My guest today is Svitlanka Sergiichuk Romaniuk, CEO & Co-founder at Neofin, a Lending SaaS FinTech. We had a ton of fun recording, we talk about how no code solutions are empowering companies to launch lending propositions faster.

Neofin started years ago in Ukraine, so we explore their founding story and their journey of losing all their Ukrainian bank customers one by one in a matter of days at the start of the war. They then had to make a very difficult decision to stop or adapt and continue. It is deep and inspiring.

Today Neofin has customers across the world, including the US, so we go deeper on the how to go about market expansion, specially in the US. And finally, Neofin has multiple awards, so Svitlanka shares with us her secrets to success, strength and perseverance.

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Let’s dive into it!

👉 You can find Svitlanka here

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/svitlanaromaniuk/
• LinkedIn Neofin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/neofin-solutions/
• Website Neofin: https://neo-fin.com/

👉 And you can find Monica here:

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/monicamillares/
• YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@moni_millares
• TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@moni_millares
• Website: https://moni-millares.mystrikingly.com/

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In this Purpose Driven FinTech episode we cover:

(0:00:00) Full-scale war starts, and banks in Ukraine close their credit business

(0:01:10) Neofin decides to scale internationally to survive

(0:01:59) How no-code solutions empower faster lending propositions

(0:08:37) Neofin's customer promise: launch lending business 4x faster with zero delivery risk

(0:15:18) Neofin's founding story and journey through the war in Ukraine

(0:19:16) Neofin expands to Canada and the US

(0:28:33) Neofin simplifies the complex lending process with no-code solutions

(0:32:51) Neofin's advantages: optimal for institutions without technical teams, ease and flexibility

(0:37:10) Challenges of market expansion: regulatory landscape, local data, cultural differences

(0:46:08) Improve collaboration between FinTechs and financial institutions

SEARCH QUESTIONS

• What is no-code lending technology?
• How to launch lending products faster in FinTech?
• What are the stages of the lending process?
• How to build resilience as a FinTech founder?
• What is loan origination automation?
• How to expand FinTech into international markets?
• What is Sharia-compliant lending?
• How to use alternative data in credit scoring?
• What is a loan management system?
• How to build lending products without developers?
• What are the challenges of building FinTech during war?
• How to diversify risk in FinTech market expansion?
• What is the difference between loan origination and servicing?
• How to automate credit decisioning?
• What data sources improve lending underwriting?
• How to market lending products effectively?
• What is KYC and fraud detection in lending?
• How to build a revenue-driven FinTech without VC funding?
• What accelerator programs help FinTech startups?
• How to make innovation normal in financial services?

—

Production and marketing by Monica Millares. For inquiries about collabs, sponsoring the podcast or creating or editing your podcast email Monica at fintechwithmoni@gmail.com

Disclaimer: This episode does not constitute professional nor financial advice and does not represent the opinion nor views of my current, past or future employers. The guest has agreed to record and release our conversation for the use of this podcast and promotion in social media.

And that's a beautiful example of a strong woman. So welcome to the show.

Svitlanka Sergiichuk Romaniuk: Thank you so much. Hi, Monica. I'm also excited to be here. Thank you.

Monica Millares: So, before we go into your story as such, let's get to know Svitlanka a little bit better as a person. So, what does success look like for you?

Svitlanka Sergiichuk Romaniuk: To me, the success is to do what you like and be in harmony with yourself and live according to your values.

Svitlanka Sergiichuk Romaniuk: That's a good questions because the first reply that I want to give is that we just have it is that you don't have any other choice. You need to be strong. You need to be resilient in order to keep going in order to keep working, especially if you're a leader and there are many people that depend on you you understand that if you're not resilient.

And the level of my teams that were also. Looking at me and the leadership's position in the hard times is critical for, for team's operation. So it's something inevitable. You should, you either go strong or you go home.

Monica Millares: I like that. Yeah. Because there's no way somebody asked me recently. Like, how do you cope when it gets really tough? What do you do? And I with a very serious face, I said, I just keep going. And she was like, what? I'm like, well, maybe I stop, I cry. You know, I reassess this, the other, but I just keep going. And that's what you need to do.

