Brussels-based Morgan Wirtz is the co-founder and CEO of a very progressive and inspiring financial app called RISE. Since launching the company two years ago, he has raised $1.9 million in seed funding and assembled a team of 20 experts to build a bank for teens to help them spend and save.
Morgan also made it onto the Forbes Europe 30 Under 30 in Technology list, where he is the youngest on the list (Morgan is 23 years old). We had the pleasure of interviewing Morgan exclusively about his short but very interesting career and ambitions at RISE.
Morgan, you were a Red Bull sponsored sailor and then you decided to drop out of college. How did you end up becoming an entrepreneur and eventually co-founding RISE?
The way I combine sports and my entrepreneurial career is that it’s actually a similar career for me. High-level sports has helped me a lot in my entrepreneurship. That’s because the values you have behind high-level sports are the exact same values you can keep when you build your business.
That means you have to be creative, you have to be high performers, you have to surround yourself with great people, you have to be innovative, and all the values that you learn in business, like I learned very early in sports. And when I wanted to build my career as an entrepreneur, I was able to carry those values forward. And then we ended up starting RISE.
And what brought you there?
So financial education is a topic that is very, very important to me and something that I’ve always wanted to address. If you look at my generation – I’m only 23, in secondary school – my friends around me were already talking about finances because finances are becoming such an important topic even for teenagers and children. Even at such a young age, we were talking about investments.
An obvious theme in school is that teenagers are talking about cryptocurrencies among themselves. And I started watching the neobanking industry and trying to understand why neobanks and traditional banks were not serving teenagers and children as specific segments. So I saw an opportunity for a “new” neobank that would do this.
However, there are some products that are similar. Such as GoHenry from the UK or challenger banks with their options for teenagers like Revolut
First of all, there is nothing going on in our main market, Belgium, so competition abroad is a good sign that says, “Okay, there is definitely an opportunity there,” rather than, “Well, there are competitors and we are afraid of them.”
Also, this is not the kind of market where “the winner takes all”. That is absolutely not the case in Europe. And given who we are, we are different – we honestly believe that it is very important to actually appeal to parents in order to raise a new, financially savvy generation.
First of all, parents are the people who have the decision-making power, who can actually open the account, etc. And who can therefore choose a relevant experience for the child. That’s why we focus a lot on reaching out to parents.
This means that you specifically target the parent company in terms of marketing, or how do you address the parent company?
It goes much deeper than that. It’s actually about marketing, but it’s also about the way you build your brand. You have to build a brand that excites teenagers, but also a brand that parents can relate to. And that’s a fine line. If we go too extreme in one direction, which is “this is made for teenagers,” parents will feel completely disconnected.
That’s why we’ve worked so hard to create a great parenting app and experience.
And the last point where we differ from others: the return to school period was a big time for us. We grew so much that we got a lot of interest from traditional banks. So we are now looking very hard at how we can collaborate with a bank because we see so many synergies and we can offer them a lot of added value in terms of financial education and user experience for children and young people.
Is your plan more about building relationships with branch banks and offering them solutions, or about becoming a digital bank yourself, or what exactly is your plan?
As I mentioned, we’ve received a surprising amount of interest from traditional banks. And yes, that’s something we’re looking at right now. So we’ll see what the future brings us. We see so much synergy with them right now and ultimately it’s going to have a bigger impact on our mission, which is about education.
Is your subscription plan working for you in terms of revenue and profitability? Or is it something you don’t pay as much attention to? What’s the idea behind it?
I believe that, especially when you’re a young company, you have to be focused. If you’re focused on building the best products and being profitable at the same time… that’s just not how it works in the technology industry.
Of course, you need to have a clear path in mind as to how you will become profitable. And that path has to make financial sense.
We are currently exploring the possibility of working with the big banks, but the basic model is that parents pay a monthly fee for their children’s education. And that’s the beauty of neobanks for children: it’s one of the few FinTech models where every customer is a parent who pays a monthly fee to use the product. This way we offer a lot of added value for their children’s education.
At 23, you still have similar experiences with finances as teenagers. Is that something that gave you this idea, or what was your personal development towards financial savvy?
In any case, I came up with this idea based on my personal experiences in banking.
I was a customer of a branch bank in Belgium. And I didn’t care at all about my bank. The experience was exactly the same as my parents’. Of course with some limitations, but I had the same user experience. I just didn’t care at all. I had a payment card. I could pay with it. And that was all.
I had no personal connection with my bank. I wouldn’t even call it an experience as a kid, looking at my bank or the app. And so it had nothing to do with financial education. When I was young, I didn’t even think about it. I just thought about spending my money and that was it.
Are there any companies or CEOs you admire?
Not specifically in the neobanking industry, but more in the general technology industry. Airbnb, for example, is a company I look up to a lot for a number of reasons. First, because they are very product-focused. And I also feel like a product guy.
Also because of the brand that they’ve built, and that’s the second thing that I really look at – how to build a real brand that connects with you.
And how do you assess Klarna’s situation with regard to FinTech companies?
Honestly, I know how hard it can be to be an entrepreneur, so I have a lot more respect for the people involved than criticism. I mean, if I look at the CEO of Klarna or any other technology company, it’s a huge success, but if you look at their journey, it’s still an extraordinary journey.
Even though the company was worth almost $50 billion and now it’s worth five or six billion, it’s still a tremendous, successful entrepreneurial journey, so I have a lot of respect for these guys and what they’ve built.
What plans do you have for the future in terms of expansion?
We have invested a lot in technology from day one to make sure that we have a very strong technology. The reason for this is because at some point we actually want to expand. We want to expand beyond Belgium, that’s for sure.
And what stage of financing are you in? Are you perhaps already looking for investors?
Now we want to focus on product launch. If we continue to receive feedback and continue to improve what we have, we will move on to the next stage.
