Have you ever been able to talk to the CEO of your bank?
Personally, never…
But things seem to change with time. Even in our old Swiss banks ;)
For newcomers, neon is my default Mustachian Swiss bank. I compared all those on the market in this article.
neon is the best.
And as with all the other financial services I use, I made it my mission to interview their founder and/or manager.
So here’s my interview with the man who co-created THE most innovative Swiss bank to date.
MP video interview with Jörg Sandrock
Here’s the interview with neon’s co-founder:
Important note: you can activate German or French subtitles if they don’t appear automatically.
Two other notes: first of all, the interview was recorded at the end of 2023, and then, at one point, Jörg states that “all employees have access to all data”. This is true for business data, but obviously not for private customer data (they follow data protection regulations to the letter).
Video transcript
And if you’d rather read than watch the video, then here’s the transcript of my interview with Jörg.
1. Can you introduce yourself to the MP readers?
Thank you very much for having me.
I’m Jörg. I’m one of the cofounders of neon.
Neon is a banking challenger in Switzerland.
I’m originally from Germany. I grew there up somewhere in the middle in the north of Frankfurt. It was in the seventies. I turned 50 this year. So in the eighties it was a completely different world. No Internet, completely different political systems. I grew up there with my older sister in a “normal” family.
I went to university in 1993, started what I would call financial engineering. A lot of math, but also some business around it.
I live in Munich now.
I used to go swimming every day when I was in school and even at university I did that a lot. Unfortunately I do not do that anymore. I miss it.
Next to that, my hobbies are maybe reading as well as a lot of music. I listen to music mostly all the time (except right now ahah). But typically I do.
When I sit I feel like a kindergarten.
People ask me about my height because it’s very unusual. I’m 2 meters eight, which is really really tall. So sometimes when I sit I feel like a kindergarten. You know, when your parents are invited and they sit on chairs that don’t fit them (this is sometimes a little painful like in airplanes, but I don’t fly that often anymore).
My colleagues made sometimes fun of me posting on our website, for instance, that I’m not very good with keys, just to be precise here. Honestly, I never lose keys in terms of I need to replace them, but I leave them somewhere and then it takes me always some time to figure out where they could be. Sometimes it takes me 20 minutes before I can leave the office because they are somewhere and I can’t find them. But that’s really extraordinary.
On a different topic, I tried to change in the beginning of neon. I really had a lot of chocolate and a lot of orange juice and so a lot of, let’s say, sweet stuff. I changed that over the last month. So I try to be more healthy with my life. Maybe also due to my age or whatever it is :)
2. Are you more Zürich Paradeplatz, or Geneva water jet?
I’m clearly more on Zurich Paradeplatz, because I mentioned I live during the week more in Zurich, but at the weekend I’m Munich.
So I would call myself more the Zurich guy.
I will go to Geneva, I think next week, which I’m looking forward to it. It’s a very nice location, but I haven’t been there too many times.
We focus right now on growing neon. So it’s more like I would say Paradeplatz style.
We did the right thing with neon to try to change the banking system :)
Paradeplatz for me means also the motivation why we started with neon. I used to work in banking as a consultant for quite some time. And if you want to see a little bit how banking works, you maybe should go to Paradeplatz…
These are typically talented young guys, pretty high self awareness and self conscious. And you can like it, you maybe can even not like it. But it was for me a the motivation to change that.
And actually when I’m at 08:00 in the morning at Paradeblaz, I think we did the right thing with neon to try to change the banking system :)
3. What’s the book you’ve most gifted to acquaintances?
When I was younger, I read a lot then during university and later it wasn’t that often anymore.
But there are some books that were really important to me, actually.
The Swiss author Friedrich Durenmart, probably one of the two most known. And he has a novel (in German). It’s about the execution of justice. And I think I read it when I was sixteen, or seventeen years old. And it’s really about perception and reality and motives, why people act, and truth. And so I really like this kind of topics. Maybe that’s what I took out of it. Maybe there are different other ideas. But that’s a book I really enjoyed reading. And I think I’ve read it several times.
And the book I think I gifted most to friends are maybe books I liked when I was a little bit older. One was also a german one. He’s an author. I think he’s not really popular outside Germany. It’s Thomas Brussig. I think he is known in the english space too. The german title is “Wie es leuchtet”. It’s a book about the early 20th century. And he described 6-7 perspectives of the changes we saw after the wall in Berlin went down. And I really liked that.
