Table of Content
INTERVIEWS
Focused on Delivering Quality: Interview with Alexander Balzer, CEO Atfinity
How can financial institutions become faster and more scalable in a way they don’t compromise their compliance and skimp on the quality of their service? This question brought Alexander Balzer to thinking about an industry solution that would bridge the gap between great customer experience and efficient management of customer relationships.
Having extensive experience in the finance world, Alexander learned first-row how cumbersome, expensive and inefficient banking processes can often be. After several years of working for banks — and studying entrepreneurship — he focused on starting a company that would offer a necessary ingredient for financial organisations to scale up and delight their customers. That is how Atfinity was created.
What do clients value the most about Atfinity's platform?
Talking to clients, I often hear that they have very complex requirements and special client types. But Atfinity is very flexible in adapting to our clients’ requirements: how the process looks, how the approvals should work, and how they want to interact with their customers. This is what clients – particularly traditional private banks and wealth managers – value a lot and love about Atfinity.
And if we switch the perspective to neobanks and fintechs, for them it’s about being extremely fast in rolling out a solution. That’s also something we successfully do — we give our clients the tools so that they can adapt their processes quickly. We can either train them to do this themselves or to have the right support model (that will help them when they’re ready to make changes).
How does Atfinity's solution differ from other available solutions?
Onboarding is a critical process for all of our clients, and they want to make it as efficient as possible. Many organisations only have bits and pieces, and not a real end-to-end journey. Our solution, however, includes everything: asking all the relevant questions, collecting all the documents to substantiate the case, and connecting to third-party background checks and data providers to enrich the case with necessary information.
We are a comprehensive solution. Once a client decides to buy Atfinity, they won’t need a separate document management system, task management system, case management system, or a separate rule engine. We give our clients all of this out of the box. Our platform is an all-in-one, feature-rich suite that enables our clients to quickly set up and be up and running in a very short period of time.
Why is Atfinity so fast to set up?
Our platform is a no-code platform, which means that everything can be configured without the need to write code. And that’s particularly relevant for organisations that have specific requirements; they can make a configuration according to their needs.
Next to that, we found a way to extract the business rules from our clients in a very easy way. We started our journey as an innovation provider for Credit Suisse. I believe they summed up their problem like this: “We have two thousand forms and we need to have the optimal journey to collect the right questions and to find out which forms are used. We wanted to build the decision tree bottom up, and realised that’s not possible.”
It took us a while to detangle this, but it boils down to the fact that, for something that large, you can never hope to draw a perfect decision tree. Which means you cannot just give it to an engineering team and turn it into software.
Thorben Croisé and I discussed this extensively, and we had a revelatory idea: Wait a second, isn’t it much easier to answer what you need to have at the end of a process? Because our clients often knew exactly what they wanted to achieve, but just didn’t know how. So, once we understood what the main problem was, it became almost easy to fix. This is why we have created our AI-inspired rule engine: From the rules (forms, documents, checklists, etc.) we extract how the process should look like.
This is how we carry out each project. Once we have the necessary information from an organisation (in terms of their exact requirement and questions they want answered), we configure a prototype for them. This prototype is tangible and a client can play around with it digitally. And the set-up efforts are extremely low, because we use what clients’ current rulebooks already say. On average, a client can have a new regulatory environment updated – and all the processes set up – in a matter of days.
What do you like the most about Atfinity as a company?
There are two things I would need to mention here, as it’s my firm belief that they are both essential to our success. Without any of them, Atfinity wouldn’t be what it is today.
First of all, we offer something truly unique, that’s different from other solutions in the market. It’s a solution whose goal is not just to be another product in the “sea” of fintech platforms, but to substantially elevate fintech on a global level and enable our clients to improve their business. It is exciting, inspiring and truly rewarding to be part of such a story.
We know how frustrating, long and complex it often is to orchestrate and automate financial processes, and we wanted to change that. Not only do we want to help our clients, but also to completely change the way automation is done, for the better. For example, I worked in banking (at Credit Suisse, Kaiser Partner and HSBC) and I have direct, real-life experience of the struggles in the industry. I understand how organisations think and what their clients demand.
But I definitely wouldn’t be able to do anything by myself – which brings me to the second thing I cherish about Atfinity. It’s the people I share the journey with.
Our leadership team consists of great individuals who have exceptional skill sets. Tijana Živić, our Head of Engineering, Thorben Croisé – our CTO, and Raphael Wullschleger – our COO, are people who elevated Atfinity to a whole new level. They are fantastic professionals, but also fantastic colleagues and people. I feel so lucky for sharing the journey with them. Their experience and expertise are invaluable assets. But that’s not all.
We are also extremely lucky to have a team of amazing people in product development, client delivery and business development. Each of our team members brings forth their best self and does an amazing job in turning our vision into reality.
In the past few months, we welcomed several new people on board – across all departments – and it’s so gratifying to see that. Because if our goal is to delight our clients, we first need to nurture a great team. And Atfinity really has a great team! I’m certain that we wouldn’t achieve half of our results without amazing people on board.
What advice do you have for companies looking for KYC/onboarding software?
Business requirements and regulations can often change. That is why it is essential to have a software solution that makes adjusting to these frequent changes — fast, affordable and easy. If you are stuck with a cumbersome system that’s not flexible enough, it will be extremely difficult to make changes cost-effectively. And it will most likely prove to be expensive, time-consuming and stressful for the employees and clients alike.
The software solution you pick should be highly adaptable, fast to deliver an initial setup — and simple to use. Our platform offers all of this, and we are happy to discuss how Atfinity can simplify and facilitate your automation. If your goal is to be at the forefront of global business and keep or improve your position in the market, automation should definitely be among your top priorities.
The future belongs to organisations that can promptly adapt to new circumstances and make changes quickly and easily. That is how you will lay the foundation for long-term success. And platforms such as ours can help you achieve that.
Book your demo today and see why leading financial institutions
worldwide trust Atfinity to drive their digital transformation.
Book your demo today and see why leading financial institutions worldwide trust Atfinity to drive their digital transformation.