The Letter from FINMA

In January we reached our first cashflow-neutral month. We also got a painful letter from FINMA telling us we had to stop being called nobank.

That pairing is a fairly accurate picture of building a company: one number finally says you’re moving forward, then an envelope tells you to rename the thing.

The rest of the month moved just as quickly. Raphael, our lead developer at NBK Labs, and the company parted ways, so I stepped into a much bigger frontend role. The CSS and React refresher I started at the beginning of January stopped being study material and became immediately useful.

My dad and I are starting a new chapter together. My family also managed a week in the Austrian Alps, half work and half holiday, entirely cold. And I finished dry January with my friend Tamas, mostly by drinking alcohol-free beer together and not making the exercise heroic.

February has three jobs: sell enough to stay in the green, keep the January habits without needing a named month for them, and find a new name that the regulator will let us keep.