Ep. 125 - From POC to Partnership: How Banks and Fintechs Actually Work Together

Jasmine Chana (0:05)

Welcome back, I'm Jasmine Chana from The Payments Shed live from Fintech Meetup Europe. And today I'm joined by Laurens Hamerlinck, Head of Fintech Venturing at ABN Amro.

Laurens, welcome. It would be great if you could start by telling us a bit about yourself and ABN Amro.

Laurens Hamerlinck (0:19)

Pleasure to be here. Thank you for having me.

Yeah, indeed. I work for ABN Amro Bank with the Innovation Team, heading the Fintech practice. I'm not an investor, but we work with two investment firms. So we work with Motive Partners, they have international Fintech investor. So we're an LP in a couple of their funds, and they still run the old CBC of ABN Amro. And we also work with Techstars. We have an annual Fintech Accelerator in Amsterdam since 2021

Currently hosting its six cohorts, and each year we invest in eight to 10 Fintech companies. And outside of that, my team is really immersing itself in the Fintech ecosystem to find new partners for the bank to innovate and transform. Can be both like startups early stage, if super early stage, we bring them to the accelerator, ideally, but also scale ups, and then we actively bring those in contact with the bank, and then we leverage the capabilities of the innovation team to test, to run pilots, to gather the proof, and then hand it over to the business and scale.

Jasmine Chana (1:27)

Amazing. And you've been at the heart of Abn Amro's Fintech engagement, including the Techstars Accelerator. So you've seen this from every angle. Why and how does a bank like Abn Amro engage with the Fintech ecosystem?

Laurens Hamerlinck (1:39)

Yeah, that's a good question, and I get the question a lot. I think there is, at the moment, there's so much technology being developed. I remember 10 years back, I think Fred Wilson called it the unbundling of Fintech, where technology firms started to build niche capabilities and started competing with banks on that. And I think now we're in the age where we acknowledged that that is the case, that there is companies out there that do stuff amazingly well, amazingly efficient, and that's what we want to work with.

So, we're very conscious in making a buy versus build decision, and we just want to work with the best. And where it makes sense, we will still develop our own technology, of course. But I think there's so much great stuff out there that we can learn from and that we can implement, and that's why we do it.

Jasmine Chana (2:34)

For sure. And having run Techstars Accelerators, what surprised you most about the founders?

Laurens Hamerlinck (2:41)

Founders, I'm still surprised by their execution power. I think, and this is also what many people often underestimate.

If you are a startup, of course, you're out there, you're looking for customers, and that is often the challenge of it. But you're also out there, you're not in a large institution, you're with a small team, very talented people, and they just have amazing, amazing speed, which many of us are still surprised by sometimes.

Jasmine Chana (3:12)

Yeah, and I think we can agree sometimes it's hard for startups or scalots to get a bank's attention. How do you think that they can actually do that successfully?

Laurens Hamerlinck (3:23)

Yeah, so I would say a couple of things, like one is sometimes founders come a bit unprepared, right? And I get why, because they're so focused on their product, and they're eager to pitch it, but I think to get the attention of a bank, it really makes sense to also read up on who you're dealing with, right? So in our case, like who is Abn Amro? There's an annual report out there, it says a lot about the strategy of the bank, the context, who we are, et cetera. Just run it through cloth and prepare yourself. I think that's one.

Secondly, I think if you really want the bank's attention, like come in with something that really blows people away, that's where you really show that you understand the problem that the bank has and how your product or your solution is going to 10x solve it, right? And because I always tell founders like, if you come in, let's say you're building a new mainframe and you're maybe five, 10% better than IBM, a bank is never going to move to your product because it's just too much risk, it's not enough of a change. But if you come in and say like, oh, this is really 10x more efficient, more this and that, it's like, oh, this is actually quite interesting. But in order to do that, you need to read up, you need to understand who your customer is before you can actually deliver that promise or put that promise in front of the right people.