Jonas Gjørup Larsen

This transcript was generated automatically (Spotify transcript) and then edited for readability: names and obvious mis-hearings corrected, filler words removed, speaker labels added where the speaker is clear. Passages that could not be understood are marked [unclear]; short omitted passages are marked [...]. Timestamps are approximate. The recording is the authoritative version.

Julius Ambrosius 00:00:16

Hello and welcome to a new episode of Campus To Capital. Today, Konstantin and myself are joined by Jonas Gjørup Larsen, CFO of Bitpanda, one of Europe's leading digital asset platforms, and I don't know about you, Konstantin, but I feel like it's so great to finally record in person again after recording remotely for like the past two months.

Konstantin Girst

No, definitely. I think it's great. I mean, I've seen you in person in between, of course, but I think it's definitely nice to be back in this studio and kind of get that face to face conversation going again for sure. So, Jonas, thank you so much for joining us today.

Jonas Gjørup Larsen

No worries. No worries. It's nice. Nice to be in person for something. I live in the hybrid world as well, right? So it is actually nice to be with real people.

Host

Great. And I mean, yeah, let's get started. So you studied law and economics, and I mean, that's a reasonable choice for studies for someone that has such a career in finance like you do. But I was interested if there's maybe a character trait that you recognized early on, maybe even when you were a teenager already, in yourself, that kind of resonated with the idea or encouraged the idea of going into finance.

Jonas Gjørup Larsen

It's, yeah, not really, actually. I wanted to be a doctor when I was younger, right, and studying medicine. And then I ended up teaching on the side of my university studies for 6-7 years. So, and we can get back to that part. But that's where I picked up my leadership training, you know, teaching kids in the age of 8 to 12 years old. And then, yeah, after that

00:01:48

jumping into, by coincidence, jumping into Deloitte actually, because I had no business relevant experiences whatsoever. But I had a, back then, I don't think the word diversity was used as much as it is today, right? But I think someone picked up and thought, why the hell is this diverse kid applying at a Big Four company like Deloitte? It actually started with, you know, I started with the business law bachelor's degree. And back then it wasn't a real law degree, so to speak. And it was kind of hard to see what it could be used for. So I jumped into the auditing part on my master's because that was extremely feasible. It's almost a practical education, right. Even though I did full time. Yeah. And then just ending up at Deloitte in Copenhagen, where it was just also a coincidence that I ended up, you know, in the department doing banks and asset managers. So I always worked with larger Danish banks and Nordic banks and especially asset managers. And the asset managers were the fun ones because they weren't as bureaucratic as the bigger banks. And then spending a lot of time on anti money laundering and, you know, money laundering schemes across Europe before deciding to not wanting to be one of the older white

00:03:19

males in the partner group. So as I thought, if I join them, I will become them. So I essentially stepped out and thought I got to do something very different. In Denmark there weren't that many choices. Lunar Bank was the choice for me. So I decided to join them back when they were just a little more than 100 people with a finance function, or more of an accounting function, and then building out, you know, treasury and a real finance function there. And then again, coincidence, my entire life has been based on coincidences, but those coincidences come along if you enable them, right. So it's me speaking to a random headhunter, you know, five years earlier. He calls me obsessed [unclear]. Speaking of, I have this new, this open CFO position where we're looking for someone new. I have the classical field of nine older German Austrian guys. Can you be my wild card? It won't turn into anything, right? But can you just be my wild card, for the diversity purpose once again. And then I ended up getting the job. I was like, OK, then we'll do crypto for a while, and neo banking was crazy. Crypto is just, you know, neo banking on steroids. It's crazy. I joined in the midst of our last crypto winter. Right, so it was on the lows and it was actually nice, right, because you go, you

00:04:53

come in and you can push. We walked away, speaking of capital, we walked away from 2020-2021 where it was like the blue skies dream world where you just needed to have top line. Then you would get capital. Some even translated: the more employees the better, right? So people were just hiring like crazy. Bitpanda did the same, went from 600 people to 1200 people back to 600 people within less than six months, which is just insane. Even walking out of the neo banking world. So it was flipping from that top line perspective into an EBITDA focus where it was now profitability, profitability was king, not just revenue anymore. So it was actually a nice time to join when everything was kind of pessimistic and low anyway. Then it's nice to come in as the CFO and do your, I still call it cost optimization exercises, where we try to be more focused on how we actually spend our money, and we can dive into that as well, on how we've changed our approach to, especially, Europe is just a different beast. That's also why I don't bank with Bank of America or HSBC. I still have, you know, a Danish or Nordic bank. The same goes for Germany. The same goes for France, Italy, Spain. You still have local players, local heroes in Europe, but it was just, it was nice to have red numbers in '22 and then flip them back into black numbers in '23. So that was quite all

00:06:23

right actually, coming in. And it started with traditional stuff, you know, walking in the door running finance, treasury, 50 people. Then because I'm an external auditor by trade, from my background, we found it kind of natural to also take in risk management, then compliance, then the whole anti financial crime area, then the information security office and now also building an internal audit function, right? So it started with a small group of people where I knew everyone to now having a plus 130 people organization, right? So it's been quite a ride as well.

