“The team dreams of neo banking 364 days a year”

Anish Achuthan, Co-Founder & CEO, Open Bank and I were introduced very early on – just after their angel funding from Ex Co-founders of Citruspay – where we enjoyed a great collaborative relationship with the founders. Team Open was still very early in their thought process of how they were going to go to market, what an India neo bank for SMEs would have to look like to address the needs of Indian consumers and lastly the industry overall was in its infancy. I decided to wait and study the timing of the segment more in India.

Fast forward two years, another existing investor in Open Bank bubbled them up again as they had changed their go-to-market strategy and jumped from a linear to exponential growth path. We got lucky to reconnect with Anish and the team at the right time. It helped that I had passed the seed round of number26, a German neo bank original, 7 years prior which had left a scar in my memory and drove me to learn everything about the segment globally.

Over time, Open Bank has become Asia’s first and leading neo-banking platform for SMEs and start-ups. It boasts over half a million users. With automated accounting as the core focus, they’ve become the backbone for SMEs in India and abroad.

For us, it is key to have a transparent and open relationship with all our founders. Our journey with Open Bank has been a coming together of fintech experts and enthusiasts enabling founders to translate their vision to reality.  As we like to say at BEENEXT – Luck is when preparation meets opportunity. We are deep believers in serendipity!