Podcast 170: Should You Launch a Bank? With Igor Tomych and Arthur Bedel

DashDevs CEO Igor Tomych sat down with Arthur Bedel, Advisor for Connecting the Dots in payments and founder of Monyz, to talk through why every SPV, enterprise, and startup seems to be launching a digital bank right now — and why so many collapse fast.

The cultural gap between a digitized branch and a real digital bank

Igor argues the failures aren’t mainly technical. Legacy banks built their culture around physical branches and silos over centuries; simply putting that same product logic into a phone doesn’t make it a digital bank. The companies pulling off insane valuations, in his view, succeed because at their core they’re software companies that happen to operate in financial services, not banks that bolted on an app.

That framing is the difference between shipping a mobile front end and actually knowing how to build a digital bank as a product system.

Neobank vs. digital bank: a distinction most people get wrong

Igor draws a sharp line using his own experience opening a UK business account: a digital bank often hides its decision-making in a black box — application, branch visit, decline, with no visibility into why. A neobank, by contrast, is upfront about its rules from the start. Both models can work, but they solve different problems for different markets.

If you’re choosing a go-to-market path, that distinction also shapes how to start a neobank without copying a branch culture into an app shell.

The one thing that decides whether a digital bank scales

Asked what matters most today, Igor doesn’t point to technology. He points to control over the business process. Outsource your KYC and onboarding entirely to a vendor, and you’ve effectively handed them your business — they own the customer data and the relationship, and you become their hostage on pricing.

Why the ledger is the most underestimated part of the stack

Igor calls out the ledger as roughly 20% of a digital bank’s functionality and the piece most founders dismiss as “boring.” His view: accounting is literally humanity’s oldest form of written language, and it’s still the foundation everything else sits on. Teams that skip investing in it early pay for it later.

That is why what a ledger is in banking and fintech — and how you design ledger architecture for multi-product banks — should sit on the roadmap before the marketing site does.

“Buy now, build later”: DashDevs’ answer to build vs. buy

Igor pushes back on treating build-versus-buy as a binary choice. His framing — buy a ready-made product to move fast now, and build on top of it once you understand your actual needs — is the thinking behind DashDevs’ own “Buy Now, Build Later” approach, including platforms like Fintech Core.