Maximilian Meyer

This transcript was generated automatically (YouTube auto-captions) 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.

Maximilian Meyer 00:00:01

If you want to scale, do the things that don't scale in the beginning. That is super important. Like when it comes to money, trust is the most important bit. If you are a startup with very limited funds and possibilities to do advertisement, you have the vision and the mission to talk to everyone. But you need to catch the low-hanging fruits firstly.

Host

If you look across Europe, what types of investors are still underserved and what needs to happen that people actively participate instead of just being passively curious?

Konstantin Girst

Yeah, welcome back to a new episode of Campus To Capital and it's great to be back on track as this is the third episode that Julius and I recorded over the last week and today we are in Munich at the Scalable Capital headquarters with their CMO Maximilian Meyer and Scalable is not just Julius and my personal neo broker but it's also one of the most interesting and biggest startups in the fintech space in Europe. So I'm very excited for the conversation today and welcome Maximilian.

Maximilian Meyer 00:01:05

Thanks for having me. Thanks for visiting us in our Munich headquarters.

Host 00:01:10

I really appreciate it. So maybe before we get into all the serious questions, could you maybe tell our listeners what you do and maybe how your career evolved over the last couple of years?

Maximilian Meyer 00:01:23

Yeah. So, I'm CMO at Scalable. I'm responsible for all things marketing. So, everything that you see, hear, and feel from us goes at least over my table. Obviously my teams are working out all the great things and I'm more of a sparring partner these days and help on the strategic side of things. How did I get here? So, this could take a while but I try to be as condensed as possible. So, I started my career in actually I went to Cologne to study there. My first studies I basically terminated after two or 3 weeks because yeah the university itself where I did media management wasn't at the level where I wanted it to be. I had the chance to work in a startup. So that made my decision a little bit easier to leave university because I knew okay I have something at least for the next I don't know couple of months or so. So I started to work in a startup. It was founded by a couple of guys who studied at VU [unclear] and it was funded by the European Founders Fund which was the fund of Oliver and his brothers. So before Rocket Internet there was European Founders Fund. So the first startup I worked in I was the first intern and then employee

00:02:53

in the beginning I did customer service, in the end I actually led the online marketing for this startup. And this career in that startup and all the things I learned helped me to grow the wish actually to found something myself and I was very lucky that one of my very good friends that I went to school with, he was in the process of founding a startup. I was like yeah if you do something I'm on board. And so we founded a company. It was a startup called Talent Arena. It was a startup for professional semi-professionals from the more creative spaces. It was a community on the one side. It had a shop on the other side. So we tried to monetize it. We were basically doing all of the production and distribution of the assets so people could choose I don't know an artwork to buy etc. We got some funding. We went to Hamburg, worked our asses off for a couple of years. So it wasn't a second Google and not even close to something even bigger. And after I don't know four or five years of really working hard on that idea, yeah we decided to split ways. And yeah after then seven years or five or six years, seven years of working

00:04:23

in the world of startups in Germany, I decided to go on a sabbatical. My sabbatical was done to study economics in Frankfurt. And yeah, I did that during my time and during my studies, I could help a couple of smaller and medium-sized companies with all things digitalization. During my studies, I basically found my next employer. For that employer, I went to London. Helped opening up their London business for UK and Ireland. It was a company that helped big publishers to get more out of their ad inventory. My role was more of a sales/business development role and yeah within London I had a couple of touch points with a couple of fintechs and I knew that the next step I wanted to take was to go back to the world of startups and especially back to the world of technology and ideally in the combination with something finance related and yeah there were a couple of options and one of them was Scalable. And I found it really interesting. I really like the idea they had, the mission that they put out already back then. And so yeah, I joined in 2016 Scalable Capital as one of the first 20 employees or so. And yeah, more or less helped building the marketing since.

Host 00:05:52

Nice. And I mean we'll jump more into the marketing strategy of Scalable and also what Scalable does and how Scalable operates later on. But maybe going briefly into your experience as a founder yourself, you've secured six figure seed funding with Talent Garden, the talent agency that you had back in the day. And maybe what lessons do you bring into your marketing role today from pitching and also what do you bring from conventional marketing to pitching in that regard?

