Five questions for the director

A short piece about Fred van 't Hoff; founder of SCOPE FinTech Solutions in 1987. He has been asked a number of questions which he has answered.

Please tell us a bit about yourself, both at work and leisure.

Fred van ‘t Hoff, born in 1955, married for 26 years to a lovely wife, proud father of a young man of 24 and a lovely woman of 23. We live in multiple areas in Europe and in British Columbia.

Funny enough everything I did when I was young is coming back in my life now, like saltwater fishing, walking in the dunes, beach life, and building plastic scale models in the winter. All simple things are good as far as I am concerned.

I started working in ICT in 1977. I worked for Burroughs (now known as part of Unisys) in the Netherlands in various sales positions. In 1987 I started my own software company in what we now call CRM. The name of this company is SCOPE marketing technology. Nowadays CRM has become a commodity and that is not what we prefer to sell. In 2016 we started a new product line with a MiFID II compliant KYC product.

Which product or service do you offer, and who are your competitors?

In 1987 we started to develop a (MS-DOS) CRM system for PC networks. In 1996 this was followed by a Windows version based upon MS Access, ODBC, and a relational database. We were a Dutch market leader in CRM from 1995 – 2005. The market went from a Blue Ocean to a Red Ocean. We did not win this, and we are probably the last original Dutch CRM supplier. We lasted 35 years in this area, and we still retain big customers using our SCOPE CRM systems.

The main products we work on now are RegTech products like AML and MiFIDII compliant KYC Cloud based solutions.

How did you get the business idea and take it from launch to the first customers?

“Computers, do we have to work with computers; I thought we had to sell computers?”  This was what one of my colleagues said when he heard he had to work with a computer system. I was surprised that in 1982 the general sales department was not working with software. I saw lots of possibilities like direct mail, forecasting, cold calling etc. So, I started my own business in my home. This was the start of an interesting journey after 10 years in Burroughs/Unisys.

In 2016 we were making a profit, but we had no big projects. So, we decided to build a new product “MiFIDII Know Your Customer” from scratch in the Microsoft Azure cloud. The idea came one of our CRM customers in asset management. This was a big project. I think our SCOPE KYC product is probably the best product we ever built.

A German software supplier wanted a “KYC” system for a customer but what they really needed was AML. So, we started to develop that product. After a few months we had a working solution and started to sell the product. This time we are successful. Quite soon it was obvious that the best strategy was to work with software partners with a vertical solution. We have about 5 partners that built our AML product in their software solution and this number is rising quick.

Which key trends and opportunities should we be watching in (European) finance?

The customer gets more and more access to ICT and knowledge-based applications like Robo investors. The average customer will have better ICT functionality than the average supplier. This is new. Big tech like Google, Apple and Amazon are empowering this.

Big tech will also start and will continue to offer additional financial products like (Apple) pay. With the interest at current rates the mortgage business will be crowd funding based. Robots will enter the marketplace.

If people want their privacy back this might change, because these Big Tech financial tools to come at a cost of personal privacy.

What is on your bookshelf/ reading list?

I read a lot of Science fiction books. Especially Jack Vance and Isaac Asimov. Also, Japanese books about history and famous samurai like Musashi are on the bookshelf. I also have a lot of spiritual books about the afterlife and philosophical books. My last book is the biography of Johan Cruijff by Auke Kok.