FinTelegram has brought a new report on the fantastic German fintech billionaire Michael Gastauer and his Black Banx. The story is actually really unbelievable, whereas the term “fantastic” in the FinTelegram story was probably meant rather ironic to cynical. In a press release, Black Banx claimed to have more than 20 million customers and more than a billion dollars in revenue. With virtually no website visitors.
Here are a few of the notable excerpts from the press release. Modesty is not a characteristic of Black Banx and Michael Gastauer.
Today, Black Banx Group announced having reached 20 million customers. With currently one million new accounts being opened per month, the Group is experiencing its fastest onboarding of new clients since the digital banking platform launched in 2015.
Blackbanx press release (link)
The Black Banx Reality
Black Banx says it has 20M clients, with one million new accounts being opened monthly. These are super-impressive numbers! Maybe we are not seeing something here. Or maybe Similarweb has made a mistake here. The latest Similarweb statistics (Dec 2022) say that between September to November 2022, only around 100,000 customers visited the website.
With 20 million accounts, Black Banx would be just behind Revolut, one of the world’s leading FinTechs, with around 25 million customers as of November 2022. However, Revolut had around 27 million visitors to its website between September and November 2022.
Black Banx would have more than twice as many customers as BaFin-regulated N26, which reported around 8 million customers. Similarweb says there were around 10 million people on the site between September and November 2022. That fits too!
