B2B Marketers on a Mission

The Strategic Role of Fintech in the Ever-evolving Finance Industry

In this week’s episode, we explore the intriguing world of fintech with Victor Salinas García (CEO, Aiontech). In this interview, Victor explains why it’s important for companies in fintech to forge strong partnerships with financial institutions, how the pandemic has helped to accelerate the development of the financial sector, how the management and analysis of data will be the key to the future, as well as the advantages and “myths” surrounding blockchain.

Topics discussed in this episode:

Companies & links mentioned in this episode:

SPEAKERS

Christian Klepp, Victor Salinas García

Christian Klepp  00:08

Hi, and welcome to the B2B Marketers on a Mission podcast. I’m your host, Christian Klepp, and one of the founders of EINBLICK Consulting. Our goal is to share inspirational stories, tips and insights from b2b marketers, digital entrepreneurs, and industry experts that will help you to think differently, succeed and scale your business.

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to this episode of the B2B Marketers on a Mission podcast. I’m your host, Christian Klepp. And today, I’m excited to welcome a guest into the show who I met at an in-person event last year at the Toronto Region Board of Trade (TRBOT). He’s a successful entrepreneur. And we’ve had many interesting conversations about his entrepreneurial journey across different markets. So Victor Salinas, buenas tardes y bienvenido! Welcome to the show.

Victor Salinas García  00:54

Thank you, Christian. Thank you for having me today.

Christian Klepp  00:57

All right, Victor, it’s so great to connect again with you. And you know, let’s get this conversation started. So, you know, give us a little bit of a background about yourself, and you know, what you do?

Victor Salinas García  01:08

Yeah, sure. Well, well, my name is Victor Salinas. I’ve been working in the financial industry for the last 20 years. So my background is system engineer. And I decided to start my company 10 years ago, I just after I studied one year in Toronto, English in Toronto. And when I came back to my country, just I don’t know, I decided to change the way I was defining how to work in the IT company. So I decided to create my own company.

Christian Klepp  01:40

Okay, well, that’s, that’s great. And, you know, thanks so much for sharing that with us. And so Victor wanted to talk to us a bit about the recent project, you know, that you’ve been involved in, that you’re very excited about?

Victor Salinas García  01:53

Well, I have to say that SmartConcil is the project that has taken like 100% of my time, right now. It’s you know, after all, this COVID crisis, we realized that companies are trying to, to improve their internal financial process. And I think we have this momentum with the SmartConcil. And now we are focused in you know, improve the marketing strategy. And also, we are working in the sales strategy. So we are very excited about this product.

Christian Klepp  02:24

Hmm, okay. No, that’s, that’s really interesting. And we’ll definitely go back to the topic about SmartConcil in a second. But, um, you know, onto the next question, which is something you talked about a little bit already in the past couple of minutes: What is it that motivated you to enter the world of entrepreneurship, you know, like to get you to start your own business? And also, most importantly, how did you manage to identify this unmet need or gap in the market that inspired you to start Aiontech, which is your company, and then developed a platform like SmartConcil?

Victor Salinas García  02:59

Well, I started the company by accident. Yes. After I went back to my country. 10 years ago, when I went back to Mexico, I was trying to get a job with a different perspective, right. After spending one year in Canada, I really love the way that people were, like, interacting, and the way that they were, like, creating good things. So I was trying to replicate that in Mexico, but it was kind of difficult for me to get a job. So that’s why I’d say by accident, because I didn’t plan in that way. So I didn’t like was like dreaming to create a company. So I just need to get, you know, revenue, I need to get the money to survive. So because I couldn’t find a job. In the first six months, I decided probably the best, the best way to start having something is creating my own company. And you know, creating different things/ways to do this stuff. I already have experience working in the financial industry. Yeah, so I talked with a couple of previous clients, and it sound like I’m having conversation and see if we can create new stuff for them. So, this is basically how I started my company.

My wife was my first investor, I will say that she was basically paying the bills in the first two years until we got our first customer of course. And well you know, we started a company as a software factory company. And based on that experience, we learned a lot of internal process in the financial institutions and based on that we started creating our own product. So SmartConcil was a platform, which is one of our first customers required us to build in order to help them to, you know, to get a better understanding about the cash flow and how the money is moving in the financial institutions. We decided to create this product, and then we start selling to other companies. And we realized that this process is not just for financial institutions, but also any kind of company.

Christian Klepp  05:11

Hum. No, that’s a that’s a great. That’s a great story about how you started your own business. And how long have you been running your company now, Victor?

Victor Salinas García  05:21

I started a company in 2009. So, it’s been like more than 10 years.

Christian Klepp  05:29

That’s quite impressive. And you started out in Mexico, but...