Post by Angelique Schouten

Normal doesn’t change an industry. We built the first core banking platform in the cloud - in the world… Every single process, every customer journey, every piece of code was redesigned; in a time when Google didn’t even have a public cloud yet. Only Microsoft and Amazon Web Services (AWS) existed. Not a single bank had its full production suite running fully cloud-native. That was the context of what we set out to do. Last week, we had a former colleague update, I was reminded again of what made our journey at Ohpen so unique. It wasn’t just the product. It wasn’t just the vision. It wasn’t just the opportunity. * It was the team that made it unusual. * It was the vision that made us commit. * It was the opportunity that made us driven. But it was never a straight line. There were fights. There was crying. There were mistakes (lots). And there were also breakthroughs, big wins, and unforgettable celebrations like this one in Mallorca, when Lydia van de Voort, . Chris . Zadeh, Matthijs Aler ☁︎, Joost Reijnen, and I were running Ohpen and celebrating 10 years of Ohpen with the whole team and our partners (throwback to 2019). It was a journey of extremes. Because if you want to break through barriers, it cannot be done with “normal.” One extreme I’ll never forget: after nine months of negotiations with the regulator, just before go-live with our biggest customer - a huge asset manager migrating their entire retail book to us - we still didn’t have approval. To stay safe, we prepared a backup plan that meant investing hundreds of thousands into a physical compute data center location - which was a huge bet for a cloud-native start-up. Then, at the very last moment, the approval came through- and we became the first compliant, cloud-native core banking platform to go live. Looking back, I wouldn’t trade those extremes; the rejections, the resilience, the laughter... for anything. Thank you to everyone who was part of that ride. I’m grateful to still have the opportunity to work/partner with some of our former colleagues at 10x.Team like my co-founder & tech muscle man Anton Zhelyazkov, the best optimistic medicine marketeer you can find Carla Martinez Sagastume, super-start CISO Raymond Morsman, Chi Wing Lam, Tommy Thomassen, Bastiaan de Boer, Erik van de Velde, Wietse de Windt and Claire de Rouville (AmsterdamTechWeek) and so many more. To all the founders and builders out there: Q: What’s the most extreme moment you’ve experienced in your journey? We will be sharing some of our more recent 'moments' soon ;-) #throwback #startup #scaleup #10x #AI

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