Resilience and speed, with Svitlanka Sergiichuk

February 24 2022, was, well, the date of a big change for Ukraine as a whole.

And for Neofin as a product, Neofin as a business, we were celebrating at the beginning of February 2022, we were celebrating becoming break even - on our own, being a fully self-funded business. On February 25 2022, we realised that we're nothing close to breakeven, because most of the customers at that time were Ukrainian financial institutions and Ukrainian banks.

On February 2024, we have received about 20 emails from our customers, saying that we're stopping our lending operations because nobody knew how long the world will last. Nobody knew how resilient the Ukrainian financial system is. After the war, I think that it's one of the most resilient financial systems, with all that it has survived, but at that time, nobody knew about that. So we just received about 20 emails from the key customers saying that they're closing their their lending operations, and they just stopped paying.

And we sat down with a team, we understood that we had a team that we were gathering all over Ukraine and all over the world, we have the little dev Centre in Kuala Lumpur, we have the little development hub in Germany, and Ukraine. These are all the financial talents that would definitely want to keep inside the company and been fully revenue funded, we would not be able to do that.