Host

Oh, very, very interesting progression. I think there's actually quite a lot to talk about today. But as you just noted, the fintech industry is a high paced environment with high growth, but also degrowth, as you just noted. So we were wondering how would you describe the evolution of the CFO's role in this environment, also with agentic tools like AI and so on and so forth?

Jonas Gjørup Larsen

I would say it's been, crypto is different to a lot of, like, to TradFi, especially DeFi is very different, because, I know, I'm just on the brink, right, being a millennial. So when you guys step into the room, you seek the purpose. So a lot of my colleagues have that purpose kind of by default because they're with Bitpanda, because they believe in crypto, they believe in the DeFi world and the setup, and that's the

00:07:55

purpose, right? So I don't need to invent some weird purpose with, you know, before nice statements [unclear] or whatever you see from the TradFis and the Big Four and McKinsey and all the others. It's kind of there by default for a lot of my colleagues. So they just have that natural [unclear] to actually do something within the space. It's definitely evolved from being, by default, being the weird kid in the class and trying to do things differently, to now turning into that startup, scale up, and now into the maturing phase of actually, you know, fitting in. We see that with, now you have, of course, you have Coinbase out there being listed already and having been there for a while. And now you saw eToro kind of opening up the fintech markets again, Circle this week with their pricing last week. And you're going to see a lot of other followers, right? So that means that once you go public, you can't really ignore the grown up phase. You need to grow up. So it's about maturing. It's a lot more about processes. It's a lot more about, you know, I would say, embracing those parts that you thought you were going to leave behind when you left the TradFi sector, in that perspective.

Host

And I mean, is there maybe a specific idea or trend that you're eyeing, kind of in the perspective of also maybe in the crypto space, what the CFO role could maybe evolve to in a

00:09:28

couple of years?

Jonas Gjørup Larsen

I think it's, and also, I didn't even get to your AI question, right, but it's a lot more of an advisor role today, especially in these companies, because you started it up as, you know, hands dirty, you know, hands on kind of role where you needed to step in and ensure that you were meeting your compliance requirements and financial reportings and everything else. Now it's much more of that whole cost optimization role, right? So where I sit today compared to where I just sat one year or two years ago, it's much more of a, to put it in easy terms, right? You have our CEO, he's the guy trying to make us a lot of money. And then I'm the guy trying to keep us out of jail, right? So that's how we actually divide the efforts. I try to ensure that we have a playing field that's levelled out that we can make revenue on and he tries to enable it. And it's also keeping the simplistic model, not having too heavy a leadership group. So if you all of a sudden end up 10, 12 people, decisions are not made fast anymore, right? Because you need to agree with everyone. If you're just four people like we are at Bitpanda today, then it's just a much more lean, much faster, more high paced process as well. So it's more of being the right hand to the CEO mostly. It can also be, in my case, the CEO is also the

00:11:01

commercial guy and you also have a CMO and you have a COO. But it's much more about being the very close [unclear] advisor or, you know, one of the Musketeers in that space. And then just being able to get some feedback, enable it quickly and ensure that we are able to push out there.

Host

And I mean, talking about that advisory and also about growth and degrowth. I mean, Bitpanda is a massive fintech company. It's one of the leading fintech companies in Europe. You guys became a unicorn in 2021. And what I wrote down actually: between quarter 2 of 2023 and quarter two 2024, your registrations increased by 113%. And I mean, those are already old numbers. So I'm sure there has been massive growth since as well. And then in that perspective, how do you guys kind of approach to balance exploration and innovation with kind of refinement and improvement at the same time?

Jonas Gjørup Larsen

So I would say when I joined, very, very product oriented organization, and now it's a very commercially, you know, oriented organization where it's, it's the American term, like we had that, speaking of how to do Europe right. You have a lot of Asian players, a lot of American players, they just enter Europe, they hire a general manager or a GM for Europe and then they do the spray and pray approach. They just try to push their product all over the

00:12:34

all over the continent, whereas we were doing the same back then, being Austria based. And then of course, Germany came kind of for free. Switzerland, different animal, but Germany came for free, right? But we were still, you know, sponsoring a local rugby club in southern Italy, throwing weird performance marketing money after something in Greece or in Portugal, just all over the place. So we pulled back and we said, OK, let's try to focus. So let's prove to the world that we can be market leading in Germany. We already had Austria kind of by default because it's the birth country of the company. So stepping in with a focused game plan instead of the spray and pray approach, where we actually just said, OK, now we want to be the market leader and we want to build a playbook for how we do this. And you do it in a couple of ways, but the main focus is localization. So that means when you're a German, especially with crypto, you provide, you know, customer support in German, you ensure that you have not one of those virtual IBANs. You have a real German IBAN that you're depositing your money with. So when you sit there as a German user, you will see that you're sending your money to an account with Deutsche Bank, which gives you safety and security, right? Because you're not sending it offshore to some, or, you know, to an Eastern European, but it just gives you more security. And especially Germans are a lot like Danes. They do appreciate, you know, the security, the regulation and everything else, especially post Wirecard and other stuff that has gone down.

