Blockchain opportunities with Notarify

Notarify is one of the leading international Blockchain service providers, with a network of thousands of customers and present in different countries. Since its foundation in 2018, the company leverages an integrated model that provides solutions for data and document notarization in Blockchain: from storaging to sharing, from identification and KYC to electronic signature.

Notarify services touch different areas of expertise: from Fintech, Insurtech, and Legaltech to services dedicated to training and education, through software integration, and even for public administration to simpler services such as the commercial or logistics area.


On the funding side, they have raised almost one million euros thanks to two crowdfunding campaigns and they are currently expanding in the Italian market with important partnerships. Furthermore, they have already opened offices in Luxembourg and the Arab Emirates.

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Synergies in community, OCS & REDO together to grow

We often talk about synergy but do they remains is a feeling of feeling of ideas and vision what remains? In the Fintech District community they these turn into agreements and business initiatives just like what as happened to OCS and Redo. Let’s let listen to the two protagonists, a corporate member and a fintech, tell us what has happened and what
will happen.

The point of view of OCS is illustrated by CEO Gianni Camisa

In FD’s matchmaking activity you met and chose Redo for your future. Can you tell us how it this went about?

In this case, I believe that the FD has fulfilled its essential mission, which is to create a link between “consolidated” companies that are innovating and looking for new market spaces and offers, and start-ups with potential that can meet those needs, both in terms of offer, approach and – finally – complementary skills.

Why Redo? What do you plan to do to enhance this acquisition?

Our strategy was to develop an innovative platform for micro-finance that had some key features: robustness, completeness, scalability and a real potential for integration with the traditional OCS offering. In REDO we found all these requirements and therefore it seemed natural to opt for the “buy” option as opposed to the “make” option which was the one originally chosen.

How does this operation fit into your broader growth strategy?

2021 ended well, with a strong growth on 2020 (which had already seen a jump on in the previous financial year), fuelled by a great effervescence of new projects, new customers and the roll-out of new solutions. The next few years – starting in 2022 – will see an even higher growth, supported by OCS’s new offering: in 2021 we have had many new end- point solutions that complementing our traditional offering offer We expect a lot from this set, starting with REDO, in terms of new national and international projects.

And now to REDO, to the founder Diego Mortillaro.

How did the FD support you in meeting big companies and opportunities and how did you experience the matchmaking with OCS?

The FD played a key role in creating matchmaking opportunities. The FD carried out an activity of assessment and evaluation of the coherence between Redo’s activities and potential Matches; this has always generated high value meetings for the parties involved. Finally, I would like to mention that the intervention of the FD has never required
particularly onerous commitment and/or activities for me and the team.

What do you think are the decisive factors that made Redo choose OCS?

OCS is a product-driven company for whom the ability to offer innovative solutions is crucial, especially at a time of great change in the financial services industry. Redo is a Ready-to-Use platform that has responded to a market need in a simple and effective way.

How will this operation impact Redo’s activities, nature and objectives?

This operation represents a great opportunity for of growth for Redo and its team. Thanks to OCS we now have privileged access to all major players in the financial services industry in Italy and abroad. Redo will therefore benefit from greater opportunities for development and growth.

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La Carica delle 101 meets the FD community: energy, vision, synergies and new horizons

Last November, a confidential meeting was held between La Carica delle 101 and some startups of the FD Community: an opportunity to offer them a confrontation with experienced professionals and the chance to reflect on their own growth path and how to continue it, not acting by default but making the right choices that the context requires, moment by moment.

As is often the case, the day proved to be satisfying, as Giovannella Condò, Founder of La Carica delle 101, Notary Public and Co-Founder of Milano Notai, said pointed out: “Fintech has been a discovery and certainly an object of great interest for our community. It is an ecosystem that has been too little explored and is growing fast. We met startups with interesting business models and well-prepared and ambitious startuppers, with a desire to bring the business to the scale-up phase”.