Monica Millares: Exactly. Exactly. And I think that's a beautiful message. It's like, yeah, crying, but go. It's like scared, but go. You just keep going. Whatever feeling is coming up, just keep going. Because I always see it as otherwise the alternative.

I never liked the alternative. The alternative is scarier than , wherever situation I may be at the moment. No, I don't like the alternative. So I just keep going.

Cool. So that's a deep topic that probably we'll go into in more detail a bit later but this podcast is about like purpose and how we can create more impact in FinTech as such. So what's your view on how we can create more purposeful products in the industry?

If we have the true. Thank you. Motivation then we can do the purpose driven product. Neofin is a purpose driven technology that powers products like that. We love working with products, with a goal, with products, with a purpose and products with an [00:05:00] impact. Yes.

Monica Millares: And that's super important because exactly it all comes back to the.

intent behind the product or the company, even like the why we're doing what we're doing. So you as Neofin, you have a customer promise that it's quite ambitious, courageous, audacious, that it's launched your lending business at four times the speed and zero delivery risk. Can you tell us about Neofin and what this customer promise is?

Svitlanka Sergiichuk Romaniuk: Yeah, absolutely. We're well, we're in the FinTech. We cannot just do the marketing phrases and then do not correspond with that marketing phrases because otherwise we'll get regulated. So of course we do have an explanation what that means. At Neofin, we are. Introducing the wave of no code to the financial world.

We all know always has a huge backlog, and it's not that easy to cram into that backlog. Whereas they can work on the core things and not be distracted. While at Neothin, we cover Everything around the lending [00:07:00] technology which is basically a commodity tool. We cover it through the no code approach.

That is why it's four times the speed, because for example, you don't need to wait for the development team to become available in order to build out a marketing lead generation page for the new London product. Or for the new financial program you can just use the site builder and get a couple of pages that are needed fully branded, fully white label as a part of the domain done in a couple of days, or you do not have to involve a huge team of integrators and developers to fine tune your underwriting strategy because you can use an underwriting studio, you And you can establish all of the, those decision and algorithms inside the studio that makes it faster.

You don't need to code them. That's why. That's why it just decreases the very basic delivery risk to

Monica Millares: minimum. Okay. I thank you for that explanation because I'll deep dive a little bit before we go more into Neofin. I want to understand properly what Neo, the impact of no code, because I've been hearing the word, you know, like no codes, these no codes, the other.

I did study engineering, but I did not study computers engineering. Therefore, like it's not my strength as such. But then what you're saying is basically. As a product professional, I can deliver my proposition, my journeys, lending journeys faster, because then I will use my tech team to go and build the core.

Svitlanka Sergiichuk Romaniuk: takes so much time.

What I like to say is that you don't have to be a coder. You can be a no coder, so you can be a non technical product manager. And it's still completely fine. With Neothin we often work with founders who are people of the business and not technical people. We often work with a product team or with the let's say head of retail lending.

Monica Millares: If it's a massive launch, yes, you have to test a lot.

Svitlanka Sergiichuk Romaniuk: probably you do. And here you are getting a simple and low risk way to test it out to take, for example, an existing cohort of the users of a financial institution run this cohort and pre score it with.

Existing underwriting strategy of the new lending product that you foresee , for your new financial product and see how much of them pre qualify, how much of them pre score, how relevant it is in general for this cohort of the users, how interesting it's going to be to them. Maybe it's your assumption and idea, but they actually don't qualify for that.

And you can do it in a couple of days for just a test, because it's a low risk

Monica Millares: model

Monica Millares: Okay, cool. I like that. So coming back to you and your story, how did you guys start Neofin?

Like, what's the story behind you and the founders, the idea?

Svitlanka Sergiichuk Romaniuk: That's a fun story. My co founder, Alex, who's a technical co founder. Yeah. You see, we also have that same duo. I'm a business co founder and he's a technical co founder. He used to work on. A number of CIO, CTO positions in the banks and the fintechs.

They were originated from Russia and in many countries around us, in the Eastern Europe these products were very popular, even though they were not. Functional, not flexible, not modern at all. And at the same time, I, I spent over 10 years scaling international Ukrainian tech businesses on the worldwide arenas.

