AAZZUR

10 years ago financial institutions built most of their own infrastructure, products and services themselves. The new paradigm is to connect services together. This is more flexible, cheaper and more powerful.

AAZZUR is a layer between the banks and fintechs to facilitate the exchange of data and transactions. This is the promise of open banking.

We are building a fintech marketplace that allows banks and insurance companies to build solutions like lego blocks. This dramatically reduces cost and time to market to validate+grow new lines of business outside of existing IT constraints.

-Retail challenger bank: We closed the Alpha test of our own challenger bank with real users, which was built in record time using the middleware technology we offer banks and fintechs. We are just starting the Beta phase for this summer.
-Proofs of Concept: We successfully tested 2 POCs with banks and an Insurance company.
-Relationships: We have forged 75 high level industry relationships over the last year.
-Partnerships: We are working on our 5th partnership with important players in the Banking/Fintech Sector.
-LOIs: We have signed 1 in the last quarter.
-NDAs: We have signed 3 with banks in the last quarter – and 4 in total.

B2B: We cater to banks, insurance firms, and fintechs, with a composite revenue mix made up of setup fees and ongoing API usage and consulting fees. We have little competition in this area and the market is very big. Our platform puts us in a great place to collaborate with banking institutions, as:

* 57% are unsure about or unlikely to respond to blockchain technology

* 83% believe that part of their business is at risk of being lost to stand-alone FinTech companies

* 20% believe that more than 20% of Financial Services business is at risk to FinTechs by 2020

We also tap into the ever growing fintech market:

* Global cumulative investment in FinTech could exceed $150bn in the next 3-5 years.

B2C: Our platform targets numerous users worldwide, with a current focus on German and EU users through B2B2C- as well as B2C-channels. We demonstrated the power of our platform by building our own mobile bank, which is about to be released in Beta. In that bracket, retail banking, our market size is almost €70 billion in Germany. :

* 33 million customers in Germany and 132 million in the EU with more than one bank account.

* 12 million foreigners living in Germany (800.000 new arrivals every year) with needs for our challenger banking services, such as fast and affordable money transfer.

* 78 million foreigners in Europe and 252 million people living in foreign countries worldwide.

Our technology solves several problems

1. Traditional banks need to offer improved mobile functions and experiences to their customers but there is no solution for banks to deliver fintech and cross sell insurtech services to their customers in an integrated and easy format especially on mobile devices

2. It is difficult and capital intensive for Fintechs to access their potential customers via individual B2C sales

3. FinTechs and Banks must code the same solutions repeatedly. There is a need for standardized financial IT solutions.

Solution for 1: Bank in a box
AAZZUR has developed a themed approach to building challenger banks. We can white label our mobile banking software for any bank, saving hundreds of hours of IT development and testing.
Result
AAZZUR built its own challenger bank in record time that is just soft launching right now.

Solution for 2: Financial Marketplace
AAZZUR enables banks and fintechs by providing a marketplace to allow access to a wider existing customer base for upselling and cross-selling, and automation tools to increase monetization.
Result
One of our partner banks is already offering a ‘Travel Pack’ with insurance and other travel necessities from 3rd parties, that automatically gets offered to clients by detecting triggers and life events.

Solution for 3: Toolbox of Common Functionalities
Our technology can combine any API into a unified front-end. Saving many coding hours and providing a standardized framework for the industry.
Result
AAZZUR is working with fintechs to help them get an MVP in less than 40% of the time, and with 2 banks to help them unify several internal systems into a single front-end for their customers and employees.

We see a small number of competitors in a quickly growing market. These platforms for financial services and transactions are currently being built by companies like DB, NDGIT, Bud and Banked. They are already being used on a smaller scale by some banks. This is a new space and we are well timed in this explore and conquer time of this new market.

Our neobank offering competes with N26, Monese, Revolut and traditional banks. However, our offering has functionalities and services specifically tooled for internationally-moving people that will make it the most attractive alternative for internationals in Germany and later internationals throughout Europe.

