2239 - Lessons from Tractor Restoration to Fintech Success with Volt's Steffen Vollert

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1:05With us right now, it's Stefan Vollert. Stefan, you are the co-founder and CEO of Volt.io, which happens to be the website, Volt.io. Stefan, it's great to have you. Thank you for having me. Yeah, all the way from Poland. And Stefan, before we kind of start talking about the work that you do with Volt, which is cool technology, do you mind to kind of share with us, like, what have you been doing in your personal life outside of work that you're kind of into right now? Yeah, so my big passion is quite odd. It's actually vintage Porsche diesel tractors. So even though I run a technology business, I really like escaping the matrix and doing something in the real world.

1:47And about like at the time when we started, when we had the Series A, I believe we started a small side hustle to just restore tractors. It was initially just intended to be a fun project for myself since I've grown up on a farm and I always wanted to have a tractor. And then it turned out to be really beautiful. And people actually called us after we made it on one of the calendars. There's a popular distribution of calendars for vintage tractors in Germany. And then people just started calling us and we started turning it into business. And I really like doing that. So there are many similarities between that business and a tech business.

2:20So that's, for me, a really nice comparison as well. vintage tractors this is so cool so just for kicks i did a an image search for vintage diesel tractors and you're right so these are really beautiful do you have a website do you actually do you have a website and so forth for your for the for the vintage uh for the vintage tractors yes i do it's vintage minus tractors.com we also have a distributing partner in the us so We're Porsche, Garza, Las Vegas. Steve is the person to call in case you would like to acquire one of our tractors. I'm sorry. It was vintage what tractors? Minus tractors. Oh, vintage Dash tractors.

3:04I think we say, yeah, in the US. Yeah, I've got it. Vintage Dash tractors. I've got you pulled up right now. Yeah, these are beautiful, which has got to be really fun. So do you remember, like, when did you kind of start, like, when did you restore your first tractor? Actually, my uncle was a mechanic at BMW. My grandfather was a race driver in the Bavarian Mountains. He was driving in NZUTT. Unfortunately, he died before I got to meet him. But there were loads of trophies on our house and the house of my mother, my grandmother. So I really, yeah, have this in the family. And yeah, we just spent a lot of time back then also restoring the vehicles of farmers in the neighborhood.

3:50So it was about like 14, 15 years back then. And that's just something that I always wanted to get back into. And yeah, four years ago, we started doing it. Please, please, please start. Oh, you do have a YouTube channel. I was going to say, please start a YouTube channel for this. you know kind of the before and after and looks like you do thank you thank you for documenting this uh on video but it would be like this deserves to be its own tv show extreme tractor makeover yeah i mean the fascinating thing all the similarities that such a like rather traditional business has with building a fintech venture so for me it's also quite exciting to see the similarities and differences of having a venture funded venture versus a small company that needs to really like to a classic writing, right?

4:45Cashflow month to month, scale organically, but you're not going to find a Silicon Valley investor for a tractor business. So it's very interesting to do this reality check between technology and something entirely outside the metrics. I love it. That is so cool. Thank you for sharing that with me. And again, that website for someone who wants to take a look at some beautiful vintage tractors, vintage-tractors.com. All right, so let's talk about Volt.io. What is Volt? We are a European fintech. We started following the vision of global real-time account-to-account payments. Our belief is that the world is going real-time.

5:24Real-time is no longer optional. It is an expectation of every consumer on the planet. Everybody wants to have a real-time experience, and it starts very often with payments. Payments should be real-time. Here in Europe, we started following a regulation called Payments Service Directive 2, which allowed us as a fintech to integrate the banks to initiate real-time payments. Similar to the U.S., you have FedNow. It's more an institutionalized network. Yeah, we also offer bank accounts. We have many customers that would be e-commerce, retail merchants. We have payments partners, PSPs like WorldPay, WorldLine.

6:01We also work with a lot of crypto exchanges that some of you would know, but also airlines. So the use case is that we are basically a payment method on the checkout of a retail merchant, e-commerce merchant. And yeah, besides of this, we also have started our global expansion. We're not only here in Europe, we're also live in Australia. We follow the infrastructure innovation of the local banks. who are also moving towards real-time payments, which we find super exciting. The big vision there is to chase feature parity with cards. So yeah, we want to be able to do everything that you purely do with a card with your regular bank account.

6:42Yeah, so when we talk about, I mean, so when you say real-time payment, I mean, that's just, is that somehow different than like just Stripe or PayPal? If you look at Stripe or PayPal, they offer many more payment instruments. And also if you integrate someone like Stripe, you get all kinds of global payment methods and you get cards, you get cash vouchers, you get all kinds of functionality on top of the payment instruments. So you get your own wallet. So for many merchants, Stripe has become a real one-stop shop similar to PayPal. PayPal is probably the biggest payment instrument in Germany where I'm from.

7:21Everybody has a PayPal account. Everybody pays with PayPal. and you could think of us a little bit like PayPal. If people pay PayPal on their checkout, you could hopefully in the future rather pay with Volt on your checkout. Yeah. Okay, so who is Volt for? Who is currently using the platform? Yeah, so our initial philosophy was that we wanted to be a lean and mean fintech startup. We believe in automation and efficiency, not in big scale and therefore we positioned ourselves a bit in the b2b value chain so our main customers are all the payments platforms like stripe or paypal could be great customers and distribution partners for us to then reach the merchant ultimately we want to be on the merchant checkout so that consumers can pay with vault yeah our customers include airlines One of them, like I mentioned, is Luxair.

