Embedded Finance Review Podcast, episode 3. Published 2 July 2024. Guest: Iven Kurz, founder of Evergreen. Host: Lars Markull.
Lars Markull: Welcome to the Embedded Finance Review Podcast. I'm your host, Lars Markull. In this episode I'm speaking with Iven Kurz from Evergreen. Evergreen started with a direct-to-consumer sustainable investment product offering, but in recent years Evergreen partnered with various German fintech startups and is offering the investment product as a service. Most recently, Iven and his team have been talking to various non-financial companies, including utility providers, supermarket chains and travel companies.
In this edition I speak with Iven about why a consumer would want to invest with a non-financial brand, the difference between embedded trading and embedded investment, and what non-financial brands have to achieve in order to succeed with embedded investment. Let's dive in.
From asset manager to platform
Lars Markull: Hi Iven, welcome to the podcast. How are you doing today?
Iven Kurz: Pretty good. How are you?
Lars Markull: I'm good, thank you. It's great to have you on the show. You're the founder of Evergreen, and Evergreen started as a direct-to-consumer business. So when you initially started, you provided investment products to end consumers. In the past years, though, we have seen that Evergreen partnered more and more with, firstly, fintech startups, and now you're also targeting non-financial brands. Before we're going to talk more about the non-financial brands, I'm quite keen to understand, was there a strategic shift for you, changing from just purely focusing on consumers to also partnering with fintech companies? How did that happen?
Iven Kurz: Yeah, kind of. I guess you could say that. We actually started as an asset management company with an own distribution channel via our Evergreen platform. So we're actually an asset manager. That means we manage funds, mutual funds in the sustainable space. We have five mutual funds managed for Evergreen and also for other companies.
And then we created this platform to more or less distribute our asset management products. And the idea was, why not just distribute our asset management products, but also the platform that is using our products? And this is how we came from B2C to provide now kind of the whole wealth management supply chain, from providing a licence, infrastructure, and investment products as well.