Numbrs, freshly replenished with millions from founder Martin Saidler after an outside financing foundered, is abandoning plans to build a major finance broker.
Martin Saidler's plans were hugely ambitious: he wanted to build Numbrs into the largest independent broker of financial products in the world. The fintech's app was meant to be a supermarket for banks and insurers – an Uber-style mobile platform without being an actual bank itself.
The Numbrs founder and CEO is now abandoning that plan, according to a company newsletter, in favor of a different business model. Instead of brokerage commissions, Numbrs wants to go after subscription fees. From the fourth quarter, the start-up will return to being a personal finance app, it said.
Conflicts of Interest
This means an end to Numbrs' distribution pacts with banks and insurers in Britain and Germany – the only markets it is active in. The conflict of interest inherent in its current business model is increasingly apparent to clients, Saidler wrote. «Numbrs is not a bank and from now on no longer brokers financial products,» the founder and CEO wrote.
It isn't apparent from the newsletter whether the strategy reversal is a result of pressure from clients and users, or out of financial reasons. Numbrs had never eked out a profit with its app, in which it plowed millions over the years to build the finance «supermarket».
Unicorn Restructures
The start-up had reached so-called unicorn status – $1 billion in valuation – three years ago after winning funding from Dubai's Investment Corporation, or ICD. Swiss ex-bankers Josef Ackermann and Pierre Mirabaud as well as Marcel Ospel, who died five months ago, also put money into Numbrs.
More recently, the six-year-old fintech restructured by cutting nearly half of the total workforce. After launching in Britain, Numbrs raised 6 million Swiss francs ($6.6 million) along with the 11 million francs of his own money that Saidler ponied up.
