Douglas Goldstein: Martin Saidler is the CEO and founder of a company called Central Way
which develops mobile banking solutions.
Many people do their banking online today and quite frankly they think it’s pretty
cool.
What needs to be improved?
Martin Saidler: We are developing mobile banking solutions and our main product is central
way numbers, a mobile banking app and we made the decision to develop a mobile banking app
because we’re not very satisfied with the existing solutions.
What we have done is so far, and this is from my perspective as well, the main topics, what
needs to be improved by banking is first of all it’s mobile.
It’s not any more with the web, it’s not any more the browser, it’s your smart phone,
what is the focus on your life and your whole personal finance you want to manage as well
on your smart phone.
And if you are thinking about banking, you are thinking about to make money transfers,
to check your balance, just to control your statement that everything is going fine and
to check if you are going into minus or not and this is exactly where the pain is starting.
We developed an app which is easy to use and our focus here is really to achieve a simplified
solution in which once you have linked your existing banking account to this, to our application,
you have an automatic personal finance manager that means automatically every single transaction
is categorized in certain categories.
For example closing or travel, and there are many more.
You don’t need to adjust it manually, but you can do it but you can check as well.
One, you check your balance.
You can check your balance not just for one current or saving account., you can do it
for multiple accounts and you can aggregate all of these accounts in just one app.
You see where you are standing and this is the goal.
Our goal is, and this is what doesn’t work today and a quite good way is convenience.
Convenience, simplicity in just a very, very, very easy to use application, so you can manage
your bank accounts, but as well your personal finance.
Douglas Goldstein: What you are talking about is really bringing so much information, very,
very private information about someone’s money situation on to his phone but these
days, people are very concerned about phone safety and not the list of which was the whole
question of how safe the iPhone was related to the Apple case against the FBI, do you
really think that people should feel safe with so much information on their phone?
Martin Saidler: Yeah, they have two points.
First of all we need to define what is safe.
What is the difference between a smart phone and a PC or MAC?
The last 10-12 years and even about 15 years, I don’t know anymore, I’m using eBanking
in my browser.
Was eBanking safe or is eBanking safe?
Yes, it is safe.
Nothing happened with my account in the last 15 years.
Of course, there are examples where it was not safe, but I would say they are very minor
in general in the last 15 years.
And what is the difference between a smart phone, and this is where how we are looking
to the issue of a safe application and as well the concerns about the data that you
can lose your data, you can lose your information about your balance, account, and this is what
we solved in a way.
First of all, we developed the application on top of layout of the banks, that means
we are not looking to replace the banks, so even not the security of the banks.
On top of the existing bank account with your username, your password, your transaction
numbers and pin codes, on top of that we have two additional security layers.
One is the username and password and the second is the security pattern that you have to create
and below that, you still have the credentials that you are using for your online bank account,
it means twice, so double security.
But there is still one thing, what we figured out what is quite a risk and this is what
is happening if you are losing your phone, your smart phone and even with the case of
Apple, iPhone with the FBI, they could not crack it down, afterwards they cracked it
down with the support of Israel, but in the end, we made the decision that no data in
our application is stored on your smart phone.
That means if you are losing the smart phone and it’s going in some different hands,
no one have access because they have no data.
Everything is online in our safety secure data centers in a nutshell in the cloud.
So that means even if you are losing the phone and this is the most critical part in our
analysis in the last years as we developed the app.
So in our case, the data is secure, even more secure if you would use a smartphone where
you are storing the data of your bank accounts and this is not in our case, exactly the opposite.
Everything is stored in the cloud and this is where you think if were to compare online
banking, the traditional eBanking solution with the smart phone, we are not just secure,
we’re a little bit more secure as we have seen it in the browser era because the data
are not stored in your device and this is where we are focused on.
Douglas Goldstein: Does the development of online banks and banking apps like this mean
the end of physical bank branches?
Are we at the end of that era now?
Martin Saidler: I think that’s a very interesting question and we discussed it many times even
with our team here internal but as well with our shareholders and very interesting as well
with the banks and we discussed it with major European and American banks and the answer
in average, everyone is convinced that the branches will not be, or let’s say we will
not have any more branches, physical branches, but instead of that, there will be mobile
banking applications, online solutions, but this doesn’t mean that the banks will be
replaced and this is exactly our point of view.
We are not looking to replace the banks because in the end you need to regulate a banking
corporation, a company which is regulated where you know it’s under certain control,
under certain rules and where your efforts are, where your money is, and it has to be
safe and regulated.
But, you don’t need the branch for that and this is exactly our perspective.
The branches will be replaced by applications, teach you the solutions, the smart phone solution,
the browser solution, a tablet or whatever you have
in mind.
Douglas Goldstein: We are talking about people handling their banking their dollars or if
you work in Israel there’s shekels, how about dealing with these crypto currencies
like bit coin, is that something you think has a future or is that not really on the
table right now?
Martin Saidler: Personally, I don’t believe in the solution of bit coins and I believe
in the concept of digital currency.
But why not change the U.S. dollar, the shekel or the euro into a digital currency?
This is a solution enough you have, as well you need a trust in your currency, but what
I think what will happen is and many, many companies are discussing that and even the
banks, it’s the block chain technology behind it so the idea behind the digital currency,
the infrastructure, the technology behind will be something from my perspective would
be very helpful for our system and it will be installed in the next years, but in the
currency itself as a bit coin, I don’t believe.
In bit coins, I believe in the technology of bit coins and the block chain that is behind
and this is the point of view how we see it from here.
Douglas Goldstein: How can people follow you and follow the work that you are doing?
Martin Saidler: If you want to download the application, just take a [different] look
what we are doing is our website, www.centralway.com in one word, you will find everything about
me, about my team, about the history and of course
of our product.