"Spend Less Time in Fear," says nBanks CEO Orlando Costa

HackerNoon Reporter: Please tell us briefly about your background.

Professionally, I have over 20 years of experience in the financial sector. 15 of them working in one of the largest Iberian banks (BPI/Caixa Bank). Across the board, I worked in different areas, from Sales, Marketing and IT, namely Demand Management. More recently together with my co-founders we decided to cause a major disruption in the financial sector with nBanks.

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

Our startup is nBanks. And what we do is to completely transform the banking model, making the customer and their profile dominate the relationship with any banking entity, being able to aggregate information, compare the best existing solutions and streamline accounting and banking negotiation processes. All on a single platform. We started as a B2B platform, but right now we are lauching also a B2C platform.

What is the origin story?

Our story is one of inspiration. It is urgent to transform the banking model and make it more transparent, free, and agile. Banking customers anywhere in the world need a platform that constantly gives them exemption and allows them to make the best decisions and with the best decision tools. And we founders, as former bank staff, decided to take a step forward and create a new, independent model that satisfies the greatest urgency of any customer: Clear and impartial language added after modern technology.

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

Fear this unfair advantage, because we manage to bring together the fundamentals to succeed in building this model: experience, multifaceted team, drive, resilience, and many customers who trust us daily and constantly make the platform evolve with more features.

We have a direct channel with each of our customers. And that's worth gold.

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

Another startup for sure. Like an athlete who trains every day, like a musician who plays every day, an entrepreneur every day undertakes and dreams of creating something new.

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

Conversion rate at each meeting/lead. Ability to retain paying customers. Have a technology team that can create new features in quick time in scrum/agile mode. Scalability to reach anywhere in the world.

What’s most exciting about your traction to date?

Continue to grow daily and in a few months have more than 2000 business users in just a few months. And reach new markets in just over 2 weeks. And to grow with new partners and customers who fall in love with new technology and bring us new customers.

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

Obviously, blockchain, because it brings us a whole new ability to audit processes and keep data and information integration invulnerable. Nodejs because it's easy to learn, keep things simple, faster time-to-market, Scalability, Battle-tested old hand, MVP development and Community.

What drew you to get published on HackerNoon? What do you like most about our platform?

Innovative approach, easy process to register and to understand the concept and authenticity, as it doesn't enter into the usual regime of rewarding a startup just to gain traffic by bots, or pay a budget to promote innovation.

Prizes are not paid. Must be delivered by acknowledgment. I liked the approach model.

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

Spend less time in fear and learn more from mistakes.

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

Being a year dominated by Covid, I learned and we all learned to have the humility to realize that we cannot dominate the long term, but make it happen in the present. The future always exists. We are either there physically (still) or we do something to become eternal. And this eternity can only be achieved if we create something in the present with impact.

Vote for nBanks as Startup of the Year in Porto!