Into Aan the de top Future Already more than ten years ago, Lonneke Makhija, resigned from her job at a well-known Dutch Bank, after being a banker her whole working career. But she did not resign for a bad reason: she had a vision and she, together with her business partner, wanted to bring this vision into reality. This is where Finaps originated. The company started from an idea from two individuals but has since developed into a business with over fifty employees! And they are not thinking about slowing down, in a few years this could be double the size. But what was their vision 12 years ago? And how does it align with their current vision? SCOPE conversates about the developments Finaps have made since, together with founder and managing partner Lonneke Makhija. TEXT Lars Geerlings DESIGN Caitlin Riesewijk
The founding of Finaps “By chance, I transferred to the IT side of banking”, says Lonneke during our conversation. Hence, chance has led to the start of a successful Dutch company. This Dutch company is called Finaps, which focuses on software development. Their name shows signs of their origin: Financial applications. Although many years, with significant additions and changes to the company, have passed since, the core of Finaps remains finance, but even more: applications. The first question in our conversation is
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about what Finaps does, the first thing that sprouts to Lonneke’s mind: “We are a software company”. Hence, the “APS” part is certainly still there! But what about Finance? Lonneke started the company with a vast amount of knowledge about banking and finance, therefore it seemed natural to take that as a starting point. Her business partner had experience with the low-code platform Mendix, another Dutch company that had only started a
few years earlier by then. So it seemed only natural to merge the knowledge and develop financial applications based on Mendix. Currently, the company has expanded to various industries such as healthcare, government and other service industries, Lonneke tells me. But they have also expanded to other techniques besides Mendix. But is their core still there? And how did Finaps grow to what they are today? But also, what do Lonneke her goals entail for Finaps and herself?
