Pigtie founders Ludwig Pöllmann, Christian Maksymiw and Maximilian Klinke.
© Pigtie

Pigtie: “Making Financial Freedom Accessible to Everyone”

There are many offers now available for personal wealth management – but according to Pigtie, most of them rely on automation and don’t help their users understand the processes. The Munich fintech startup wants to change that and not only help its customers with investing, but also provide financial education. The startup tells us more about how that works in our interview.

Munich Startup: What does your startup do? What problem are you solving?

Pigtie: Pigtie empowers people to start investing and take finances into their own hands. 80 percent of people between 18 and 32 years of age in Germany say that investing is important. But only 20 percent are actually involved in investing. With the current pension system, the younger generations in Germany are also facing the threat of poverty in old age. We’re fighting this problem with Pigtie by empowering more people to invest and by making financial freedom accessible to everyone.

Munich Startup: But that’s nothing out of the box!

Pigtie: There are already a lot of startups in fintech that are active in the personal finance sector. Most of them offer solutions that are based purely on automation. In this situation, the users don’t understand what’s going on in the background, which basically means they’re engaging in ‘blind’ financial planning. A few players in the market rely on financial education. But in this case, users don’t end up actually doing anything and are left on their own when it comes to operational activities in personal financial planning. Pigtie, in contrast, takes a holistic approach. We’re the point of access, a concrete savings tool and a knowledge platform for personal financial planning all in one. Pigtie is the helping hand in the gigantic financial jungle and supports its users in every step involved in personal financial planning!

“We were in need of a simple and holistic solution for our personal finances”

Munich Startup: What is your founding story?

Pigtie: We started the project in 2019 and then officially founded our company in October 2020. What motivated us to build a holistic solution for personal financial planning is basically pretty straightforward: We noticed that we all had excellent knowledge of different subjects (physics, electrical engineering & business administration) and were ready to change the world. But we were in need of a simple and holistic solution for our personal finances, and even extensive market research failed to provide any results. So we decided to teach ourselves everything. Chris (co-founder & CTO) even completed vocational training as a financial investment broker with the Chamber of Industry and Commerce (IHK). With our university knowledge combined with newly acquired financial knowledge, we then created Pigtie.

Munich Startup: What have been your biggest challenges so far?

Pigtie: Our biggest challenge as a B2C fintech startup is still finding the right product-market fit. That’s the only way we can empower as many people as possible to take their personal financial planning into their own hands.

Munich Startup: How is business going?

Pigtie: It couldn’t be better at the moment. We celebrated the official launch of our app last year. Since then, we’ve seen downloads in the four-figure range. We’re constantly working on the further development of our app in collaboration with our users, regularly release new app features and are improving existing processes. We work with Pigtie every day to get even more young people excited about financial planning! Our team also grew from two to five employees last year and will continue to grow this year.

Pigtie has worked with many Munich accelerators

Munich Startup: How have you experienced Munich as a startup location so far?

Pigtie: The Munich startup ecosystem has been extremely helpful for us so far. We’ve been able to work in close collaboration with various accelerators in recent years, such as the LMU EC, the Strascheg Center for Entrepreneurship, the Digital Product School, Xpreneurs and many others. Thanks to all of these programs, we’ve made major progress on both the product and business side of things.

Munich Startup: Risk or security?

Pigtie: Like we said in our answer to the first question: We want to make financial freedom accessible to everyone. And to us, financial freedom means living a good life without any kind of financial worries. Which is why we would definitely choose security.