Olga Gavrina from Fincoro, winner of the Open Banking Hackathon - CEE Edition 2022, shares what this means to the company
Open Banking Hackathon took place at the end of September 2022 and brought together forces in Central and Eastern Europe's financial industry ecosystem to discuss and find solutions as we are moving forwards to the PSD3 on the table of the European Commission.
More than 45 fintechs from across Europe have registered to join this year’s 4th edition of Open Banking Hackathon - CEE Edition 2022. After careful consideration, 15 teams from Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Romania, Ukraine, Croatia, Greece, and Spain have been selected to move forward with the competition that started on 26 September and lasted until 30 September 2022.
Today we speak with the winner of the hackathon, Fincoro from Ukraine, a project that is developing an independent claim management system that connects all participants in one flow.
Why did we start FINCORO? The founders of the company have worked in enormous corporations for many years and have seen the problems of clients with resolving their claims, which arise every day. We thought that it was better to automate these time-consuming and repetitive tasks while providing the best support to customers. And we founded a company that could provide CORE solutions for companies in the fintech market.
Today Fincoro provides claim management solutions for payment providers and merchants. Our platforms help businesses to control and automate the investigation and processing of customers’ claims. It allows mediating the dispute with cardholders and merchants within a single platform, reducing the number of complaints through the payment systems and drastically optimising the workload.
Any new startup or fintech project in the CEE region (and in the whole of Europe) will process their payments by applying for partnerships with dinosaurs in the market - payment providers, processing centres, and banks - large, structured companies. Any change can last for months or even years in such institutions. As a result, it is often cheaper to provide such companies with an outsourcing service or integrate SaaS solutions than to develop an in-house solution.
On another side, the consumer market changes every minute. We are shifting online, using our smartphones for any action or occasion, and we do expect to receive the services in seconds. Our banks provided us the seamless payments for any products or services, but why then they can’t solve our claim a bit quickly?
Generally, the business pays for its customers twice – the first while attracting them and the second when it loses the customer due to any problem issue.
Thank you! We still can’t believe that we are the winners! We are not a mainstream product for x, y, or z-generations. Our product isn’t something new that everyone wants. And we do not enter a Blue Ocean market. We solve a problem that has been ignored for a long time.
By the way, have you ever thought about how much time and cost businesses and customers lose on typical claims? Let me provide some statistics:
70% of bank customers can't recognise all transactions on their statements.
30% of customer applications are rejected.
The minimum time for claim investigation is 5 working days. Sometimes it can last up to 60 days.
20% of merchants raise prices as a result of claims.
All those reasons pushed us to create solutions for them, help them get rid of those issues, and provide them the possibility of not spending their time on claim management but their business development.
The main challenge was presenting claim management from a more attractive side. As some people think - claims are not sexy to invest in them. All companies basically think about lead generation, sales, and profit growth. But the claims were always the last point to think about. Our solution is hard to be understood for people. So, we aimed to present it from the customer's side. The customer shouldn't think about how to solve a problem or find the right contact on the bank's or merchant's webpage. The customer should be able to tap on the transaction on their smartphone to solve it. So, we started developing a new customer flow for businesses.
As a result, we have confirmed that it is possible to build a more advanced system that fundamentally changes the processes and provides more loyalty to customers. And, of course, we appreciated the mentors' deep expertise that helped us during the hackathon.
We will spend our prize mainly on participation in conferences and other fintech events to present our product to European companies. We expect that it will help us receive implementation partners and new customers. Again, we hope that our solution in the future will help other companies provide new and seamless support services for their customers.
About Olga Gavrina
Olga Gavrina is the founder of Fincoro Inc. and has worked for 15 years in fintech. She is an expert in payments and business development.
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