Valentin Stalf – German Entrepreneur

As the founder and CEO of the NUMBER26 in Berlin, Valentin Stalf’s goal was to create the bank of the future. He has received a lot of attention and funding from investors, from Valar Ventures to Peter Thiel's fund. This might be due to the fact that the amount of customers had doubled in just five months, and it's all because the CEO wanted to make a bank like “Spotify or Uber”.

Stalf has taken the app-only bank, which started with 60,000 customers in the beginning of 2016, to around 160,000 consumers. Since, launching in Ireland, Italy, France, Greece, Spain, and Slovakia the startup has been extremely successful with no borders to constrain it.

While the company is still small when compared to other banks, it is “one of the fastest growing banks in Germany”. Known as a “neobank”, NUMBER26 is one of many banks that are popping up all over Europe right now. Stalf want to create a marketplace online for financial service and much more. In 2016, Stalf was named one of the 100 most influential fintech leaders by Hot Topics Magazine in partnership with 360Leaders.

The masculine name Valentin is a version of Valentine, which is from the Roman cognomen Valentinus that was taken from the name Valens that means “healthy, strong, and vigorous” in Latin. The name comes from Saint Valentine, who was a martyr from the 3rd-century. There are many people with the name, from Valentin Blass the German basketball player to Valentin Chmerkovskiy the Ukrainian American ballroom dancer.