Startup Interview with Patrick Stäuble, Teylor CEO & Founder

HackerNoon Reporter: Please tell us briefly about your background.

My name is Patrick Stäuble. I am Swiss but grew up all over the world. - I was born in Holland, then moved to Colombia, Malaysia, Brunei, and Oman. I returned to Switzerland at the age of 18 and joined the Swiss military, where I completed peacekeeping missions in Kosovo. After this, I studied Economics in Zurich, started and sold my first startup, and then worked as a product manager at a Swiss mobile banking fintech, where I eventually became Head of Business Development and Sales. During that time, the idea of Teylor was born. I left my old job at the end of 2017 and launched Teylor in 2018.

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

Our company is called “Teylor”and we have developed a modular technology platform to build, automate, deliver and scale credit products. In other words: We are building the lenders of tomorrow.

What is the origin story?

At the previous job, I dealt with many banks in Germany. I quickly realized that they lack digital tools in the realm of SME financing. This was amazing to me because for the last ten years, everyone had talked about digitizing banking. But somehow, only a few institutions had focused on the SME lending segment. That’s when I decided to seize this massive opportunity and jump in headfirst. We launched the Teylor Loan Platform in 2018 with a fully automated SME loan with a German bank, and it was an immediate success.

We saw the demand for automated lending not only from SMEs but also from banks, and we saw that our solution works. As several banks came to us and inquired about our technology, we expanded the Teylor loan platform to a full-fledged technology platform. We now offer modular Software-as-a-Service solutions for banks to digitize and automate their lending processes.

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

Our team comes from diverse backgrounds. We have engineers that worked for technology companies or other fintech before and traditional finance people that come out of investment banking, SME finance, and consulting. It’s fascinating to see how many synergies there are between people with completely different backgrounds and how everyone really pushes towards our common goal of revolutionizing SME lending.

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

I would be building another startup. To me, there is absolutely nothing else I would rather be doing. It’s what I’m good at, and it’s what I want to do. There are so many problems out there that need to be solved, and that’s why there will always be a good idea for another startup.

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

As a technology company we mainly look at two things: First, how good is our technology and does it solve the problem we have set out to solve. Today, I can confidently say that we have the best digital lending technology in the European market. No other company has accomplished what we have. The challenge is to ensure that we remain the technology leader.

Second, we run a business, and even the best technology will fail if it doesn’t sell. So it’s paramount for our growth that we can quickly onboard more banks to our platform and grow our revenues. At the moment that is going great, and our numbers have been exploding since the beginning of the year.

What’s most exciting about your traction to date?

There has been an enormous push for more digitization in the last two years. One reason was the pandemic, but also the need to fight climate change and to keep up with new competitors from Asia. That has played into our hands as more and more banks see the need to digitize their credit processes.

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

One of the fascinating technologies to me is machine learning. We just launched a new version of our OCR tool, “FinCR'' that we use to convert financial data from annual reports into machine-readable formats. Banks and other businesses use this tool to avoid manual data entry, for example, to avoid copying and pasting financial information from annual reports to their systems.

We used machine learning to improve FinCR’s accuracy, and it’s absolutely astonishing how good our tool has become in a very short time. As for the second part of your question: I’m not really worried about any technology. I’m just worried about how humans may use it. Take the example of artificial intelligence. You can use it to read financial statements, or you can use it to build intelligent weapons. I’m a fan of the first, not so much of the second.

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

I’ve been a long-time reader! HackerNoon is a place where bright brains discuss new technologies and innovations. Where you can say what you think without fingerpointing, on HackerNoon, you can throw your ideas out there, and the community will challenge them without judging. I think that’s great.

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

I think I would tell myself to check out this little thing called bitcoin and invest a few dollars when it launches!

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

I think the pandemic has shown how fragile the world is. We think we have it all figured out, and then a virus turns up and puts the world upside down. The good news is: It teaches us to be flexible, both personally and in business. That was one of the key lessons for me this year and last year.