1. Who Are you?

We are Ralf Penndorf, Niels-Jens Kühn and Dejan Maljevic.
We are the management of CURENTIS AG who has developed the CURENTIS RISK FACTORY within the last three years and intend to found the CURENTIS RISK FACTORY GmbH to accelerate the growth of this product.

2. Which services do you sell and who are your competitors?

The CURENTIS RISK FACTORY digitizes identity papers, salary slips and account statements for the business processes of financial service providers and all other companies for whom the creditworthiness and identity of their customers is important.

The authenticity of this information is automatically checked and made available for all business processes.

The CURENTIS RISK FACTORY consists of three modules:

ID-CHECK

• Authenticity check in real time: Using ID-CHECK, cards, driving licenses, passports or residence permits can be checked for authenticity.
• ID-CHECK makes the data from the machine readable zone and the visual zone, including a picture, available for further processing in the customer systems.
• CURENTIS uses the card reader of the Bundesdruckerei (Federal Printing Office) for this.

Docu-CHECK

• Digitization of the credit check: Salary slips are scanned and digitized via an integrated OCR software. The digitized data is professionally interpreted by Docu-CHECK. A predetermined set of rules checks the data for plausibility and reports any problems.
• The data are available for further process steps (e.g. e-file).
• Docu-CHECK can also be trained for other documents.

Account-CHECK

• Automated checking of electronic account statements: Account-CHECK allows banks to have read access to the current accounts of the person applying for credit.
• The bank customer can submit the access data of his account (user name, PIN) or his accounts via an internet front-end.
• On the basis of the data from the electronic account statements, an expenditure accounting can be carried out fully automatically.

3. How did you get your startup idea and how did you finance your startup?

• CURENTIS AG has been active in the field of consulting for banks, especially in financing, fraud management and external reporting. Doing this business we understand that the retail banking business have to check the identity and credit worthiness of their customers. The needed information is often only physically available (e.g. printed salary certificates) and entering them into the company data banks, as well as verifying their authenticity, generates high costs and time required. This process is very prone to error and opens the door to fraud.

We have financed the product development from the profits of our consulting business.

4. What were the biggest challenges in starting?

Product development and sales need more investment than we can derive from the consulting business. Therefore, we decided to found a separate company and seek venture capital to accelerate growth.

5. What areas within FinTech do you personally find most interesting and why?

Retail banking, because this is the field of our competence and experience. Moreover, there is still a big  need for industrialization and digitization in retail banking.

6. What opportunities do you see for FinTech startups in the DACH region, and how can we help to accelerate it?

Digitization of banking. Banking is essential, banks are not.

7. What tip would you like to give FinTech entrepreneurs?

You have to be well prepared and informed about your business and your competitors.