Launching Neobank in One Day? Velmie and ConnectPay Join Forces to Offer End-to-End Digital Banking Solution

In 2022, investments in Fintech took a dive, falling more than 30% compared to the boom witnessed in 2021. Owing to current conditions, speed and efficiency will jump up the list of priorities for established market players and newcomers alike. Driven by market demand, technology companies Velmie and ConnectPay have announced they are partnering up.

With Velmie, providing white-label banking software, and ConnectPay, offering banking-as-a-service (BaaS), fintechs will be able to launch new financial offerings — or an entirely new neobank — in a matter of days, using a single technological solution.

Speeding up new fintech launch

Typically, developing digital banking software from scratch requires immense research, expertise, financial and human resources. Often, it takes no less than a year to see any tangible results. To provide banking services in the EU, a company also must acquire an EMI (Electronic Money Institution) license, however, it is a difficult, not always successful, and expensive process, with costs nearing a million euros. An alternative to this would be becoming a distributor of another licensed entity (getting BaaS), such as ConnectPay, which would allow operating as if granted a license.

Until now, ConnectPay provided all these tools to offer financial services — except for banking software. With the new partnership with Velmie, the company will be able to extend its offering to provide clients with banking software as well as allow them to build new fintechs quickly and efficiently while using one technological solution.

For market newcomers, this will enable them to expedite new fintech launches from a matter of years to a matter of days, also saving millions in getting, if able at all, the EMI license to keep the business running safe and compliant.

Accelerating new product rollout

Seasoned fintechs, whether BaaS, marketplaces, crowdfunding platforms, or others, will be able to take advantage of this as well, using the platform to streamline new offerings and scale up services in a much shorter timeframe. Most fintechs need to work with a few providers to service their operational needs, but juggling multiple partners can be tiring, cost-inefficient, and complicated. Also, each new partner must be vetted.

“Having the alternative to switch from a plethora to a single trusted partner, which can cover the entire scope of services needed, allows to reduce operational friction and expedite new product launch,” says Marius Galdikas, CEO at ConnectPay.

One key challenge remains the same for established and new fintechs alike — staying one step ahead of rapidly evolving regulations. Remaining compliant is a too complex process to be approached in an ad hoc manner, and to avoid it hanging over as Damocles’s sword, it must be an ongoing — and continuously refined — process.

“Companies face a lot of regulatory pressures. Knowing compliance intricacies well, we offer to take these pressures off our clients’ plate, as all the compliance-as-a-service, KYC, transaction monitoring, and regulatory reporting processes are already embedded in the offering,” says Galdikas.

“Having teamed up with Velmie, we will now be able to offer a complete scope of tools needed to support fintechs back-to-front,” he added.

Slava Ivashkin, Founder and CEO of Velmie, backed up the sentiment. “We are delighted to find a business and a technological fit and partner with ConnectPay. This partnership will expand our offerings and add value to our customers around the world,” shared Ivashkin.

Currently, the integration of both companies’ solutions stack is in progress, with the preliminary launch date set to Q2, 2023.