The 2015 Fintech Finance 35: Vladislav Solodkiy, Life.SREDA

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< The 2015 Fintech Finance 35

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Vladislav Solodkiy
Chief Executive Officer and Managing Partner
Life.SREDA

Venture capitalists who have scoured the beaten paths of North American and European fintech are increasingly opening up to opportunities in Asia. Vladislav Solodkiy has been eyeing that territory since 2012, when, as vice president of marketing at Moscow-based LIFE Financial Group, he launched Life.SREDA. The firm’s first fund, Life.SREDA I, invested $40 million in 13 start-ups, including mobile-oriented banks Rocketbank, in Russia, and Moven and Simple, in the U.S., the last acquired in 2014 by Banco Bilbao Vizcaya Argentaria (see Jay Reinemann, No. 14). The $100 million Life.SREDA II fund, announced in November 2014, is explicitly Asian — a point underscored in May, when the firm relocated to Singapore, invested in remittance company Fastacash and opened an accelerator program, InspirAsia. Solodkiy found that he had no problem managing investments in Germany, the U.S. or other points west from his Moscow base but that Asia was impractical without an on-the-ground presence. He concluded that “Singapore is the best place in the world for financial innovation,” in part because the local banking community and telecommunications infrastructure are leading-edge and the government is supporting development of a fintech ecosystem. (Another plus: “There are no traffic jams.”) The 32-year-old’s view of financial innovation’s historical sweep: “Seven years ago everybody talked about the branch of the future; five years ago it was omni-channel distribution; and three years ago the fintech hype started. But there are a lot of other trendy ideas in the air: IoT [Internet of Things], O2O [online-to-office e-commerce], big data, etc. Previously, fintech was about retail clients; now services for small and medium-size enterprises are growing faster. Fintech started as a fancy game for hipsters and geeks, but now the biggest challenge is fintech for the unbanked.”

The 2015 Fintech Finance 35