We recently spoke with Mantvydas Štareika, the digital financial services professional and CEO of CapitalBox.
This company, which Štareika joined in the last quarter of 2022, is one of the European fintech lenders that provides the EU’s startup ecosystem with timely, trusted, and specifically tailored alternative funding solutions.
CapitalBox has been a presence among alt-lenders and is known in the European startup scene since it was founded in 2015 as an independent business unit of the Multitude Group growth platform. Eight years in, the company is focused primarily on SMEs underserved by traditional banks. Granting these underserved businesses capital quickly and easily is at the very core of the company’s mission.
Over the course of our conversation, Mantvydas outlined the steps that took him to CapitalBox, how his leadership styles have changed, the changing realities of startups and digital finance throughout Europe, and where those changes are poised to take us.
Our conversation with Mantvydas is shared below.
Crowdfund Insider: Can you provide a brief overview of your journey to the role of CEO at CapitalBox?
Mantvydas Štareika: Of course. It’s certainly been an interesting ride to get here and it has taken me across the finance world and back again. My educational background is in law, funnily enough, and it has been an invaluable tool in navigating finance. In 2007 I joined Coface, eventually working my way through several senior roles to CEO. Coface was a total immersion in the world of fintech and credit lending, and it was a crash course in broader crisis management as we weathered the bank crisis in the late 2000s and early 2010s.
In my role as CEO, I expanded and restructured teams across the Baltic states, consolidated and relaunched entire divisions to promote across-the-board optimization, and made huge strides in integrating AI and data information systems. This experience, in addition to my role as CEO and board member at SME Bank, put me in an ideal position to take the reins of CapitalBox. Now it has been just under a year since I joined the company. Approaching the one year milestone feels amazing, to say nothing of what we’ve accomplished during that relatively short period of time.
Crowdfund Insider: What have you accomplished in that period of time?
Mantvydas Štareika: The accomplishments that stand out most to me, especially given my prior experience expanding Coface’s market footprint, are the ones that also have to do with expansion. We’ve launched an entire new branch in Denmark with a Danish team with in-depth knowledge of that market. They really hit the ground running. We’ve expanded our C-suite and, most importantly, continued to service an ever-growing roster of SMEs that have been overlooked or not given the capital they need to grow by corporate banks. Plans are already in the works to expand to more countries and markets within the next year.
Crowdfund Insider: Tell us more about this emphasis on SMEs and the underbanking crisis, as you’ve called it in the past. How exactly are you addressing it?
Mantvydas Štareika: Naturally. This is a favorite subject of mine and, as I see it, the issue at the core of CapitalBox’s mission. Maybe it’s the engine behind what we’re doing, if I can mix metaphors. Let’s start with pure statistics. Small- and medium-sized enterprises – what we call SMEs – make up 99 percent of European companies.
By any discernible metric, this makes them the absolute backbone of the European economy. Yet when it comes to these SMEs actually securing the funding they need, many larger corporate banks are leery of providing the requisite capital. It’s a matter of risk assessment, or maybe a little too much risk aversion, on the part of these banks. It’s made for an untenable situation. Recent research around the underfunding gap estimates that it’s sitting at about 400 billion euro in the E.U. alone. That’s not a gap, that’s a canyon.
This is where CapitalBox comes in. We’re an alt-finance lending provider, and we take these SMEs seriously. Our approach to supporting these businesses is multi-tiered and rooted in pure fintech. We designed our own business risk assessment methodology that isn’t simply a lowering of the eligibility criteria but a total rethinking of it. Using machine learning, we take into account metrics beyond a simple credit score. Because we know that SMEs have shorter financial runways than larger institutions, we’ve done a full-scale AI integration into our application process. This makes it so approvals can be processed and funds can be dispensed in usually no more than a single business day in the majority of cases. In some cases, it’s as short as a few minutes. As we see it, the businesses the European economy is built upon can’t be left behind. That’s why we’ve rethought lending, and our pure fintech approach has made this level of rethinking possible.
Crowdfund Insider: You’ve held executive and senior roles throughout your career. How has your leadership style evolved?
Mantvydas Štareika: I’m not the leader I used to be – and that’s a good thing. I’ve grown from my missteps and a few big blunders along the way. It’s those mistakes that taught me personal resilience and how to weather a chaotic period with a team, then grow from it. I no longer think of mistakes as the end of the world, and I’m better at evaluating my team and their mistakes fairly in a way that fosters growth and support instead of a culture that feels punitive or belittling.
I’ve learned how to encourage innovation that may not be a guaranteed success without instilling a fear of retribution in my team. I’m just as intent on celebrating successes. Happy teams make good companies work, and confident leaders that don’t balk at serious innovation certainly help with that.
Crowdfund Insider: In a broader sense, where do you see the digital finance world heading in the next decade? What shifts are you seeing that have caught your attention?
Mantvydas Štareika: This industry is undergoing a period of significant change already, and I think that will continue moving forward. We’re seeing it in a number of areas. First and foremost, personalization has really come to the fore. Personalized services and customer experiences are on the rise, including products tailored to meet not only individual financial needs but preferences.
The integration of artificial intelligence is quickly becoming key to the optimization we’ve seen across risk assessment, fraud detection, and customer service. This extends well beyond chatbots, as it should. Open banking, which is the process that allows customers to share their financial data with third-party providers, is on the upswing in Europe. This is enabling the development of new services in the sector. I think it’s also worth noting that CapitalBox is not alone in its focus.
We’re seeing a new prioritization of SMEs in the financial service industry via flexible financing options and digital banking solutions. A high tide raises all boats. On top it all, what I’m most excited about is the massive industry-wide push toward digital transformation. It wasn’t that long ago that mobile banking was old news and digital wallets had yet to hit mass adoption. Look at us now. We can expect that level of paradigm shift in the next decade, if not an even greater one.