Holvi founder buys back his own FinTech
One of the founders is buying back Finnish business banking fintech Holvi, which reportedly has 90,000 customers in this country, from major Spanish bank BBVA. That’s according to an email customers received last week.
Literally, it states:
“We have exciting news about our company that we’d like to share with you. Today we announced that Holvi has changed to a new owner, Keru Fintech Investments Oy. The owner of Keru is Tuomas Toivonen, one of the founders of Holvi. The change has already been approved by the Finnish Financial Supervisory Authority (FIN-FSA).”
Holvi was founded in 2011 and acquired by BBVA in 2016. BBVA had made a number of investments in the fintech space in previous years, sometimes for a lot of money. In 2014, the company bought US banking app Simple for $117 million. This was followed in late 2015 by a $68 million investment in UK fintech Atom – for 29.5 percent.
Already on January 7, the following news made the rounds:
BBVA shut down Simple, the mobile and online banking app it acquired in 2014 for $117 million. The accounts will be moved to BBVA’s US business.
“We are focused on the things that make the most sense for the future of the company, whether on a standalone basis or a potentially combined basis with PNC,” BBVA said in a statement. “As a result, today we are accelerating some changes and stopping work on others, including the closure of Simple.”
What’s going on with the Spanish? Strategic realignment, in which direction?
What do Simple and Holvi have to do with each other?
And this is what the Payment & Banking Team says
André M. Bajorat
I think the whole thing is a focus on the core business. BBVA has been showing its focus on Spain and South America for some time. The USA – Simples home base – and Holvi – Northern and Central Europe – no longer seem to fit into the portfolio.
At the time of the acquisition of the two flagship fintechs, BBVA was in its transformation into a tech player. In such moments, acquisitions can be a super signal to generate more speed and a change in mind internally as well.
So it doesn’t seem far-fetched to me that the Moor has done his duty and there is no more room for this kind of “gimmick”. Why it didn’t make it into more than a gimmick is the other question. With Holvi I always had the feeling that there was no clear focus in the product, but that the variety was almost program. In a market that is more and more verticalized and specialized, probably not a suitable answer.
Jochen Siegert
BBVA had an early, good hand at the time with both Simple and Holvi. Simple was THE model for the many successful neobanks, but was recently closed after just over 6 years in the hands of BBVA. Holvi went to market with the SME banking value proposition, which was copied by many later but more successfully. I’m thinking Qonto from France, Kontist and Penta from Germany, or Revolut and N26 with KMU offers. We first had the former Holvi CEO on the podcast in April last year when he talked about Holvi’s expansion into the UK. While N26 was just pulling out, he and Holvi strongly believed in the potential of the UK market, only to sign off barely 6 months later.
Clearly, both ventures were early innovators and clear role models. Timing is everything, even in the FinTech segment, and perhaps both were simply out too early. Who knows how both models would have developed outside BBVA if the funding situation at the time had been comparable to that of today. Maybe BBVA has now profited enough from the know-how and technology transfer to the core business and can part with the “speed” boats, who knows. Holvi, once again led by its founder, can certainly develop independently in a different way to the BBVA group. But I’m not sure Holvi can catch up with the other SME fintechs in Europe now. I think they will remain a local player in Scandinavia.
Kilian Thalhammer
Kind of a shame, we always looked at BBVA in the old German way – they do it right, we do it wrong and thought we were being left behind. And now discontinued without a sound. One can speculate a lot, about lack of integration, about mindset, about technological hurdles, management changes, strategy changes or maybe they just “learned enough”? You can’t see much of Learning from the outside, I don’t like to judge it from the inside.
Why not “let” both run in parallel towards profitability? You don’t necessarily have to integrate, even a Comdirect ran stand alone very well. Does this mean that the model does not work in general, neither Holvi nor Simple? Would be too simple minded for me though.
Has the courage perhaps been lost? Did Holvi and Simple “just get on your nerves”? – Were they a drag? It’s not uncommon for such decisions to be made out of emotion…. I don’t know, but I continue to hope for the topic – and presumably Penta and Kontist now have an “old” competitor again.
Good luck to the Holvi “resellers” and have a good next trip – maybe it was just the wrong time