Konstantin
Werhahn
For over a decade I have been building inside German and European financial infrastructure: payments, brokerage, pioneering regulated Bitcoin trading, and now natively-digital capital markets.
Successful digital transformation is never a 1:1 conversion. It is a new way of using digital-first thinking to achieve a better outcome.
The pattern keeps repeating: businesses extend the status quo into a new technological epoch, and in the long run it fails. New epochs reset the playing field. Treating the new technology as a way to keep existing processes alive turns it into a second-class citizen, and second-class citizens don't carry transformations.
The real drag is rarely the new technology. It is the plumbing built over decades around the old one.
This is what drew me into financial services. The analog architecture goes back centuries in some cases, and as a digital native I never found the technological state or the UX of financial services satisfying. The gap between what the technology could be and what customers actually got was too wide to ignore.
- 2025-nowDigital Marks GmbHCo-FounderBuilding the infrastructure for capital markets' shift from electronic to natively digital. One global digital layer where value moves directly between assets, 24/7, without intermediaries or borders.
- Vertically integrated digital public capital market
- One venue in place of the fragmented electronic-trading stack
- 2019-2025SynolonPartnerInnovation work that does not fit inside an existing org chart. Six years on transformations that require rebuilding, not relabelling.
- 2017-2019Bitwala GmbHChief Product OfficerMerged traditional banking infrastructure with crypto rails inside a regulated German banking environment. The result was the world's first fully regulated bank account to buy and sell cryptocurrencies.
- Pioneered regulated Bitcoin trading in Germany: among the first to win BaFin permission, built with solarisBank
- A trading engine spanning a traditional core-banking system and open public blockchains
- Instant liquidity across both worlds
- Grew the product organisation to ~45 people
- 2016-2017flatexDEGIRO SE (f.k.a. FinTech Group AG)Head Product DevelopmentLed the post-merger product transformation: XCOM, biw Bank, flatex and viTrade consolidated into FinTech Group AG and FinTech Group Bank AG.
- Four businesses merged into two regulated entities
- ~450 people across the tech and banking sides
- 2013-2016viacash (f.k.a. Barzahlen)Head of Product ManagementBuilt a real-time cash-payment infrastructure from the ground up. A high-performance B2B platform connecting cash-on-cashier rails into German retail.
- Real-time cash-payment rails built from scratch
- B2B platform reaching across German retail