How to Take a Loan Without Leaving Your Home? Interview With Dr. Jan Weitzel, CEO of CashCape

In the banking industry, some basic actions have been known for quite some time. We have been able to make transfers or check our account balance for many years now. Nevertheless, convenient online loans were and still are limited and they still require extensive paperwork.

That is why I decided to take a closer look at CashCape, a fintech mobile first app that started an era of easy and transparent loans available exclusively on the German market. CashCape premiered on both iOS and Android and redefined the way people apply for both long- and short-term loans.

The undeniable advantage of the company, except its transparency, is technological excellence. CashCape is also a gateway for learning true consumer patterns that can be utilized to promote cross-services tailored to the needs of specific groups of people.

What was the inspiration behind CashCape? What are the company's plans? I had the pleasure to interview the company's CEO, Dr. Jan Weitzel and ask about the past, present, and the future of the company.

What has been your inspiration?

I wanted to quit banking and consulting and all of this legacy stuff connected to it and create an app that will allow you to act fast and intuitively. Getting to know the fintech industry is not as easy as it might seem. You have to comply with many bulky regulations and this can be an uphill struggle sometimes. I wanted to have something easy to understand and easy to use, even with tons of legal matters connected to the fintech industry. German bureaucracy is super complicated and takes time. I wanted to make this process shorter.

Who’s your target group?

We switched from old-fashioned offline activities to easier ones, which can be done on different portable devices. Our target group are mostly young people that are used to doing everything on their phones. They are very tech-savvy and value their time. And so do we.

We have a lot of young digital pioneers in our growing customer base. Naturally, we find the greatest interest in the early 20s demographic. Here lies our business: where the responsibility of a loan agency and the full potential of CashCape’s automated intelligence meet. Some applicants may just have started their university studies and should not get into long-term loan ties, while for others already receiving a stable income it’s a great financial tool.

Being able to service your loan obligations in that early stage of life is extremely important. Especially in Germany, where your creditworthiness record is important for many aspects of your financial life. We mastered verifying the repayment capabilities automatically, and reached an unprecedented level of prediction of default probabilities. This is our key to success, and a high-value automated consumer protection for our customers.

What needs does your app cater to? What tools do you provide to do it?

The answer is quite straightforward: our app allows people to borrow money quickly and easily. Applicants don’t have to go to the bank. They can do everything via their mobile phone. There is no need to provide any paperwork, copies or scans. You won’t need to wait for any physical mail.

And you can run as many calculations as you like for a loan setup in real time. You will have the perfect loan for your individual needs checked on your bank account in the same amount of time it would take you to walk to your physical bank – let alone file and process the application itself.

What is so innovative in the app?

That’s simple: one of the biggest advantages is that you can borrow the money fast. We do not ask many questions compared to our competitors, and you don’t interact with another person at all. Having your bank statement evaluated by an automated system rather than a loan officer reading every turnover’s purpose is one of the many reliefs for our customers. Also, our system works about a hundred times faster (laughs).

For some people, the most important thing is to save some money when taking a loan, but they get tired of the mountains of paperwork they need to submit or questions they have to answer. Some German portals allow you to compare different loans and tell you which one is the best but they collect your personal data and might use it in the future. The process is clunky, and they often make you enter all your data more than once. CashCape has a great offer, reduces the amount of bureaucracy, making the process a breeze, while at the same time always highly valuing the customer’s privacy.

What are your main challenges?

The finance industry is still a very regulated market. We have to follow plenty of strict rules. Our biggest challenge is to simplify the application process further, whilst always strictly complying to and often even exceeding the requirements of regulations.

The second one is getting attention. When you open a startup going into the market, being properly noticed is not an easy thing. We have to get the attention of even more potential customers.

What is the future of your company?

We plan to add new features and additional products. We are also thinking about expanding geographically but it’s not our priority at the moment. The German market is big enough, so it’s our main focus. We prefer to be stronger locally than to be present in three or four markets but without being one of the key players there.

We also want to provide an even higher level of individual offering and to extend our product range. CashCape will be able to offer more financial products precisely tailored to customers’ individual needs and capabilities.

And what are your milestones to achieve for the next 2-3 years?

Our main goal is to continue our development. We want to get more customers and make a strong footprint in Germany.