At quirion, people play the leading role, not machines. One of our players: Volker Dansauer, the head of our back office in Berlin.
He was one of the first, back then, in 2014. Quirin Privatbank had launched quirion only a few months earlier, as a pioneer in the market for robo-advisors in Germany. Volker Dansauer was the third colleague in what was initially a small team. "When I moved to Berlin, quirion wasn't yet an independent company, but a kind of digital arm of the bank," the Mannheim native recounts. "At the start I was involved in all sorts of things – in regulatory matters, in customer service, in marketing." Dansauer is proud of that today. And he's entitled to be, after all, he helped build quirion up. There was a founder's spirit in the air. A hands-on mentality was called for. "You can't be shy about taking on topics you've never had anything to do with before."
A team called Bob
Dansauer was, of course, thoroughly familiar with banking and investment topics. The now 45-year-old had previously gathered around 20 years of experience at large banks, working through several roles along the way, including in investment advisory and lending. At quirion, the trained bank clerk is now head of the back office in Berlin, a team of four colleagues that internally is simply called Bob. Bob is responsible for processes that run behind the scenes but without which not much would run at all: whether it's recording birth certificates for children's accounts or handling estates, correcting customer data or dealing with regulatory questions.
What's it like to provide important services yet be noticed only a little? "The more inconspicuously we work, the better," Dansauer notes. "That's always the goal in customer service."
The back office team makes it its business, for example, to clear many small hurdles out of the way. Take the tax identification number, which is needed when opening an account and where errors easily creep in. Help is occasionally needed with the reference account, too: "Some new customers give an instant-access savings account or a savings account, but a reference account must always have a payment function, like a current account." Is someone allowed to open a children's account? For questions like these and any misunderstandings, the team is on hand as well. "Only legal guardians may do that, so not the grandpa, for instance." The information is then passed on to customers via customer service or directly by email.
A human eye for individual details
Besides routine questions, regulatory details need to be clarified time and again. It's precisely then that Dansauer is in his element. Things can get tricky, for example, when a customer is affected by the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act. "If a customer was born in the USA and has dual citizenship, their worldwide income is subject to tax in the USA." Not every customer who is affected knows this. Special cases like these demand not only know-how but also engaging with the customer's individual situation. That doesn't always fit into pre-cut templates. "That's why genuine customer service can't be handled at the push of a button and fully automatically."
By now quirion has more than 30 employees and looks after over 50,000 clients. Many tasks the bank clerk had to take care of on top of everything else at the beginning are now handled by specialized teams. "But there's still a lot of pioneering spirit here and very short decision-making paths, which I really appreciate," says Dansauer. What he appreciates most of all, though, is that he can fully identify with the company's services. As quirion employee number 3 and quirion client number 257: "Our product and investment concept convinced me right from the start."
