Metaco plans to bulk out considerably as part of a two-year plan towards break-even CEO Adrien Treccani tells finews.com after clinching $18 million in fresh backing. The start-up is also close to clinching new partners.

Adrien Treccani, you just raised $18 million – including from two banks. Is the mass adoption of cryptocurrencies by banks is here?

Our products have been in the market for more than two years now, so we are actually very proud and excited to see the adoption, both in Switzerland and internationally of our technology. Two years ago, the ideas in the banking industry were mainly about tokenizing. It has since come back to cryptocurrencies, stablecoins, and other existing crypto assets within a banking environment as the first use case.

What happened to the tokenization idea many banks and others seemed to be pursuing?

We realized the ecosystem was still lacking. There were no real secondary markets and not enough custodians in the markets willing to host and store and custody such tokens.

Do you still believe in that strong case for tokenization, and what would it look like?

We still see all of these interesting applications of technology in tokenization, but the timeline is a bit different.

«Banks can't tokenize profitably, quickly»

Cryptos are very short term, and it’s the first use case that can become profitable for a bank. Tokenization is something that they can start immediately, but I'd be surprised if we see profitable applications in the next 12 months.

How long will this $18 million fundraising last you?

We don't foresee any additional financing, although we may decide in a couple or three years to do yet another financing round as a way to accelerate our growth even further.

When do you expect to break even?

In two years. We could be profitable, but we are investing massively in research and development as well as in sales efforts. The target to break even despite this reinvestment is in 2022.

How many people does Metaco employ now?

There are 27 of us. This is pre-investment so as you can imagine this is going to grow substantially this year and in 2021.

Is Libra, the Facebook-backed currency project, the anti-bitcoin?

Quite the opposite. I think this is a very strong gateway towards other cryptocurrencies, an alternative to these very volatile digital assets which for many people actually is not the right solution.

Isn't Libra purely a payment system at this point?

It's interesting to define what is a payment system and what is a stablecoin. It's formally a stable coin, but because they also are also building the whole infrastructure and providing their own ledger, it sounds very much to me like an efficient and modern payment protocol.

What sort of financial targets have you laid out for Metaco?

So we don't share the financial targets, but in the next two years, we intend to grow in the markets which we're strongest at, which is Tier 1 and Tier 2 financial institutions.

«Expanding offering with cloud for smaller banks»

The next milestone for us is to also augment our offerings more adapted to smaller banks, with a new cloud-based managed offering.

You’ve also attracted two central bank partners as investors – Sicpa and Giesecke+Devrient.

That’s the other side of the market that we’re already part of, but expect to grow in. Sicpa in Lausanne is one of the leading central bank suppliers globally, and we have also attracted Giesecke+Devrient as an investor, which is in a way the German alter ego and partner to Sicpa. We anticipate that this will accelerate our presence in this very secretive market too.

Do you have any you know specific partnership plans, your existing one with Avaloq aside?

Avaloq is a very strong partner of ours. They are a shareholder, board member, and very direct advisor and internal partner. However, we are not exclusive to Avaloq. We have replicated similar arrangements with other key infrastructure players in the markets. If you think about Swisscom – it’s very much another «Avaloq» in this market: they are active through Custodigit. They also rely on Silo [Metaco's digital operating system]. I certainly anticipate that we will be able to announce similar other partnerships and strategic partners in the next few months.

 Adrien Treccani is CEO of Metaco, a start-up he co-founded in 2015. The Lausanne-based provider of digital asset management solutions on Tuesday said it raised 17 million Swiss francs ($18 million) from existing and new investors including Standard Chartered, Zuercher Kantonalbank, and Avaloq. A Swiss native, Treccani began his career in 2010 as an intern quantitative analyst with Jabre Capital Partners in Geneva. He earned a Masters in financial engineering from Lausanne's prestigious EPFL and a PhD in finance from the Swiss Finance Institute. The 34-year-old is also a lecturer at his alma mater as well as at HEC Lausanne.