Upvest, the Berlin-based infrastructure Fintech, has expanded its management team and appointed Markus Maier as the new Chief Operating Officer.
Maier has previously “worked at UBS and Deutsche Bank and brings more than 25 years of management experience in the securities services and derivatives business.”
In his new role at Upvest, he will mainly “focus on building automated operations processes ensuring seamless scalability of Upvest’s platform, so that new B2B clients can go-to-market faster while focusing on building a user experience that delights their end customers.”
Martin Kassing, founder and CEO of Upvest, stated:
“We are proud to welcome Markus Maier to our team. He is a proven Operations expert with more than 25 years of industry experience. Upvest’s unique strength is the combination of a clear tech-DNA on the one hand and strong expertise in capital markets and crypto on the other hand. Markus Maier will help us further strengthen the intersection of these two fields, making our processes more scalable and bringing us even closer to our goal of making our Investment API available to as many retail investors as possible.”
Recently, Upvest became one of the few financial institutions in Europe “to receive BaFin licenses for securities and crypto brokerage and custody.”
Upvest’s B2B clients are now able “to provide the full range of investment services, ranging from ETFs and stocks to crypto assets and brokerage services.”
Kassing noted:
“One of our next major milestones will be to integrate these processes and scale them at large. By means of a best-in-class infrastructure set-up, we want to enable our clients to build better investment experiences for their end users. That is how we want to become the technological backbone for all fintechs to provide their end-customers with secure access to traditional securities and crypto assets.”
After graduating in industrial engineering at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Markus Maier started his professional career at Deutsche Bank, “where he led, amongst others, the EMEA business in Frankfurt and London as Head of Transaction Services.”
At UBS, he managed Operations areas globally “across various products and businesses as a Managing Director.”
On top of his impressive track record in the banking industry, he “served as COO at the Swiss payment Fintech MOGLI, where he was responsible for the implementation of the operating model and the business infrastructure for the expansion of a payment solutions offering.”
Maier added:
“When we look at the large investment platforms today, we can see that they are all struggling with rapid user growth and providing new product offerings, and this is mainly due to manual operations processes. At Upvest, we are changing exactly that by building our operations functionality on the greenfield, with fully-fledged process automation at the core. This will give our B2B clients maximum flexibility to individually programm the API tailored to their needs, help to reduce onboarding time for new customers, and make investing possible instantaneously.”
Upvest’s investment API and core banking system “enables B2B clients, including those without an own banking license, to benefit from the full range of investment services, from ETFs and stocks to crypto assets.”
Designed as a plug-and-play solution, Upvest’s Investment-API can be “easily connected to existing backends and can be immediately deployed, enabling businesses to build great investment experiences for their end users – seamless, secure and across international borders.”
Therefore, fintechs are now “no longer forced to develop their own brokerage and custody infrastructure and can consequently fully focus on their core business and product innovations for their end customers.”
Upvest is a fintech company “founded in 2017 by Martin Kassing that empowers other Fintechs to provide their end-customers with any type of investment product.”
To achieve that, Upvest has developed an Investment-API that “is easy to integrate for small and large Fintechs alike.”
This allows Upvest clients “to offer their end-customers the best experience in the field of capital market investment and retirement planning, save resources and fully concentrate on their core business.”
Upvest is one of the few fintechs in Europe that can “provide its B2B clients with the full range of investment opportunities in the areas of principal broking business, proprietary trading and safe custody business for traditional securities as well as crypto assets.”
The company currently “employs 90 people at its main hub in Berlin.”
Series A investors reportedly “include the venture capital firms Earlybird, HV Capital, Notion Capital, ABN AMRO Ventures, Speedinvest, and Partech as well as the Fintech founders Maximilian Tayenthal (N26) and Felix Haas (IDnow).”