And another one is more a fun book. It’s “Die Uni als Klinik”. It’s also only published in German. It’s based on the austrian author Thomas Bernhard. It’s some kind of fun making out of Thomas Bernhardt. And that’s also something I really enjoyed.
4. If you could put up a gigantic billboard in the middle of Zürich Paradeplatz, what would it say?
I had to think a little bit about what could I put there… and honestly, after 5 seconds, I came up with: “Thank you”.
Because, I learned in the last years that it’s good to be friendly.
That’s the idea of how people can coexist, be better, and improve themselves and then get encouraged.
So I think I would just write “thank you”. And making people think they could say thank you again, or could be friendly to each other.
Thank you.
The last time I thought about it is when we started with neon, and maybe even before. I think people are or it seems that society and then people, how they act and how they communicate together has changed over the last years. And I think it would be wise on the one hand to respect that, and on the other hand to get more friendly to each other.
5. I imagine your net worth could allow you to retire today. Why don’t you do it?
I’m not a serial entrepreneur.
neon is the first startup and most likely also the only I will do in life.
Of course it’s always unsecure what you do in the future, what you plan. But I’m not that guy who said: “Okay, I want to start one and then the next, and my ultimately goal is to become rich by that.”
We started neon in 2017.
The idea was from a little bit earlier. It was all of us the cofounders, who worked together in consulting. So we actually had a job where we could have or we had a high salary and maybe even an early retirement could have been an option if you work as a consultant out for a little bit longer.
Personal finance was not a trigger for me to found neon.
Honestly, personal finance was not a trigger for me to found neon and is actually also not a trigger for me right now.
I have a rather modest life and I don’t have a car. I don’t spend a lot of money. And right now the salary we pay out as the founders in neon aren’t that high either. So, for me, I have somehow the freedom. And I ignore my personal financial situation. So it’s not a good sign if you somehow say he’s ignoring it, you must be aware of it. But it’s not a big part for me in my life right now to think about what is my personal financial wealth or net worth.
6. What are your plans for the upcoming five years?
The vision question is on one hand a little bit, and don’t get me wrong, a standard question in terms of what do you want to do in five years or where you want to be.
But if I would look back five years from now, and it would be 2018, we just launched, we had a user growth that was a little bit under what we expected. We had a lot of technical issues, really very basic topics, the card, the app and all that.
So five years with that perspective is a very, very long time for us.
We want to be a very relevant Swiss player in the banking scene. We want to improve the market. We want to improve our product. We want to force other banks to also be more customer oriented. And that’s where we want to be in five years.
If you think about figures, we should be somewhere around 400'000 clients. We should be really relevant in the market in terms of having a larger scope of products that we could offer, having a very healthy client base still, of course, with people that are really into mobile banking.
That’s the only channel we will have also, I think in five years.
And, yeah, so it sounds maybe a little bit boring, but we want to have more of the same and want to be a little bit larger, more relevant, more visible also on the market.
That’s what we would like to achieve in five years for the company.
It’s right now that we used a lot of money from investors like our crowd to grow the company.
And for us, it’s also the next important step: to become profitable, meaning that we don’t need more external money, but rather are in a situation where we can fund our growth.
7. What do you fear the most that could disrupt your business model, and make neon go dust like Blackberry and the iPhone story?
We are in a market, in an industry, that is banking, that is very important for Switzerland, and that is rather large and on the other hand rather slow.
What we did is that we copied ideas from other industries in the banking world and applied it to the financial products.
For neon, we did it in the last five, six years.
Others started maybe a little bit earlier.
Right now I don’t fear it.
If you look at the change, and I think in the beginning I mentioned the eighties where we didn’t have Internet, and in the nineties some of the earlier banks started to adopt it, and the structural change took 20 years.
Now, banks really change their operating model, close branches, change their pricing, all that stuff.
So honestly, I hope it doesn’t sound arrogant, but right now I don’t feel that we have a next wave of disruption already.
But rather, I think we are still positioned for neon to be still one of the disruptors. Maybe there will be completely new technical changes, I don’t know…
I’m not a real expert about maybe artificial intelligence or quantum computing or whatever it is. But right now I don’t fear it.
8. Do you envision merging with another Swiss bank (Yuh, Zak, etc.) one day, to become THE Swiss leader of online banking solutions? Why?
We have been asked several times, what is the plan, not only on the product side or on the client side, but also with the shareholder structure.
We don’t have any discussions ongoing about exits or other scenarios.
Of course, some of our investors want to get the money back in terms of hopefully more. That’s the idea of an investment. We don’t have any investor who really has, let’s say, some kind of strict timing in terms of they need to close a fund in two years or three years or whatsoever.
