From 4 to 40 in 4 Years – Executing a FinTech Scale Up Plan

Zurich, 21th August, WealthArc, a Swiss FinTech company is 4 years old. During this time, WealthArc, grew form 4-guys start-up into 40-empolyees strong technology company with customers all across the world.

It all begun in 2015, when Chris Gogol (current CEO) together with his 3 friends including Radomir Mastalerz (current CTO), founded their own company to automate repetitive and mundane processes in the wealth management industry. During their work at Vontobel Bank in Zurich and UBS in London, founders, who studied computer science and financial mathematics together, came up with the idea how to use latest technologies to integrate data from various custodian bans via cyber-secured APIs.

In those early days in 2015, 4 co-founders had to work on dozen of tasks at once: application development, speaking with potential customers, hiring or even setting up the gear for new employees.

WealthArc Mission

“We accelerate the growth of Wealth Managers and Banks by automating processes and making data integration easy”

This four-people-and-an-idea stage did not last very long. The first two data feeds to Julius Baer and Lombard Odier were not enough for growing number of customers. There were more and more ideas for processes to be automated.

The team went from 4 to 40 employees in just 4 years.

Turning Plans Into Action With a Large Team

Today WealthArc is made of 5 major business units: engineering, product, sales, marketing and operations. Those 5 are driven by a yearly plan made up of OKRs (Objectives and Key Results).

OKRs methodology is widely used by tech firms such as Intel or Google. The idea of OKRs was proposed to WealthArc during its residency at Google for Startups Campus in 2017.

“This strategy gives the company the flexibility to scale up at an incredible pace.”
– said Radomir, WealthArc’s CTO

We start with company’s OKRs, which are broken down into departments’ OKRs and those are broken down into personal OKRs. At the same time, each employee is encouraged to propose their own OKRs. This way we try to mix a top-down with bottom-up approach.

The company’s plan and performance are visible to everyone. Each staff member has the ability to look into the financial and operational data. This drives a better decision making with employees making more informed choices and teams being more aligned with the ultimate goal.

“With mentoring from Google experts, we implemented OKRs very quickly and saw first benefits already after one quarter” said Chris – Founder & CEO of WealthArc.

Bringing Technology Across the World

Headquartered in Zurich, WealthArc launched its platform to first customer in German-speaking part of Switzerland in 2015. Its customer base quickly expanded to all parts of Switzerland – Geneva, Lugano – as well as to Lichtenstein.

Growing a large team brings a lot of challenges, especially when you start to scale internationally. This year WealthArc signed its first contracts with customers in London and Dubai with Singapore on the way.

Grand vision behind WealthArc is to become the leader in wealth management technology by leveraging innovation. We are on the right trajectory to make it happen!