Maximilian Meyer 00:06:22

Yeah. Oh, that's a good question. I never had the question because it's a good question because I think I learned a lot there. And I think what I learned back then when you get in touch with a couple of business angels and potential investors is you get rejected a lot and you need to cope with that. That's one of the most important bits that I learned there that was actually even more extended in the world of sales afterwards in my next role. So also getting rejected here is something that belongs to the business firstly when founding and looking for potential investors and then if you work in sales. And so what I learned there is that you needed to make every pitch as personalized as possible, to really understand with whom you are talking and thus yeah making the pitch as personalized as possible, be it in the world of sales or in the world of getting some funding and this obviously helps a lot when it comes to marketing too because a lot of our marketing budget also goes into partnerships, partnerships from I don't know the influencer side to big partnerships with companies and it is super important especially if you are small and unknown which Scalable in the first few years was

00:07:53

in comparison to now. It helps a lot if you know your audience. It's one of the terms I always also tell my teams so they get a little bit sick and tired of me saying know your audience but it is super important. If you know how to talk to your conversation partner, that helps and this helps in the world of getting funding. It helps in the world of sales and it helps in the world of marketing, especially partnerships.

Host 00:08:23

I really like the aspect regarding rejections and setbacks since I think in our last episode we also interviewed a founder of a prey [unclear] startup in Copenhagen and he said that the most valuable skill for him as a founder is to deal with setbacks and rejections in 15 minutes. I think he said

00:08:44

yeah that was his time frame. He said he doesn't always manage to do it in the 15, but it's like one of the biggest qualities he's looking for when making hires.

Maximilian Meyer 00:08:52

And that's super important. Like and this is something I learned along the way. Like I haven't found my 15-minute rule. I might adapt it to my world because yeah you just need to continue and really not overthink what went wrong because even though know your audience, you can't foresee everything and there are so many aspects of people rejecting you or you yeah discovering setbacks because of things that go on in the life of your potential partner that you can't foresee. So really not overthinking it. It's not that deep, helps you to continue and to be better also in the next conversation you have.

Host 00:09:39

Definitely. So maybe one last question regarding your career before we get into Scalable. I think you, I don't know the exact year but I think in 2019 or 2020 you switched to Fidelity for one or two years.

Maximilian Meyer 00:09:55

Yeah.

Host

Which is one of the largest asset managers in the world. I think they're placed fourth or fifth in terms of assets under management. How did working at a global institution like that shape the way how you work at Scalable today since you're now working with 600 employees roughly?

Maximilian Meyer 00:10:15

Yeah. So it helped me understand I guess most of the things that we are coping with these days. As you said, Fidelity is one of the biggest asset managers in the world. And it's also a bank which Scalable is also these days and to cope with regulation, with processes, with a little bit not being able to be the speedboat that you used to be, which you need to be as a startup, helps me a lot these days to yeah really see what is important to prioritize and also to get along with potential external factors that slow you down. For us as a company I think, and also having seen the other side, the more corporate world of finance, I know that we are still the speedboat. For some it might not feel as it was like 5 years ago or so but for all the right reasons. We wanted this banking license. We wanted to become that platform that we are now. So we obviously need to adhere to all the regulation, to all the rules and as it might be annoying here and there, it really makes I think our business more

00:11:45

stable and more robust against also external factors, be it new competition, be it old competition, be it everything that is in relation to it. And that is something that I really learned at Fidelity back then. It felt different, right? Like I came from Scalable to Fidelity and I was like, "Okay, this is a different world to me now. This is not how I want to work and how I think you must work if you want to compete with everyone out there." And everyone out there is obviously especially the new players. I mean against all the incumbents you might be able to achieve still great things if you play by their rules. But yeah, if you really want to compete in this market against all the new players out there with high funding, with great talent, that try to solve problems with technology and not throwing more people at a problem, you need to be different and this was something that I wasn't seeing back then and yeah made me also come back to Scalable rather quickly.

Host

I mean based off of the small office tour we had, Scalable certainly still at least looks like a speedboat but in the best way possible, a very nice one. Was your move to Fidelity, was that something where this is going to be a temporary station for you from the get-go or is it that

00:13:15

you had to return to Scalable? Was that something you realized after you arrived there?

