In this episode of Cards Against Complexity, Jan speaks with Sergey Petrov, co-founder of Finom, a digital financial platform built to simplify banking, invoicing, and expense management for small businesses and freelancers. Sergey shares his journey from traditional banking to an attempt at launching a bakery in Amsterdam, and how that experience shaped his vision for making financial services truly work for entrepreneurs.

Key Takeaways:

• Entrepreneurship Requires Full Commitment:
Sergey shares how trying to open a bakery while working full-time made one thing clear: running a business doesn’t work as a side project. That realization led him to go all-in on Finom—building a fintech platform designed to eliminate the complexity and admin burden that hold small businesses back.

• Financial Services Are Still Not Built for SMEs:
Based on his own frustrations as an entrepreneur, Sergey explains how Finom addresses the structural gaps left by traditional banks—offering fast onboarding, seamless payments, and intuitive tools tailored for  entrepreneurs. In Germany, for example, Finom enables businesses to open an account in under an hour.

• To Build Better Experiences, Control Your Infrastructure:
One of Sergey’s biggest lessons: relying on third-party providers often limits customer experience. From early on, Finom prioritized obtaining its own licenses and building its own infrastructure across multiple markets to ensure full control over service quality and scalability.

This episode is a must-listen for anyone building financial services products for SMEs—or anyone curious about the real, day-to-day complexity of entrepreneurship in the fintech space.