00:14:07

It's just more in the culture of the people there. So we set out a 12 month plan and we conquered Germany in less than 6. As I guess you said, we were also lucky with some of the optics. Last year was fun. Q1 was the ETF launches and everything else. Q4 was just [unclear], right, which is always good for the crypto space. So we actually became market leader way quicker than we had anticipated. And now it's leading Germany by a double figure down to #2. Then we took that plan and then we said we're doing the same in France. We've gone through 26 countries in Europe and saying, what's the next core market? France was the next one up for grabs. Most natural one would have been the UK, but because the UK is not in the EU they had three years of just radio silence [unclear] from the FCA where they weren't giving out any new crypto licenses, so we couldn't do the UK. So France next natural choice, then Italy, not Spain, because Spain is just very different to the rest of the markets, as being extremely price sensitive. Most Spanish people will have 4, 5, 6 banks, one for their car loan, one for their mortgage, one for their, you know, their salary accounts and everything else. They just go for the cheaper options. Whereas the Italians are just by nature a little more quality. They will spend their last, you know, euro on, you know, high quality food, high quality

00:15:37

products and stuff like that. So it was more about the quality there of the product. And then it's also walking away from three years ago. If you guys dial into a Coinbase quarterly, right, you won't get any predictions out of them on, you know, their top line revenue for the coming period because it's so volatile. Trade premiums in the crypto space is just, I can't predict it, right. It can be 100X, it can be 1X compared to what I'm looking at right now. And no one really has a clue on how to do any economic modelling for forecasting purposes on that. And three years ago we had, I would say, close to 100% of our revenue was that variable trade premium revenue. And what do you do? And then, coming from having worked with so many asset managers in the background, the philosophy of an asset manager is, should always be: you have management fees and performance fees, right? Your management fees are the fees you take in and you ensure that those management fees are covering your fixed cost basis, because then you're always in the black numbers, right, no matter what happens with the markets. And then the performance fee, in my case, the trade premiums is kind of the performance fee. So we've tried to diversify our product offering as well, so that we have products on the shelves that are, they're not banking

00:17:08

sticky, right. But at least they're a little more recurring. They're a little more sticky than just trade premium. Because what actually identifies or, you know, qualifies trade premium is you as a customer have to do something actively to actually ensure that I generate revenue on the back end. Whereas if you have staking, if you have leverage products, there's always an overnight fee tied into it. So you sit and hold on the position and it's slowly generating, not as much as the trade premium, but there's just a nice sticky revenue flow on the back end. You have saving products. We can't do deposits. We're not a bank, but we can do money market funds where you can as a customer park your money. If you believe that, you know, everything is downward trending in the crypto market and you are not risk willing enough to jump into a short product, then you just want to park it somewhere else. And one of our biggest of also keeping those customers active, or keeping them on the platform, is ensuring that you don't need to withdraw the money out and then go somewhere else, because it's very hard to get you to be active again if you have to first deposit money. So we try to have an environment where you can do everything, like you can also go into gold, precious metals, right? Not real stocks, but [unclear] stocks as we have right now. And then that's the B2C side of the world. Then we also started with the B2B side of the world where N26 is still kind of the flagship where we are. It's everything is powered by, it's kind of like, from a Danish perspective, when you walk into Lunar and you buy stocks, you do

00:18:38

it via Saxo Bank because they provide the white labeling solution on the back end. So it's powered by Saxo. Whereas within N26 everything is powered by Bitpanda when you buy crypto with them. And then we actually got Raiffeisen, which, if you're German, you might know them, but it's comparable to Danske Bank, very conservative older banking group, and they have the same now. So we're powering their entire crypto offering on the back end. And then it's Deutsche, it's Société Générale also. So we see the TradFi sector now starting to move, and it's everything from providing on premise cold storage, custody solutions that we help them build. They also need fall back solutions because they're banks. So we can actually do that. But all the way up to powered by Bitpanda, right, where they just say, here's the APIs, just connect and then do it in our colours. And then we're off on that side. That's what you would call extremely sticky revenue. Once you sell a SaaS solution to a financial institution, they're in it for a long time. You can see with all the traditional banks, they've just now come around the corner, starting to consider, hey, what do we do with, you know, our very old infrastructure and what's that cloud thing that we should be getting on, right? So it's actually, that has helped us a lot. So now there's a way better split in between variable

00:20:08

and, it's still not fixed, right, but variable and more sticky revenue. So it makes my prediction life a little bit easier when it comes to that.

Host

So you just said that you have new B2B partnerships as well. But I'm wondering, because I think that there's quite some scepticism and maybe also some misconceptions about crypto in general, especially with these traditional incumbents in the banking market. So could you maybe tell us or explain how you were able to persuade them to collaborate with Bitpanda?