And at that point I was really. Interested. I was a big fan of the innovations in Ukrainian banking. And I love what we are doing from the user perspective from the end users perspective, but at the same time, what I did not like is how it looks like from. Insight from the perspective of the institution, from the banking perspective.

So it started with that and started just as an idea that we were building out at night, having our full time jobs. And then it gets super quickly sold to the first bank super quickly in a few months and then boom, and we started serving a lot of major banks and institutions in the, in the country.

Oh, that's amazing. Congrats. So it all started in Ukraine, actually.

Monica Millares: Yes. I was about to ask that. And then what happened? Because this is like prior to the war starting and then... Actually, it wasn't

So Russia invaded our home region and when Neon started, it was already several, years of the war. And we were already expecting something and had experience with with this. There's a dark joke, dark humor that I usually say that we started getting missiles from Russia before it has become a mainstream humor, but dark humor, but this is what we have.

What happened when the war started ?

Because the banks, our customers, Ukrainian customers, the banks start closing their credit business one by one by one by one. And we stopped billing the banks. The situation is very uncertain. It's hard to predict how it's going to operate, [00:17:00] how the country is going to live in general, how the bank system is going to live, to survive in general.

And the banks just close their banking businesses. And we understand that we have a fantastic team that we have been gathering from all the world from banks and fintechs that we want to hold in. And we're a fully self funded revenue funded business. So we need revenue to keep going. And our revenue just stops coming in and we realized that, well we.

Either should do something that we have never done before, or we just close, we just close and say goodbye to neophene. And of course we choose the first option and we decided we're going to scale internationally. We're going to go to international markets.

Monica Millares: Can I stop you there? Let's continue, but can I stop you?

Svitlanka Sergiichuk Romaniuk: You need to be effective as effective as possible because as a leader, you understand that a lot of people depend on you.

And there is a country that is in blood and in pain, and your people, your nation that is in blood and in pain. The only way for you to be effective and helpful is to keep going. To continue. To keep generating value, to be able to keep giving job to people. Keep paying the tax, keep earning something to be able to help, to donate.

Equipment and it's not cheap, like everything, every small thing, I would never expect I would be able to understand what is a good terminal in an imager, what is a good anti drone rifle or what, what are, what drone models are there and so on, but you get, you become an expert in that because you need to buy all of that.

If you don't keep going, then what is the hope for you? And what is the hope for these people? You cannot make another, that was the only relevant choice that we could do at that point, and we were existing for a few months with no revenue. Working fully on internationalizing the product and working on building out the partner ecosystem and researching the ways how we can go international, which regions are the most relevant.

And tough accelerator that we were going through, yeah, because for example we needed to pass through compliance and certification to work internationally. And usually this takes at least a year, at least a year. In our case, we managed to pass all the U S compliance and certifications like ISO SOC two and so on in half a year.

So a lot of things we were We were doing because we were so motivated. We were doing faster and we were, when we decided to go into the into us I was talking to a lot of people from the FinTech space in the U S I was talking to a lot of investors from the FinTech space of the U S and.

Monica Millares: catalyst. I'm like, congrats.

Amazing. You've done really well.

Svitlanka Sergiichuk Romaniuk: Thank you. Thank you. There's always there's always this thing. That we could do better and I'm thinking, could we do better? Of course we could, but of course, I think that it was still not bad.

Monica Millares: No, I think you did a great job because like, also if you think about it, like many, many FinTechs tried to go into the US.

And then they don't, you not only tried, but like you did, and you did it fast. And then you got the clients and you're now in the U S like you have U S customers, which is

Svitlanka Sergiichuk Romaniuk: amazing. Yeah. We still feel like with the U S we're on the start of our journey, but we're actively scaling in different countries.

So we don't stop there. War teaches you to diversify the risks. You don't put all the eggs in one basket. If we would only, who do you ask on stakes that would not be sustainable for us because it's a long term shot. Hmm.

Monica Millares: Yes. I like how you think it, I think it made you stronger also as a person, as a human, not only as a leader.

Monica Millares: I love that. You know, like I, when I'm into the habit of. Weight lifting and then I'm like, and I start to see my body shape change and like the muscles and you feel stronger, like you're mentally stronger as well.

I do think that it's like, so related, like when the body feels like super strong, then the mind is stronger. And likewise, when the mind is super strong, then the body gets strong. It's just, yeah.

