Last week, Edoardo Moreni reached out to me. He sent me a personal message on Linkedin, informing me about the launch of their personal finance management app called Kiria. We had been in contact before to discuss his plans of starting up a peer-lending platform in Germany last year. It seems his plans have changed. So we chatted on Linkedin and since this may be of interest to some of you, we decided to publish the conversation with Edoardo’s consent and slight corrections. Since he’s Italian, we chatted in English.
Edoardo Moreni, Kiria: Hi Clas, we realised how tough it is to deal with bureaucracy and banks for the peer-lending venture, so we have slightly changed our plans and launched Kiria, an iPhone app that helps people managing their personal finance. It’s available here: kiria-app.com/download
Clas Beese, finletter: Thank you very much. Congratulations on your launch. Quite a pivot from online lending. What is your USP at Kiria?
Edoardo: Thanks 😀 While digging into online lending, we got in touch with Figo and Finapi, so we thought why not try it. We are building a digital bank without being a bank. P2P has taught us how horrible bureaucracy is and we want to give the same services of a digital bank, without actually being one.
Clas: I understand. But what is your USP compared to other personal finance management tools?
Edoardo: Ease of use and no subscription plan, it’s completely free.
Clas: How do you monetize then?
Edoardo: We don’t. Right now, the focus is on product and growth. In the long term, we could sell digital products within the app, have a prepaid card, p2p payments and maybe a subscription model; or we could do a b2b with the banks, if we have a strong user base.
Clas: Ok, got it. Are you funded for this process?
Edoardo: No, we are using our own money. We’ll have to raise a seed round, if things get bigger.
Clas: And how strong is your team at the moment?
Edoardo: We are two computer scientists. We built the first version in two months, so we can move pretty fast.
Clas: Best of luck for this adventure!
Edoardo: Thank you very much.