Maximilian Meyer 00:13:19

Yeah. So I mean it was connected firstly to some personal reasons. So I kind of needed to go back to Germany. At the same time, I've always worked in startups. I founded a company myself. I rejected a couple of great offers of the Magnificent Seven and I always had it a little in the back of my head that I needed to see the I don't know the big world, the world of a big corporate, of a company that serves millions rather than back then Scalable thousands, to be able to work on this kind of scale. I always had it in the back of my head and I kind of needed to see it. Although I expected most of the things that I was then seeing, I needed to I don't know discover it myself. So this was a little bit in my head and then yeah as I said, I realized super fast that this wasn't the world yet for me and the personal time in my career and how I wanted also to develop and so yeah for me it was relatively clear that I wanted to go back into the world of a startup, a scaleup and yeah I left Scalable in the very best and so I could come back rather quickly and continue my journey here.

Host 00:14:47

Well, now Scalable also serves customers in the millions. So,

Maximilian Meyer 00:14:50

exactly.

Host 00:14:51

Yeah, maybe talking about Scalable, Scalable's mission is to empower everyone to become an investor. And I mean, I'm not in Germany super often these days, but whenever I come to Germany, whether it's Berlin or Munich, I'm always certain that I will see some poster of yours with some interesting slogan. So for our listeners who haven't seen your eye-catching punchlines across Germany over the past months, what does this mission to empower everyone to become an investor in your day-to-day marketing?

Maximilian Meyer 00:15:19

Looking back at the 10 years of Scalable, this is the mission that really drives everything that we do. And it's certainly one of the biggest changes also in terms of channel mix and messaging that we use in our day-to-day communications. We started as a digital wealth manager back then with the same mission but with a very targeted first audience that we wanted to address. If you are a startup with very limited funds and possibilities to do advertisement, you have the vision and the mission to talk to everyone. But you need to catch the low-hanging fruits firstly. And so we basically went out and were looking, we were calling the audience the smart busy professionals. So we said okay those are people that are smart enough to understand that investing into the capital markets, there's no other option but to do that, but might be too busy and or too lazy to do it. And so we went out to get that audience and we were rather successful in really finding the first five then 10 then 50,000 clients and every year of us existing and then especially with us launching the broker six years ago now, we could zoom out in terms of the audience that

00:16:49

we were addressing with our advertisements. And so our out of home measure is one of the most visible things of doing so. Firstly because the channel is one where you have limited targeting options. Let's put it like that. Usually in the world of marketing you try to avoid scattering losses and when you look into out of home, that could be one way of doing. For us it's really, we are looking for scattering wins here, to address audiences that we might not address with our more specific channel marketing in the digital world and next to the channel there's the messaging. So whereas in the digital world where you have a lot of targeting options we can be a little bit more product focused, we know that in the outside world to catch the awareness of an audience, yeah short headlines that not necessarily in the first place are connected to the capital market but once you look at them and read them and you might have some moment of realization, you see there's actually a connection to the capital market and this is why we really like out of home advertisement. We found, I think, a pretty good, or we hit a pretty good nerve in our way of putting out bold headlines that are catching awareness and are talking to audiences

00:18:19

that might not be invested into capital markets. And by doing it in a smart, sometimes funny, sometimes a little bit over the edge way, I think we found our way of talking in the outside world.

Host

But it's nice because I think it's not only that the headlines are catchy, but it's also that for me at least, I started associating these headlines with the Scalable brand. So they certainly became part of your handwriting. But talking about not the people that you still want to empower to become investors but the people that are already investors with Scalable today, whether that's friends of Julius and me who are making their first investment experiences through Scalable or people who benefit of your wealth management services with significantly higher funds. What is a key aspect that you want people to associate you with? Is that trust, performance, reliability, simplicity or maybe even something else?

Maximilian Meyer

Ideally all of these [laughter] but I mean it's not a secret I think, like when it comes to money trust is the most important bit. Like if people trust you their money, then be it us managing it in the wealth management service or doing it on your platform themselves in the brokerage, which most of the people choose, you need to trust that platform and everything that we do and

00:19:51

marketing of it is really only the pinnacle. I think like the trust in a platform is really the sum of all parts. This is really being a stable platform, having great client service, having great features, talking in a way that respects their clients in all day communications and simply also pushing forward everything that we do as a platform. Adding more features, adding more services, all of that leads to trust. And obviously within marketing we want to bring that message over to audiences. At the same time we want to do things differently. Like when we look at the whole world and universe of banks and financial services out there doing advertisement, internally we always look at it and we say it's the original sin of the banking industry. And this is, if you look at a lot of advertisements and ads of the incumbents, it's always happy smiley people getting on with their lives while finding the advertised financial service somehow really good. And if you remove the logo of the ad that you see, you wouldn't know who is talking to you. And we wanted to break it. Like we wanted that people

