Tech Talk: interview with Yifat Oron, LeumiTech

Thank you, Joy.

So let's think about what is a startup. A startup is usually a few people, a laptop. They're usually very young, they have a lot of big ideas and a lot of ambition. What they don't have is money, they don't have a product, they don't have assets. What happens is when they meet a bank, there's a little bit of uncertainty from the banker's point of view because they're looking to understand numbers and things that the startups cannot supply them.

Okay, so what we've done three years ago, we put together a platform that consisted of three elements where we think is the right thing for the startups. The first one being that we took bankers and we trained them on the technology industry. We think bankers who service the business must understand technology. Another thing we've done is we've built an array of products that are tailor-made for the industry, and essentially the bottom line is that they're supposed to help them to grow. And the third very important element was to build a network which is connecting the startups to the ecosystem. Startups have a lot of issues when they want to grow, it's a very tough journey, and the more they get connected to venture capital funds, angel community, accelerators or thought leaders, this is something that speeds up their work. So we're helping them to be connected to the ecosystem.

Okay, so what we have in mind is always what is the biggest issue the startup faces and how we can try to solve it. One of the things is credit. I think you all know that most of the banking world does not loan to startup companies, and for a very good reason, by the way. The startups are losing money, there's a lot of uncertainty, and it's very different from other industries that we know. What we've built is we've built a lot of products in the credit space where we understand the risk, we calculate the risk, we understand the companies and we understand their surrounding, their investors, and we provide credit to the companies even in a very early stage. Although we do know how to tailor the various credit products according to life cycle. This is on the credit side. Another thing, for example, that we have is we have actually the first in the world community-based credit card, which is a corporate credit card aimed at early-stage companies. And what we do with this card is we allow companies to get a lot of benefits of things that they need at early-stage company life cycle, things like travel expenses, which would help them save on things like cheaper cloud services. All those things that our startup, when they start their way, every discount you can give them is helpful for them.

Okay, Leumi Bank is actually a very, very old bank. It's 115 years old, it's the first Israeli bank. It's known for being a leader in the digital banking space in Israel. And one of the things that we keep on doing in the bank as a whole is we have a policy of working with startup companies in order to bring them over, have open innovation. By the way, not just in the FinTech space, we do this in cyber, products, marketing, risk, everything. We can go out and look for the best solutions out there that startups supply us. We're welcoming them, and part of our role is to be the window to the ecosystem of the startups. And we open the bank to them, and we're very proud to be buying products from a lot of startups in Israel.

Well, grow. We started our activity in Israel, we've extended it to the United States as well as to the UK. And our main activity in the next year or so is to significantly, significantly grow our operations over there. And also, and very importantly, to keep on introducing new products that are novel, that are new, and who make us look for the right things for the entrepreneurs who help them grow their business.

Thank you.