A Chat with Alex Mifsud, Co-Founder and CEO at Developer-First Banking Platform: Weavr

Digital applications continue to transform the way we live our lives: get educated, develop our careers, run our businesses etc. Financial services – spending, saving, borrowing, converting money – are also deeply involved in making these activities work better. Imagine how harder buying a house would be without mortgages. It’s odd that banks do financial services and non-financial digital applications do everything else. Really the two should be far more integrated, like getting car finance when you buy a car from a dealer.

Weavr is a financial technology company that enables software developers to easily integrate financial services into non-financial applications, especially those applications that are shaping the future of work, healthcare, education, real estate, and other services sectors. To do this, Weavr also needs to make sure that it is safe for the end-customers to access such financial services through applications that are not operated by banks. That’s where Weavr’s unique technology comes into play.
 
 

 

How did you come up with the idea for the company?

 
In my previous business, we were always grappling with having to build, integrate and run financial solutions for our corporate clients because they didn’t have the skills and the certification to handle the financial technology and the financial customer data themselves.

That meant that we could only take on so many clients – if only we could find a way to make it possible for our clients to build and run these solutions for themselves then we would be able to serve 10x more. As engineers, along with some of my colleagues, I thought about what a solution might look like and started unpacking the barriers and finding technical as well as operational solutions to them. The result is Weavr.
 

How has the company evolved during the pandemic?

 
Weavr is a company largely created during the pandemic. During 2019 we were very much in the garage, mostly writing code and signing up and integrating partners. In 2020 we had just launched a very limited beta when the pandemic unended all our plans for marketing, for fundraising, etc. With no legacy, we simply went ‘pandemic native’ (if that’s a word) – every aspect of running the business was done remotely.

We even raised several millions of pounds in funding from investors we never actually met physically. For businesses like Weavr, the pandemic warped both time and space: without any distraction or dead time spent in travel, we were able to practically double productivity as founders, and able to do all the stuff startups do – market, sell, hire, build tech – with collaborators anywhere in Europe. Pre-pandemic, we’d have all been based in an expensive office in London. Now, our team now is now spread across various parts of the UK, as well as Berlin, Lisbon and Malta.
 

What can we hope to see from Weavr in the future?

 
The shift to delivering financial services within non-financial applications is just starting to accelerate but has the potential to be the next evolution in financial services delivery: if the bank branch was 1.0, and banking apps 2.0, then financial services 3.0 is this ‘embedded’ form of finance. The technology and business models are all up for grabs and Weavr’s mission is to create the platform of choice to make Embedded Finance happen globally.

Our vision is backed by venture capital investors including Anthemis, Headline, QED and Seedcamp who are not just providing us with the money we need but also with the connections and expertise we need to get there faster.