We have interviewed Kerstin Cooley and Kaj Hed from MOOR, one of Mitigram’s main investors, so that they can tell you a little bit about themselves and why they are supporting Mitigram.

MOOR is a private investment company funded by serial entrepreneur Kaj Hed - former majority owner of Rovio, the creators of Angry Birds. MOOR was co-founded by, and is managed by Kerstin Cooley.

Hello, Kaj and Kerstin, could you tell us a bit about yourselves? How are you connected to fintech?

Kaj founded Trema, and over a decade, built it into an international leader in the treasury management system market. The product was used by treasury functions at global Fortune 500 companies, and adopted by numerous central banks. Trema was eventually acquired by Wall Street systems. Kerstin was also part of the Trema journey, working with strategic client implementations in multiple geographies. Later on, Kerstin worked with Hedge Funds and other structured products at SEB. Now, at MOOR, we both meet lots of exciting startup opportunities in the fintech space, and invest in a few select opportunities such as Mitigram.

What do you think are the main challenges faced by the corporate banking industry?

Digital disruption has the potential to deeply reposition the role of today’s banks, and we believe that those that embrace this disruption and embark on a digitization journey will have the potential to offer better, faster, cheaper services, making them an even more essential part of everyday life for their customers. If the existing banking players are to benefit from growth driven by new services and productivity, Openness, Collaboration and Investment are critical themes they need to address. Many banks only have a fragmented or opportunistic strategy for dealing with digital innovation. Certainly, legacy technology and the difficulty of deploying new technology fast and current skills and culture present a challenge. Most banks are minimally equipped for the digital age.

Do you see a need for a corporate banking marketplace? What would it look like?

We are strong believers in the transformative power of cloud/SAAS based delivery models where the focus is on delivering high quality user experience as well as rapid feature evolution and delivery. From the corporate banking perspective, we believe that a lot of value can be added by simplifying and speeding up the process of finding counter parties, price discovery, and transaction completion. Furthermore, we feel there is a big opportunity to increase transparency in the market, to the benefit of all parties, by providing all actors with structured, real-time market data. Today this is not available, due to the fact that transaction level data is currently isolated and stored locally in an unstructured manner in emails or excel sheets, making it impossible to aggregate market-level data.

Why do you believe in Mitigram?

As committed, early stage investors, we have a strong focus on the team quality. We are convinced about the Mitigram team’s ability to execute on their mission to build a company that adds digital value to existing corporate banking flows, such as in trade finance. An important team factor here is the ability to navigate and adapt to the needs of the market, as well as innovating and creating features that lead the market forward. At MOOR, we like teams focused on solving the needs of deep, global markets in specialised spaces, where there is an opportunity to build long term success stories.

If you had one piece of advice to give Mitigram, which one would it be?

Always to keep the spirit of thought leadership, and the vision that originally inspired the founders to embark on their journey to build the Mitigram offering.