Michael Gastauer has been called many things throughout his career in the booming fintech industry—fintech mogul, master innovator, and banker extraordinaire. Most recently, he has been described as Germany’s youngest self-made billionaire. The Hurun Global Rich List found that 67% of the global billionaires are self-made, with numbers continuing to rise. Gastauer’s success is undeniable.
Gastauer’s Journey to Self-Made Billionaire Status
The concept of self-made has been around since time immemorial but has only been discussed openly in recent years ever since reality star-turned-beauty mogul Kylie Jenner was named the youngest self-made billionaire at 21 years old by Forbes in 2019. Before her, Mark Zuckerberg held the record after reaching billionaire status at 23, thanks to Facebook. Jenner’s recognition was mired in controversy since many people questioned how she could be labeled as “self-made” when she had a wealthy and famous family to back her up. Forbes, of course, justified its decision to give the title to Jenner by backing it up with the results of a scoring system that looked into various considerations.
Unlike Jenner, who leveraged her fame to her advantage, and Zuckerberg, who invented the largest social networking site, Gastauer innovated what has been around for thousands of years and disrupted the world of banking by introducing a financial solution like no other. Suffice to say, Gastauer did not make the first digital bank. He joined the competition 20 years after the first website for banking services was launched by Stanford Credit Union in 1994. However, his entry into the industry in 2015 quickly made waves because of his ambitious plan to develop a globally accessible online financial institution. While other fintech brands opted for a small, reasonable, and very manageable inaugural year, Gastauer’s digital bank started strong by making its services accessible to 180 countries and territories from the get-go.
In its first year, Black Banx, then called WB21, was already a global hit despite only having around 200,000 customers. Its international status may have helped it swiftly penetrate numerous markets, with the digital bank reporting 10.5 million customers five years after its launch. Even more impressive is how Black Banx achieved a user base of 40 million individual and business account holders by February 2024. Such rapid growth signifies Black Banx’s expansive appeal amid the ballooning volume of fintech companies sprouting up and very eagerly working to get a slice of the market.
Alongside the growth in the digital bank’s clientele is Michael Gastauer’s aggressive efforts to carry out expansions and implement effective customer acquisition strategies. For the past ten years, Black Banx has set up offices in key markets, including the United Kingdom, Canada, Brazil, Russia, South Africa, the Middle East, China, Hong Kong, Japan, India, and Singapore. The company has also updated its platform to include more advanced features like crypto trading. The continuous efforts by Gastauer and his team to stay ahead are just some of the reasons why Black Banx is very successful and dominates the fintech space.
Gastauer’s Success by the Numbers
Looking at the milestones set by Black Banx in a span of ten years gives a clear picture of how success did not happen to the brand overnight. After Gastauer set up his single-client private asset management firm Gastauer Family Office in 2008, he allotted the next six years to crafting and perfecting his digital bank offering. By the time Black Banx launched in 2015, Gastauer had high hopes for a successful start, only to be dismayed by the lukewarm response of the market that year. However, having only 200,000 customers in its launch year did not stop Gastauer from picking himself up and refocusing on his goals and the very reason why he started his digital banking journey in the first place.
In 2016, determined to give his platform a distinction from its contemporaries, Gastauer introduced cryptocurrency as a deposit method on its platform even though many financial institutions were still hesitant to fully embrace digital assets at the time. This almost immediately paid off since Black Banx saw its customer base jump to 1 million by the end of the year. In the year that followed, the bank’s clients soared to 3 million, and then to 5 million and 8 million in 2018 and 2019, respectively. At the halfway mark of its journey so far, Black Banx reported a record-breaking 10.5 million number of clients after building its China-based office in 2020.
During the pandemic when everything stood still and several businesses struggled to make ends meet, Black Banx continued its streak by expanding the community to 12 million customers in 2021 and doubling that figure in just two years. By the end of last year, Gastauer’s brainchild reported having 39 million customers across the globe, after onboarding 6.1 million new clients in the fourth quarter alone. The significant growth in its clientele also translated to an impressive $2.3 billion in annual revenue and $289 million pre-tax profit, making Black Banx the fastest-growing fintech brand in the past five years and the dominant brand to beat throughout the global fintech ecosystem.
Throughout Black Banx’s journey to success, Gastauer has been the sole visionary leader to take the helm. His hard work paid off since he is now considered one of the wealthiest people in his home country, Germany, after generating a net worth of $11.4 billion, thanks mainly to Black Banx. Going by the Cambridge Dictionary’s definition of self-made as someone who becomes rich and successful as a result of hard work and not because of inherited family money, it’s undeniable that Gastauer deserves the title. Not only has he made a name for himself and established an empire, but he has also dominated the fintech space through and through.
