“Adoption is going to take time. These players are starting to look at solutions. A year or two ago, our conversations with them would have come to nothing,” says Fipto co-founder and CEO Patrick Mollard. Mollard has a good head on his shoulders and a wealth of experience behind him, including the sale of a majority stake in Ibanfirst in 2021 to Marlin Equity Partners, after raising nearly €50m in five years.
With Fipto (founded in 2022), the French entrepreneur is now developing a B2B software solution based on blockchain to enable various structures--from family offices and AIFMs to asset managers and more institutional players--to get their hands on cryptocurrencies, currently stablecoins (backed by conventional currencies).
“My observation is that there were international payment players promising speed, transparency and fairly low costs, and that new tools are emerging on a market that is not always very mature, based on blockchain technologies, which have the same compliance and governance requirements. Finally, more and more financial services are being created directly on blockchain,” explains the founder of the French fintech, who arrived in Luxembourg via Biba Homsy and her law firm.
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On Thursday 30 May, Fipto announced that--after being registered with the Autorité des marchés financiers in France in November 2023 as a digital asset service provider (DASP)--the fintech is now also registered in Luxembourg as a virtual asset service provider (VASP). “As long as Mica has not been transposed in the various member states, there are subtleties that lead us to seek out these registrations,” explains Mollard, ’s Franco-Dutch CEO. “There’s a market for us here!” A market driven by the adoption of bitcoin exchange-traded funds (ETFs) and, perhaps soon, ethereum ETFs. “On certain markets, our solutions mean that we can go from 24 to 48 hours to process a transaction to 30 minutes.”
All this while maintaining strict compliance “by ensuring best practices, particularly in AML and KYC, with partners who are recognised for this,” Mollard adds.
The startup is off to a flying start, having already raised €15m in a round led by Serena Capital, which contributed half, and followed by Motier Ventures, the family office of the Houzé family and owners of the Galeries Lafayette, among other stores. These sponsors have enabled the team to grow to 30 people, two-thirds of whom work in tech and one-third in regulatory affairs. “Since the start of the year, we’ve had good commercial traction,” says Mollard, although for the time being he has chosen to turn to business introducers and brokers to sell his solution. “For the moment, we’re working on a very transactional model, because there are companies with a lot of legacy and it’s not easy for them to adopt our three APIs [application programming interface]--custody, wallet and IBAN--and others don’t yet have the maturity.”
Does the fact that Fipto is on the Luxembourg list of virtual asset service providers mean that it can develop business directly in Luxembourg? “Not for the moment,” replies the entrepreneur. “But we’re definitely going to make contact with the ecosystem.”
This article was first published in French on . It has been translated and edited for Delano.