Croatia’s Fintech scene sets example for Western Balkans
The Fintech scene in Croatia was acknowledged for the first time in 2018 by a broader public, and has witnessed tremendous progress in the past few years.
Meetups and conferences were encouraged to inspire and motivate young Croatians to be the leading Europeans in the category of digital skills, by realizing what skills they needed then acquiring them on their own, with no institutional support available. However, the COVID-19 pandemic has made such events impossible.
While global investors are beginning to turn their attention towards Croatia, the local fintech scene still needs further investment.
Microblink is Croatia’s largest success story in Fintech and the digital funds sector. It is a software program firm that develops pc imaginative and prescient expertise.
The Fintech company relied only on the monetary assets of its founders when it began in 2013, reaching a worldwide presence – the US, Europe and Southeast Asia. Creating AI-powered scanning and knowledge extraction merchandise that greater than 100 million end-users use.
It was also listed as Europe’s fastest rising firms for 2020, and its merchandise have opened up enterprise alternatives for the corporate sector, which has been recognized by the Fintech business.
The company isn’t planning on slowing down and wishes to launch new revolutionary merchandise that revolutionize the Fintech business. “Two weeks ago, we launched a first-of-its-kind identity document scanner made to be used directly in a web browser. And we firmly believe in-browser ID scanning holds the potential to reshape the way we onboard financial services for the better,” Microblink said in a statement.
“For experience and knowledge to compound for the whole community, there has to come a point where they all need to work together to create a fintech scene. A rising tide lifts all fintech – and an active community would help create interest among developers, new companies, and so on.”
Another example is Electrocoin, a Zagreb/Crotian-based cryptocurrency brokerage, with an annual revenue of about €35m ($42m).
The company created a payment service that allows any shop to accept payments in cryptocurrency for free. The Croatian city of Sveta Nedelja benefited from this service, where local residents can pay local tax and duties in crypto, making it the first city in the EU that has enabled such a payment option.
Croatia’s progress has the potential to set a trend for the rest of the Western Balkans, as “digital-only” services become the new normal.
However, the principles about the way fintech companies conduct their business remain a grey area as long as financial technologies enter more and more segments of Croatian society.