In one of my first roles in fintech, I realized that entrepreneurship is less about the size of the company you work for and more about the impact you have on your customers. 

Entrepreneurship, at its core,  is about solving a problem and serving a community in a way that no one else can. That's precisely why I'm so excited to join Bond as Chief Product Officer. 

When a customer applies for a new bank account, credit card or a financial service launched in partnership with one of their favorite brands, they see an opportunity; they see a financial product that's tailored exactly to their needs from a brand they trust. What they don't see is all the work that went on behind the scenes just to get that brand enabled as a fintech. But I do. 

Throughout my career, I saw how difficult it was for financial institutions and modern brands to work together to launch new financial products and continue to iterate and improve them.

Bringing a new financial product to market meant navigating a process that felt out of step with the pace of the market and the workflows of most modern companies. The timelines to launch were tied to an inflexible, unscalable process of approvals, handoffs, and reports that lacked transparency. 

Bond's power as a company with the vision of an enterprise and the spirit of an entrepreneurial startup is to streamline that process and to make it more scalable and more transparent using the power of the cloud. Bond will enable any brand to be a fintech and offer more value to their consumers. ‍

Democratizing access to fintech using the cloud 

The cloud is essential to democratizing participation in the world of finance and building more access points while lowering the barrier to entry. 

Instead of relying solely on connections with legacy financial institutions to launch a new product, small businesses, brands, and banks can build it themselves with Bond on our platform. This cloud-powered approach to fintech also helps those businesses leverage data they need to understand their customers' needs more deeply and deliver on them. 

Bond understands the nature of this sizable opportunity and is delivering on it using APIs that give developers the power to prototype, build, and scale financial products on an intuitive platform. 

Our platform lets banks and businesses reach a broad base of customers and dive deep into their needs. That combination of breadth and depth is something that the world of fintech needs now.‍

What brought me to Bond 

At Bond, we're focused on our mission of making fintech work for brands, banks, and their customers. And, we're transparent about meeting our goals. One thing that stood out to me when I was interviewing at Bond was the fact the interviews were a two way street; I was able to interview with and meet what is now my product team. Having that direct relationship and organization-wide transparency is absolutely critical to the quality of our work going forward. It's a reflection of both Bond's culture and its values in practice. When I spoke to the executive team, they reinforced that sense of culture and Bond's mission that carries from the team building Bond's products to the product itself. 

Seeing companies like Squire launch products specifically designed for barbers and barber shops, and watching our other customers grow on Bond's platform, helps underscore the power of our mission. And we're just getting started.  

I can't wait to build the future of finance at Bond. If you want to join me in building the future of fintech, email me at helcio@bond.tech.