We are looking for a bank in the US to buy

Hello everyone!

If you are the owner of a small or medium-sized bank in the US and are ready to sell it completely (or partially) – write to me: Slava Solodkiy, slava@ariv.al.

Who I am

Managing partner @ Life.SREDA fintech VC. One of TOP35 the most influential fintech-investors in the worldTOP21 fintech influencers in Europe and TOP100 fintech ecosystem builders in Asia.

Contributor for Forbes, TheNextWeb, European Financial Review, EFMA journal (one, two, three) VentureBeat, TechInAsia, e27, LTP, FTR, FintechNews, and other leading media.

Keynote-speaker at Money2020, Rise\MoneyConf, European Fintech Awards (speaker+judge), Global Payment Summit, FinSpire (speaker+judge), Singapore Fintech Festival (judge), FinnovAsia (judge and speaker), Fintech CEO Summit by IFC, Paris Fintech Forum, Global Venture Summit, Fintech Award LatAm, Dot Finance Africa, Itroymanagement, The Future Of Finance Summit, Cloud Expo and many other conferences.

Who we are

Shortly about Life.SREDA VC history: The firm was established 5 years ago. We focus only on fintech. Previously we have been based in Moscow and since 4th of May’15 we relocated to Singapore. Life.SREDA has invested in 22 startups (7 exits already) in the US, UK, Germany, CIS, Singapore, Philippines, India and Vietnam: Simple, Moven, Fidor bank, Rocketbank, SumUp, Anthemis Group, Mobikon, Lenddo, etc.

We publish our annual fintech&blockchain&insurtech research – Money of the Future: 2012\13, 2013\14, 2014\15, 2015\16, 1H’2016, 2016\2017.

Life.SREDA VC launches a $200 million venture capital fund, named Based on Blockchain or BB Fund. The Fund will invest in fintech and blockchain companies by acquiring and holding equity and/or tokens.

What I am planning to do with this bank

I plan to use it for my new project Arival – the first crypto-friendly fintech bank.

1) This will be a fintech-bank. What is it – I have described in my book The First Fintech Bank’s Arrival, neobank, combined with other 6-8-10 fintech startups to provide a full range of financial services, and not just an application + card.

2) This will be a crypto-friendly fintech-bank. In my recent The Bubble Generation manifesto I have described what difficulties new crypto-currency and ICO blockchain startups are now facing – and how traditional banks are not ready to work with these startups because of a lack of willingness to understand, to change business processes or use new technologies. I want to buy a small bank, completely clear it of the traditional business (to remove any conflict of interest), change the team, products, processes and technologies – and completely focus it on working with crypto fintech and blockchain startups, making the bank crypto-friendly. To be completely transparent to the regulator – from the very beginning and at every step we will show how and what we do, we will identify any areas of potential risk and will work together on fixing errors, educating each other in the process creating and implementing new rules for the new emerging crypto world.

3) I have analyzed existing crypto-friendly debit cards and ICO-backed crypto-friendly neobanks – and I believe that, although they are doing the right and useful things, their efforts are far from being sufficient at the current stage of this new crypto economy. I’m not going to compete with them – on the contrary, I want to make the bank their partner (and partner of any other fintech neobank in general). Arival will be built on the principle of open architecture BAASISa set of open APIs integrated into its own BaaS-platform (including blockchain-based digital KYC – BAASIS ID). It will allow to:

  • quickly launch products and partner with third-party developers for the customers’ sake; people need new services, not new licenses;
  • effectively integrate into one network your banks and any other banks (both traditional and neobanks that have raised or are raising ICO rounds in order to get their own banking license in their own countries), which want to join the community of crypto-friendly banks;
  • to land any other fintech, blockchain, crypto-startups: to create, in fact, the first fintech-bank in the world allowing them to launch faster and cheaper as well as to scale to other countries. There is no need to reinvent all fintech services once again – too many people have been doing this for the past five years! You simply need to help them to move to new rails, integrate them among themselves on the basis of your open architecture and business processes tailored for a new type of customers;

4) Arival itself is focusing on SME-clients. Whereas there about 500 customers (which have raised over $3 billion through ICO) on the market. This type of customers is very homogeneous, fast-growing, and absolutely no one is ready to serve them now. In the second approximation, there are other very clear clients with similar problems: crypto-exchanges, exchangers, wallets, money transfer services, etc. The “Blue Ocean” are the representatives of the GIG-economy: freelancers, independent contractors, makers and doers. We should work with SMEs first (and not second or third) as they are the driver of the new economy. While retailers – their employees, partners and customers – will come after them.

If you are on the WebSummit in Lisbon now – I will be available at the stand A 728 in the Fintech Exhibition Area on Day 2 of the event, Wednesday, Nov 8.