We started with 2-3 employees. Olaf Zetnitz, MD VisualVest

At the start we wanted to build a robo advisor. Now we have a platform on which our clients, the banks, can customize their own robo advisor. Olaf Zetnitz, MD VisualVest

The CEO

Olaf Zeitnitz is also kind of a returning interview guest (https://www.linkedin.com/in/dr-olaf-zeitnitz-722b0a1b/). He was part of our Robo Advisor talk, dating back to October 2016, when not every video was turned into an audio podcast. VisualVest is not an average Robo Advisor, it is a white-label company, integrated into a much larger group of cooperative banks in Germany. Olaf studied physics and his Ph.D. studies took him to the CERN particle accelerator, where he was one of the first users of the newly invented internet. He also attended the first www conference.

Not one robo advisor startup was ever able to become profitable in a few years … VCs have to invest for the long term. If you invest for two to three years, a robo advisor is the wrong VC investment. Olaf Zetnitz, MD VisualVest

The Corporate Startup

VisualVest (https://www.visualvest.de/) is part of the cooperative banking group, a group of independent banks – known as Volksbanken and Raiffeisenbanken - (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VolksbankenundRaiffeisenbanken), working closely together on many services, including asset management. Their asset manager is called Union Investment (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Union_Investment) and VisualVest is a corporate startup of Union Investment and the DZ Bank, the central bank of the cooperative banks in Germany.

VisualVest is a SaaS platform. They are basically a toolbox where the different banks within the group can choose their features to create their own robo advisor.

I was there at [CERN], when they invented the internet. Our experiment was one of the first users. Olaf Zetnitz, MD VisualVest

Youtube Video from October 2016

Olaf has been a guest in our robo advisor talk back in 2016, together with other returning guests. You can find it here:

https://youtu.be/akCaXmFfgMQ

Investing is the opposite of sexy. Olaf Zetnitz, MD VisualVest

I was positively surprised that BaFin did not try to kill robo advice from the start. Olaf Zetnitz, MD VisualVest

The Interviewer

This interview was conducted by Jörn “Joe” Menninger, startup scout, founder, and host of Startuprad.io. Reach out to him: LinkedIn Twitter Email

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