We have more investors who believe in long term investments.
And currently we don’t have any discussions ongoing about exits or other scenarios.
9. On a daily/weekly basis, what’s the ONE THING that still gives you an intrinsic sense of fulfillment?
So internally, everyone has access, more or less to every data.
We have a dashboard representing clients, or actually plenty of dashboards like what’s the number of card transactions in the last 24 hours whatsoever.
And for instance, we launched a trading product in July. And right now we see really very nice growth rates.
So right now at least two times, three times a day, I look on the trading figures and typically I’m getting happy with it. Or sometimes, of course, if there is a day where it’s not a lot of trading, then we started asking ourselves, what’s the effect? And then we learn here a lot about it. And that’s what I currently check most.
Maybe this will change they after some first excitement. But right now that’s probably the thing that everyone from neon looks at it maybe once or twice a day.
10. While being a successful entrepreneur, what’s the challenge you still have that you had when starting neon in 2017?
Actually it is a pretty good question, because when you start your own company, maybe your personal involvement gets higher, or maybe sometimes even the other way around, that people see the risk and hence get frightened and hence want to have some distance.
For instance, we’d also one cofounder who said more or less after a year: “Hey, personally, I just noticed I’m not the guy for that.” And we talked about it. That was, I think, very good discussions we had. And then we found a solution where he still could contribute to neon, but not anymore in this position where he feels somehow exposed.
Personally, I haven’t had these kind of personal feelings that, oh wow, now everything is too hard, everything is too risky, everything is too positive. You could also have it maybe in the other direction. So for me, I felt quite stable.
But the biggest challenge we saw as a company was actually the funding. When we started neon, since we only focus on the Swiss market, we were aware that funding will be the biggest problem. We didn’t fear competition as our top risk or banks reaction, but actually starting neon in a market when investors could invest in companies like Revolut or European banks or global banks.
[…] the current plan, and that’s the very clear will of the board and of all cofounders, is to avoid additional funding.
And we started with only a smaller market, and we saw that that could be the biggest risk.
We manage it.
However, our risk seems somehow to be valid because currently only Swiss investors have invested significantly in neon. So it was always a local game. And hence the financing risk or funding risk was the highest risk.
Right now, we manage also with a crowd to raise enough money to become breakeven.
It’s still a challenge because we have to deliver the products, the clients have to react as expected, as wanted.
That’s a little bit the planning exercise.
But right now we are in the position, other than maybe other fintechs, that we don’t have to run to get the next funding round, but rather right now are in a position where we say we can still manage if things in next year will not turn out to be as planned.
We see a risk to need maybe a little bit of funding.
But again, the current plan, and that’s the very clear will of the board and of all cofounders, is to avoid additional funding. And we’re really working hard with the whole team on that.
11. What do you think of the FIRE movement?
From a very distant way, I like it.
On one dimension, I really do like what I do with neon and the work and working with people, seeing the team grow, seeing the company grow, the client base grow.
But on the other hand, having the opportunity to have a life where people don’t really have to work, but rather spend their time on what they want to do or with whom they want to do, I think that’s a good thought.
Especially after a certain age, that’s maybe even better.
So that’s what I like about it.
To me, I don’t spend enough time with my personal financial situation. I don’t know why, but honestly, it’s just not really my thing. I have my account, I have enough money to pay the bills. I don’t have enough money to retire. But that’s fine for me, honestly.
Since I don’t invest much money on other shares, I don’t have any kind of particular investments. I’m very a boring investor. Yeah, that’s it.
Personally, […] I don’t want to go and do the work [to become FIRE].
So personally, I see the benefit, but I don’t want to go and do the work to be very transparent.
I maybe would have not start neon if I had money from my parents then, of course. But right now, for me, it’s not an option, to be honest, to think about it, but rather not that I thought through it. And then I think: “Okay, it’s not an option and I don’t.”
Also, maybe it’s a little bit too far away for me. That could also be an answer.
12. During the past 12 months, each time you had a big decision to make that your brain couldn’t solve alone, what was your process and/or mental process to make it?
Also here are two answers.
On one hand, as a team, people have maybe different opinion. We really rely on facts, figures, data, comparison, stuff like this. So it is really more or less a fact based decision.
However, for me it’s typically a lot of pattern that you recognize, and then you already might have come up with a solution. So sometimes, in decisions, I have very fast intuition in terms of what is my gut feeling, what would I do then?
Of course we look at the figures, but personally, let’s say my inner decision process is pretty fast. So it doesn’t take me too long to decide.
