The Kontoleser

Stefan Krautkrämer has created a successful payment method on the Internet as COO of "Sofort". After the exit, however, he did not want to retire yet. About one who needs the work - more than fat cars.

The moment when it clicked for Stefan Krautkrämer was a few years ago. But since then he has been certain: if you give the customer even a small incentive, he will throw his principles overboard in no time. For Krautkrämer, curly dark hair and a Bavarian accent, who likes to say "paschd" or "furschtba", this moment was in 2007.

At that time, he and a friend were setting up "Sofort AG", which many people know from online business as "Sofortüberweisung". With the help of the company you can pay in Internet shops themselves by bank transfer by logging into the Internet banking. Today under the wing of the Swedish payment service provider Klarna and established in the German scene, this was new, unusual and obscure to many people at the time. "Private customers were constantly calling us and asking who we actually were. They also asked us when the product would be delivered. That's how little they could place us," Krautkrämer says.

But how could they convince people of their own service? At a large electronics retailer, Krautkrämer and his comrades-in-arms tried something new: There was a 50-cent discount if you paid with "Sofort." Less than an hour later, the phones were ringing again, but the questions were different: No one asked about security but suddenly why their own bank wasn't there or whether it was possible to give the login data for online banking over the phone. "That was the moment when I understood: What the customer says he would do and what he then actually does are two fundamentally different things," Krautkrämer says.

For Krautkrämer, those were the first fruits of his rebuilding efforts. In the years before, he had been COO of the company, which a friend had previously bought from a couple of Giessen students. In the beginning, Krautkrämer received a salary of 400 euros and a place to sleep in the owner's attic. The employees were mostly students who could only program when there were no lectures. At the beginning, Krautkrämer had his doubts: "I thought to myself: nobody would do that, enter their PIN on the Internet." But the example showed: for a few cents savings, people give a lot.

"When I'm trading around, I sit around and drink caipirinha. That's nice for a week and then the ceiling falls on my head"

Stefan Krautkräumer

Sofortüberweisung grew in the years that followed, expanding into eleven countries, and Krautkrämer had a team of more than 60 people under him. At the time, Stefan Krautkrämer, who describes himself as a "furschbaren" student, was just 27 years old. Then in 2014, the Swedish payment service provider Klarna bought Sofort AG for more than 100 million euros. Krautkrämer didn't earn badly from it, as he says. So what to do when you've managed what many start-ups want to manage, the big exit?

For Krautkrämer, the sale was drastic. Retiring, he said, would only bore him. "When I'm trading around, I sit around and drink caipirinha. That's nice for a week and then the ceiling falls on my head," he says. So work, just differently: "I like working in small teams best of all, no politics, no systematics," he says. A big company like Klarna doesn't fit the bill.

Krautkrämer thought about it for a few weeks, quit and founded his own company with Dirk Rudolf in 2014: FintecSystems. The idea came to him, who bikes to work in the morning and travels long distances on 2nd class trains, when he tried to apply for a credit card and was turned down for reasons he couldn't understand. "I was then supposed to send my paycheck there by mail, which of course is totally inconvenient," he recalls. "But what if the company could just take a quick look at my account?" That's where FintecSystems comes in, but at the time it was still a bit in the gray area.

Six million euros in sales is what Krautkrämer wants to bring in

It wasn't until 2019 that the rules changed with the so-called "PSD2", clearing the way for the Munich-based company's business model. Via the start-up's platform, credit companies, among others, can analyze the creditworthiness of their customers by looking at their bank accounts - provided the customer accepts this. After all, confidential data is at stake. But many are easily convinced: "It's just much faster digitally. Convenience wins. It also helps that we are a company licensed in Germany," says Krautkrämer.

In principle, much is back to the same today: Rudolf, formerly CIO at Sofort is an old colleague, the topic "account" has remained and since 2017, as before at Sofort, Reiman Investors is also back on board. Krautkrämer had met the managing director of Reiman Investors, the family office of the Reiman family of entrepreneurs, at the Oktoberfest. The deal: "I pay for the beer and you watch the company presentation." A week later, the family office wanted in and has since become a shareholder.

According to its own data, FintecSystems makes this year profit expected around six million euros in sales. He does not want to sell his company in the near future, says Krautkrämer, but instead raise more money from investors. He is currently looking for 15 million euros. Initial talks are already underway.