Daria Dubinina | CEO & Co-Founder | Crassula
Crassula is a White Label Banking software platform that assists businesses and financial institutions in building their banking products. The cloud platform allows the launching of PSPs, neobanks, wallets, FX services, and other FinTech products in a matter of weeks, not months.
The company was established in 2015 in Latvia by 3 co-founders: Daria Dubinina, Aleksandrs Novozenovs and Vlad Nikolaevs. Within a couple of years, it expanded and established offices in London, Cyprus, and Estonia.
In a candid chat with Elite X Daria shares the motto, vision statement, the products offered by her company and the various business challenges she has overcome to bring Crassula to the standard it is today.
Elite X (EX): What are the motto and the mission statement of your organization which is backing you up in making a difference?
Daria Dubinina (DD): Our motto is to help companies in any country of the world quickly and efficiently build and run reliable, modern, and technological FinTech products.
Our mission statement is our goal is to transform the financial industry, where banks and financial institutions will fully switch to platform solutions and become the leading FinTech platform, providing a full range of technological and financial services to all companies moving the industry forward.
EX: Your Company provides services in a market where there are many competitors. What are the products offered by your organization and how are they diverse from the other players in the market?
DD:Crassula is a versatile platform that offers 3 main products: Core Banking System, Crypto Banking System, and PSP. Across all products, we provide an administrative panel for managing the business, native Android & iOS apps and web interfaces, as well as open A
What makes Crassula stand out among other competitors is that it delivers a ready-to-deploy white-label product that is very easy to integrate into any app. Among more than 40 integrations, we closely work with the biggest guys in the financial industry, such as Railsbank, CurrencyCloud, ClearBank, Central Bank of Lithuania, and more.
Indeed, the speed and quality of our services justify the bill. Launching a digital bank with us is very affordable and accessible.
EX: Please share the story of the genesis of your organization.
DD: I started my career in the lowest position at an international payment system, where I learned about FinTech and dedicated more than 10 years of my working life to mastering payments, banking, e-commerce, and business development. An idea for the company came up very suddenly. I met my business partner Alex Novozhenov, received some experience in banking and tech and launched Crassula as a quintessence of our expertise put together. It then transformed into a White Label offering, expanded to Banking, and today we continue developing products for more than 50 customers.
EX: As a businesswoman what are the changes you’ve seen over time and what are the challenges you have overcome?
DD: Taking into account the massive adoption of digital banking, the market has evolved tremendously over the last 5 years. In the beginning, nobody believed in the business model we built. Today, platformization and digitalisation are a new reality and Crassula is an important player in the ecosystem.
The challenges I have overcome are that being in a male-dominated space, you are always perceived as inexperienced, less intelligent, and slower than you are. I had a couple of moments in my career where people at some business events would try to belittle me or refuse to talk at all. I felt the big gaps in diversity in my experience and genuinely want to hope they’ll start to diminish in the future.
EX: “Innovation is the key to evolution”. How are you practising this?
DD: We are constantly working on evolving the product roadmap and making it even more feature-rich by including multi-currency money transfers, international bank funds settlement, SEPA transfers, crypto banking, as well as Automated ID and business verification, with PEP lists check, and full data compliance.
EX: As a CEO who would you credit for what your brand is today?
DD: The people. People are everything to us. At Crassula, we provide constant education opportunities, helping each other grow within the community and implement new solutions. We have created a space that embodies a unique culture of striving for development, creativity, and improvement.
EX: Fintech is here you stay. How are you ensuring that your organization always stays ahead in the Fintech market?
DD: Companies are looking at the economies of scale, and embeddedness, something that is efficient and quick to launch. They are in great need of enablers, and that’s where white-label software platforms like Crassula come into play. We make the launch faster, more agile, and more efficient. In the future, my team and I would like to conquer new markets and serve businesses globally.
EX: Can you please share some of your ‘findings’ with the females out there who are looking to make it big in your industry?
DD: I want to inspire my fellow female executives to celebrate their accomplishments and never downplay the daunting path travelled. Compare yourself not to other men or women in the same niche but to yourself in the past and see how far you have come through. Acknowledge your little successes, both professional and personal.
All of Crassula’s client roadmaps are unique projects.
– Daria Dubinina
