Embedded Finance Review Podcast, episode 6. Published 13 August 2024. Guest: Borut Hrobat, co-founder and CEO of Finmesh. Host: Lars Markull.
Lars Markull: Welcome to the Embedded Finance Review Podcast. My name is Lars Markull. In this episode I'm speaking with Borut Hrobat. Borut is the co-founder and CEO of Finmesh. Borut has plenty of experience with retail companies building and launching financial products. Last week Swiss retail giant Coop announced they are shutting down their banking product, only nine months after the launch. I'm speaking with Borut about what has likely caused Coop's decision, and what other retailers can do better to succeed in embedded finance.
Welcome
Lars Markull: Hi Borut, welcome to the podcast. How are you doing today, and in what part of the world are you in right now?
Borut Hrobat: I'm sitting in Slovenia, to survive the heat, but working the whole summer. I prefer actually to work during the summer, because you have access to all the people you want to meet. I mean, they go for the vacation for like two, three weeks, but a month and a half they are sort of idling, because nothing serious is going on in different companies.
Lars Markull: That's a great strategy. Borut, it's nice to have you on the show. Both of us have been chatting over the last year or so about a few different topics. I have you saved in my own contact book as one of the experts for embedded finance topics when it comes to retailers. That's why I invited you to join me for a bit of a chat, because last week we had a bigger announcement in the world of embedded finance, specifically from the retail company side.
The Swiss retailer Coop announced that they are pulling the plug on their own banking product offering, which they had just launched nine months ago. So we're going to look a little bit into what we know around Coop's product and the decision to stop it, but we will also talk a lot about the opportunities for retailers within embedded finance.
But perhaps before kicking off and talking about Coop and retailers in general, maybe you can give us a quick intro about yourself, and focus specifically on your experience at the intersection of retailers and embedded finance, because I think that's quite interesting for everything that will follow.
Borut's background
Borut Hrobat: To basically start with this, I'm sort of a non-financial guy from the scratch. I'm an IT guy, working in systems integration for the last almost 30 years now. And what my mission is, is that I'm trying to solve the problems of my customers, either on the system integration side or on the other side. So understanding, listening to the customers, and also having a slightly different view than the financial guys, it helps me quite a lot.