocking every financial transaction until the following Monday and pretending that it is normal to wait until five days for an international bank transfer.
Cryptocurrencies represent the main challenge to the traditional banking system. An independent, immediate, irrevocable, and low-cost system of financial transactions means pushing traditional transaction systems to change as well.
How does iSwiss change transactions?
iSwiss is among the first fintech to integrate euro and Swiss franc portfolios with cryptocurrencies. In partnership with ShareCoin, an exchange, we have developed a system of free and immediate transactions in cryptocurrencies which, in this way, can be used, among our customers, also as a form of payment. On the other hand – continues Aleo – we offer our customers credit cards with which they can pay in cryptocurrency. We are also working to develop specific services for merchants.
The world is changing, financial services need to keep up too. iSwiss is a key player in the change in Swiss financial services because changes, according to Aleo, must always be in favor of the users.
