It was a sensational deal that the credit agency Schufa announced on May 10, 2022. The British fintech Yapily, according to the good news, is buying all Schufa shares in the Munich start-up Finapi. This was a milestone for the British financial start-up. Thanks to the takeover, “Europe’s leading open banking platform” was to be created – and that was also a reason for the credit agency Schufa to celebrate. After all, the Wiesbaden-based company, which has collected data from many millions of Germans, bought around 75 percent of the shares in the start-up in 2018 for relatively little money. Now the sales amount was in the high double-digit millions, an insider even speaks of 70 million euros that Schufa could earn through the sale.
But eight months later, there is not much left of the great joy. According to SZ information, the takeover should have been completed by Tuesday night at the latest. But that didn’t happen. The day after, the Schufa reported that Yapily was still missing “regulatory implementation conditions”. The British start-up declined to comment.
This is of course annoying for the Schufa, but it is not entirely unexpected. Insiders were already rumored last year that Yapily wanted to withdraw from the takeover. Among other things, there was speculation that the start-up might not have the money for the takeover because a round of financing did not materialize. But the financial regulator Bafin could also have expressed concerns about the takeover. A spokesman for Yapily declined to comment.
Schufa should insist on going through with the takeover
But what to do with a deal if one presumably no longer wants or can? Schufa has only two options: either it sells the start-up, with which it wants to work later, against the will of the buyer – or it looks for a new buyer. The credit agency has not officially commented on this. From financial market circles, however, it can be heard that Schufa will withdraw from the contract and go in search of new interested parties.
Whether she can again achieve a high two-digit million amount, is meanwhile open. At the time of the deal in May 2022, a high double-digit million amount was quite common as a purchase amount for a start-up. Since then, however, the investment climate has clouded over considerably. In the face of various crises and the end of loose monetary policy, many start-ups have had to put on the brakes, lay off employees and abandon announced expansions. Investors and thus potential buyers have also been keeping their money together much more since then. one Study by the management consultancy EY According to the report, investments in German start-ups collapsed by more than 40 percent in 2022. Start-ups were only able to collect 9.9 billion euros from their investors. In 2021 it was still more than 17 billion euros. In this environment, Schufa now has to find a new buyer for the 75 percent subsidiary.
Despite the current chaos, they do not want to keep the start-up themselves, which is not least due to the orientation of the credit agency under boss Tanja Birkholz. It wants to be aimed more at consumers than customers. However, Finapi is more active in the corporate sector, which is no longer part of the core business, it is officially said.
Unofficially, according to insiders, there is another reason to close the Finapi chapter. Because the start-up is considered burned by some in the Schufa since it made negative headlines in 2020 because of a pilot project. At that time, NDR, WDR and Southgerman newspaper first tests by Schufa and Finapi uncovered, which ran under the project name “Check Now”. The credit agency and the start-up tested whether people who did not get a mobile phone contract due to their poor creditworthiness would already have their account searched in order to get a contract after all. Data protectionists saw this extremely critically and feared that consumers would “bare” themselves. In a petition, 380,000 people later asked Schufa to keep their hands off German bank statements. The project eventually had to be dropped. Almost a year and a half later, the sale of Finapi was happily announced. Nobody thought at the time that it would stretch like this.