Czech fintech Dateio wins ING contract: Ivan Dovica interview

Czech fintech startup Dateio, founded by Ivan Dovica and Ondřej Knot, has won the biggest contract in its history: the Dutch banking group ING has chosen its Tapix service to enrich the payment data of tens of millions of customers. ING’s market capitalization on the Amsterdam stock exchange exceeds two trillion crowns.

Dateio, based in Prague’s Smíchov district, makes two products. Platform handles discounts and cashback in banking apps, while Tapix is an API service that turns cryptic payment records into clear ones, assigning each a precise merchant name, category, contact details and logo. The company’s investors include Austria’s Erste Group, the parent of Česká spořitelna, and Air Bank, part of the Kellner family’s PPF group.

Tapix will first go live in the Netherlands, and the cooperation is then to expand to nine more markets. In the Netherlands alone, the service will process data for almost five million customers, roughly a quarter of the country’s population.

“ING is perhaps in the top twenty banking groups in Europe. It is a large, respected group operating globally, including in Australia. For us it is another big step,” says Dovica. At the same time, he does not want it to look as though “we were small and ING is now taking us somewhere”: in his words, this is a logical step. Dateio has long worked with leaders of the Czech and European markets, and has now reached the level of a major Western banking group.

The numbers. Tapix grew by almost 60% over the past year. The ING contract will be a serious jump in revenue compared with the current tens of millions of crowns. The company’s total turnover this year should come to just under a quarter of a billion crowns.

Why the data is valuable. Dateio’s business is built on the “oil of the third millennium” — data. Payment data is more accurate than internet cookies: a search engine can only guess at a user’s interests, while a payment is irrefutable proof of real consumer behavior. High traffic on the Ferrari website says more about a crowd of fans than about buyers, but a single payment at a Škoda Auto service almost certainly means the customer really drives that car — even if they bought it for cash at a used-car dealer. By combining such data with algorithms, banks get a complete customer profile.

A telling example is a Dateio Platform campaign for a seller of baby products: the algorithm identified customers who had recently paid for services at Prague’s Institute for the Care of Mother and Child as the ideal audience.

What’s next. While Dovica and Knot prepare to enter several European markets under the ING banner, they are also eyeing the US. In tightly regulated Europe, banks are obliged to fight to retain customers and therefore want to know as much about them as possible. In America the situation is different: customers hold several accounts but use only one, and fintechs are luring away the younger generation.