In this episode hosted by Silvan Krähenbühl, a serial entrepreneur and host of the Swisspreneur podcast, Silvan spoke to the co-founder of Neon, a leading Swiss digital bank, Simon Youssef, about the future of banking.

Here are the highlights of what they talked about:

Leaving your well-paying corporate job
The business model behind a free product
Is Revolut a competitor?
Being on Höhle der Löwen
Doing a 5M tokenized crowd investment

Simon Youssef's story

Simon Youssef is the co-founder and CTO of neon, a transaction account for everyday finances. Before starting his own company, he was an associate at the management consulting company Strategy&. His educational background is in Physics, and he holds a PhD from the Microsoft Research Lab.

Simon and his co-founder Jörg Sandrock worked together at Strategy&, where they became well acquainted with the Swiss banking market. After a few unfulfilling projects, Simon went on a surfing sabbatical in Indonesia. During this time, Jörg proposed the neon business idea to him, and Simon decided to take the leap.

Whereas typical banking apps cater to the bank's sales interests, merely replicating the organizational structure of a traditional bank, neon offers a client-focused product free of charge, with the lowest fees in Switzerland. Neon manages this because, having a team of around 20 employees, they can live on much slimmer margins. Their revenue comes from card interchange, premium plans like neon Green, and finance fees (from when clients buy partner products on the app).

Revolut and Transferwise don't pose a very big threat, since they're more travel cards than anything else. neon, on the other hand, is a Swiss banking product, meaning they can offer you a Swiss IBAN, e-bills, and so on.

Having been the first of its kind in the small Swiss market, neon has already amassed 70 000 users, in part due to the large amount of press coverage they received. Their participation in Höhle der Löwen, while helpful cash flow-wise, did not bring them as much of a boost as they initially imagined.

Recommended resources: How I Built This and The Happiness Lab.