In Conversation with Gabriela Nistor

In the weeks following Salt Bank’s successful launch as Romania’s first digitally native bank, Salt Bank CEO Gabriela Nistor took a quick break to answer some Q&As and tell us a little about her vision for the innovative neobank and experience of working with us.

We were expecting around 20,000 sign-ups during the pre-enrolment stage and to grow after that, but we had more than 80,000 sign-ups in 3 weeks. Sometimes I had nightmares that no one would download the app at all. But after the pre-enrollment stage, when we went live, in less than 2 weeks though, we were up to 100,000 clients. We know what to do to activate them and can work quickly, so it is fine. There are other implications too, such as making sure our Care Center is working effectively because we have promised that we will be on hand to answer all their questions.

Definitely a positive. We had big plans to build a beautiful app to disrupt the Romanian banking market and knew that you would put in the effort to make us a success, because that would be your success too. There were also other reasons for choosing Engine. We’d seen proposals from a number of potential partners by the time we got in touch. All of them were quite right, but when we heard the presentation from the Engine team though, something just clicked. You fitted our style and way of working.

The first line of code was written last March, following a two month discovery phase and everything was built from scratch. While we were building the app, we were also working on the new brand, hiring the team, both on the technology side and for the Care Centre. As you can imagine, there were many challenges with a complex project like this. We had so many integrations and implementations to do in parallel and a lot of things had to happen really fast. It was like building a giant puzzle, where each piece had to be in the right place to see the big picture in the end. We worked fast, and very organised with the masterplan, but in a very agile way in each sub-project

On the first day, I remember saying to the team here, if this project is successful, it will be the team’s success. It will be hard work, I told them, but I hoped that the roller coaster ride we were all on would be fun too. I really wanted everyone to feel fully involved and that, if the bank grew, they would grow with it.

We kicked off with a long meeting, where we asked a lot of questions. We really needed to understand what could be done and how we’d do it. I also think it was really important that Engine understood our position and the scope of our ambitions. The relationship has continued in the same way from there. What I really appreciated was that Engine’s people were always very pragmatic and real ‘doers’, like us. When we needed something, a solution was always found very quickly. There has been a lot of travelling between Romania and the UK. During the launch week, there were a lot of the Engine team here, monitoring the systems and raising tickets if necessary. Right now, even a small incident is considered a big one, because we need to react very quickly to our new customers.

It is broadly in line with our expectations. Our goal was to address a very different segment of the market to that of Banca Transilvania, which is the largest bank in Romania and South East Europe. I worked for 27-years at Banca Transilvania, latterly coordinating the retail side. The customer base there is much more universal. With Salt Bank, we are Romania’s first 100% digital bank and want to address the growing market of young professionals in urban areas. This is an affluent segment, and we wanted to give them a product they liked and could relate to. This is not just a banking app, but an innovative service that will help them save and invest their money.

We have a very, very long roadmap of the services we will be adding in the future, which we will be working on with Engine. I’m looking forward to realising these developments together. Watch this space.