00:21:22

see an ad, and I think in out of home we really did a good job here, see an ad and even without the logo then understand this is Scalable talking to me and I mean we want to apply that to all the channels, all the assets that we are using so that people really understand the Scalable brand and that should add to the complete picture. But getting back to your question, yeah, after trust obviously I think simplicity or the usability of our app is, next to the one of pricing, the thing that we achieved in the past couple of years also when looking at the incumbents, right? Like I mean if you look really deep into the product, it's pretty much the same product as other online brokers and banks have offered for decades even. But if you look at usability and pricing, those are the two main factors that drive the difference between us and them. And this is only the beginning and that's the beautiful part of it. Almost now one and a half years ago we launched our fully integrated verticalized platform. So we have a core banking system, or build our own. At the end of last year we finally received our banking license and this will allow us moving forward to build things that others haven't. And so this

00:22:52

is what really excites me about the future, that after we basically yeah disrupted the world of brokerage and banking through pricing and usability, we will actually add features and do things that others haven't in the past.

Julius Ambrosius

I think this is super interesting because when I think about myself, I opened up my portfolio at Scalable on the day I turned 18. And back then I did a lot of research about, okay, which platform should I use? And back then I think you weren't the cheapest one, but it just felt right to me. I don't know, it was probably the trust aspect you just talked about. And one other aspect I find super exciting is the community aspect. You do a lot of that, also in collaboration with for example with Noah. So could you maybe talk a little bit about that, what's your vision in that regard?

Maximilian Meyer 00:23:52

Yeah, great you mentioned it. I think it is something that we always had on our plate and it always was one of the strong levers we had. So when we launched 10 years ago as a wealth manager, we also knew that putting out large billboards with our logo and a slogan wouldn't do the trick back then. And we were looking at a very specific audience. This was the one bit and we knew that broadening the audience, we needed to do some of the educational work ourselves. So we were always producing our own content in-house. We always had editors that were writing really good content. These days the content creation team, we not only write content ourselves anymore. We're producing podcasts. We're producing videos. We have I think the biggest financial newsletter within Germany with over a million subscribers. So the output that we are having in terms of educational content that we produce in-house on the one hand is really big and was always a factor for our success and the other one is to work with the right external partners. And there also the quality of the content was always super important to us and you mentioned

00:25:22

the podcast of Noah Leidinger. Yeah, we are a super proud partner. We are working super closely with Noah on various things. For us this is not like we pay to get mentioned with our name. This is really like we have weekly exchanges on all the things that happen on our side, all the things that he is looking into. We do joint events. And this is really I think one of the things that is super important to us. And since you introduced the question with community, like the community work at Scalable is, I don't want to call it even more important but it is equally important. Like so we have a community team that is in heavy exchanges with our communities because like the best input we receive on our social media channels, in return on our newsletters and emails etc. and we are in exchange and like be it wishes on the feature side of things, be it wishes on license [unclear] that should get listed. So this is exchange that is super valuable for us and this is really the connector between our product and our marketing, or the community side of things and we also go active in finding communities that are not on our socials but for example on Reddit. Like there's a Scalable

00:26:52

Capital subreddit where our community team is actively yeah answering questions and exchange with the community and it is super valuable to us.

Host 00:27:05

Where can you make suggestions for the license [unclear]? That might be something that I would like to get back.

Maximilian Meyer 00:27:09

Through our community, I mean just comment. I think there's an email address also. It might be community Scalable. I need to double check that. But yeah, you can do that. And yeah, we are in exchange with our own exchange. So this makes it a little bit faster maybe than in the past also.

Host 00:27:32

Okay, good to know. We put it in the show notes.

00:27:34

Yeah. So maybe talking a little bit about your users and the user demographics. I could imagine that most of your users are between 20 to 30 years old, but I mean you will probably know. But how do you manage to also target an older audience that probably are sticking to the incumbents and also in that regard how do you keep a clear identity and vision by serving different types of customers?

