Matthias Kröner, founder and CEO of German digital bank Fidor, has parted ways with the company he founded in 2009, following a blow up over future strategy with French parent BPCE Group.
Fidor was one of the first breed of new digital banks, establishing a reputation in European circles as a disruptive innovator, utilising a full range of social media, crowdfunding and P2P lending techniques and digital currency services to build its business.
In the summer of 2016, eager to buy some technological savviness for its own digital transformation, the 200-year-old BPCE agreed to pay around EUR140 million for Fidor.
But two years down the line, talk emerged of a culture clash between Fidor management and BPCE. Despite injecting a further EUR89 million into Fidor in 2018, BPCE appeared to be losing faith in its acquisition, abandoning plans to roll out Fidor in France and instead pumping all of its digital investments into its existing brands.
In a message to staff explaining his departure from the group, Kröner states: "This was a joint decision. Apparently, we have different views on the future strategy, which I regard not to be surprising at all and as a completely normal process in business life."