Jonas Gjørup Larsen

A lot of diverse stories and journeys to get there for a lot of people there. I think our biggest kind of news story over the last three years was the Bayern Munich sponsorship, because Bayern is notoriously known as being the most boring football club in Europe. But it's also the most, yeah, but it's, no, no, but it's from a kind of management perspective, right, because they don't run with deficits. They actually have a sound capital backing and they're profitable most years. And it's a pretty conservative club, if you compare it to, especially if you compare it to some of the Italian clubs or when you compare it to, you know, a lot of the Premier League clubs in the UK. So that one, whereas they don't,

00:21:40

they don't pull anyone in to do a sponsorship. So that took a while for me. The biggest announcement that we've ever had was us being able, not to do customer accounts, but just to have a corporate account with Deutsche Bank, because we're literally the first crypto player globally that has, it's called a top tier banking partner, in that perspective, from a treasury perspective, from a corporate finance perspective and everything else. And that started, the ball started rolling from there, because of course you can do a partnership with N26. They're a little closer to being a native, you know, fintech compared to the others. They move a little faster, but doing Deutsche just opened up the doors for that whole piece. And then Raiffeisen as well was also part of it, because especially German banks, they do know Raiffeisen as being an even more, they're Austrian, right? The Germans think that Austrians by nature are a more conservative people. So getting them on board was also a huge win. And you would think that it's cannibalizing your own B2C stream by just giving all the traditional banks the opportunity to steal those customers. But that's not what we're seeing. We're actually seeing that it increases the adaptation rate for crypto in mainland Europe. So whenever we do something with Raiffeisen, with Deutsche or SocGen or others, you see a lot of new non-native crypto players come in. So you see a lot of retail customers that have never bought

00:23:13

crypto in their life and now all of a sudden their local bank is offering it, right? So we have it, right. I think I still have my mortgage with Nordea, and I have Nordea because, you know, my parents had Unibank back then before it was used [unclear] into Nordea. Even my grandparents had it there. As I said, Danish people just have one banking connection. That's where they do their stuff. And if they don't have a product offering, you don't do it. But then all of a sudden, once your own bank that you've been banking with your entire life has crypto on the offering, it's not as scary anymore. So you see people actually adopting into the asset class in that perspective, which is extremely interesting. And I think that's the next phase of increasing adaptation, because we are still lacking behind in mainland Europe. The UK, they're good, but they also get all those rub off effects directly from across the Atlantic, and mainland Europe is just behind on adaptation. Germany is pretty good. Bitpanda, Bitvavo, who were there before that, probably played a crucial role in it. Scandinavia or the Nordics, complete crap. I think we're the worst in crypto adaptation across Europe. We're just not picking up on it. But it's also the same when you look at online betting and stuff like that, then you see a much higher rate as you go further down Europe, right? And then it decreases when you go up north. So it's just not really a thing. Lunar Bank launched their Lunar Block [unclear] crypto offering and it

00:24:45

never really took off as we expected it to do back then, because Danes are just boring when it comes to taking risk. They want to buy the Novo stock, right, which has also turned out to be a bit risky over the last year. But if you bought it 20 years ago, you're probably still holding it. And it's almost the same huddle [unclear] return as you have on some of the crypto assets, right? So I think even a lot of Danish people, they're getting better now because it's also gotten more accessible and not as expensive. But just buying non Danish stocks was kind of a big leap for Scandinavian investors. But it's all about accessibility and trust. So by doing that whole, we fell behind in the early days because we were so focused on being an onshore crypto player playing under local regulations within the financial landscape of Europe. That's going to cost you money, that's going to, you know, force you to turn some customers down because they don't fit into the regulatory requirements, or they don't want to do the tedious proof of funds or, you know, tax reporting. So what have you, they would rather just have their assets on an offshore account then. So we definitely were lacking a little behind. But then you had FTX happen, then you had, you know, some of the other players, Binance, Coinbase, falling under the scrutiny of various regulators. You had Bitvavo, another big local hero in Europe, out of the

00:26:15

out of the Netherlands, that were simply banned from acquiring or having customers in Germany. That gave us a lot of customers for almost no acquisition cost at all, because their customers already chose them because they were a European player and they wanted to have their money sitting with a European player and not with Coinbase, a Binance, a Cockney [unclear] or the others. So there was no other option than to move to Bitpanda, right. So that's also one of the reasons why you saw that extreme uptick in customers coming in. And then we still see it, but it's moving from market to market. It's the brand awareness. So you have two sides of marketing, right? You have your brand building and you have your performance marketing, and the brand building, that's where we kind of deploy that playbook. You see it on the football teams. That's the easiest way to follow it around. Bayern Munich first, then moving into France, obvious choice, probably Saint-Germain, going into Italy. Everyone thinks that Rome is the capital and paper [unclear], right. But Milan is actually the biggest city in Italy and it's the financial centre of Italy. So you had to do one of the Milan clubs and it ended up being AC Milan. And now we actually got our license in the UK just before Christmas. So the UK is the next bet. So it'll be fun to see what colours will we have when we roll into the UK? But it's part of the brand building playbook. And then you look into

00:27:47

affiliates, media outlets and everything else on how you actually lock down and invest there as part of rolling out. And that brings in, the organic growth is just good and it's cheaper than non organic growth, because you have a lot of local heroes across Europe in the various countries. And a lot of them have been for sale and some of them have closed down. But yeah, the price that they were asking just one year ago, two years ago, were still 2020-2021 valuations. So we just figured, hey, organic marketing is cheaper. So we can keep the customer acquisition cost at a level where that's a better option than just buy someone where you get 5% market share upfront.

