1. Please tell us a bit about yourself, both at work and leisure.

My name is Anya Schmidt, CEO of the Munich-based banking app Outbank. At work I am passionate about building great products based on Cutting edge technologies with our talented team. In such a fast-moving environment like FinTech that is a great challenge. When I’m not working I love spending time with my 2-year old son and hiking in the mountains.

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

Outbank is the most secure banking app in the German speaking market. What we do: We aggregate more than 4.000 banks, payment services, share accounts and other financial products in one single app to provide users with a comprehensive overview of their money status and flow. All major banking activities, like payments, financial analysis, export and expense categorization are developed under highest security standards and appear in a well-thought UX design. Our main competitors are Finanzblick and Centralway Numbers in the German speaking market.

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

Tobias Stöger – Outbank’s founder and now shareholder – had the vision for a secure banking app allowing you to aggregate your financials into one secure view many years ago and launched the first version of Outbank on Symbian!

We are VC funded.

4. What are the biggest challenges in starting?

The biggest challenge is actually to start at all and then to follow through and persevere and not be thrown off ones path by one of the many difficulties one encounters along the path of building and growing a startup.

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

There is so much room to simplify financial management with a huge potential for creativity, but at the same time the necessity for rocksolid technologies. Whatever product you provide it needs to be secure and built on state of the art technology.

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

The problem of understanding what I am spending my money on is a global one. And everyone strives to optimize their money flows. Outbank provides the basis for doing so. Allowing free access to the user’s financial data stored in banks as planned within PSD2 will facilitate the process of optimizing ones finances enormously. The challenge will be to ensure that PSD2 is successfully implemented and actually opens the market to more competition to the benefit of the consumer.

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

Don’t underestimate data security and build your products on a Zero Knowledge security concept. Everyday we read about data breaches and hacks. Loss of data in the FinTech space will be hard to recover from for everyone. A secure infrastructure is key. Storing data on device instead of servers under full end-to-end encryption is the basis for such a security concept.