Talk with CEO “Edi” Wögerer on SRF 1 and TVSO
25 years at Bank Frick: Edi Wögerer looks back at his career in an interview with “Südostschweiz Standpunkte”. SRF broadcast the talk for the first time on 1 June.
Even Edi Wögerer himself had no idea what path his career would take. Studying wasn’t really his thing, until he started a business apprenticeship at a Liechtenstein bank and everything changed. Afterwards, he could have chosen the path of least resistance and moved into trading derivatives at a major bank. That would have been a dream job for lots of young bankers, with five screens and plenty of responsibility. But after the job interview at Bank Frick he got bit by the start-up bug, which is still as infectious as ever.
The beginnings in the family garage
At the start, the office was in the family garage. These garage days were reminiscent of the early years of famous bands – with only a few instruments, jam sessions and the courage to explore new ideas. Wögerer’s major career breakthroughs came in 2008 when he joined the Management Board as COO, and later his appointment as CEO in 2014. There has been a common thread through the 25 years: the openness to new technology. This was apparent during his work building up the payment services business. To date, Bank Frick is the only bank in Liechtenstein with acquiring licences from both Visa and Mastercard. He later went on to accumulate crypto know-how for the bank. With the blockchain as a business model, Wögerer is looking not only to create a new mainstay for the business, but also to fill a real gap in the market.
The think tank with a banking licence
“After deciding at a strategy meeting to hire a US blockchain expert, we called him up on the same day at ten in the evening. He was working for a crypto exchange in the USA and we poached him without hesitating”, explains Edi Wögerer. Not long afterwards, in 2018 Bank Frick was the first licensed bank in Europe to offer professional trading and custody services for leading cryptocurrencies as part of its regular banking range. Since then, it has been a trailblazer in the blockchain banking sector, offering for instance tokenised fund units and staking as a service, while at the same time focusing on what it does best: developing products at the cutting edge. This is a philosophy that Edi Wögerer has exemplified since his first day at Bank Frick.
The talk was broadcast by SRF 1 for the first time on 1 June, and will later be repeated on SRF-Info and TVSO.
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