FD: “Blanco CFO Bernadette Wijnings’ former boss, impressed by Blanco’s team and disruptive product, decides to invest in Blanco.”
People with strong entrepreneurial spirits, like Bernadette Wijnings and her first boss Jan Maurits Faber, prefer to start their own businesses than choose the certainty of a corporate job. Instead of a secure career performing the same respectable but monotonous tasks until retirement, they would rather set up their own ventures in pursuit of visions and ideas that improve the world.
Faber started his career at Arthur D. Little in 2002, which went bankrupt. He continued to join Quintel Strategy Consulting, where Faber and Wijnings met as corporate consultants before parting ways two years later when Faber quit to start his company SuperSaas. Despite the respect and financial reward that his job at Quintel provided, Faber often spent his spare time experimenting with and creating innovative reservation system prototypes. These efforts eventually manifested as SuperSaas, a successful company with a turnover of over €1 million that Faber took the risk to build from scratch alone.
Wijnings exhibited entrepreneurial tendencies from the age of eighteen, regularly penning business ideas in booklets, so no one was surprised when she started building her first company while working part-time. Now Wijnings is co-founder and CFO of fintech start-up Blanco Services, which develops innovative technology and digital platforms for asset managers.
Although they met as boss and subordinate at Quintel, Faber and Wijnings entered a collaboration when they realized that their entrepreneurial spirits and visions aligned. At the time, their opinions were united over how difficult it was for a start-up to bring foreign programmers to the Netherlands due to expensive resident permits for employees. Impressed with the Blanco team and the disruptive technology they provide to the traditional world and processes of financial institutions, Faber is now an investor in Blanco. In this manner, the collaboration and relationship between these two entrepreneurs continues to stimulate innovation and improve the world.
Read the full FD article here (in Dutch).