We were so impressed by the success of the meeting, and sorry not to be able to share it live for obvious reasons of confidentiality, we decided to bring you the post-event impressions of some of the protagonists, as if you had met them at the bar immediately afterwards.

Happy reading!

When you have been working on a project for a long time, you risk losing objectivity and contact with some of the elements that are fundamental to the value proposition of a product. It is therefore necessary for every professional to confront the outside world, trying to see things from a new and creative point of view. The power and whirlwind of 101 women can sweep you away and accompany you towards new visions…
Alan Gallicchio – Ecomate

This experience has been very positive and stimulating. The fact that I was able to interface with a group of women only soley on issues that are fundamental to our business was something very different from what I am used to, as our team is predominantly made up of men. Their professionalism helped me to look at my startup from a different point of view, bringing out many interesting ideas that deserve to be developed and implemented.
Matteo Anthony Destantini – SplittyPay

Beyond the nice atmosphere that was created during the meeting, the comparison with the 101ers helped us to have more confidence in some strategic choices related to the scalability path of Ener2Crowd, and to bring out some misalignments between the message proposed to the market and the values and vision of the company. Also in this case, the depth of the interlocutors and the punctuality of the interventions and comments helped us to understand which elements to focus on to make our mission even more engaging and impactful. From an open and shared reflection, we found the strength to take immediate action.
Giorgio Mottironi – Ener2Crowd

And you find yourself in front of women with different experiences, skills, positions and backgrounds, yet all united, ready to support you and team up for your goal, which suddenly becomes theirs too. So a real commitment emerges, a real will to confront each other, to propose solutions and new approaches. “Nobody can whistle a symphony. It takes a whole orchestra to reproduce it.” (H.E. Luccock)
Romina Zorzini – Trakti

It was certainly a great opportunity and pleasure to be part of the 101 charge. We had the opportunity to receive feedback and put our product under stress at a crucial stage where any feedback is precious. I think it’s a wonderful project that allows anyone in the world of innovation to engage with people who are extremely knowledgeable and willing to help.
Daniele Mogavero – Corptape

It was a very positive experience with the 101’s charge. A group of exceptional women who, with experience, attention and a different point of view, provided us with precious ideas and contributions regarding the sharing of our OpenMall project, the social commerce managed by AI in 3D and XR with avatars and virtual assistants that evolves in a persistent and synchronous metaverse. We thank 101 for the strong interest shown and compliments received and the Fintech District that made this possible”.
Gennaro Calì – OpenAI

I really liked the way the event was organised, and it was great to be able to tell about Switcho to professionals who had already looked at our startup’s document before the meeting and had had a preliminary preparation meeting. Thanks to this process, I was able to quickly explain the project and receive so much valuable feedback and insight in just one hour of conversation.”
Redy Vyshka – Switcho

The Outsiders Inn was an inspiring but also brainstorming event with the 101 people in the room. Everyone contributed according to their own experience and I’m sure we all took away something away: an idea, a test, a discovery. This is the strength of the group. The different experiences put together create new knowledge. As an entrepreneur, I take home a list of experiments to do. On the other hand, you can’t improve without trying, failing and trying again.
Ester Liquori – Ghostwriter

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Speed and flexibility, and Solarisbank has arrived in Italy

Just arrived in Italy, Solarisbank has chosen to join the Fintech District community. We asked to Solarisbank AG to tell us about the objectives of the new challenge and the collaboration with our ecosystem.

How does Solarisbank stand out on the market and to whom it is aimed?

Solarisbank is Europe’s leading Banking-as-a-Serivce (BaaS) platform. Unlike other BaaS providers, we have a full German banking license and local IBANs in Spain, Italy and France too. Via APIs, partners can integrate Solarisbank’s modular banking services directly into their own product offering – We provide the technological infrastructure and the banking license needed, so our partners can: offer digital banking accounts and solutions, rely on identification services, provide flexible financing options, or even integrate crypto banking. We let companies focus on business and customer experience while we take care of banking rules, regulations and bureaucracy letting our partners embed banking services like interest-paying deposits and lending services (e.g. fixed-term deposits, overdrafts, instalment loans, credit lines etc.). Thanks to simple APIs, we can offer these solutions with a great speed to market and scale the financial services our client needs with no business interruption or distraction from the focus on clients and business.

