“It is our obligation as a bank to provide innovative services to our clients”, stated the Chief Executive Officer and Chairman of the Management Board of UniCredit Bulbank, Levon Hampartzoumian, during the opening of the Innovation Explorer forum. 

“We are trying to introduce a new way of doing business. For that reason some of our services, such as financing startups, providing risk capital, etc., are not the typical banking services”, added the banker. He is explicit on the point that traditional banking will not change its nature significantly and that banks will not disappear, but change the way they provide services.  Levon Hampartzoumian believes that the future of banking is synergy between the new technologies and the traditional banking.

“We, at UniCredit Bulbank, believe that innovations are not a goal, but an instrument to provide out clients with accessible quality services 24 hours a day, 7 days a week,” explained the banker. 

He is explicit that innovations will not replace the human factor in services.
“An excellent example of this can be the Amazon bookstores. 20 years ago Amazon “killed” the traditional bookstore as it started to offer everything on-line.  At the moment Amazon is opening new bookstores where you can touch the books and talk to people.   At the same time, everything in these bookstores can be ordered on-line, too.“

Filip Genov, First Vice President and Special Projects Senior Manager at UniCredit Bulbank, shared a similar opinion.

UniCredit's guidelines for a successful business model for startups Especially for his participation as a lecturer at Innovation

Explorer, Filip Genov prepared practical advice for a successful business model for the startups. Filip Genov is convinced that for the good implementation of a new business idea a combination of sources of financing should be used.

As an example, he mentioned business accelerators and incubators, investment instruments in partnership with banks and guarantee funds.  It is a similar combination of products and solutions for startups that UniCredit Bulbank is offering, and that is why the bank is a partner of every other of the fastest growing companies on the market in Bulgaria. 

Apart from this, in order for a startup to be successful it needs clear business goals.  Another characteristic feature of the successful companies, according to him, is the maintaining of a clear management model and the focus on the good performance of the company. 

According to information provided by Filip Genov’s team, 464 companies in Bulgaria have over 250% annual increase of sales and operating profit for the last 3 years. UniCredit Bulbank is a partner of 47% of them. 

“Usually sources of innovations for Bulgarian companies are adaptations of various novelties from global companies (33%).  Others rely on partnerships with companies with know-how in various processes (28%).  The rest rely on clients’ proposals (25%) or analysis of large data bases (5%).  Only 9% of Bulgarian companies do internal research and innovations development”, Filip Genov said.

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Additional media information:

Victoria Blajeva, tel +359 (0) 2 9264 993, wjlj/ebwjepwbAvojdsfejuhspvq/ch

Beatris Nikolova, tel +359 (0) 2 9232 528, cfbusjt/ojlpmpwbAvojdsfejuhspvq/ch