The Kontoleser

As COO of "Sofort", Stefan Krautkrämer created a successful payment method on the Internet. But he didn't want to retire after his exit. About someone who needs work - more than fat cars.

The moment 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, they will throw their principles overboard in no time at all. For Krautkrämer, with curly dark hair and a Bavarian accent, who likes to say "paschd" or "furschtba", this moment came in 2007.

At the time, he and a friend were setting up "Sofort AG", which many people know from the online business as "Sofortüberweisung". With the help of the company, you can pay in online stores yourself by bank transfer by logging into your internet banking. Now under the wing of the Swedish payment service provider Klarna and established on 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 knew about us," says Krautkrämer.

But how could you convince people of your own service? Krautkrämer and his colleagues tried something new at a large electronics retailer: there was a discount of 50 cents if you paid with "Sofort". Less than an hour later, the phones were ringing again, but the questions were different: No one was asking about security but suddenly about why their own bank wasn't included or whether they could give their login details for online banking over the phone. "That was the moment I understood: What the customer says they would do and what they actually do are two fundamentally different things," says Krautkrämer.

For Krautkrämer, these were the first fruits of his development work. In the previous years, 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 doubts: "I thought to myself: nobody does that, entering their PIN on the Internet." But the example showed that people will give up a lot for a few cents in savings.

"When I'm trading, 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 employees under him. At the time, Stefan Krautkrämer, who describes himself as a "furious" 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 says that he made a good profit from this. So what do you do when you have achieved what many start-ups want to achieve, the big exit?

The sale was drastic for Krautkrämer. He doesn't want to retire, as it would only bore him. "When I'm trading, I sit around and drink caipirinha. That's nice for a week and then the ceiling falls on my head," he says. So he works, just differently: "I prefer to work in small teams, no politics, no system," he says. A large company like Klarna doesn't fit the bill.

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

Krautkrämer wants to generate six million euros in revenue

It wasn't until 2019 that the rules changed with PSD2, paving the way for the Munich-based company's business model. The start-up's platform allows credit companies, among others, to analyze their customers' creditworthiness by looking at their bank accounts - provided the customer accepts this. After all, confidential data is involved. But many are easy to convince: "It's simply much quicker digitally. Convenience wins. It also helps that we are a company licensed in Germany," says Krautkrämer.

In principle, much is back to the way it was: Rudolf, formerly CIO at Sofort, is an old colleague, the "account" issue has remained and Reiman Investors has also been back on board since 2017, as it was previously at Sofort. Krautkrämer met the Managing Director of Reiman Investors, the family office of the Reiman entrepreneurial family, at the Oktoberfest. The deal: "I'll pay for the beer and you watch the company presentation." A week later, the family office wanted in and is now a shareholder.

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