Host

And talking about making retail investing and especially investing in the crypto space more accessible, I mean, Bitpanda is really diving into that. As you just touched upon, and I saw Bitpanda has three values. There's [unclear] transferability, availability and divisibility. And you guys also offer Bitpanda Academy, which is kind of to increase financial literacy, to provide some financial education. So you really want to be there for the average Joe, let's say, and kind of give him the opportunity to make investing easy, to make him understand what he's doing, and just to kind of provide a full, open [unclear] service there.

00:29:20

And what does this issue of democratizing finance mean to you on a personal level?

Jonas Gjørup Larsen

It means, first of all, I mean, that's the biggest hurdle for the adaptation, especially in Europe. It's getting better, but a lot of people just think or associate crypto with scam, right? So they think that it's just an enabler of scammers across the globe because it's, you know, off the grid and everything else, which is definitely not true if you set it up the right way. So for me the security part is number 1. So it's ensuring that FTX doesn't happen. It's ensuring that the Bybit hack doesn't happen to us. So it's having impeccable cold storage setups where you keep most of your customer funds, at least the ones you don't want to have on the hot wallet for trading purposes. That's by far, for me, the biggest trigger into this. And then, as you said, it's the educational part, because that converts people. It's almost like preaching, right? You need to get out there, you need to preach and correct the wrong assumptions that people have about this asset class, because it is a different asset class. And it's kind of like, you know, I almost want to say it's kind of like, you know, you see a motorcycle gang and some people think that they're all criminals. There's a couple of bad seeds in there. Yes. You had the Hawk Tuah coin. You had, you know, a couple of

00:30:51

other interesting coins, Luna coin and the likes. You had the rug pulls across the board. So you still have, you know, 3000, 4000 assets out there. We only have 600 assets in that perspective offered on the platform, because we're trying to also ensure that we don't burn the customers, so that customers don't come in and then just lose all their money. You want to keep them as loyal cohorts because we can make money together when you step into those bull runs along the way. And that's where they turn very profitable for us as a company as well. And it's all about keeping the righteous path of being regulated and behaving nicely and not taking risks with customer funds. That means keeping a total and clear segregation between what's Bitpanda funds and Bitpanda assets and what's customer assets, right? That's the FTX learning at least for everyone, which should have been basic, you know, asset management 101 back then. But that was just a crazy outlier, I hope, in the industry, right? And we see some of the others now also catering to that whole part. You see Bybit, OKX, you see Coinbase, Binance and the likes. You see them setting up now grounds in Europe to actually get European licenses so that they can operate fully or full

00:32:24

scale in the European environment, because it's not the most important market for them, the US is by far right now, especially with what's happening in the US. But it's still important to have some anchor in Europe, right? They're not just going to give it up and just say, Bitpanda, just take Europe, right? We can do the rest of the globe. So that's for me personally. It is the literacy part. It is ensuring. So I actually like the Bitpanda Academy piece and Elizabeth, who's pushing out a lot of the small posts that you probably see on Instagram or TikTok or YouTube, where we're trying to, in lack of a better term, right, just, you know, dumb it down so that everyone understands what's actually happening in some of the extremely complex environment. And don't get me started on Web3, where we just launched our Vision token today, which was a merger of Pantos and the BEST token. And it's kind of the first step in that whole Web3 environment. That one is going to be even more fun when we include those pieces in the educational parts of the platform.

Host

And I mean, to round it up, I think 600 different good investment opportunities are also definitely enough to build a diverse portfolio [unclear].

Jonas Gjørup Larsen

Beer coin, right? Beer coin, all about German beer coin. I think that was the last real new hype asset that we, no, sorry, that was Trump coin. But beer coin was the last out of nowhere fun asset,

00:33:58

just completely driven by a singular market, by the German market.

Host

But I feel like what a lot of people are underestimating is actually the technology behind all of this, because it's not only utilised for crypto. When we look at blockchain, it's also utilised for fractional ownership, tokenization in general. [...] So what do you think? How will this technology develop and are there other use cases for it as well?

