By
Bena Ilyas
April 25th, 2024
Fred Schebesta, one of the founders of a tech project Finder.com, has revealed his plans to launch the first Australian crypto bank.
It is expected that Australia will soon have its first crypto bank. Such an initiative was announced by Fred Schebesta, a 26-year old self-made millionaire, co-founder of a comparison website Finder.com.
According to Schebesta, as the public’s interest in cryptocurrency is increasing, it is quite understandable that the society soon will need an institution that will be able to cover people’s needs in this sphere.
At the dawn of its history, Finder dot com was a simple credit card blog, but today it is a $1 billion business, which operates in 10 countries. Moreover, currently, there are ambitious plans for expanding its geography in the near future.
And now Schebesta wants to enter the crypto industry. He hosts a daily crypto talk show and tries to have his fingers on the pulse of this sphere. Speaking about Bitcoin, he said:
“Remember, people said bitcoin was a bubble at $US10, a bubble at $US100, a bubble at $US1000. After it went to $US100 it went down to like $US12, that’s way lower than $US20,000 down to $US6000.”
As a response to the strong interest around cryptos, last year, in September, Finder launched its cryptocurrency comparison service, which began to gain popularity very quickly. The traffic growth was about 10 times higher in comparison with other site’s services covering insurance, telcos and credit cards.
Schebesta explains the success of his ideas by the fact that he is a “time traveler” who can visit the future and see what will be demanded, now seeing strong potential in cryptocurrencies. That explains why the entrepreneur aims to open a crypto bank in Australia and supposing that 18 months will be enough for him to do it.
If turn to some regulatory issues, one needs to have an authorized deposit-taking institution (ADI) license to open such an organization. With this view, Schebesta is going to enter a partnership with an existing Australian bank. He has already purchased shares in Goldfields Money, the only bank in Western Australia with an ADI license.
At the same time, at the moment Schebesta clearly sees that local major banks are not open for cryptocurrency and are scared of it:
“They’re closing accounts, they won’t bank people, and I don’t think that’s fair and I don’t think there’s any reason to do that”.
According to the Finder dot com co-founder, the understanding of the importance of cryptocurrencies will come after people will face potential problems of traditional financial system. He believes that crypto will become a huge part of the financial ecosystem able to solve sector’s existing problems.
The idea of launching crypto banking services is widely discussed today. As was previously reported by CoinSpeaker, the Blockchain department of the payment service provider Qiwi launched the first crypto investment bank in Russia. The crypto investment bank named HASH will provide its clients assistance in ICOs and in developing their blockchain networks.
Moreover, another tech giant Circle Internet Financial Ltd. is leading talks with the U.S. regulators with a view to get a federal banking license.