Moneybase CEO Alan Cuschieri: "We need to make money simple"

An interview featuring CEO and Founder of Moneybase, Alan Cuschieri on how the fintech company makes banking easier.

We look back at an interview between Vanessa MacDonald and Alan Cuschieri, the Chief Executive Officer and Founder of Moneybase. The interview took place during the FinanceMalta 16^th Annual Conference in 2023. In the interview, Alan discusses how the fintech makes banking easier.  

Vanessa: Your slogan is making finance easier. What exactly does that mean? 

Alan: Basically, we're here. We're a local fintech. We're here to make money simple for everyone. When we say everyone, we mean individuals and businesses and it’s a passion that we have which is ingrained in our DNA; our purpose is really to help people by making managing finances easier for everyone. And it's not something that's easy to achieve, and it's something that we set out to do four years ago.  

Alan: We launched a year ago for regular individuals. We obviously have a long way to go, but we've already been very successful over there, and we were approached by businesses to do the same thing. This is not just Moneybase, businesses in general across the world are seeing what is going on in the Neo banking space, in the fintech space and want the same convenience. They want to be able to assign, create a wallet on the fly, sign a permission to someone, create an approval and do everything very conveniently. They want the same experience that we are all now accustomed to on our mobiles using FinTech apps like Moneybase, where you get your push notification, and everything works for business. Our purpose is to make money simple for everyone, both individuals and businesses.  

Vanessa: This Moneybase business was only launched at the FinanceMalta conference. What can you actually tell us about and what, what is it going to do? 

Alan: If you have attended any conference on the island that's to do with finance for the past five years, you would know that it's been a nightmare to open a bank account or a payment account for companies. It’s taken weeks if not months, if not close to a year and there’s been a lot of problems by the legacy banks to be able to handle that because they don’t have the digital processes. This means that the onboarding is manual, and they have issues monitoring manually. We are revolutionising that whole process from the onboarding side where our promise is to onboard within 48 hours of getting the documentation.  

Vanessa: You are not cutting corners, you are still doing all the KYC, compliance checks, due diligence, etc. 

Alan: We’ve invested in teams that are committed to onboarding, and the 48-hour timer starts from when the client gives us all the documentation, but then our promise is ‘there’s no reason to delay this provided you’ve given us everything we need’. We will process that; we will set you up and then you have an account.  

Vanessa: You will have the financial suite of services that they would require to run a business. 

Alan: And this is something that's very important. For small businesses, they want that support but don’t want a pedantic approach. Yes, there will be cases where we might need documentation, but you can easily do it through the app. We're not going to block your account unnecessarily. We’ve made all the processes as simple as possible. There are small businesses who want to benefit from that but there are also Startups that are very important for the Maltese economy. These people want to have an account that is Malta-based and that has customer support they can call, so we’re also catering for that segment as well.  

Vanessa: If I can just quickly go back into your history a little bit. You've been a tech company for quite a long time. You were the trailblazers with CC funds, for example, and then Moneybase and so on. This is really what you what you now – is this how you see yourself going forward.  

Alan: We've always been a customer-oriented business. We started in 1971 with investors, as a brokerage;  people came to us for investment advice. At that time, it was bonds, later on, funds, portfolio management, wealth management, capital markets, and all of that retail. We've always been very customer first, customer-service orientated. That side of the business is part of the group. Moneybase is part of the Calamatta Cuschieri Group and that's still very much the core of the business, but this is the digital side of the business. 

Vanessa: Digital to me means you can offer it anywhere. Are you going to passport it?  

Alan: It has already been passported across Europe, both the investment service side and the payment side. We really have that ambition to grow internationally and we’re talking to investors and so on. But at the same time, we still have a way to go in Malta. It’s a software and platform that do a lot so it would be a shame to keep it local but one step at a time.  Moneybase is a financial institution. We're not a bank and we don't lend. 

Vanessa: You’re not a credit institution.  

Alan: No, we’re not a credit institution. The main difference is that we don’t lend our client deposits. When people deposit money with us, it is ring fenced and we don’t lend that money. But otherwise, we have the full capabilities to do cards, banking, investments.  Now with high interest rates, the investment part of the business is also getting very important and interesting for businesses because now they have excess liquidity.  

For example, a CFO can get 30-day or 60-day interest in the same platform where he’s managing different wallets for different things. So that's the vision.  

Alan: Today we're launching it with IBANs and the payments. Eventually we'll be adding corporate cards and then salaries and so on. If we meet again in a year’s time at the next FinanceMalta event, it will have developed into a full-blown tool for businesses to use. Our aim is to help businesses maximise their performance; they don't need to worry about doing basic things like opening an account or making a payment, they need to worry about growing their business. We’re just there as a platform to facilitate that path.  

Vanessa: I look forward to meeting you again, Alan and thank you so much for being with us.  

The video interview from the FinanceMalta 16^th Annual Conference can be accessed here.