Jonas Gjørup Larsen

You will see, for me it's a little down the list, right? Because when you look at it, for me, globally speaking, the most important next phase is the whole stablecoin movement. You see that in Nigeria, you see it in Latin America, you see it already moving. And I think that's also where you see incumbent banks, you see central banks actually trying to lean into that space, because everyone recognizes that stablecoin is kind of the next TradFi thing where they will adopt. And then you have #2, which is just the digital assets as a recognised asset class. We're already getting there. And then you have RWAs, or real world assets. It's still lacking a little behind, because for the TradFis to lean into that whole journey,

00:35:30

you need customer demand. And it's simply not really there yet. It will come, right? I think it's the same as, when you think about it, it's interesting, right? Because I would argue that the first real blockchain in the world from a digital perspective is the Copenhagen Stock Exchange, right? They're the first ones that actually took physical stocks on paper and digitized them. And that's a blockchain, right? It's just a bit slower. It's a bit more manual. And it's very old school. So there are of course a lot of use cases for every asset class out there. It can be the real estate books in Denmark that are run through a more seamless structure where they're on the chain all of a sudden. So you can trace all the amendments made to that, you know, plot of land that you own, that were made since, you know, the 1800s or wherever, where right now it's old pieces of crappy paper that, if you're lucky, are scanned in somewhere in a public filing cabinet. So there's a lot of use cases. We all saw the most tangible one, if you're not deep into the space, when Maersk were looking at, you know, just putting every single shipping container out there on the chain so that you could trace it and follow it around and use that instead of having, you know, tedious old documents that the ships had to carry around and show in every dock. Then you could just have it on chain, right.

00:37:01

That for me was a kind of tangible use case. It turned out to be a bit more complex than that. I think they just paused it a little bit. Real stocks is of course the first, just tokenizing real stocks, because then you can also, the beauty with tokens compared to traditional stocks is it's by nature, you can do fractions like this, right? So we can all buy a very expensive Apple share or something else where we don't have to pull up the entire amount to buy one stock. You don't have to do an underlying technology that fractionalises it on a financial contract in the back end, you can just have a token and I can buy, you know, a small corner of that token instead.

Host

Very interesting. So we will finally be able to buy a Lindt stock then and get all the chocolate.

Jonas Gjørup Larsen

I think, what is it, in Austria, you buy the Do & Co stock, right? And then you show up for the annual, the General Assembly, and everyone shows up with the, you know, Tupperware boxes because there's so much, like, that's my Austrian colleagues. They just buy one stock because then they're allowed to go to the shareholder meeting and then the food there is just amazing.

Host

Yeah, I know for sure. So investment advice.

Jonas Gjørup Larsen

Buy one stock and you don't have to buy groceries again, you know.

Host

Yeah. But we talked a lot about just the evolution of the whole, yeah, fintech space, crypto space, but regulators are actually moving along with this evolution, with MiCA now coming into effect.

00:38:35

How do you see this regulation, the regulation shaping competitive markets? Is it stifling innovation as much as people tend to say it is?

Jonas Gjørup Larsen

So the biggest effect, the biggest immediate effect for Europe was, you know, USDT or Tether kind of being banned essentially from the MiCA space. That gave a pretty big rise to USDC and Circle instead, but, and that's where it comes from, right. It's annoying because we have this DeFi world and now someone else is interfering in that DeFi world. The community felt it as interference, right? But what it will do, it will create, and it's a funny and it's a misused term, regulatory clarity. Regulatory clarity per definition is a utopian thought because it will never happen, because then you wouldn't have as many people employed in the traditional financial sector as there are. Because whenever you think you're close to achieving the regulatory clarity, they just make a new regulation down in the EU or in Danish parliament, right. And then you can start over again. But at least it will bring in trust from the traditional financial sector, that now you have something where we won't get scrutinized or punished by regulators for actually adopting the asset class. And it started out softer than I would have thought. I thought it would have been

00:40:06

more harsh from the get go. MiCA is interesting because it levels the playing field in Europe. That means that now all of a sudden it's very good for us, because we had plus 20 licenses before MiCA. We even had, like, in Denmark, you don't need a license because it's not required. In Sweden you do, in Norway you do, so there we had licenses. You had licenses in Germany, Austria, France, Italy, Spain, all across the board, right, different, either crypto asset service provider licenses or virtual asset service provider licenses. You need your e-money institution licenses, a lot of licenses. And now you have this almost banking license where it can be passported, because you couldn't passport the other one. So you needed to have it country by country. So now you can just get one license. You can get it in Dublin, right? You can get it in Malta, you can get it in Germany, and then you're allowed to play ball in 26 countries, but you need to get that one license first.

Host

I mean, it's nice to hear that this certain regulation encourages this efficiency. And I mean, I also think that, because, I mean, as we said, Europe, especially also Germany, is super, super strong, like we love our regulation. But I think that can also encourage innovation, because when you look at the PSD2, the Payment Services Directive 2, for example, I saw that that makes APIs not voluntary, compared to the US where you don't need to have them. And I mean, in this conversation there have been a couple of instances where we compared the European market with the global market situation, and looking at Europe as a fintech hub,

00:41:41

I mean, you have these regulations and then you have big players like you guys, Bitpanda, we have N26, what we talked about earlier. We also have Klarna. But then on the other side, I think we all know Europe is maybe more risk averse. There is less VC backing compared to the US, and also digital payment, like in China with WeChat or in the US with Venmo, is not as common in Europe. And looking at these two tails almost, do you think Europe is underestimating its potential as a fintech hub or is it not?

