PSP Angels VIKTORIA SOLTESZ Founder of PSP Angels
Q What motivated you to pursue a career in accountancy? I was always a very technical person and I loved maths from young age. I used to live in England whereby I was working for the biggest accounting software provider company at the time, SAGE, so they offered free training on accounting and I had the experience to talk to real company owners about their real problem with finances. So when I moved to Cyprus, 11 years ago, when the offshore culture was booming, setting up my own consultancy was an obvious path to enter. Q How was it making the transition from the shipping industry to the derivative trading industry? I had my private tax and finance consultancy parallel with my employment in shipping, so during this time, I was dealing with a lot of different clients from different industries. We are now specialized in payments and banking, which is not strictly related to trading - we are helping companies from every industry. Q You are now based in Malta, is there a lot of difference between the working practices of Malta and Cyprus?
GAME CHANGERS Issue #24
There are several differences in terms of business. “Malta smells like business” they say, and its true: everyone has the start-up mind and enthusiasm to make it work. There are several different meetups, business gatherings and opportunity for networking. Great ideas fly around in every conversation. Malta’s government is also very innovative and offer a lot of help to companies, which further helps businesses to thrive. Cyprus has a more traditional attitude towards business and innovation. Both islands have their own individual benefits of course. Q If the readers are not aware you are the founder of PSP Angels. Why did you start this? During my 11 years of private consultancy I have been dealing with several high risk clients and start-up companies, and the first issue which I had to resolve was always about the banks and the payments: “the funds got stuck in the payment service provider’s account, the bank closed the account out of the blue, banking fees are extremely high...” and so and so forth. Plus, in this industry everything is changing very quickly so the merchants were always having nightmares keeping up. We have created PSP Angels 2 years ago, to help these merchants save time and the nerve of dealing with all this. We screen the market to see what is available out there at the moment, by partnering up with different payment service providers, banks and acquirers.