Maximilian Meyer 00:28:07

Yeah. So the largest audience size we have are 25 to 34 year olds. Fastest growing are 18 to 24 year olds but there's also a huge chunk of people below the 35 year olds. How do you target them? I mean this is a channel topic, right? Like so stuff like out of home, like print, like linear television is usually connected to a little bit older audiences as well and this is how we address it, also with know your audience, a couple of different messagings because a little of other topics are more important to these audiences. Also, if you look into our kids accounts that we are having, usually it's people in their mid-30s that might be the ones that are attracted to the kids account because they actually have kids. And this is one bit and the other bit is that through our legacy and history of being a wealth manager actually, I think we have a relatively good standing in these audiences anyway because for many years we were

00:29:37

maybe a little bit more reaching out to these audiences than our closest market participants.

Host 00:29:46

Yeah, very interesting. So maybe if we look at the broader scope of investors across Europe, I mean you're focusing on the DACH region. But if we look across Europe, what types of investors are still underserved and what needs to happen that people actively participate instead of just being passively curious?

Maximilian Meyer 00:30:08

Yeah. So the state of the European Union when it comes to investing is not really unified, as in other areas as well. But I believe when it comes to capital markets, it's not, I mean it's obviously not one market and the one thing that really divides all the countries, and there, I don't know if there would be the need of it being unified. It would be an interesting idea actually. But one thing that is different from all countries to each other is really how capital market gains are being taxed and or not taxed and if the state supports private investors to go into capital markets or not. I started my career at Scalable living in the UK when it was part of the EU and they have a great tax wrapper. It is called ISA. And this is a tax wrapper where you can invest per year, I think these days it's even 20,000 British pounds sterling per year, which up until the point where you take it out is tax-free. So everyone is doing it and simply because it is so good to invest in these tax wrappers and if you look in other

00:31:38

European markets, in France that's the PEA. It's a different product but for the similar reason, for being a tax wrapper for your pension and in Germany we simply don't have something like that, right? Like in Germany every euro that is invested is a post-tax euro and this is not helping to get more people into the capital markets but luckily the alter [unclear] is coming. So next year there will be a real pension product in Germany and this is going to change I think the way how the broader public is looking into it. I think it will be heavily spoken about in media. Even the government will talk a lot about it and so in Germany there are roughly 15 to 20% of the people only investing into capital markets. If you look at the UK, at the US, it's above 50%. And I truly believe within 12 to 18 months, we might be able to actually double the amount of people becoming investors in Germany. So this is going to drive a lot of growth for yeah capital markets participants. If you look at the other countries, even though they have these kind of products, they're not necessarily

00:33:09

closer or far in terms of people being invested into capital markets because there people use it often in more interest related products and not necessarily in the capital market. So even though we tend to say we Germans, we are not there where the UK and the US is, if you look at other European countries we are actually quite mature when it comes to investing and the fun bit and the one that really excites me also for the other countries that we are live in, so we're live in Italy, in Spain, in the Netherlands, in France, is that the curve that you see in terms of growth, it's super similar to the curve of the past 5 years that we've seen in Germany. So, it's a matter of time and not an if question anymore. And we are a happy and proud supporter of this movement really, that more and more people take their chances into their own hands and invest into capital markets.

Host 00:34:23

Yeah. Well, the share of retail investors is certainly growing, maybe as you said in some countries faster than others but I mean they are becoming more and more significant, not just with things like the GameStop stuff that we've experienced during Covid but also in general there's significantly more market power sitting with the individual people. [...] A very obvious thing to discover here is that retail investors lack the mental model or the set in stone approaches to actually do some fundamental financial analysis. And I know that you as a neo broker are trying to supplement and support retail investors in making smart decisions, whether that's through in-house offerings or sponsored activities such as Noah's podcast. So what is your strategy here to help the retail investor to make smarter decisions without overcomplicating the investing experience for

Maximilian Meyer

Yeah, I just said the word movement and this is one that really also drives the growth of new players like us in the market and also made the decision for us really easy now eight years ago or so to decide to go into the brokerage business because when we started as a digital wealth manager, it was like that out there

