What is your mission statement?
Symetrics is a team of quants & brains with the mission to support our clients in making informed investment decisions, by offering next generation financial risk analytics
Our main product, SyMath, provides institutional investors with SaaS based risk analytics software for stress testing their assets & liability portfolio real-time. SyMath is the world’s first model capable of combining asset and macro-economic data with behavioural algorithms.
SyMath enables clients to use consumer or central bank behaviour for stress testing, resulting in true crisis simulation by which the output gains relevance and realism while reducing dependency on historical datasets.
Our main goal is to support our clients in making informed investment decisions.
Where are you headquartered?
Our current headquarters are in Apeldoorn, a city in the East of the Netherlands and we have a branch office in Breukelen, close to Amsterdam. We operate out of two Regus locations which gives us access to any place in the world to work when we are abroad using the same technical infrastructure and first class communication equipment (video conference rooms e.g.) for product demonstrations and board meetings.
In addition we are a Level39 member, the Canary Wharf based European FinTech incubator which is a great place to be as they provide us unprecedented resources and a vibrant working environment.
Who do you think will be the most influential figures (or companies) in FinTech, in 2015?
That entirely depends on the perspective. We see many exciting initiatives popping up around the world and an increasing number of start-ups also gets the actual chance to fulfil their ambitions due to FinTech investments interest. I tend to watch closely how our Dutch fellow FinTech50 peers perform; Ayden, Five Degrees, Invoice Sharing, Synerscope and BUX as they cover most of the hot trends in FinTech.
What kind of year do you foresee for your company, and the industry as a whole?
We foresee a vibrant year in which we will focus on continuous improvement of our product, extending its functionalities, accessing new markets well prepared and on-boarding new clients while still having a lot of fun. The industry will see a lot of investments flowing in, from which we expect that new innovative initiatives can start-up and grow their business.
What are your key targets for 2015?
Holding the line, maximise customer happiness and growing our revenue according to plan.
What will be the most important opportunities for FinTech in 2015?
The current ecosystem is dominated by payments, lending and crowdfunding. We expect most credit based lending initiatives will gain traction in the year(s) to come.
Western society got itself in a debt frenzy the last four decades. We need to face the fact that we already consumed a large part of our future wealth.
Current debt levels prove to be unsustainable given the historical low interests rates, which could continue to decline possibly below zero in certain scenarios. This will dramatically disrupt the business models of banks, insurers and pension funds.
Combined with ever accelerating technological developments and individualisation, we expect that equity based lending will gain momentum. Needless to say that Symetrics foresees that some of our current FinTech50 2015 peers, will be tomorrow’s clients.
What are the key hurdles for growing your business this year?
Regulation is tightening, economic uncertainty increases demand for scenario based stress testing, new product market combinations occur (banks are securitising mortgage portfolio’s using SyMath for pricing e.g.) and our development and innovation pipeline is filled for years.
Our main challenge will be to stay focused on our key strengths, pick the right markets and don’t get carried away pursuing each potential opportunity.
What are your thoughts on the current state of FinTech?
The FinTech ecosystem will remain an exciting, fast moving industry to work in, with some of the smartest and both nicest people around.
