He created the largest platform of open banking in Europe and one of the largest in the world: it’s called TrueLayer and is reinventing the world of digital payments globally. He is Francesco Simoneschi, he is 37 years old, and his startup, born in 2016, it is already a unicorn, that is, valued at more than a billion dollars: “The story of the unicorns is a matter that exists more in the press than in reality. What we are trying to do is a business that makes sense “.
We are in London (but “Italy in the next few years may have an important role in the European technological panorama”), with him there is Luca Martinetti, a high school and many entrepreneurial adventures. Both passionate about IT, they have a vision: “Open banking will bring about a radical change and will allow us to compete with traditional payment systems”. Truelayer is a fintech specializing in payment technology infrastructure. It is developing a network parallel to that of debit cards, which facilitates those who have an online business, making him pay less commissions: “We are at the beginning of a revolution. The idea of people walking around with a piece of plastic in their wallets is quite old-fashioned ”.
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The context in which we operate is the one opened on January 16, 2016 by the European directive PSD2 (the acronym stands for Payment Service Directive 2), which forced banks to share (at the request and authorization of the customer) data and banking information, thus enabling so-called third parties a offer services previously provided only by credit institutions traditional: “It is a moment of huge boom for our sector. But unhinging an industry like the payments industry, where huge economic interests revolve, is difficult. But we have ambition and capital, and we are on the right path ”.
Over the past 12 months, Truelayer has grown 10 times in terms of transactions. It processes billions of dollars (20 by the end of 2022), connects 3,500 banks (there are 10 thousand in Europe) and hundreds of companies. Has raised capital of 270 million dollars. The latest $ 130 million round was led by US investment firm Tiger Global Management, with Stripe holding. It has 400 employees and 4 offices, in London, Milan, Dublin and Sydney.
Simoneschi is a careful observer of how things work: “There is a mechanism causal common to many sectors. As technology progresses over time, services become more accessible and cheaper, thus opening up a space for innovation. When the barriers to entry in an industry are lifted and millions of developers are given the opportunity to create new ideas, great opportunities arise. In our case, the banks were forced by PSD2 to equip itself with access interfaces, called API. We have collected them all together, creating our payment network on top of them ”.
A brief history of TrueLayer
Simoneschi’s story starts from Italy, passes through California and arrives in London. Romano, serial entrepreneur, at 19 he already has a startup in his hands. Meanwhile, he enrolled in computer engineering at Sapienza, but he will never finish it. She recovers years later. She graduated in Economics from the London School of Economics: “I have never been afraid to have a different perspective from orthodox thinking and to take some risks. I dropped out of university to do startups, I left Italy to pursue my ambitions. I unhinged the It has always been like thistrying to reinvent the way payments are made ”.
In 2006 he founded his first startup with Martinetti: DomainsBot. A few years later it was acquired by a German company listed on the stock exchange. The two are sent to San Francisco to open the American branch. Arrived in Silicon Valley and dazzled by the air they breathe, they create Staq.io, a startup for video game developers, which is absorbed by another bigger one. Simoneschi remains as a manager for two years, then leaves and opens an Italian fund that invests in early stage startups. With him, two other Italians, Stefano Bernardi and Simone Brunozzi. The fund is called Mission & Market, like the two main streets of San Francisco: “But also because if you want to make a startup that works, you need a solid mission and a large market”. He has already invested in 50 startups.
“In 2016 I started dreaming of an ambitious project again”, and the two friends decide to leave again. Fintech sector, Truelayer is born: “A play on words between true, that is truthful, reliable, legitimate, and layer, that is layer, often used in software development contexts to define different levels of complexity and logical separation. The idea was to focus on safety and reliability ”.
A few months after their birth, the two ride the PSD2 and move to London, the capital of fintech, which at the time was in the European Union. Among the first investors there is another Italian: Pietro Bezza, founder of Connect Ventures. “This is a world that investors look to a lot. The B2B infrastructure is difficult to build, it needs large initial capital, but then it is a very long-lasting business model with relatively few competitors “.
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Developer, Simoneschi has always wanted to create small pieces of infrastructure that companies could use to solve their problems. And behind it has always seen the business. The word infrastructure recurs continuously in this interview: “My first love was the engineering part of the IT infrastructure. And all software developers fall in love with this concept ”.
To explain it better, he says: “You know the physical infrastructure, ports, bridges, highways, airports, power stations? The digital infrastructure is the alter ego of the physical one. IS the enabler of the most innovative part of the world economies. The digital economy is 15% of the GDP of the world economy, but it is growing much faster. “
Simoneschi has lived in London for years, got married, became a father. When we interview him, he’s on his way to New York: “The road ahead for us is still enormous. All success stories are marked by an infinite number of failures in which everything seems lost. I learned that you have to find within yourself the strength and the ability to constantly react to difficulties and change situations in your favor “.
Will you return to Italy? “In part we are already back, I spend a lot of time in our Milan office“. And obviously Simoneschi will be in Turin, as speaker at the Italian Tech Week at the end of September: “I often ask myself what is our country’s place in the tech world. I am optimistic: in the next 10 years Italy will be able to do very well in Europe. But on one condition: we must create highways to bring home the talent we sent abroad. It is a precious opportunity, let’s not waste it. Italians abroad want to return. Let’s give them a reason to do it. They have ideas, skills and experience: they could create innovative businesses and jobs ”.
But could TrueLayer have been born in Milan? “As far as it is nice to think that if a business idea is good it can make it anywhere, without a liquid capital market it is very difficult. London is in the very first places in the world for access to capital. This is not the case in Italy. Then you need great skills. But this is a gap that we are filling. And Satispay is a fantastic example ”.