Svitlanka Sergiichuk Romaniuk: Working with body is my absolute recommendation to everyone who's going through the hard times. It's so interconnected.

Can you guide us quickly? So for anyone that's not familiar with the lending end to end process, can you guide us through the process and then expand what are the main pain points that you're solving for or that your customers may have? And they are like, yes, we want to go to Neofin because of that.

Svitlanka Sergiichuk Romaniuk: Yeah, of course. It's definitely a complex process. Let me try to structure it in a simple way. There are several stages on the landing process. The first stage is the actual onboarding which is common in this region to be called loan origination. That is the stage when the user is onboarding.

So it's either approved or disapproved or, or declined or it goes for the manual for the manual decision. All of that. Is under the umbrella of loan origination and for each part of this loan origination there are the separate solutions inside neophene on the stage of on the stage of the fraud detection on the stage of the face recognition, lightness detection for remote identification on the stage of the OCR documents check [00:27:00] then process and the application scoring.

Running the underwriting rules and making the decision. The goal with Neofim is to. Allow the customer automate as many decisions as possible, leave, let's say, automate 96%, leave 4% for the manual check. Yeah. Just make the use, the, the use of the, you know, human resources of the team effectively. Not to have them deal with the very standard cases that can be automated.

Then the next stage is the loan management system. This is when, okay, we've already made the decision. Yeah. What is going to happen next? You need to manage it somehow. You need to have the user base. You need to operate it. You need to use it as a. CRM, you need to build out various financial products.

Send the necessary communication, necessary notifications, necessary communication, and so on. And then you need to market it somehow. So run, let's say affiliate affiliate marketing campaigns run various communication [00:29:00] campaigns maybe do some promo codes or holiday activations and so on. And this is a marketing part.

So this isn't, this is how the process of lending looks like in a nutshell. Of course, under every of these part, there's a lot of nuances, a lot of solutions, but the platform covers this all in a nutshell, in a nutshell. And it is very open to any external solutions that the customer is used to work with, and we just make it super easy to, to work with, with that.

Monica Millares: So why could a financial institution, whether that's a fintech or a bank, why would they choose you over any of the other tons of lending management systems?

Because for FinTech for bank, they, the technical teams need to be very focused on their core product to make sure that their user experience is perfect, their customer support is perfect. Their applications are perfect, and usually lending is something that is kind of left behind. And they're not, they're not, not much resources there whereas Neofin helps make it as digital, as seamless, as dynamic and automated as, let's say, the user experience of a great neobank.

That is super important. Exactly. So there's so many audiences right now that are getting access to finance, which would not be possible if financial institutions would not start using the alternative data. Having the legacy or I would say more traditional More traditional does not make the institution flexible and open to the usage of all of that new technology and integrations and solutions and and so on. It often can take years to integrate something new. It may have been the longest new data source [00:32:00] integration that has ever taken us five days. That was the longest, that was the longest.

Yep. So,

Monica Millares: I'll be like what people would be thinking now. Oh yeah. And it's super, super expensive. It's like, no, it should be less expensive than managing the whole team for X months to build the thing on your own. So this is like a good way to get fast to market and reduce your costs probably like development costs and maintenance costs

Svitlanka Sergiichuk Romaniuk: because the maintenance cost is just the, the personnel who is working with the platform. The employees that the financial institution has anyway.

It's not. So with you, I was just thinking, I'm like, I'm sure it's not just five. days, all this complexity behind it, just so that we don't miss sell the product as well. Of course,

Svitlanka Sergiichuk Romaniuk: of course. No, I want to be very transparent here. I'm speaking about the new data sources and the data sources. It can definitely be done below five days.

If we speak about integration with something heavy, like a core banking system. Oh my God. That can take a long time. That can take a long time. But still with me, I've been. We designed the system in a way that it has this ready API mythos to communicate with the existing lending landscape of an institution.

So it would not take that massive time as with the hard coded platforms, but oh my God. It's definitely a big piece of work. So I'm not going to do any false promises

Svitlanka Sergiichuk Romaniuk: Every market has its own specifics and its own climate and the regulatory landscape and the, its own local data. So the regulatory landscape. Does concern us, but a bit less because we are not providing financial services ourselves. We are a technology and all we need is we need to comply with the local certification and compliance requirements which is doable, challenging, but doable.

