"Be ready to fire youself," advised Markus Wunsch, Executive Chairman at Mount Wish

HackerNoon Reporter: Please tell us briefly about your background.

Having worked for more than 4 years in the corporate venture capital and treasury departments at an F500 company, I realized the need for an alternative financial risk management solution, one which really meets the needs of the customers. Therefore I started Mount Wish in 2016 with the aim to replace derivatives-based hedging with something simpler and more efficient.

What's your startup called? And in a sentence or two, what does it do?

Mount Wish is the company behind RiskPool, a quasi-mutual insurance which as a side effect (and I am quite passionate about that) also achieves the joint mission of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and Bank for International Settlements (BIS) with a higher degree of efficiency and efficacy.

This said, our customers benefit from

• Significant cost savings resulting in an up to 12% increase of their EBT
• Lean and clean insurance processes, i.e. no MiFID II, EMIR or other compliance hassles anymore
• A seamless integration of RiskPool with their ERP system and complementary products (e.g. our independent financial services marketplace fincato allowing easy cross-border financings)
• Automated counterparty risk and overlay-effect optimization
• No longer being dependent on financial forecasts in their risk management, a fact clients really loved during the unpredictable corona pandemic

What is the origin story?

Managing FX, interest rate, and commodity price risks (FICC risks) is becoming more and more cumbersome due to ever-increasing complexity (e.g. unforeseeable geopolitical or other events like Brexit or the coronavirus disrupting global supply chains and their impact on FICC markets), regulation (e.g. EMIR, MiFID II,…), and finally treasury costs, having reached an average of 2.87 USD per 100 USD in revenues as per a recent KPMG study.

Thus, an insurance-like risk pooling solution which drastically increases the efficiency in handling these risks in a VUCA world while also cutting costs is what customers really want. Hence the interest in RiskPool was huge right from the very start.

Though there were three big challenges which we had to address first:

• The first challenge was that the product only works at scale and on the global level and thus we had to make sure to grow almost equally in all parts of the world at the same time. This is why we came up with complementary solutions such as fincato, or our automated audit products, which again allowed us to win sales partners with compelling barter deals. These barter deals also included the initial outsourcing of parts of our business model inherent insurance asset management.
• The second big challenge was and now is even more the political risk in a world where international financial organizations are increasingly subject to political discussions. Hence a lot of diplomacy is required which is why it is so vital for us to work with strong and respected partners such as the IMF or BIS and international organizations like the World Economic Forum.
• The third and last challenge was a bit more technical and relates to making the product work for both fiat and crypto currencies. This said, we believe that all these different currencies will continue to coexist side-by-side. Hence bitcoin is important yet - in our opinion - will not dominate the world as big tech companies like facebook, Microsoft, or Amazon will more likely start their own crypto currency projects rather than jumping onto a third-party one. For that reason even when crypto grows in importance our solution will remain relevant not just for managing commodity and interest risks but also currency ones. The latter is especially true as fiat currencies (though likely digitized one way or another) will remain important given their economic functions and certain interest groups.

What do you love about your team, and why are you the ones to solve this problem?

Well, it’s a very diverse team with decades of experience in finance, tech, law and sales.

And with regards to diversity I even dare to say that we are one of the most diverse teams in the industry.

This said about 55% of all leadership positions are currently held by female colleagues and the top level is comprised of 4 ethnicities.

We generally welcome minorities and people with different views in our team; be it people from different cultural backgrounds, the LGBTQI community or people with disabilities. This kind of diversity makes work pretty exciting and more important from a business perspective allows us to quickly adapt our product to different customer groups.

Speaking of the latter, RiskPool not only works worldwide but now even caters to customers asking for a risk management product which is compliant with Islamic finance rules.

Another fun part is our geographic flexibility which allows people to work from any of our locations (i.e. partner offices) worldwide as long as they join the big team meeting in one of our regional hubs at least once a month. This approach allowed us to establish follow-the-sun processes very early on and to gain a strong presence globally despite an initial lack of resources. The latter aspects have been key when it comes to time-to-market and growth.

If you weren’t building your startup, what would you be doing?

I would work on other compelling (impact) startup ideas… well I am much more of a company builder, strategist, relationship and vision person anyway rather than a “corporat-ish” CEO/manager type.

At the moment, how do you measure success? What are your core metrics?

One of the most important metrics is the netting quota, referring to the amount of positions and volume which can be offset in the risk pool.

Other key metrics include gross and net revenues as well as Opex in relation to assets.

We also track politically-induced provisions given the rise of trade wars.

What’s most exciting about your traction to date?

The growth rate and fact that we were pre-financed by our customers and later also by key business partners as many VCs deemed the risk too high.

That said, there are quite a few off balance sheet positions to be aware of, mostly for work completed by business partners (customers and third parties) in return for promised future discounts, future business or other forms of compensation often subject to our own business performance again (thus income-contingent payback and interest terms apply).

We are also very excited about the strong network effects which we achieved due to the very nature of RiskPool and which make it very hard for competitors to attack us directly.

We are also proud to see a considerable number of very well-known brands among our customers.

What technologies are you currently most excited about, and most worried about? And why?

Julia is our preferred programming language and we are really looking forward to see how the language will evolve over the next years as it combines the ease of use and familiar syntax of Python and R with the speed of C, C++ or Java. So programmers no longer need to estimate models in one language and reproduce them in a faster production language.

So that’s really exciting.

The other technology we are excited about - though we are only using it to a small degree right now - is the blockchain. This said, we are currently looking forward to combing traditional database approaches on micro-level (local operations and customer data) with the blockchain on macro-level (for aggregated local data used to make global/regional decisions).

What advice would you give to the 21-year-old version of yourself?

Stay open-minded and constantly challenge your own views as the world has become to complex for simple answers. Also take care of your health without compromising the need for hard work. The trick is to find balance at work. So about 20% of the time I’ll work from home, which in my case means working from a small sailing boat circumnavigating the world. This way I keep working but get to recharge my batteries quickly for the other 80% of my time spent in the office. Plus, the created opportunities on the docks - golfing was yesterday, nowadays your meeting the real power brokers in the harbor - and benefits from offshore-closings are very real too.

What is something surprising you've learned this year that your contemporaries would benefit from knowing?

Be ready to fire yourself.

What I mean by that is to be aware of your personality (I am for example an ENTP person with the following Big Five scores: Openness 92%, Conscientiousness: 72%, Extraversion: 80%, Agreeableness 25%, Neuroticism 21%) and always review your performance and ability against the very needs of the company. In the end it’s all about finding out how to best leverage each ones strengths and where necessary hiring the people who can help you achieve your goals.

Given the nature of Mount Wish’s core business, growing concerns about the stability of the financial services industry and an increasingly hard to manage political landscape (rising trade wars, countries accusing each other of currency manipulations, outrageous antitrust actions against tech companies, etc.) we not only got under more scrutiny but also dragged into a lot of politically-motivated legal battles and thus have been facing more and more potential black-swan risks and therefore in my case it was best to take a step back, hand the CEO role over to someone more experienced, more “corporat-ish”, and someone a bit more diplomatic.

Therefore, I fired myself as CEO and switched to the newly created role of Executive Chairman which accounts better for my current responsibilities, background, capabilities, future plans (well I am following a bit more of a Virgin-Group-like management approach here) and some personal aspects so that we are now combining the strengths and experience of all of us in an optimal way.

Today, I focus on strategy, corporate and business development, and product vision while the new CEO manages and leads the company.

It’s great and most importantly it strengthened Mount Wish once more.