Fintech Giant Black Banx Boasts Highest Annual Profit since 2015

Digital Banking business Black Banx has recently been thrust into the limelight due to its year-on-year profitability, a rare achievement for fintechs. In January 2024, Black Banx announced a total of $2.3 billion in revenue and an increase of annual pre-tax profit to $289 million.

The results reflect a 109% year-on-year revenue increase, 62% increase in pre-tax profit and a 95% increase of total number of customers, which reached 39 million by the end of last year. The company claims that for the full year and fourth quarter of 2023, revenues were the highest since 2015 when the company was founded.

There have been speculations and talks about Black Banx planning an IPO this year, an arguably predictable move as U.S. markets have seen some highly successful tech company listings in the last quarter of 2023. So far, Black Banx has denied those plans and commented it would rather prefer to wait for market stability.

The person behind Black Banx´s success is German billionaire and Black Banx founder Michael Gastauer. The serial entrepreneur is listed alongside Germany’s ten wealthiest individuals with a net worth of $11.4 billion. Gastauer founded his private family office in 2008 after selling his previous business. Recently, his family office invested $1.5 billion in a nature fund supporting the United Nations ecosystem protection program.

Black Banx is not Gastauer’s first company, the entrepreneur previously founded and sold two other businesses, allowing him to fund Black Banx’s early days. Similar to Elon Musk who founded Tesla after he sold his shares in Paypal, Gastauer decided in 2014 to invest his funds into creating a new digital banking solution that became Black Banx.

Since its inception, Black Banx has come a long way. Like many other startups, it had to deal with product development, marketing, competition and legal problems, keeping its focus on growth and customer acquisition. Unlike other startups, Gastauer didn’t raise funding from outside investors, but took $380 million of his own money and invested into Black Banx until the company became profitable in early 2020. Today, his investment has already turned out to be very lucrative, as Black Banx could pay out its annual profits of almost $300 million to him, which Gastauer is reluctant to take. He prefers to reinvest profits back into the company to finance further growth. With its current annual growth rate of 109% on revenue and 62% on pretax profit, this might turn out to be a smart choice.

What seems to be making Black Banx very successful is solving a global problem in the banking industry. Traditional banks are less willing to provide accounts for businesses or private individuals from other countries. As of late, sending money across borders is under heightened scrutiny and most banks are making it difficult for their clients to send wires to so-called “exotic” countries. With ongoing globalization, the world has become more connected than ever before. Black Banx is addressing the solving problem of a $22 trillion-dollar market uniquely. Based on its proprietary software Global KYC, the company can identify customers in 180 countries, real-time and provide them with checking and saving accounts in 28 FIAT and two cryptocurrencies. When Black Banx did its first live demo in 2016 on Money 20/20 in Vegas, the potential of this technology became apparent to the expert community from banking and finance.

Where traditional banks need days or weeks to open an account for an international customer, Black Banx needs minutes. Where traditional banks have huge efforts and manual labor costs to identify and do background checks on their non-resident clients, Black Banx uses Server Power and AI to run a fully automated and scalable identification process in real-time.

Black Banx numbers are truly impressive for a company that launched in early 2015. In December 2023, the Black Banx Group employed more than 5,900 people with offices on four continents, serving 39 million customers. The key regions in which Black Banx operates and generates revenue are APAC (Asia Pacific, 33%), LACAR (Latin America and Caribbean 28%), NA (North America, 21%) closely followed by MEA (Middle East Africa, 12%) and EEA (EU, Iceland, Norway 6%).

Every month, the Black Banx Group sends more than 50 billion USD to its clients worldwide, a substantial revenue factor for the Group. For the current business year, the Black Banx Group expects to reach more than $4.5 billion in revenue.

Gastauer’s plans to take Black Banx public depends on timing and how global markets develop over the next few months. However, if markets stabilize further, then Gastauer could turn his $380 million investment into a 150x return.

Learn more at blackbanx.com.