At a special event in Sofia, Evrotrust and Konica Minolta Bulgaria presented data from their national survey on the internal digitalization of processes in the financial sector. We participated in the panel discussions alongside Dr. Dochka Vassileva, Head of Project Planning and Institutional Partnership at FMFIB, to discuss the relationship between companies' digital maturity and attracting EU or investment funding.
What our expertise shows so far
Digital solutions lag in penetrating at traditional banks compared to large fintech companies. Banks continue to stick to hybrid services, and regulations in the sector are leading to less flexibility relative to current customer expectations and to the services of neo-banks (such as Revolut, which now has 1m customers and over 22m transactions per month in Bulgaria alone, with a third of these being card payments).
Investors consider companies without a clear digital transition strategy to be high-risk, which leads to difficulty in accessing capital.
FMFIB does not finance financial and credit institutions, but our financial instruments towards SMEs have an indirect impact on the digital transformation of financial institutions. Fintech start-ups supported by us develop innovative digital solutions for the financial sector, as well as solutions for the digitisation and upgrade of IT systems in enterprises.
We have invested public resources of BGN 212 million through 5 OPIC 2014-2020 funds. We have supported 327 start-ups, half of them in the ICT sector. Successful companies in our portfolio are Phos (software POS, now part of the French Ingenico.), Phyre (mobile wallet), IRIS Solutions (open banking), Paynetics (e-money operator), and Contiant (open banking/payments).