How it is growing?

· Solarisbank is experiencing an exponential growth in terms of its product offering, partners, tech capabilities and also in terms of scope. This year 2021 after a successful and oversubscribed round the capitalization reached EUR 1.4 billion and Solarisbank become a fintech unicorn. The round was followed by the acquisition of Contis, a leading, profitable European payments fintech and Solarisbank became the undisputed pan-European Banking-as-a-Service leader.

Solarisbank drives the inevitable trend of embedded finance by enabling both global brands and fast-growing fintechs to integrate financial services into their own product offering via APIs. In addition, Solarisbank is one of the firsts banks 100% migrated on cloud: this sets a new European benchmark in terms of cost efficiency, scalability and service quality. The space for growth is enormous: according to the latest Solarisbank study made in cooperation with the Handelsblatt Research Institute, the potential for embedded finance and thus Banking-as-a-Service is immense. In Europe alone, nearly 500 million bank accounts are up for grabs in the next few years. Lightyear Capital estimates that the global market for embedded finance will grow from around EUR 22.5 billion at present to around EUR 230 billion by 2025.

Why it has chosen to develop in Italy and what it expects

Italy has enormous potential for Solarisbank; we present ourselves on the market with the aim of driving the growth of Banking-as-a-Service in the country and to help Italian companies to offer the best financial solutions to their customers and, ultimately, to support and accelerate the delicate post-pandemic recovery phase.

Thanks to the introduction of local IBANs in the four major European markets, together with the possibility of passporting our license, we are able to offer financial solutions throughout the European Economic Area. Speed and flexibility are therefore the elements that help us to grow with our current customers and to involve others – from the single-member companies to the multinationals – in this new era of financial services.

What kind of interest do you have in the fintech world and what do you expect from joining the FD community

Joining the Fintech District community is a great opportunity for us to connect with its ecosystem, collaborate and co-create a bright future. The Italian fintech community is one of the most impressive hubs of creativity and the network is well developed in terms of stakeholder engagement. Hence, it offers us the opportunity of collaborating with public institutions, investors, professionals, financial institutions, international innovation hubs, universities and corporations. On our side, based on our experience as leading BaaS platform in Europe, we’ll cooperate in increasing the knowledge of the fintech sector and to share best practices for new innovative solutions connecting both with startups and traditional operators/companies/banks in order to create new services and products and offer an international perspective of business development.

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OCS & Crispy Bacon, together to innovate

When synergies are born within our community we are the first to want to talk about them and this is exactly what we are going to do with the collaboration created between the OCS corporate member and fintech Crispy Bacon. We will thus leave the floor to the two protagonists, Valentina Cianci, Head of Sales & Marketing OCS, and Marco Volpe, Co-founder and Head of Sales of Crispy Bacon.

How did was your collaboration come about?

Cianci (OCS) : Collaboration with Crispy Bacon was born from a contact created by the Fintech District to whom OCS turned to during the remake of its front end applications. We were looking for a young and innovative company that could give a new image to our front end and,therefore, make it not only new from the technological point of view,but also from the point of view of style and image. Not having these skills in house, it seemed to us an excellent opportunity, as Fintech District’s corporate member, to take advantage of the relationships it has with innovative businesses and ask them to suggest us some potential partners. That’s how we met Marco and his team who are giving us various types of advice but especially the UI and UX of our new front end.

