Data is eating the world and today it launched Team8 Fintech, a startup foundry with the mission of growing future fintech unicorns, finding new ways for data to drive financial decisions.
Team8 Fintech is led by Rakefet Russak-Aminoach, former President & CEO of Israel’s largest bank, Leumi Group; Yuval Tal, Founder & President of digital payments unicorn Payoneer; and Ronen Assia, Founder and former Chief Product Officer of social trading network and multi-asset brokerage unicorn eToro. Galia Beer Gabel, former Head of Business Development for PayPal across Eastern Europe, Israel and Africa, is also joining Team8 Fintech as part of the founding team.
“The financial world is off-balance today,” says Russak-Aminoach. Consumers are not happy with the service they get given the current state of technology and regulators are letting new competition into the financial services market. These new players typically incur heavy losses because gaining market and mind share is very expensive. “With Team8’s resources and company-building model, we’ll launch companies that are B2B2C, working with the incumbents. Eventually, we will reach the consumer with a better solution, but we are not going to invest in customer acquisition,” says Russak-Aminoach.
Team8 Fintech plans to have the startups they will launch work not only with existing large financial service providers but also with “successful fintech companies” and the “new providers”—companies such as Amazon and Uber—large digital enterprises looking for help with “embedded fintech,” the rapidly growing financial transactions part of their business.