Should You Launch a Bank? With Igor Tomych and Arthur Bedel

Igor Tomych, co-host of Fintech Garden and CEO of DashDevs, stepped into the guest chair this time, joining Arthur Bedel on Connecting the Dots in FinTech to unpack the wave of digital banks and neobanks launching right now, and why so many don’t survive.

Why digitizing a branch isn’t the same as building a digital bank: #

Igor’s core argument is cultural, not technical. Legacy banks built their processes around physical branches over centuries; putting that same logic into an app doesn’t make it a digital product. He points to Revolut’s rapid India rollout as an example of what a company built as a software business, not a bank with an app bolted on, can actually pull off.

The real difference between a neobank and a digital bank: #

Drawing on his own experience trying to open a UK business account, Igor explains why digital banks often feel like a black box (application, branch visit, unexplained decline), while neobanks tend to be upfront: here are the rules, here’s whether you qualify. Neither model is inherently better, but conflating them is where a lot of confusion starts.

Control over the business process, not technology, is what actually matters: #

Asked what he’d focus on if building a digital bank today, Igor skips the tech stack entirely and goes straight to who controls the business process. Hand your KYC and onboarding fully to a vendor, and you’re no longer running your own business; they are.

The ledger: #

The most boring, most essential 20% of the stack: Igor makes the case that the ledger is the single most underestimated component in digital banking, calling accounting “the first written language in the world.” Teams that treat it as an afterthought build technical debt they can’t easily undo.

Why listen: #

For anyone building, evaluating, or investing in a digital bank or neobank, this is a grounded, jargon-light breakdown of what actually separates the ones that scale from the ones that quietly fail, from someone who’s run the engineering side of it, not just watched from the outside.