[FH] What did inspire the creation of Pulsoo and how does it address the needs of small businesses in Portugal? 

[DR]: Our innovation team in BPI Bank was born two years ago. It’s a recent team in the bank and we were challenged to try to address the needs of several segments in the bank. We have a specific segment in the bank for small and medium companies, which basically represent more than 90% of the Portuguese landscape.  

We understood that despite this big market size, there was no specific solution to address it and that two-thirds of the small and medium-sized companies have multiple bank accounts.  

Entrepreneurs have different needs, and they need more than just a banking app. It’s not just about checking the bank account but it’s also about having the financial and regulatory vision that you need. We started doing a lot of focus groups, a lot of interviews. We literally went on the streets to ask small entrepreneurs what their needs were. 

[FH] How does the strategic partnership between BPI and NOS enhances the Pulsoo offerings? Did you make any other strategic partnership in the fintech ecosystem to enhance the Pulsoo offering?

[DR] Pulsoo is a joint venture that is 50% owned by BPI and 50% owned by NOS. 

NOS is one of the leading Portuguese telecom companies, and they also have this very high ambition of contributing to the business segment. Basically, we established a partnership with Bank BPI as the leading bank in the small and medium-sized segment, and we provided the financial knowledge. NOS provided the tech knowledge, including all the digital transformation part.

We had some other stakeholders involved but they were not investors of the app. One of them is an Israeli startup that provided what we call business finance manager. Basically, it is a fintech that has a plug and play module and they offer the categorisation of the transactions. They also offer other relevant insights like budget monitorisation.

Then we also hired a Tech Consulting company to develop the project. They worked with us since the ideation phase, when we did the brainstorming and the focus groups, all the business case and the phase one until the launch.

[FH] Did you face any challenges developing the solution or any barriers in the Portugal market?

[DR] Everyone knows about open banking, but a few people use it. So, the transition is still not very smooth.

Right now, this is a challenge because open banking is not yet where we wanted it to be, and I feel like we are not 100% prepared to use this technology.

[FH] Are there already plans for the future of Pulsoo, and what will the app be in the next future?

[DR] We launched the MVP in March, and since then, we have already launched two new versions in the App Store and Google Play. The first one was the multi-company management. So basically, with the MVP, you could only add one company to your Pulsoo profile. Now, you can have multiple companies in your account, and we also added the social security.

We are already working in new features, and we are planning to launch until the end of summer an area that is dedicated to documents management because we feel like there’s still a lot of bureaucracy, and entrepreneurs are often asked to have a lot of documents.

Our intention is to evolve the app and bring new features once we have all the necessary data.