Read about successful, inclusive, and diverse companies in tech with Womentech Network.
Today, we talk to Alina Kornienko, COO and Co-Founder of Quppy, a digital payment solution consolidating your bank cards and accounts.
What is Quppy? What makes it unique compared to other bank-as-a-service products?
Quppy is a digital payment solution consolidating your bank cards and accounts. Quppy has gone further than Google Pay and Apple Pay to develop an AI solution that makes the right decision of choosing a payment card at the moment.
After a successful launch and development of a unique payment solution gathering all types of banking operations with both e-money and fiat assets within one decentralized application, Quppy is now launching a revolutionary financial and social solution not only for banking cards consolidation, but also an AI based recurrent payments, expenses and investment automatization, gift cards consolidator and planning solution. We have already launched the Quppy prepaid cards emission, the first ones will be delivered to our EU customers in the beginning of 2021.
Since the launch of the first version of the Quppy app in 2018, we have won over such important European markets as Germany, UK, Spain, Italy, Norway, Denmark and Poland. The Quppy services are already significantly present in the CIS countries and we are currently expanding our presence in Latin America and Asia.
With the current world pandemic situation, the need of a contactless fully digital unifying financial solution has significantly increased. As Quppy offers all the above mentioned solutions to its individual customers, its audience as far as its net revenue has shown 10x growth during the last three quarters only.
Does the Fintech industry present unique challenges or opportunities for women and minorities?
It definitely does. Fintech is a challenging cross-disciplinary and cross-border field that is fastly growing, exploring new synergies. Fintech is now popular; however, only 3-4 years ago it was simply moved and developed by enthusiasts and dreamers, professionals in their traditional roles from the industrial and economical perspectives spheres.
Thus, fintech with its numerous startups, today many of them unicorns, welcomed every professional despite gender and origin. It introduced a brand new corporate atmosphere of equality and equal opportunity for success, development and growth. I believe that fintech is important for modern society not only in terms of economical wealth and comfort, but in terms of inclusion.
Fintech, of course, has gender problems in terms of fundraising and leading positions for women (less than in terms of funding). And yet, it is a more inclusive and less reserved field than the financial, banking and pure tech ones. Also, in fintech and in terms of funding lots of great female-oriented funds and organisations as far as awards appear, and such projects as our and such great communities as yours are the ones to spread it more. I believe that in fintech it is easier and faster to spread as it is relative new and fast-growing field.
Your company is run by 70% women. What diversity policies did you implement to achieve this number?
Actually, in the very beginning we did not set up any special policies. Our company was simply developing together with the fintech industry. We, the co-founders, were looking for bright professionals to create, launch, and develop a disruptive financial solution.
And it turned out that the brightest specialists in law, analytics, financial management, PR, customer support, and backend development were women. :)
What policies do you implement to establish an inclusive culture and a feeling of belonging at Quppy?
At Quppy we have a talent and employee oriented atmosphere and policies as we believe that the employee’s general and individual comfort contributes to an efficient cooperation and results in a faster and better achievement of common professional goals.
Our personal managers as far as group heads are always there to help their colleagues. Before the pandemic spread, we had already established efficient remote work opportunities, especially for our IT dev specialists, which helped their inclusion and at the same time kept their personal comfort. This helped us significantly increase our potential and our achievements in 2020.
We have a respectful atmosphere where colleagues love sharing their experience, their culture, their knowledge. Every month, we have dedicated days for our team members to explain to others their own part of the work, professional sphere, step-by-step work process, and product development. It’s like a university class in a way.
We have our Women community which is established to help, hire, and develop female professionals to join our team, to attract great female specialists from other industries so that they could feel comfortable with us and could growth together with us as specialists as far as personalities.
The community helped us a lot to grow together as a project and to enrich each other as professionals and as individuals of different gender, nationalities, and cultures. The Quppy philosophy is not only to provide a unique and better personal banking customer experience, but to also make fintech more inclusive and equal on our own corporate example. We also “enforce” our employees, especially female ones, to stay as close to their families and children as they can.
How do you retain your workforce diverse?
As Quppy is constantly growing and expanding to new regions, we love hiring professionals from those regions. We love hiring not only experts on regions, but regional experts grown in those regions, who understand clients’ needs and minority needs as we aim to build a universal all-in-one app that would become the most convenient financial management service for every citizen around the globe.
We are now developing our network and hiring professionals in LatAm and Africa later this year.
What benefits for your business have you observed as a result of having a diverse workforce?
We adore professionals that are passionate for developing and working on something brand new. We adore courageous specialists who are not afraid of unexplored paths, thus, we adore giving equal chances to everyone, and as a result we receive fantastic metrics as we have specialists who are able to think differently, compared to the business and financial perspectives, yet they all complete each other to build an extraordinary product.
In what ways did the pandemic affect your teams? What measures did you undertake to offset negative experiences due to COVID-19?
As already mentioned, we were already well prepared for remote work and the pandemic made our team even closer. We became a true family as we did not slow down but continued looking for solutions to help people overcome the pandemic digitally, to stay financially in touch with their families and friends during the lockdown, to stay always online, on the phone, to support those who needed to pay bills, make transfers.
When local bank offices were closed and people were desperate, we offered help and financial digital comfort. And we are very proud of that.
What are your diversity goals for 2021?
We are now developing our network and hiring professionals in LatAm and Africa later this year.
What does Quppy look for in candidates?
We are looking for cross-disciplinary specialists in the financial and tech sphere, for IT specialists on their way to gurus and passionate about new solutions, R&D, tech dreaming, and later for implementing those dreams into life.
We are looking for optimisation geeks and financial sharks who believe that disruptive technologies are our future. We welcome candidates from all around the globe of every age, every origin and every gender to become our colleagues and, of course, our friends in development, in opinion, culture, experience and idea-sharing.
You can learn more from Alina by participating in our upcoming Fireside Chat with her, checking her talk from the WomenTech Global Conference 2020 on our YouTube channel, and you can meet more inspiring women and companies during the WomenTech Global Conference 2021 this June.
