Building trust in fintech with Nicolas Kipp (Episode 52)
In this episode, I sit down with Nicolas Kipp, CEO and founder of Credibur.
Guests
Show notes
In this episode, I sit down with Nicolas Kipp, CEO and founder of Credibur.
Nicolas Kipp is a fintech entrepreneur, investor and financial services executive with extensive experience across lending, payments, risk management and embedded finance. He is currently Founder and CEO of Credibur, where he is building infrastructure to automate the management of structured credit transactions between alternative lenders and institutional capital providers.
Previously, Nicolas co founded Banxware, an embedded financial services provider enabling digital platforms to offer integrated financing products to merchants. Before that, he spent four years at Ratepay, ultimately serving as Chief Risk Officer, with responsibility for credit and fraud risk, KYC, compliance, data analytics and IT security.
He has also served on Bitkom’s board for Payments, FinTech and Digital Banking, advised the German Bundestag on artificial intelligence, and invests in and advises fintech, proptech and software companies across Europe and the US.
With him, we will be talking about the future of the fintech market in Europe, but also building trust in this market, and going from an executive to a founder role.
In this episode
Nicolas Kipp, founder and CEO of Credibur, explains how raising around 20 debt facilities for lenders showed him that asset-backed financing between fintechs and banks still runs on spreadsheets. Credibur tracks the loans and receivables behind these facilities in near real time to value portfolios and detect fraud. He describes selling trust in a small, relationship-driven market, raising a fast pre-seed from fintech-specialist investors, why angels help most early on, and how AI lets a tiny team run sales and operations.
Chapters
- 0:00Introduction and Credibur
- 1:26Discovering the problem
- 3:29The private credit market explained
- 6:07Selling trust, not software
- 10:02Building the product with customers
- 14:01Early traction
- 16:16The most interesting technical challenges
- 18:51Handling volume spikes
- 21:05Raising the pre-seed
- 25:32Why angel investors matter
- 27:29Trends: stablecoins, AI and tokenisation
- 37:47What AI changed
- 43:11Advice for founders
Key facts
Nicolas started in traditional banks, became chief of staff and chief risk officer at a large BNPL company in Berlin, and co-founded SME embedded-lending company Banxware.
Nicolas has raised and closed around 18–20 debt facilities, always rebuilding the same reporting in-house.
Credibur, started about 18 months before this recording, tracks the assets behind lenders' debt facilities in near real time, calculating portfolio values and detecting fraud and anomalies.
By Nicolas's estimate, 80–90% of this debt-facility reporting still runs on spreadsheets.
There are perhaps around 200 debt funds and banks active in this market in the EU and UK, concentrated in London and Luxembourg.
Credibur raised its pre-seed in two weeks in 2025, heavily oversubscribed, and began earning revenue beyond pilots in January.
Credibur has around ten customers and has passed 2 billion in assets under reporting.
Credibur performs in five to ten minutes calculations that legacy providers take three business days to deliver.
Credibur's investors include a large Japanese insurer and about 17 angels from the industry, pooled in an SPV.
At Credibur one person runs marketing, operations, HR and corporate functions with AI agents, and two people handle all sales.
In a closed, relationship-driven market, you sell trust by supporting the ecosystem rather than by cold outreach.
Early-stage founders should bring in angel investors from their industry; they often help more with introductions than institutional VCs.
Stablecoins add value where instant payments don't exist, but not in facilities already settled in euros with instant payments.
Founders shouldn't take VC by default; decide whether it fits your vision, team and product.
Questions and answers
What does Credibur do?
It monitors the pools of loans or invoices behind a lender's debt facility and values them continuously for the lender and its investors.
Why generate spreadsheets?
Analysts still want to run their own checks, so Credibur offers spreadsheet outputs alongside APIs and an MCP server.
What is Nicolas's advice to founders?
Go for it, ask for help openly, and don't take VC just because it's popular.