While doing research and interviewing founders, co-founders and investors in Internet, high-tech and non-high tech start-ups and scale-ups for my new book in Dutch (see here) on start-ups and scale-ups, I realized that there were a lot of similarities between the first and the second Internet-bubble we seem to be experiencing now. One of the most interesting things is that start-ups and scale-ups seem to be ‘crashing’ for the same reasons for the last 25 years! From 1997 to 2001, I was working for ABN Amro Corporate IT Strategy and we were designing the new Internet-strategy for the Group. At the same time, all requests for funding (corporate venturing) and financing of Internet and other high tech ventures came to the Head Office to be reviewed. So we spoke with many large and small customers globally about their business plans and strategies. Continue reading…

Since Deloitte published the report on RegTech is the New FinTech, a lot of people have discovered the fact that large Banks and other Financial Institutions are spending a HUGE amount of money on Compliance and not to forget fines for not being compliant. Although it is true that there is a lot of new regulation coming towards the Financial Services Industry, that is not the reason why they spend so much money on Compliance.

Why do large banks spend so much money on Compliance and KYC ? The main reasons why large Financial Institutions are paying so much money on Compliance have nothing to do with the Regulators. Why ? Continue reading…

Recently  I was coaching and judging a number of local startups in my hometown, The Hague, in The Netherlands. The interesting fact is that many of those different entrepreneurs have a number of things in common and one of them is that they focus way too much on financing their company, their working capital and their investments and not enough on their customers and how to differentiate themselves from others. And the other thing that many of them have in common, large or small, is that they are asking for way too much money! Their financing needs are way to high. And that is a pity. So here are seven ways to reduce your financing needs as a start-up, inside or outside Fintech. 

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Last week, the European Fintech Awards were won by a number of companies from across Europe. The interesting thing was however that the number of Fintech-companies with real innovative (digital) business models and digital revenue models still seems to be rather limited. Continue reading…

Recently I was giving some workshops to students at the University of Groningen (The Netherlands) on ‘How to create your own startup as ‘plan b”. One assignment from the ‘5-step Startup Blueprint’ we use was about the earnings models/digital revenue models and business models of companies like Netflix, Uber and Airbnb. After the students had looked at these companies, they saw a number of interesting characteristics. Continue reading…

The period we are living in is more or less similar to the period between 1997-2002 when a number of experts at a number of large Financial Institutions and other specialists were looking at proposals of all kinds of .com start-ups. I would like to share with you some practical lessons learned from that period and from current experiences .

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