8:19There are also others. There are retail merchants, Farfetch, for instance. Many of you might know Farfetch, but also crypto platforms. I'm not allowed to mention all of them since we have NDAs. But in the background, many people might also pay with us in a white label, where they see bank transfer on the checkout, and it's actually powered by us. So, Stefan, as a fintech company, it seems like it might be a crowdfunding. space? How does a company like Volt grow? And how do you, yeah, like, how do you gain more customers? And something from my experience, again, just seems like there's so many options out there.

9:02Yeah, absolutely. It's a super competitive industry. I've been in the industry now for 12 years. I could really see margins decline to close to zero. And also, I think the payments market is a market that's consolidating and where the perfect price of a payment is zero. And you see this happening in markets like Brazil, where you have PIX back in the days, four years ago, before there were real-time payments, it was really a card market, like Visa, MasterCard owning the market. And then PIX is a near perfect payment instrument and prices collapsed to basically zero. So what is the value add and how do you survive and how do you compete in such a market?

9:41And you need to be fast, right? it's all about the speed of delivery um working close with your customers solving problems specifically for them but not so specific that you cannot reset it because otherwise you're wasting resources and you go down in niche you don't want to get into um so being really close to your customers listening to them working with them helping them to go to new markets but also collaborative innovation so you want to build new products and you're going to ship them quickly so product diversification is important for us but also geographic diversification We don't always want to be the first trying everything, but we want to be pretty close to the first one.

10:19Yeah, yeah. You know, and I guess I'm sorry, I still can't stop thinking about the vintage tractors. And I suspect that there's a business lesson here. What have you learned from your work with vintage tractors that has actually helped you be a better CEO for Volt? Yeah, so I think the most important lesson probably is really the time when I was COO, so Chief Operating Officer, on my journey here at Vault. So I was initially CTO, then COO, no CEO. And the businesses were in pretty much the same kind of phase. You had your first product working, you knew how to restore a vehicle, you could sell it.

11:04We had a product at Vault, we knew what the product market fit looks like we could sell it but then winning a customer and getting a customer life and keeping a customer life are very different right and it's same like with the vehicle a vehicle every mistake you make you have to pay for right so you need to travel you need to collect the vehicle you need to fix it the same with payments right it's a serious business it's real money you're handling real funds so every mistake you make is very expensive So building playbooks for taking merchants live, improving, working with them, ramp, we call this here, ramp process.

11:39And we really focus on that, like building playbooks to avoid issues with customers later, right? We really want to guide them through the go-live process. We want to have quality insurance in place. So there are a lot of similarities. Yeah. Yeah. And how might, to our friend that's listening right now, how might they know that Vult might be a better solution for them than their current payment processor? Excellent question. Many of our investors and customers asked that. So generally, that is by design how we design it. We're very competitive here at Vult. When we entered the business, we really focused on all the use cases that open banking had in Europe initially on payments.

12:24And we used a concept that many people from the payments industry will know. It's called the Payments Orchestrator. And the Payments Orchestration model is by design for competitive comparison. For us, the ultimate success matrix is conversion. So the bottom line that a merchant gets from checkout conversions of 100 shoppers that go to your checkout, how many complete payments successful that for us is the ultimate holy grail that we are chasing and optimizing the entire business for because that is what has the ultimate impact on the merchant and yeah our model by design is set up to compare ourselves with other partners that we also equally route traffic to in the platform but apart from this it's not only conversion it's also how you interact with us so the real value of a partner you see when something doesn't work and how close your partner is to you to resolve these issues when something doesn't work and takes you along the journey to fix it quickly and without blame culture, but just owns it and executes it and solves your problem.

13:24And that is really culture retweets of it here. Excellent. So, volt.io is the website. What is it like when you're, let's say that you're going through a demo or you're kind of doing an assessment with somebody to see if Volt might be a good solution for them, what do you typically do in that discovery process? So there's, of course, an official sales playbook, right? So there are many stakeholders. So our customers are often enterprise merchants, like very complex organizations, often multinational. So you need to identify your stakeholders that you're selling to. You need to tailor your pitch a little bit to them because each of them have different concerns and problems they want to solve.

14:14So for us, I'm picking what a CFO or a treasury owner might want to expect from a payment solution like us is different to what a e-commerce manager might expect, what a fraud manager. So understanding the person you're selling to is really important, the key decision makers, but also really understanding the problem. but you're not here to sell a prepackaged product. You're really here to understand the problem and to help your counterpart understand how you solve it and also identify if you're not solving it and to innovate together. So that is really important during a sales process for us.

14:50Excellent. Okay, volt.io is the website. To our friend that's listening, what would you recommend they do next? They've heard our podcast here and they may or may not be a fit, but they'd like to figure that out? Yeah, you can contact us by the website or you can drop me an email directly. So stefan.io. So I usually love spending time with our customers, hearing how we can work with you, how we can maybe open new products or territories with you. So yeah. Or also if you have a comparative story, a different venture that you want to build in the fintech space, quite often there are synergies you wouldn't anticipate.

15:31So we'd love to hear from you as well. Yeah. All right. Volt.io. Stefan Voller, you are the co-founder and CEO. Stefan, it's been a great conversation. Thank you so much. And can't wait to see all the latest transformations at Vintage Dash Tractors as well. Stefan, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you very much.

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