We are a high-performance team. We move quickly and are competitive.

Our founders have each taken a company public. We count with the experience of high-level professionals/entrepreneurs, each with 15+ years of experience and several entrepreneurial successes, and the talent of the 10 top performing professionals that form the rest of the AAZZUR's team.

We are building the only integration platform/marketplace provider that also offers a white-labelable frontend including a validation service for new business offerings. Our approach also differs in that we deliver services directly to the customers and cover not just technology but also concept formation.

We have multiple income streams:

B2C: Monthly Plans, Packages, FX&Remittances, Loans, Data&Leads, B2B2C

B2B: Marketplace, Bank-in-a-Box, Withdrawals&Deposits, Transfers&FX, Implementation Fees, KYC/Trust Agent, Insurance Modules, etc.

The planed cumulated revenue in the first 3 years after launch is 77m€.

AAZZUR’s broad set of services will result in numerous income streams:

* Initial license and setup fees, especially from banks

* Repeat license fees from banks and insurances for platform access to third party and AAZZUR tools

* Repeat commissions for sold products and services (smart data-usage on AAZZUR’s marketplace)

* Repeat transaction fees for third party services ( fintechs, third-party banks and insurance companies)

* Recurring and fixed fees for transactions and services delivered via our challenger banking product.

* Other recurring fees for additional tools and packages

We will use the funds to expand our middleware platform, automate KYC processing, partner with more banks, and complete our mobile banking platform soft-launch.

Investors will get a share of a prominent company player in the already validated market of fintech+banking services infrastructure at an extremely convenient funding stage.

AAZZUR is a fintech company at seed-stage that focuses on providing technology services to banks and bundles third party financial services for end customers. Other than the usual start-up related risks AAZZUR has identified the following top four risks:

**Scalability across multiple jurisdictions**

AAZZUR plans to expand across Europe and later the world. Financial services do not scale as easily as other services because of varied regulatory and licensing standards across different countries. There has been great unification and harmonisation and AAZZUR is mitigating the risk by a partnering and not a self-licensing business strategy. Furthermore, AAZZUR is aware that scaling across borders is demanding, but also see an opportunity in doing so. It has made provisions in their business model and financial model to accommodate slower cross border growth. Furthermore, we focused on a market large enough to not require moving out of the initial markets if, for example, friction within Europe was to increase.

**Data security and Privacy**

A part of AAZZUR's business model requires the analysis of customer data to better serve and monetise the customer – with their consent. The rules and regulations (including licensing) are quite clearly laid out and AAZZUR was built after GDPR rules. The risk AAZZUR has identified not the lack of regulatory data requirements but the potential unwillingness of customers to share data at all. In a world where data privacy becomes much more stringent our ability to innovate is curtailed. As a mitigation AAZZUR has already performed internal and one external data security audit and will perform an external penetration test to assure data safety. As to data attitudes AAZZUR has a strategy to diversify across many products so that even if no data analysis is allowed by customers we can still offer basic services. Furthermore, AAZZUR does not hold funds as they are with the partner banks and financial institutions who have ultimate responsibility

**Staffing**

AAZZUR plans to significantly increase in staff size. If AAZZUR can not find staff in sufficiently high numbers it will have an adverse effect on growth. This has been considered in the business plan and financial plan. As further mitigation, AAZZUR has access to a network of professionals through Techstars and enjoys a high-morale, high-performance team at the moment.

**Liability**

In an open banking environment the customer will contact the last point of contact for any errors or mistakes in a chain of responsible parties. AAZZUR is mitigating this risk by partnering with licensed partners, and requiring fintech to meet high quality standards in order to be considered for the marketplace.

We participated in 2 acceleration programs: techstars and RBL_start

147 Startup Battle 2019, 2nd place in Pitch Competition
Pirate Summit 2019: We were among the 7 finalists in the pitch competition