An Open Banking-era fintech we built before the regulation was ready, the partnerships were possible, or the market was waiting. The idea was right. The timing wasn't.
MyCash let bank customers withdraw cash from any account, on any bank, through a smartphone app and a merchant tablet. No ATM commissions. No card-network fees. A direct account-to-account transfer, completed in real time, behind a scan-and-confirm flow.
The bigger ambition was Perkonto itself: an Open Banking-native consumer platform on which multiple financial services could be built — agregator, payments, account analytics, third-party APIs — anticipating the PSD2 regulatory shift that would later reshape European fintech.
The most expensive mistake in business is not slow validation.
It is fast validation in the wrong direction.
By 2018 the platform was approximately 70% of the way to a market-ready product. What existed was real, functional, and demonstrable:
PSD2 — the European regulation that would later force banks to open their account APIs to third parties — was still being defined when we started. Bank partnerships took longer than seed-stage capital allowed. Spanish fintech funding in 2016-2017, before the PSD2 wave, was thin.
We wound down operations in 2018.
Looking back, what we proposed in 2016 anticipated several things that later became normal in European fintech: open banking APIs, cash-on-merchant networks, multi-bank wallets, regulatory-driven competition between fintechs and incumbents.
What I learned from Perkonto is the philosophical core of what I'm building now.
Most ventures don't fail because they validate slowly. They fail because they validate the wrong hypothesis quickly, then spend everything on the certainty that follows.
That conviction shapes my current work: synthetic research infrastructure for testing how decisions actually form, defend themselves, and break — before any team commits real budget to fieldwork.