Embedded Finance Review Podcast, episode 20. Published 6 March 2025. Guest: Enrique Sánchez, managing director of IESA, part of Aareon Group. Host: Lars Markull.
Lars Markull: A good embedded finance product can provide various benefits to the users. Often one of them is better access to financial products. In today's episode I'm speaking with a Spanish company that makes it easier for property managers to run the financial activities for their clients. This customer group has been mostly ignored by traditional banks, and there were no tailored products available.
Meet Enrique Sánchez, who is the managing director of IESA, which is part of Aareon Group. IESA offers an ERP software for property managers and launched its own banking product last year. I'm speaking with Enrique about why they decided to offer financial products, what the benefits for the customers are, and what they've learned since the launch.
Welcome to the Embedded Finance Review Podcast. My name is Lars Markull. Every two weeks I'm interviewing the builders and shapers of embedded finance.
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Welcome
Lars Markull: Hi Enrique. How are you doing today? Welcome to the podcast. And in what part of the world are you actually located right now?
Enrique Sánchez: Hi Lars. Thank you for having me here today. Right now I am in Madrid at IESA facilities. I am in my office. Madrid is home for me.
Lars Markull: Nice. I mean, I'm based in Berlin, as many of my listeners know. Actually the sun is shining right now, but otherwise I still see a lot of snow. I guess always when I talk to people in the more south I get a little bit envious about the weather. I guess this is the same today as well.
Enrique Sánchez: Yeah, today it's cloudy here as well. Although we have had three days in a row very, very sunny and very, very nice days, but today it's cloudy here.
What IESA does
Lars Markull: Great. Let's dive in. Obviously in this podcast I speak with a lot of different companies from around the world who build embedded finance products. I'm typically most excited about companies like yours, those companies who are not fintechs, who are not banks, but they develop and offer financial products. And obviously from my side, or from the embedded finance industry, there's a lot of interest to understand better what kind of financial products.
But before looking into detail on the financial products, I'm actually first quite keen to understand a little bit the companies behind there. We spoke about this in the pre-chat as well. There is TucoBan, there's IESA, there's Aareon, different companies in the background. It would be great, I think for me but also for the listeners, Enrique, if you can describe a little bit these different kinds of companies and what their core business is, before we dive into the financial product offering.
Enrique Sánchez: Yeah, absolutely. Well, it's a software company that was set up 40 years ago. Actually it's our 40th anniversary this year. And we develop an ERP specially customised for property administrators. And we have also a portal, which is kind of a meeting point for property administrators, homeowners associations, owners, tenants and contractors around the building.
We started as a software company, of course, but along these years we have developed some business layers. Now we could say that we have like a fintech business layer on top of that, also a legal tech layer. In some aspects we are kind of a marketplace as well. We finally provide products and services for PAs, for homeowners associations, and contractors and owners and tenants around the building. And Aareon is the absolute leader in real estate software solutions in Europe, without a doubt.