ebankit: digital banking

As more and more financial institutions go digital, ebankIT, based in Porto, offers an omnichannel online solution combining internet banking for retail and corporate teams, mobile customer solutions, contact centre support and other features. “It’s all completely integrated with the main core systems in the market”, explains Renato Oliveira, CEO and founder of the company.

With digitalisation gaining pace, Renato decided to invest in a new product that would help banks and credit unions with their digital transformation. “We set up a team of 12-15 people and came up with our product and our own IP. We hit our first milestone in 2014 when we officially set up ebankIT and then in 2018 when we gained our first reference in N. America. We’ve since grown to being close to 100-strong with a solid worldwide partner network.” With 50% year-on-year growth for the last four years, it’s difficult to disagree.

ebankIT boasts customers in Canada, UK, Switzerland and South Africa, offering digital solutions not only to forward-looking banks and fintechs, but also to traditional financial institutions, who are looking into investing in their digital transformation. “Banks want to offer a better user experience, especially to younger clients who are always online, while the COVID experience has also accelerated this trend,” he adds.

An investment from Pathena, a venture capital firm backed by the EIF, helped the company in this growth, increasing its headcount and expanding the business, developing the product further and boosting sales. “We want to strengthen and increase teams throughout the business, especially the commercial and international sales team. Of course developing our product is also very important bearing in mind that legislation like PSD2 (European regulation for electronic payments) needs to be fully supported. This represents a huge investment but it allows us to extract more value from the market. We make sure that our online systems are in sync with the latest regulations, and that often helps a lot – our omnichannel platform played a pivotal role for one of our customers to be licenced and start operations in the UK in record time. So we’re constantly innovating and there’s always a learning curve.”

Company: ebankit

Type of business: ICT

EIF financing: PVCi

Financial intermediary: Pathena Investments

For further information about EIF intermediaries in Portugal, please refer to:
http://www.eif.org/what_we_do/where/pt