How Inbank’s founder Andrea Agostinone’s business interests span from Baltics to Dubai

Cryptocurrencies and the blockchain have been the talk of the town in the last decade. Whereas cryptocurrencies have seen their precipitous highs and lows, the fintech sphere has been quietly evolving as new innovations become an organic part of modern-day life. Some financial experts believe the era of financial technology started in the 1950s when the first credit cards were mailed to some 60,000 Fresno residents in California; others date it back to the 1970s when ATMs began to take the world by storm. Opinions differ on this account with some pundits arguing the origin of fintech goes back to first wires with payment orders in the late 19th century. What experts do agree on is that fintech has been an increasingly vital aspect of society since its inception.

One of fintech's invisible parts is the so-called embedded finance. Embedded finance represents the placing of a financial product in a non-financial customer experience. This may first seem like nothing new as businesses other than banks, such as retail chains, airlines, and supermarkets have been offering financial services (Costco, Amazon Prime rewards, Walmart rewards cards, etc.) under the brands' names for a while now. Further illustrating this point, retailers and auto dealerships offer consumer loans that customers can obtain directly at the point of sale.

Banks that stand behind those arrangements thus ‘embed’ their services in the retail chain, unobtrusively reaching out to customers by making their purchasing experience accessible through the retail business their potential client is already working with. The next generation of embedded finance is about integrating financial products into digital interfaces such as what we use daily: customer loyalty apps, digital wallets, and more.

While developed market economies have long been the testing ground for all sorts of new fintech instruments, smaller groups of European nations such as the three Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania fell behind as they had a late entrance into the global banking and financial sector (around the 1990s) once they broke away from the Soviet Union. Andrea Agostinone, an Italian-born entrepreneur, former international tax lawyer, and an expert in international M&As, moved to Estonia in 2007, seeing the opportunities in and for the country. Before long, he co-founded Colonna, a real estate company that purchased commercial properties at bargain prices and rented them out. The company is now one of the largest commercial real estate operators in the Baltics.

Estonia in the early 2010s was a much different country from what it was twenty years prior. Its economically active population was—and still is—very entrepreneurial, and for that reason, the Estonian capital Tallinn became the European silicon valley. Agostinone saw an opportunity for himself in the banking sector and together with partners, founded Inbank in 2013.

Deepak Jain is a freelancer content writer.