There comes a moment in every entrepreneurial journey when one realizes that the carefully aligned assumptions of a business plan will not survive their first contact with human reality.
For me, that moment arrived far earlier than expected.
When I first started imagining my WealthTech venture, I anticipated a largely technical battle. I believed that lines of code, algorithmic models, and product architecture would constitute the core challenge. It was a comfortable illusion.
Reality proved otherwise. Technology was only the visible tip of the iceberg. The real challenge lay elsewhere: in the ability to bring people together around a vision that was still fragile, unfinished, and evolving.
A table, a prototype, and a moment of clarity
I remember the scene vividly: an impersonal meeting room, an overly bright screen, three lukewarm coffees. At the center stood a prototype that, on paper, ticked every box: elegant, functional, promising, and boasting an impressive ROI, having nearly eliminated the middle office. All that remained was development and sales.
We were convinced we had found something compelling. Yet as the discussion unfolded, a subtle discomfort emerged. The product wasn’t the issue. What was missing was collective momentum, the mindset required to challenge deeply ingrained bureaucratic reflexes.
That was when I understood something fundamental: even the best idea remains inert until it finds the right people to carry it, challenge it, and improve it. Technology, no matter how brilliant, does not move on its own.
I also learned, sometimes painfully, that a simple “yes, but…” can slowly suffocate even the most promising projects. Ideas rarely collapse under blunt criticism; they erode under the quiet persistence of polite skepticism.
The quiet but decisive challenge: hiring conviction, not résumés
Building a WealthTech means navigating a space where finance meets technology, but where humans remain the decisive factor. It is not just about skills; it is about alignment.
I learned to recognize profiles who see finance not as a static industry, but as a field for reinvention. People who understand that financial psychology matters as much as software engineering. Those who invest in a mission before investing in a model.
And, perhaps most importantly, I learned to say no:
- No to brilliant candidates who were culturally misaligned.
- No to investors attracted by upside but indifferent to impact.
- No to compromises that would have weakened the culture before it had even formed.
It was also at this point that I recognized a deeper, structural limitation: academic education rarely prepares individuals for the hybrid nature of modern finance.
Example 1 — The academic dead end
Most specialists trained in elite institutions struggle to detach themselves from their academic frameworks. In finance, offerings combine both products and services. Yet traditional marketing education focuses on one or the other, never on hybrid models. As a result, when it comes to marketing a financial SaaS or a complex digital service, over 99% of marketers step aside, due to a lack of hands-on experience, inadequate training, or simply the courage to learn new approaches.
This cognitive rigidity is one of the most underestimated obstacles in building a WealthTech.
Culture: the invisible infrastructure shaping everything
Corporate culture is often described as an abstract concept. In a startup, however, it acts like gravity: it attracts, directs, accelerates or slows everything down.
In our case, three principles emerged naturally:
-
Hire people driven by the mission
Finance can be intimidating, opaque, and exclusionary. Our ambition was to make it more accessible, intelligible, and human. This is not a technical objective, it is a commitment. -
Make innovation a behavior, not a slogan
We built an environment where experimentation is encouraged, fast failure is treated as learning, and everyone can contribute to product design. -
Use technology as an accelerator, never as a substitute
Technology amplifies. It does not replace intuition, vision, or the ability to understand real user needs.
It is precisely within this tension between rigor and flexibility that one of the most complex challenges of WealthTech resides.
Example 2 — The false industrial analogy
In the automotive industry, an engineer can document over 4,500 micro-SOPs to build a car: every component is tangible, identifiable, and standardizable. In WealthTech, none of this applies. Between two process steps, AI, algorithms, and dynamic decision flows generate outcomes that cannot be formalized into fixed procedures. Where an engineer assembles parts, a WealthTech professional translates strategies, data, and abstract interactions into measurable outcomes. Academia does not teach this cognitive flexibility – and that is a missed opportunity.
The WealthTech equation: alchemy rather than a model
Over time, one truth became clear:
- Technology alone transforms nothing.
- Culture alone does not scale.
- Finance alone does not mobilize.
- But together, they create a dynamic capable of bringing something new into existence.
Today, our WealthTech is no longer just a financial management tool. It has become an ecosystem where:
- technology accelerates,
- culture unites,
- mission provides direction,
- and teams turn complexity into clarity.
What I’ve learned: ideas only matter when they find their carriers
If I had to summarize this journey, it would be this:
An idea has no intrinsic power. Its strength depends on the people who carry it, challenge it, and refine it. It depends on a culture that protects it and a mission that guides it.
It is this imperfect, demanding, deeply human dynamic that turns vision into reality. And perhaps it is precisely in this space, between intention and execution, that true innovation takes place.