00:35:54

there was no real solution for people that was cost-efficient and easy to understand to invest into capital markets. And most people were still pretty much dependent on their advisor and their bank. And as we all know, many of them are selling too expensive products that at the same time not necessarily are the right products that should be sold to the client. And so our solution was, we knew we needed to do an ETF based wealth manager. We need to be as cost-efficient as possible. We were taking care of all the tax optimization stuff. So all the cumbersome stuff for any retail investor out there. And at the same time with our growth there was the growth of influencers or content creators in the finance space, especially in Germany. And this is where we are by far the furthest in comparison to all our European neighbors. And this is one of the bits that we now see in the other countries too, that more and more content creators are actually, be it on YouTube, be it on Instagram, be it on TikTok, explaining the world of finance to a retail audience in a way that is super useful because yeah go back 10, 15 years ago, people thought they needed to study I don't know economics,

00:37:24

needed to be a banker to do the finances themselves. Whereas in many ways it is not rocket science. It is rather easy to have a broadly diversified world portfolio these days. And if you do that and you save for a long term, you are doing better than 99% of everyone else that is not investing anyway. But even people that are actively investing, you will outperform most of them. So with the rise of all those content creators and really the retail investor that was then yeah fueled by the Covid crisis, where people had time to look into their financial stuff as well and found interest in the topic. Next to that we, and I talked about it a bit earlier, like we decided to yeah fuel everything that we could from our side also with content and basically starting with beginner content but also to a little bit more expert content on our side. This content is not only played through our external social media channels but also within the app. So we have an investor academy where we explain how to get started on the side for the beginners. Our podcast Asset Class is more for the more experienced investors. So we

00:38:54

try to serve the whole spectrum and next to it obviously we have tools within the app that help investors make smarter decisions. So we have an AI assistant, our insights feature where you can have a great overview of your portfolio, how your portfolio would do in certain scenarios. You can benchmark it against it. Our AI assistant, you can actually ask questions to, where we might explain you a couple of things. And this is only the beginning also. Like we have so many ideas how to bring that to the next level to make investing as easy as possible to everyone and I think this is also one of the biggest chances still for us because if you open up the app these days there's a lot of help already but I think in parts it could be even easier.

Host

Yeah, I think the potential with AI is probably, I mean we all don't know where it will go in the next couple of years, but it's probably yeah infinite. And it is also changing content and customer communication very quickly. I remember that when we talked to Noah two years ago in our podcast, it was so interesting because there was just at the verge of, you know, short form content becoming like so much short form content emerging because of AI. So where do you see AI genuinely

00:40:24

improving the customer experience and where does it maybe also diminish trust?

Maximilian Meyer

Yeah. So, we try to bring in AI wherever it is possible to serve the client in the best possible way. We only want to improve everything that we can improve. Our AI assistant insights I think is only the beginning. You can chat with it like with any other chatbot. We have proprietary data in there. We use the data of justETF. So, it is really useful also to get information about ETFs, about certain topics. We bring in our own educational content into it. So there's a lot of data that isn't available in the outside world so to say. So this is helping already on the one bit. I think looking a little bit into the future, the one bit that really will be interesting and we're working on it is that you can talk to your portfolio so to say, right? Like you want to get information about like okay, why did my portfolio move today I don't know 2% up, like what was driving this growth, or if it goes into the other direction you also want or even more want to know what is happening and that is the next layer that we are looking into, really to get basically the portfolio information into the conversation for you and this should help investors understand

00:41:55

even more why things move and especially your personal portfolio is moving in what direction. This is the one bit and when it comes to content creation, we try to make our content better, make it more localized in all the countries that we operate in. But, and that's a very important bit, like our team of editors is really at the very forefront of creating this content and being responsible for all the output. So to get into a direction where it is, especially on the educational and content side, purely AI based, I do see it that this a, either way it takes a while up until a point where we feel really comfortable with it and b, might never go into that direction because it all comes back to the topic of trust. Trust is the most important and valuable thing that we have and people need to trust the information that we give them and so it is super important that we have all eyes on it. And then there's obviously the topic of I don't know asset creation and marketing, right? And there it is also something where we, be it a voice over,

00:43:25

be it visual content of real people, we also have that in our marketing mix. We like to shoot these kind of things ourselves with real humans because I think yeah the trust topic is so important and also to be that unique is important to us, so that we put a lot of effort into these kind of assets for us and to convey the trust to the outside world.

