The bolder, bigger, and borderless third season of the Visa Innovation Program is steadily moving ahead and all participants are tirelessly working on their innovative solutions. Today, we are excited to present two startups from Turkey – Norma and Paratic.
Norma is a “one-stop-shop” financial and business platform for freelancers & micro-SMEs providing integrated and streamlined products in addition to addressing all their banking needs. Paratic is a cash management software solution, which allows companies to manage all banks they are working with from a single platform.
Continue reading and get to know them better!
At a glance:
The Problem
Banking, accounting, financing, and taxes are everyday anxiety for business owners due to lack of access to information and high costs. They have to deal with time-consuming administrative tasks rather than concentrating on new sales or running their business better. Also, the current banking and financial management solutions offer an underwhelming banking experience as products are built for individuals or large enterprises, not for new-age micro-businesses requiring unique solutions.
The Solution
Norma is a digital banking and financial management platform targeting freelancers, sole traders, and micro-businesses by providing integrated products to save money and time. A platform where customers can find all needed functions to manage their banking, accounting, and business needs.
Why is this important?
Norma is a platform, which has fully integrated banking & business management solutions and professional services backed up with value-added services to facilitate daily business activities. The team’s main goal is to minimize integration and manual tasks, as well as make their clients’ life more comfortable and hassle-free.
Founder Blitz
In order to learn even more intriguing insights, our team met with Norma’s founder for a quick “founder blitz”.
1. What inspired you to start Norma?
We have been working in the fintech sector in Turkey for the last couple of years, helping underbanked individuals access financial services. As new services and tools emerged for individuals, no new innovative services were being built to help freelancers, sole traders, and Micro-SME’s. We wanted to use our sector and technology experience to build a simple, yet powerful new-age banking experience to help our clients have an easier time running their business. Our mission is to focus on creating hassle-free financial and banking experiences so that our clients can focus on improving their businesses.
3. What is the biggest challenge you have come against since you established Norma?
One of our biggest challenges which will turn out to be our strength is combining multiple financial management and accounting functionality into the digital banking ecosystem.
Working closely with our experienced product and design team, we were able to create a simple solution that the customers will enjoy. As we continue to grow our team, we are finding talents in both of these areas to help tackle issues in each sector. Building a strong and highly competitive team will be our priority in order to tackle all the challenges on our way.
2. What is your next big milestone?
Our key milestone is to release our product into the Turkish market in September. After hitting our targets in Turkey this year, we’ll start our global expansion with 3 countries in 2022. We want to build a global digital banking solution by using Turkey’s competitive advantage in banking and technology.
4. What does success look like for Norma?
Our aim is Norma is to become a digital banking provider for Micro-SMEs and Freelancers in multiple geographies helping our customers to manage their banking and financial life much easier.
At a glance:
The Problem
One of Paratic’s founders has worked in cash management departments at 4 different banks for 7 years and during this time saw the problems companies are experiencing with banks. These problems include having passwords for each bank, different screens and processes of each bank, different bank tools, authorization processes, repetitive transactions, bank and accounting program tracking. So far, the financial departments have been using several tools since there is no integration between the software. These increase the operational risk and decrease efficiency.
The Solution
Paratic is an end-to-end cash management software solution, which allows all banks to be managed from a single platform. Integrated with accounting software and ERP, Paratic provides comprehensive features to help customers to make transactions and monitor the transaction on POS bulk payments and bulk collection.
Why is this important?
Firms benefit from Paratic by having minimum operative work, fewer mistakes, advanced technology, and a result-oriented approach. Analysis and feedback from Paratic’s clients show that it accelerates the processes and decreases the operational risk within 60% efficiency argumentation.
Founder Blitz
Meet Paratic’s founders and learn more about their vision and the next milestones for the company in our “founder blitz”.
1. What inspired you to start Paratic?
Standardization, efficiency, and risk are some terms that are very important to us. While working at banks, we saw that companies had to comply with the standards of banks. However, when a firm has to comply with the standards of 10 banks, the operation increases, the risk increases, and the efficiency decreases. So, we just found customer pain in this area and this is how the idea for Paratic was born.
3. What is the biggest challenge you have come against since you established Finqware?
The biggest challenge was establishing a successful team. Fortunately, we have the best.
2. What is your next big milestone?
We want to be the leading company in open banking in Turkey for both companies and individuals. After increasing the number of our customers and banks, we aim to become a well-known brand on the global market. We aspire to cooperate with banks and companies with wide networks and to grow bigger and stronger.
4. What does success look like for Paratic?
Making our clients and business partners promoters or brand ambassadors of Paratic is a key success factor for us. Our goal is to make Paratic the first fintech that comes to mind when speaking about Cash Management – this is how success looks like for us.