TONIK
“ When you innovate , you have two vectors running against each other , namely the corporation vector and the conflict vector , and the corporation vector is actually created by people being in the same room and sharing the values and the history and the relationships with each other ”
GREG KRASNOV FOUNDER AND CEO , TONIK
institutions and average , unbanked citizens often believe that the products offered by financial institutions are not for them , because they are not rich . Tonik is breaking the mould in that regard .
The future for Tonik In terms of new products on the horizon , Krasnov says savings will be a key area for development as well as the lending arm of the bank and asset creation .
“ We ' re running very fast in terms of growing our loan portfolio , both from the point of view of getting already existing products scaled , as well as introducing new products so we can broaden up the funnel . That ' s really our biggest focus in the next 12 months ,” Krasnov says .
“ Getting those lending products to the market , scaling and balancing out our assets and liabilities so that we can actually start making money . We ' re in a fortunate position because we can achieve fantastic product level profitability on these lending products . We have a unique opportunity to build a very profitable operation . We think that if we do our job right , then probably sometime next year we should be hitting overall bank profitability .”
As far as he is concerned , all is well on track and Tonik is looking towards a bright future in the region , because incumbents simply aren ’ t moving quickly enough to take advantage of the changing marketplace and new customer expectations .
“ Traditional banks in emerging markets are very slow to change themselves . They don ' t have the tools and the imagination to even execute on it [ digital transformation ] if they wanted to . So , I think it ' s going to create an interesting world in the next decade or two with digital contenders like ourselves .”
He adds : “ There will be , of course , many more digital contenders , complete with different cost structures , that will be able to compete away a lot of the margin from the big banks , the traditional banks . It ' s going to be an interesting transformation , where the market share of the digital contenders will grow rapidly , whereas attrition banks ' market share will decline .”