Volpe (Crispy Bacon): The collaboration with OCS has been for us a lightning bolt in the sky. It was born thanks to the Fintech District network that contacted us and told us that a company of the Community was looking for services like the ones we offered. We gave our consent to know meeting them and deepen our knowledge. From there we discovered that they were OCS; we met them and understood our services could actually meet the needs of this potential client. So we started a collaboration, a partnership that has now lasted eight months. Collaborating with a big company like OCS for us is certainly a challenge within a challenge because our goal has always been to work with big companies and participate in big projects presenting our values: transparency and technological innovation. OCS,from this point of view,has turned out to be an excellent experience because the project they submitted us is one of huge dimensions so again it was a challenge within a challenge. The most interesting part was collaborating in a project that had already started and in which we had to focus vertically on one part only – we had to integrate with the corporate structure and all the various components that were part of the project.

Do you have in mind or have you already done other Open Innovation projects?

Cianci (OCS): Within its technological roadmap OCS already provides a large program of collaboration with new and innovative businesses such as Crispy bacon, through collaborations in partnership or through the acquisition of companies or shareholdings in companies. This allows us to quickly and very solidly enrich the pool of our skills and our products therefore enabling an increasingly richer offer to our customers and particularly in line with the rapid evolutions that our market is experiencing. Specifically, during 2020 we completed a very important project for us enabling landing services thanks to the new API architecture we have built on one of the largest ecommerce platforms in the world. We are very proud of this first step and above all it is an element that shows that the innovation path we have undertaken is absolutely solid and functional to the development of our customers’ business.

Volpe (Crispy Bacon): Crispy Bacon was born with the goal of being an innovative company. Every project we create, past, present and hopefully future, has a strong character of open innovation. If I had to take a picture of the current situation I would say that we are trying to push mobile innovation a lot, both from the point of view of framework and from the point of view of new features and new ways to interact with mobile applications. We are working a lot in the field of customer services developing projects related to customer support that allow operators to follow the customer step by step during his journey in the mobile app thus allowing the operator to interact with the customer’s monitor,giving useful information for the completion of tasks and in the most explicit cases allowing also to act in first person on the customer’s device to solve problems. All this is done with the aim of improving the user experience and increasing the perceived quality of the service.

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PLICK: interview with Donato Vadruccio

Plick is the Paydo developed service suitable for all banks and financial realities that offer payment accounts. It allows payments across the SEPA area without having to know the payee’s IBAN. With Plick all you need is the mobile phone number or payee’s email address. As the CEO of PayDo Donato Vadruccio explains, “it’s an incredible advantage for those who want, or have to, make a payment without having an account or other services linked or parallel to their account”.

The platform was created in less than a year and, since April, has been available to customers of the first bank whch activated the service, Banca Mediolanum. Currently all of its customers can access Plick’s services through
the app in an easy and effective way. Vadruccio noticed that every customer uses Plick in his personal way: “someone pays for a car or a 3000 euro bike while there are even those who pay the deposit for a house. Plick is effective because it allows for immediate transfer to the beneficiary, it also guarantees when the asset is delivered!”.

After Banca Mediolanum, Credito Valtellinese will also start offering Plick services to its customers this summer, through a very similar pilot project. From September, Vadruccio and his team will continue the communication
campaign to make Plick known as rapidly as possible and not only to banks. They will also participate in numerous events and conferences, “the first on the agenda is the ‘Salone dei Pagamenti‘ in which we will have an active part”.

Being part of Fintech District for Plick means “being part of a community where startups find contacts, collaboration, cooperation and above all contamination. It is essential for startups to get to know each other, to know their problems, to swap experience and to derive value to grow together in an ecosystem that is becoming stronger and stronger thanks to Fintech District”.

“Undoubtedly, the difficulties in the fintech sector are many but we prefer to see them as incentives to find the best solutions” Vadruccio explains, noticing that “In Italy, Fintechs suffer from lack of capital and have problems with customer numbers and critical mass but working together and pushing beyond Italian borders helps to create expansion”.

For Plick, internationalization is essential. “Plick is already international, serving all the banks in Europe – Vadruccio points out – the customers of Banca Mediolanum can already pay a customer in any part the continent. For us, the European development will be a fundamental path to follow, in part thanks to Fintech District”.

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