Host

Yeah, I certainly agree from a user's perspective. When you now market your financial products, how do you avoid sounding too promotional while still persuading people to act on your product?

Maximilian Meyer 00:44:08

It's a very important bit and it's one bit that I forgot earlier to mention and now finally the thought came back. Like again I'm sorry to hammer on that point so much but the trust topic is so important and now that we are live for 10 years. Like being live for a day, you won't get a lot of people because they won't trust you. Being live for a year, more people might be able to trust you because you are there for a year. Now we are there for 10 years. Every day more and more people that sat or stood at the sideline were looking at us and were like, "Ah, this is a new player. I watched them firstly before I make my decision." More of these users, potential clients every day will choose us simply because we're doing what we are doing now for 10 years and not only one year, two years, five years and so on. And every day that we are live, that we are providing the services and having the great product that we are having, every day that we are longer alive and really persistent on that topic will make more people choose Scalable and this is something where only time really plays into our cards and at the same time to us it is super important to communicate what we are doing, be it close to the product, which we also

00:45:38

sometimes do, right? Like I mean we talked about our billboards out there. Most of the campaigns are super zoomed out, right? Like there's only a small subline, say invest into ETFs and stocks with Scalable, but the headline has something really awareness driving. When we launched our overnight offering we were talking also in the headline about our 2.5% overnight rate because it is something that is so close to our product that people will understand and that will also drive a lot of interest. There you could say the feature or the product communication was louder than in the past, which it was certainly, but at the same time we did not try to talk anyone into the product. It's simply we made clear how great of a product it is. And the same goes for everything that we do. It's really about the long-term game. There is this one rule. It comes more from the world of B2B marketing, but I think it is super applicable to the world of banking for retail investors or retail consumers. It's 95 or 90%, maybe in the world of banking in retail investing 90% of the market or the consumers are not in market

00:47:08

to convert today. Like 90%, no one is looking at an ad and says oh this is a nice ad, I will open up a new bank account, a new brokerage service. 90% of people are not in the market today. It's 5 to 10% that are in the market right now but you need to be present to the 90 or 95% of the people all the time to be top of mind once they are in the market. And because of that, you need to be unique in your communication to be top of mind once they are in the market. And because of that, it is a little less important also to try to be so conversion driven, right? Like this "open account now". Like for 90 or 95% of people it doesn't matter, they are not in the market and this helps, once you understand this, this helps in your advertisement and you don't need to be that pushy and at least to me it also feels cheap if you are pushy when it comes to financial services and banking because of all the things that we've already covered today. Yeah.

Konstantin Girst 00:48:17

Yeah. Certainly. I mean, while we were on the note on how you guys communicate with your audience. I mean, Julius said earlier that just how he perceived your quality was what nudged him to sign up for his Scalable account. And for me, it was actually when your CEO was on the Tim Gab [unclear] podcast a couple years ago. And I just really liked his vision, his trajectory from Goldman to Westwing and then starting Scalable. And it certainly convinced me as well. And I mean you mentioned earlier that Scalable is now not only active just in Germany but also in the Netherlands and France and in Italy. And while you said that you're seeing a similar curve in terms of your historic user growth in Germany, I'm sure that people are still kind of thinking differently about how to invest and when to invest. So how are the mindsets different across these demographic regions?

Maximilian Meyer 00:49:07

Yeah. You put it well. The curve is similar but the reasons to invest or not invest, they differ from market to market. In Germany when you look into the market it's really that people are worried about their pension, right? I mean everyone, most of us have received the governmental letter saying you need to take care of your pension yourself next to the part of the state. So this is something where a lot of insecurity drives people into looking into other solutions. And you also know like in Germany we are not strong when it comes to buying real estate. It's to many other countries a huge difference. So in many other countries people buy or invest into real estate rather early and this used to be their pension plan. But also in other countries it's getting more and more difficult to do that especially at a young age and so there the drive to start investing might follow basically this missed opportunity that the parents had

00:50:37

to invest early into real estate. This is the one bit and one bit that is super interesting in other countries that is driving people or young investors into capital markets way more than in Germany is the world of crypto. So in many other countries a lot of young people invest, and they invest with crypto first to get their first exposure to the world of investing, obviously with a way more volatile asset class. And for us here the approach is a little bit different when it comes to the educational part. It's a little bit more to talk about the effect of compounding interest because what drives in many ways the investor into the crypto space is a little bit this get rich fast theme, let's put it like that, because young people in other countries feel a little bit this might be the only chance, whereas in Germany we have always been a country of savers. Like this compounding interest effect and basically being a long-time saver helps us to promote ETF savings plans and the likes within the German market, whereas in the other countries we need to explain a little bit more the potential of