So getting to understand the local climate in the data. Is also an important challenge, and it's important to respect this because the effectiveness of the customers operations would depend on that. And also, of course, the local. Cultural differences, for example, when we went Middle East and we started working with Middle East in the first in the first place [00:36:00] we got to know the Sharia compliant lending very well because Sharia compliance is an important thing.

And the lending has its own specifics in the region. If you want to operate in the region, effectively, you need to respect that.

Monica Millares: Definitely. Cool. Because I think there's many fintechs that are trying to grow, exactly, international, but it is not that easy, but I think you, you gave like a good summary.

Svitlanka Sergiichuk Romaniuk: It's not that easy.

I'm just putting it into the clear words because we're on the podcast,

Monica Millares: Looking back summary, rather

Svitlanka Sergiichuk Romaniuk: than going through, no, we're on that journey, we're on that journey right now. Yeah,

You were awarded Equifax Accelerate Award, Finn took an eCommerce Linking Days Award in Poland, you were selected as part of the top five companies to be part of in the MasterCard Start Path Ukraine program, recognized as an innovator of the U. S. Department of State's Global Innovation through the Science and Technology Initiative in 2023.

So it's like... It's not just one, it is many, it's multiple awards. So kudos to you and the team. Thank you. No, it's like, thank you to you.

For the startups to have their voices to be heard. I know that we don't have right now. We don't do marketing. We don't have any budget for sales and marketing. We are a self driven revenue driven business. Not VC backed. And. All of these platforms, all of the awards and programs they provide a platform for your voice to be heard and for your message to be heard.

Please look for these opportunities. Please go for them because that's your platform. That's

Monica Millares: your voice. I love that. I love the fact that you talk about your voice as such and your message. So. Obvious follow up question. What is your voice and your message as NeoFin?

Svitlanka Sergiichuk Romaniuk: We want to make FinTech in general and lending as such a place where Innovations are normal and not exceptional.

We want to make it a reality.

But no, there's so much behind that button in the app and then you're right to innovate like we have so many limitations everywhere like that we need to. walk around and jump up and down and try to do it in a different way. So yeah, I like that vision of making innovation accessible and make it a day to day thing rather than the extraordinary once in a while thing.

That's cool. And what has been your secret to success then?

Svitlanka Sergiichuk Romaniuk: That was a complicated question for me because I don't think that we're that super successful right now to talk about that. I mean, we're not a unicorn yet. We just started getting our international, our international traction. So I'm always a little cautious.

So yeah, probably the more you try, the more chances are you, you succeed. This is mathematics.

Monica Millares: Yeah you just described life or a startup, like, yeah, or, or both, or both. Yeah. So before we go, where can we find you and Neofin?

Monica Millares: on LinkedIn, which makes it easy.

And also all the vintage shows, Yes, I've seen you money 2020 FinTech meetup. We go for all of that. All

Svitlanka Sergiichuk Romaniuk: be? That's a tough one.

Monica Millares: Yes, it is a

Svitlanka Sergiichuk Romaniuk: tough one. One thing

I would probably make. Special fast track due diligence procedure to effectively evaluate, to enable financial institutions effectively evaluate and due deal the fintechs and be able to integrate the fintechs in their lives easier. Interesting.

Svitlanka Sergiichuk Romaniuk: And how can we, how can we be synergetic? Because financial, traditional financial institutions have a lot of what we need to learn from them, but we as the FinTechs also have a lot to, of value to bring and how it can be synergetic, how it can be how it can be brought to the level of effective interaction.

That would probably be the change I would be looking at.

Monica Millares: Yeah, I like that. It's, it's beyond efficient collaboration. It is proper. How can we work together better? Where I bring my strengths as a financial institution, I bring my strengths as a fintech, we both have different strengths. And then how can we bring them together to do better?

Svitlanka Sergiichuk Romaniuk: thank you for having me, Monica. Thanks for the invitation. And you're a fantastic coach. It's the host of the, of the podcast. It's been a total pleasure.

Monica Millares: Thank you. It means a lot.

Thank you everyone. Ciao. Ciao.

Svitlanka Sergiichuk Romaniuk: Ciao. Ciao.