NOTO & Visa Innovation Program: “We received really good market validation and visibility in the local banking market”
“The major challenge for a regtech startup is to gain a portfolio of at least a couple of reference customers and further validate and strengthen the proposition,” tells us Ivan Stefanov, the founder of Noto. Founded in 2015 Noto has developed a solution in the risk management and data processing area that aims at changing the way companies conduct fraud and risk management. In other words, the core product of the company is a platform that addresses all financial crime aspects of the customers – from money laundering to fraud prevention and account takeover. Noto enables organizations to process their data in many different ways and deliver multiple real-time decisions, all via a single integration. The typical customers are from all over the payments ecosystem – banks, insurers, payment processors, and merchants.
The company joined the pilot edition of the Visa Innovation Program facilitated by Eleven Ventures in 2019 aiming to better present their product to the Bulgarian market and gain connections in the banking community. As a result, Noto reached a pilot with Raiffeisenbank Bulgaria, one of Visa’s local partners.
Good market entry
“By participating in the program we managed to get several very good leads and I hope we’ll manage to convert at least some of them into actual customers. We received really good market validation about Noto, that it really delivers what we’ve envisaged it to deliver. Last, but not least the program helped us gain visibility in the local market,” summarized the experience of the CEO.
The co-founder expects to double the results from last year by acquiring more customers and further developing the product with new features and functionalities. According to him, the program could do a lot for a startup, but one needs to also prepare accordingly and be ready to dedicate and invest time in this.
“Make sure you prepare a really nice introductory pack that gives a great overview of what your product or services are. And if you can supplement it with some use cases and case studies, this could be a very good start,” is his advice for founders who are also considering joining the Visa Innovation Program.
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