The Spanish fintech Pecunpay, trademark of the E-money institution Pecunia Cards EDE, which is specialized in innovative payment solutions and E-money processing, has just launched FINTANK, the innovation center for digital payment methods.
The project is led by Elbio Nielsen and Ignacio Santos, co-founders of Fazil Pay, and will have its own structure. Their experience starts with their journey in disruptive projects based on data intelligence, service design and agile methodologies. They both come from different industries where their learning was based on finding solutions to future problems. Their careers have been linked to companies in constant growth and important innovation in hybrid fields. In addition to this, they both share a passion for biohacking and disruptive technology.
The fintech innovation tank is located in Pecunpay’s offices in the centre of Madrid. Two floors dedicated to finding hacks to improve the user’s experience and new hardware and software developments. The open source mindset encourages entrepreneurs from all over Spain to share ideas and ideation processes for future projects, promoting daily stimulation while eating some fruit and playing pin pong.
The first neobank to emerge from these dynamics is Fazil pay, focused on the new generations. A 100% digital wallet on the mobile phone through which, for every euro spent by the user, a tree will be planted or a kilo of plastic will be collected from the beaches.
Fazil Pay has a store with more than a dozen financial products in just one click, aiming towards the world of decentralised finance. They are currently working on a project in the hardware environment that will give rise to a debate in the upcoming months.
Elbio Nielsen explains how the idea of creating FINTANK emerged: “Since the beginning of our neobank Fazil, we have been focused on disruptive innovation, we started analysing technologies that seemed like science fiction and today they are already a reality. From day one, Antonio García Cruz, CEO of Pecunpay, encouraged us to strive to break the limits, and soon after we were integrating 100% with Pecunpay, which defines our strong business relationship. The natural objective is very clear: that the mother of the Spanish neobanks has its own innovation hub, -for us the tank- where we evaluate and debate hypotheses to immediately validate solutions. We want to create advanced products that are able to understand users in their constant evolution, something that traditional banks have already lost. Our innovation ratio is very high and we are going to implement it with our focus on Fazil Pay to make the business model viable as soon as possible.”
This is a further step for Pecunpay in its strategy to position itself as a leading issuer in the fintech ecosystem, enriching its innovation and service offering for its issuing customers.
Since Pecunpay and VISA announced their direct connection alliance last year, they have been very active in the creation of new products such as POROS (Virtual Card Issuing Platform), the launch of Xpays for Apple Pay and Google Pay, the launch of Mastercard-branded issuance programmes, etc.
For Ángel Alonso, CMO of Pecunpay, “having Elbio and Ignacio leading FINTANK is a very important qualitative leap for us. They are very close to the end user, they know very well what users need and how they want it, and they certainly know how to get it to them. Therefore, that knowledge and experience is going to improve our service offer for the rest of our customers through new products and better functionalities.”