13. Who was your mentor in your ascending years (20-40)? Why?
I was in consulting for twelve years in my career.
And there, I had a formal and informal mentor. It was the same person.
So the formal means I was more or less assigned to it. But of course I could have changed it if I didn’t want him.
But he was a real mentor in a way that he mentors my personal career or my career in that company, but also in other aspects.
After we have this call, I’m going to meet him actually.
He retired now, which was very difficult for him because he also loved his job for many years. And yeah, he was what I would call a real mentor here.
And still sometimes, despite the fact that I just said I make my decisions very quickly, we talked about decisions I made and maybe then he had another opinion, maybe not. Maybe that’s also a little bit the issue that in many cases I think we have more or less the same opinion, which is then maybe a good sign. But maybe not, but he’s a real mentor.
I think he’s living now in France and Munich, so ran I into him last time two months ago.
Now we meet today, but we haven’t maybe also met for half a year sometimes.
The mentoring stuff was I think closer when we were in the same company. Then we had a very regular exchange. Right now it’s more like: “Hey, I have this idea, what do you think? Or maybe also just a personal update, hey, I did that or whatever. What do you think about it?”
14. Imagine my 10-15 year-old daughter is next to me now, and asks you boldly: “Hey Jörg, nice to meet you! Look, I would like to invest to make my money grow, but… honestly… I’m not interested at all by it… I just wanna spend 15-30’ a quarter maximum to monitor it. What strategy and platform would you recommend me to follow for the next 20-40 years?”
Not as neon, because we are by no ways a FINMA regulated company and we cannot do any investment advice and we are very careful about it.
But personally, I invested a lot of money in ETFs that somehow follow a large market index.
Being from Germany, people go to the DAX, which is the top. You could also go to a more global which might be even more diversified.
I also invested a little bit in companies I just liked at certain point of time. I liked Apple and I invested some money there, and that was a good decision. But that was could have also been a stupid one.
So I would go rather with a broad portfolio.
So I would go rather with a broad portfolio.
And ETFs are probably a product that help.
There are platforms that charge you high charges for investments. Others, like neon invest for instance, don’t ask you for a long term investment fee. Our fees are significant when you buy or sell, but not when you hold.
And this supports the idea of having maybe investments for a lot longer time.
15. Would you be up for a fondue in Zürich somewhen in 2024?
For our Christmas celebration, we will have a fondue in our office this year.
Last year we went to the Zurich lake and had a fondue there.
But yeah, happy to have this anyway :)
16. By the way, what is your best recommendation close to your hometown (north of Frankfurt)?
My family is more from the north rural area.
There is only one restaurant at all in the town where I grew up. So that’s a clear recommendation. I think you could even go boating there. So now you have a little bit the feeling what kind of restaurant this might be.
Actually, the nature there is pretty nice. We have a lot of forests. Some small, very small mountains, especially compared to Switzerland. But it’s nice to walk there.
Kassel is the larger town it’s known for, maybe for documenta, which is an art exhibition, I think every four years. And this has a nice park. But if you take the train from Munich to Hamburg or whatever, you necessarily don’t need to stop there.
My thoughts from my interview with Jörg Sandrock
Don’t launch a start-up (just) to get rich
I really like Jörg’s mindset. He’s already rich in his mindset. And I think that’s a very good thing for neon, because he won’t be making short-term decisions that would put my favourite Swiss bank at risk.
After that, he may not be financially independent yet, but if neon continues to execute their plans as they do, I think Jörg will become FI through his shares in the company.
In a way, I’m a bit ‘jealous’ of his career and his sense of freedom. But on the other hand, it’s actually the same path I’ve started to take with this side project that is the blog, as well as my property investments.
neon is not for sale <3
I wasn’t sure what to expect when I asked the question, but here I am reassured.
It would have meant something to me if he’d told me they were open to discussions. After all, it’s still business, but still. The worst thing that could happen to me would be for UBS or Swissquote to buy neon… just imagine!
neon wants to break even on its own
I was also very reassured to hear that their biggest focus these days is to break even without new investment.
That’s very sound from a business point of view, and it reinforces my choice of neon as the best Swiss bank for Mustachian.
Investing for the long term via diversified global ETFs
If you needed any further confirmation that I’m not a complete novice when it comes to investing, you’ve got it now :)
The best way to invest in the stock market for a small private investor like you and me is a good old global ETF diversified across several thousand companies spread around the world.
What do you take away from this discussion with the CEO of neon?
