From Bank Innovation to B2B SaaS: Building Fintech with an Insider’s Edge

Most fintech founders come from either big tech or startups. But in a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Julio Martinez shared how his experience running innovation at Banco Sabadell gave him a unique perspective on building financial technology – one that would prove crucial to finding product-market fit in the competitive FP&A space.

The Innovation Laboratory

At Banco Sabadell, Julio led “inno cells,” which he describes as “essentially a venture builder and an investment fund for strategic purposes.” His role involved two key activities: “We launched four fintech products to market and many others that didn’t work. And we also conducted venture capital investments across the UK, Israel, other places in Europe, and actually the US as well.”

This dual role – building products while also evaluating startups – provided crucial insights into what works and what doesn’t in fintech innovation. More importantly, it taught him the value of failing fast and learning from unsuccessful launches.

From Corporate Innovation to Startup

The transition from corporate innovation to founding a startup wasn’t immediate. Julio’s journey actually began earlier, with a pivotal experience in microfinance. In 2006, inspired by Muhammad Yunus winning the Nobel Prize, he took a sabbatical to work with microfinance institutions in India. This experience, combined with his later work in banking innovation, shaped his understanding of how financial systems could be transformed.

When he finally decided to start his own company, Julio brought two key insights from his banking innovation experience:

1. The importance of thorough validation before building
2. The value of having deep domain expertise

The Power of Domain Expertise

This background proved invaluable when identifying their market opportunity. “Both my Co-Founder George and I have been in finance for many years,” Julio explains. “We both then moved into technology. He was CFO and COO in amazing companies, unicorn companies, venture back, companies, super fast growing, super exposed to tech.”

This combination of finance and technology experience helped them spot an opportunity others had missed. They saw that finance teams were spending “60, 70, 80% in some cases of their time, in manual tasks, cleaning data and scrambling through data and fighting with spreadsheets.”

Building with Conviction

Their domain expertise also gave them confidence to launch during COVID, when “the world was melting” and “VC’s running headless trying to help for portfolio companies.” As Julio explains: “We knew the pain is very real. We knew we had an unfair advantage to solve it. So it was full determination to go and do it.”

This conviction came from understanding not just the problem, but why previous solutions had failed. “The category exists for a long time,” Julio notes. “Financial planning and analysis exists in hyperion in the eighties.” But their experience helped them see why existing solutions weren’t meeting mid-market needs.

From Validation to Product-Market Fit

The path to product-market fit wasn’t immediate. Even with their background, they conducted over 100 customer interviews. Julio approached this with the same rigor he’d learned in banking innovation: “I’m very rigorous about going by the book and trying to doing customer research as it’s supposed to be done.”

This methodical approach paid off. Their initial growth exceeded “ten times year” before settling into “more the three times year growth” as they scaled. But perhaps more importantly, it gave them confidence in their expansion plans beyond pure FP&A.

The Future Vision

Today, they’re becoming “the operational planning system for companies in the mid market.” This expanded vision comes from understanding how mid-market companies actually operate: “These companies in the mid market are sophisticated. Usually they have a good tech stack in terms of ERP, CRM, data warehouse, bi solution, has, the hiring solution as well, ATS.”

For founders building fintech products, Julio’s journey offers a crucial lesson: while you don’t need banking experience to build successful financial technology, you do need deep understanding of your specific problem space. The key is combining domain expertise with rigorous validation – something he learned firsthand at the intersection of banking innovation and venture capital.