Jonas Gjørup Larsen

I think we're lucky that we have a couple of guys that along the last 10 years said, fuck it, let's not have the US win every single match in this whole fintech space. Because if they hadn't, we would have been even further behind, right. And again, I think there are also very, very big differences country by country. I experience this on a weekly basis, right? Going to Austria, where I have to carry cash around all the time. As a Danish person, I'm like, what's going on, right? But there's just a high risk chance. And I think it's the same in southern Germany, especially in Bavaria. There's just a high risk chance of walking into a restaurant and there's an old yellow sign on the door saying, oh, you know, the card machine doesn't work today. And you can just see it's been hanging there for six months, right? Because they're required to have it, but it doesn't work because they would rather avoid some of the fees in that payment space, which actually, that's, I think,

00:43:15

that's the main point of stablecoin as well. Global payment sector, I think it's like 3-4X on global banking sector, right? And we all know that banks make a lot of money. And from a retail perspective, it's also, I think Lunar is pushing their current campaign, the zero, the free, the fee transparency, you know, zero fees when you go travelling. Because who here has, I always check, if I can choose between different currencies, because then I can see, hey, I'm now exchanging the Danish krone at, you know, 8 point something. And I'm not going to choose that one. But when I choose one, I don't go back and check, hey, was it actually converted at, you know, 7.44 or was it converted at 7.48? So there's usually, when I do use the card, when I'm allowed to use my card in Austria, there's usually like 4, 5, 6 middle men from my bank account to the vendor's bank account in Austria, right? And if that was done in stablecoin or in a digital asset, it would be instantaneous, there would be no middle men. It would just be account to account. And you can do that on a global scale, right? So I think that's a big revenue bucket and that's where you have the TradFis trembling a little bit, because Visa, MasterCard, Klarna, PayPal, there was a lot of money in the space. And if they see that, and they thought that they'd already seen the race to the bottom, then stablecoin could bring in an even further slope to that bottom, right. So that's why they're leaning in. They're not leaning in because

00:44:46

of the potential revenue, new revenue. They're leaning in for the potential loss of other revenue in the transaction.

Host

Yeah, they have to, for the consumer. So it's very good for the consumer.

Jonas Gjørup Larsen

It's like, remember the whole, when people were paying negative interest rates in Denmark on their deposits, right? And people like, oh, furious. And when you kind of did the math, it was like, the average Danish person, it would be like maybe 30 krone or something. And then if you did the math on what they were paying in transaction fees, it was just like 10X that. And you never heard a complaint, right? So it's just culture, and it's a fun thing. It is kind of the telco revolution still going on in the financial sector, where it's about transparency. And let's see if insurance is the next phase, right? Because who here has, you know, you can't tell me on the spot what you're actually paying for and what you're actually getting on the back end for the insurance money that you're throwing out there, right? So I think there's a lot of revolutions going on just on smaller scales. And yes, Europe, because of the things that happened and the things that had direct political influence in the US, means that from a regulatory point of view, we're not in that game where you always see the map, like the US always beating Europe on every single aspect except for regulation. Europe is number one, right?

00:46:17

But now it's actually a good thing, because there you have U.S. politicians, we have US sane politicians looking towards Europe and saying, hey, how are they actually adopting regulation in this asset class? And I think you will see a lot of mirroring in that perspective, everything from MiCA, also travel rule, which is for me, from an anti money laundering background and perspective, by far the most interesting one, because it ensures traceability on assets, right? So that we can avoid sanction breaches or terrorist financing and other interesting stuff like that in the sector.

Host

Yeah, but I think that the demographic evolution will then just be in your favour probably, because with Gen Z, Gen Alpha, we will just be more curious how much we're actually paying at the bank that our parents used to have their money at. And we'll ask questions. And with all this transparency that you could provide, I think that there will be a lot of, yeah, just change and evolution in the sector at all.

Jonas Gjørup Larsen

Try to ask your, no one's doing the real wealth coach, right, but all the banks are trying to adopt AI. Speaking of AI, try to ask it, if there is an AI or a bot sitting at your local bank, try to ask it about, you know, fees and transaction fees and everything else, if it can help you figure out how much you

00:47:48

paid the last month or the last year or so. It dies. It just dies in a moment, right? Because that will be the next. You're also a generation that's kind of native within those tools. [...] You just need to have the right AI tool and it can help you do the analytics on the back end and it can say, hey, at your current bank, you're on a yearly basis paying X. If you use this other bank, you could be paying this much, like below that. And then you can more easily make the choice, right. You don't need to be very good in spreadsheets and able to draw out everything. You can do it in an easier way because you have the tools and you're born on a more digitalized tool base than the rest of us, right?

