Finoa is a German-based institutional platform for digital assets. Servicing institutional investors for custody and staking services, Finoa is regulated and supervised by BaFin, the German financial regulator. This has made Finoa a big draw for global crypto investors looking for a fully qualified custodian that offers a comprehensive suite of digital asset services.
In addition, Finoa offers all of its staking service offerings in-house — setting it apart from other custodians that tend to use third parties for their staking offering. Thanks to this structure, Finoa is able to onboard new clients quickly and tailor node infrastructure offerings to their specific needs.
Finoa has also been an attractive offering for venture capital firms and crypto foundations, partnering with them to provide “pre-token” support for their projects at both the custody and validator layer. Recent clients include the foundations for Saga, Celestia, Mina and Near respectively.
Founded in Berlin in 2018, Finoa is licensed under the German Banking Act (KWG) and overseen by BaFin.
The Challenge
It was taking us a lot of time to go into block explorers and manually input transactions into our crypto accounting sub-ledger due to blockchain data being non-standardized across respective chains. So it was very time consuming and inefficient to understand on-chain movements and work backwards to get to the correct end of month wallet balances.
William Lindsay – Head of Finance
As a custodian, Finoa supports multiple blockchains that each use their own blockchain standard. The challenge they encountered was in trying to find a single platform that could track activity across multiple chains for reporting purposes.
A particular problem was accurate tracking of staking data. As blockchains take different approaches to staking activity and their associated transactions, they struggled to find a one-size-fits all approach to gathering accurate transaction data.
As a stop-gap solution, Finoa had a member of their team dedicate five days a month to reconciling all of their activity manually using block explorers and multiple data sets. As they keep a lean finance team of three people, this placed an undue burden on their operations.
They pointed out that as Finoa has continued to grow over the last 12-18 months, there has been an increase in transaction volumes. The five-day process for a member of their team, would now likely be six or seven days if it wasn’t for TRES (more on this later).
As part of their fiduciary duties to financial regulators in Germany, Finoa’s accounting reports require specific information — so an accounting-led solution was not in their best interests. Instead, Finoa sought a platform that could accurately aggregate data that their finance team could use to lighten their operational loads for creating their financial end-of-month reports.
What this demonstrates is that as crypto firms such as Finoa grow and their operations begin to scale, using a manual approach carries a heavy operational cost, as well as an opportunity cost in a very fast-moving market.
The Solution
We came to the decision that a data aggregator is more attractive to us because we can automate it on our side, get the data in to populate all of our own sophisticated and customised accounting reports, and we can then seamlessly upload that into our accounting software system.
During their market research for solutions, the team at Finoa came across TRES Finance. What they found attractive was TRES Finance’s data-first approach to this problem. Rather than reconciling everything into a finalised financial report, TRES provides a comprehensive data-led solution that covers multiple blockchains and the particular ins and outs of staking activity across chains.
Now with TRES at their disposal, the finance team managed to cut down this five-day requirement to just one day a month — representing an 400% improvement in the team’s efficiency. This has freed up a member of the team for an additional four days in the month, representing a huge gain in operational capacity. It has also dramatically decreased the chances of human error, as manual inputs are abstracted away. Having both transaction and month-end balance reports, means that any errors in the ledger can quickly be identified and resolved.
The data provided by TRES has made it far easier for Finoa to answer queries from its accountants on where transactions have come from, especially when it comes to staking. One example the team highlighted was on the Cosmos-based blockchains. When commissions are claimed, the network executes a claim for staking rewards at the same time. Although this should have resulted in an added transaction on the subledger, it did not clearly appear on block explorers. This was leading to operational headaches for the team on end-of-month balance reports as they were showing discrepancies in additional, unexplained tokens.
We were like, how can that possibly be?” We then looked at the TRES data export and saw where all these additional tokens were coming from. So TRES really helped to massively speed up our processes to figure out what’s actually going on under the hood.
Finoa also praised TRES Finance’s customer support for our quick response time.
The customer support is really good, very proactive. We’ve got a dedicated slack channel and I think that’s great for just general comms. The Tres team always helps us out to try and get to the answer pretty quickly, which is great. So yeah, I think overall customer support, I would also say it’s a big upside for us.
Interested in TRES?