00:52:07

really investing for the long term and this is a little bit on the educational part which really differs and then yeah coming back to the maturity of each market, this is also connected to how many content creators are out there. I mean in Germany we have Finanzfluss, which is by far the biggest financial education platform we have within Europe. We don't have these kind of platforms in other countries. So sometimes we try to step in a little bit in a way in producing this beginner friendly content ourselves or we try to push the first creators that go into the space and try to partner up with them early and support them also in creating content and giving ideas what content might be there next. But overall the difference between the young investors and the old investors are even bigger in the other European countries than in Germany.

Host 00:53:05

Just because you mentioned Finanzfluss. Thomas, if you're listening to this, please reply to my email. We would love to have you on the show as well. Yeah, I mean I really like the real estate argument you made because I also read that US investors are now targeting the German private real estate market. So I do believe that the problem will become even worse which is then in the end good for you I guess.

Maximilian Meyer 00:53:28

Yeah, I mean I'd like to have also the opportunity, like for us as a country, to have a more approachable real estate sector. Let's put it like that. But there's a lot of content also out there, like investing into real estate is more of a lifestyle decision than really a financial decision, if you look into all the data there is and all the hassle that is connected also in the world of real estate investing. I think like capital markets bring a lot of opportunity and if more and more people understand that yeah buying your own apartment and or house is not necessarily the pinnacle of investing or of a life goal, but there are other ways to yeah provide for your pension, then this would help also a lot and exactly this kind of educational content is even more important in the countries where the real estate investing was way more common than it was in Germany.

Host 00:54:44

Yeah. So maybe slowly wrapping up the very interesting conversation we had today. We always want to give some advice to the listeners in the end of our episodes, or our guests to give some advice, not us. I mean you've managed marketing through multiple stages of not only Scalable but also different companies. And have been there at the very start. So as a piece of advice to one of the startup sectors with currently very great growth momentum, what's the one biggest lesson you've learned about building a consumer finance brand? Maybe in one sentence.

Maximilian Meyer 00:55:21

That's a big one. I need to think in one sentence.

Host 00:55:29

It can be two as well.

Maximilian Meyer 00:55:30

Yeah. Okay, I know what to say. I think it's not only applicable for the world of consumer finance but to many verticals and businesses. It's, if you want to scale, do the things that don't scale in the beginning. That is super important, to really hustle and really get the first 100 not only clients but fans of your product because they will be the core of everything that you build upon.

Host 00:56:12

Nice. It's a good point, also a unique one because oftentimes we

00:56:16

get advice that overlaps between the episodes but that's one we haven't heard before. Maybe as a last question from me as well, I mean we can see Scalable's success with your growth numbers, also in, I mean, your own company size but also in your user base. But looking back and also looking ahead, outside of these quantifiable things, what is the one thing in your eyes that allowed Scalable to be successful? Is that maybe part of the team, a mindset, a specific approach?

Maximilian Meyer

Also a big question. So the one thing, it's really hard to find but if I really needed to nail it down to one thing, it must be the team. That was also one of the reasons why I joined back then. I mean, as I said, I was one of the first 20 or 25 people to join this company. I've seen a couple of founding teams in my previous career. And what I found so strong about Scalable was that the founding team, they were experts in the field which we wanted to be successful in, which I think is not needed in all verticals, not at all. Like really to disrupt a field, it might be super helpful

00:57:46

to be from a different world to really think differently. But when it comes to the world of finance, you need to have a deep understanding how it works to break it in the most positive way, right? Like to know where the levers are to change things, where to do things differently. And this I've seen in the founding team, next to all the other topics that are important in a team of founders, that is this absolute willingness to be successful and to change things.

Host 00:58:25

Yeah, I think this is a very inspiring closing note to today's episode. So Max, thank you so much for actually hosting us in your office today. It was a pleasure.

Maximilian Meyer 00:58:33

Thank you and hope to see you at some point in time soon.

Host 00:58:37

Thank you very much.