Host

Although I don't know if I want to find out, since I only got my Danish bank account a month ago and still paid with my German bank account until then, so probably not going to ask the AI.

Jonas Gjørup Larsen

Yeah. No, don't, don't ask it. Don't do it when it's out of necessity, right?

Host

[...] And for now, this has been quite a technical but very interesting conversation. But we always ask our guests what qualities they look for in young talents if they want to break into a certain industry. [...]

Jonas Gjørup Larsen 00:49:21

Passion. Eagerness and willingness to learn, right? I think that's the most important one. And then for me, it's the cliche: don't choose your job, choose your boss, right? Or choose your mentor. For me, it's always been more about mentorship than having bosses. Because if I'm not working with someone, for someone that I can actually learn from, then I should be doing something else. And I have the same, it's a reverse thing. So it's the same for me working with people. I need to be able to teach them something. Otherwise I will pass them on to someone else who can actually teach them something. And then it's also: don't be afraid to speak up, right? I think that's also why it's nice and easy to be a disruptor in a German slash Austrian company as a Danish person, because if someone loves pyramids and hierarchies, it's the Germans, right? And the Austrians, they just really love that, you know, the intern did something and then it needs to pass through 6 layers of people before it actually gets to me. And I don't care. I want to speak to the intern that actually sat with the numbers, did the job, did the calculations, did the math, because it's easier and it's way more efficient.

00:50:52

And it's also a sign of respect, right? It's easier to actually follow and keep your passion if you also get recognized for what you're doing out there. So it's about being curious and just pushing through and not being afraid to speak your mind. I think those are the most important traits that I'm looking for when I'm sitting with people, and I hate facades. Also a reason why it was hard for me to land in a German institution where people were still, especially in the financial sector, right, where people were still on the whole Herr and Frau and last names and surnames. No, sorry, it's Germany, right? So not just Herr and Frau, Doktors, Magisters, PhDs and everything. Yeah, it was so formal and I don't really, I like the informality. I like the just be yourself, and it brings you a lot further. Don't try to be someone that you're not, because then you will either break during your career at some point, or you will just burn out. Right. So be yourself. It's way more fun.

Host

No, definitely, I think for us as well, it has been quite refreshing to experience the more flat and more agile hierarchies in Denmark. And I think I really like what you were saying about passion, finding yourself. I think we also got kind of the similar answer from our podcast with Joachim Fundy [unclear]. That was, I think, actually even the last podcast that we did in this room, and that was a long

00:52:23

time ago. But yeah, I think definitely figuring out who you are, what you're interested in and following your passion is definitely the ultimate and I think also the necessary key to be happy and to be successful.

Jonas Gjørup Larsen

And I got to say, for me personally, it's also the Danish part. It's so much more about empathy in that perspective. And that also means for me: don't just single handedly do what you think is career enhancing relevant shit while you're studying. Do some other weird stuff, like, you know, work with kids in ghetto areas or, you know, go travelling and experience other parts of the world. Read fictional, you know, literature, because that kind of increases your empathy levels, because that's a different way of travelling and experiencing other people's point of view. So for me, it's the empathy and the ability to actually embrace [unclear], because that brings diversity to the table. And everything is about diversity these days, right? Because the more diverse a team you have, the stronger you stand, because then you have someone who can tackle the situation when you walk into a wall or into a given situation.

Host

No, that's great. I really like that. And to end this episode, I mean, it can be serious, but maybe on a less serious note, earlier we had an instance where the camera ran out for a

00:53:54

bit and we kind of talked about what the other management positions at Bitpanda are doing and what makes their positions exciting for them. And my last question to you is, if you would have the opportunity to switch jobs with someone else at Bitpanda for a week, who would you trade with?

Jonas Gjørup Larsen

I definitely don't think I want to do the CEO position for Lucas, because that's a very different stakeholder management position. But I think I would jump into any of them. The CEO [unclear] is also very interesting, sitting with the entire customer service crew and the ops team, but also the product and tech people. It would be interesting to live in the Web3 world for a week, right, seeing how they actually think on a more detailed level and move around in that perspective. So, yeah, I think, like anything, in Denmark we used to have, you know, an education called KaosPilot. And I think if I was speaking to my younger self, I would tell myself to do that education instead of the others. Unfortunately, it doesn't exist anymore, but it's essentially all about project management from a chaotic perspective, because fintech is very chaotic. But that's also one of my drivers, right? I just love chaos. And you don't get any more chaos than in the crypto space.

Host

Sure. Well, thank you so much, Jonas, I think this was a great conversation. And guys, you know the drill. I mean, we're back in two weeks. Until then, listen to our other episodes

00:55:24

if you haven't already, check out our social media. We're on LinkedIn, Spotify, Instagram, YouTube, Apple Music, you name it. And also, if you haven't done so already, make a Bitpanda account, get some financial literacy on the Bitpanda Academy, and then we'll see you in two weeks. Thank you.

Jonas Gjørup Larsen

Thank you so much. Thank you.