Fair Banking

With Thomas Vles, founder & CEO of GoDutch.

In 2024, Thomas Vles observed the record profits of the three major banks in the Netherlands: ABN AMRO, Rabobank, and ING. Their combined profits exceeded €15 billion in 2023—more than ASML, Airbus, and Heineken, three leading companies based in the Netherlands, combined. This frustrated him. Traditional banks prioritized profits over people, offering low interest rates, poor customer experiences, and minimal investment in climate and social impact. At that moment, Thomas decided to change this by creating a banking app built on transparency and fairness.

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Thomas’s first venture was in a completely different industry, and his tendency to jump from one field to another reflects his personality well. At university, he initially studied physics and astrophysics before earning two master's degrees in psychology, a subject he is passionate about. “I think every high school should teach psychology. It adds so much value if you learn the basic principles of social psychology and understand how individuals and groups interact. I believe it helps you become a better person and can prevent many conflicts and misunderstandings that I see in daily interactions between people and groups today.”

During his studies, Thomas’ first business job was at an early-stage medical startup, where he was the seventh employee. This role allowed him to be involved in every aspect of the startup. He began with research and algorithm development before moving into marketing and sales, and later into product development. He holds a special lesson from this experience: “The CEO there was just a guy who said, ‘If you're excited, and you're doing it, here’s the responsibility. I don’t care if you're 18 or 40 or whether you have all the degrees or not.’ That’s also the way I look at it now.”

After graduating from university, Thomas left the company to join a strategy consulting firm, advising large multinationals and governments in the field of energy and chemicals. It was exactly what he had always wanted to do. Like many young graduates, he saw consulting as the highest achievement he could pursue. He stayed there for three years before deciding to leave because he wanted to start his own company… Poopy Cat!

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Moving from an energy consulting firm to a cat litter box startup is not a conventional career move—we can all agree on that. But Thomas’ experience with his girlfriend’s cat was so frustrating that he was convinced something had to be done. And he was right. Within three weeks, he brought on a former colleague. Together, they secured a patent and raised a €250K pre-seed round. The company eventually expanded into 18 countries, first in B2C and later in B2B. After four successful years, Poopy Cat was on the verge of reaching the ultimate milestone for a startup–an exit–and Thomas was about to become a millionaire.

But things didn’t go as planned—at all.

In 2017, the buyer, a major player in the industry, gave Thomas a letter of intent. The team began integrating their products and setting up the factories. It was an incredibly exciting time. But then, the buyer’s company underwent a management change. Their original director was replaced, and the new one came in with a fresh strategy. He told Thomas, “We really like you, but we need to start everything from scratch. So we’re going to need an extra 6 to 12 months.” A devastating blow.

The worst part? During this period, he became too focused on the transition and simply let the business slip away. They let go of the team, didn’t order new inventory, and stopped their marketing engine. Their revenue took a complete nosedive, and without funding, bridging the period to finalize the deal was impossible.

In the end, it worked out. Poopy Cat did manage to exit—though not with the same buyer or under the same conditions. However, it was an exit that allowed them to cash out a bit, and Poopy Cat’s products continued. Now, Thomas laughs about it, but at the time, it was an incredibly tough lesson: celebrate only when the money is in the bank.

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In 2018, immediately after this adventure, Thomas started a new startup—once again, driven by frustration. First, he had been frustrated by changing cat litter boxes. More recently, he had been frustrated by the organization of his wedding. So, he decided to launch wedoido, an online wedding planning platform. He raised a seed funding round from investors in Amsterdam and New York, but despite a promising start with 1,200 couples and 130 vendors, the venture faced an untimely closure due to COVID-19.

Despite this failure, Thomas learned two important lessons from this startup. First, people tend to get married only once. Yes. Repeat business is—hopefully for everyone—quite low, and this creates challenges when trying to scale. Now, Thomas aims to be at the core of his customers' operations to generate recurring revenue. Second, you don’t realize how hard wedding planning is until you do it. And by the time you’re in the middle of it, it’s often too late to enter the sales cycle. That’s why it’s critical to engage customers at the right moment.

In 2020, after seven years in entrepreneurship, Thomas joined the Dutch Startup Association as Managing Director. He stayed for one year, as it was a 12-month rotating position, before being headhunted to join Tellow, an accounting platform for freelancers, as CEO. “It was a corporate venture from Rabobank—a great product, a large team, but a high burn rate, with a strong dependence on the parent organization for customer acquisition. When they became independent, growth stalled. I was brought in to turn things around, and we did. We reignited hypergrowth—50% in the first year, 70% in the second—and the company became profitable within a year and a half.”

Tellow was the first company in the Netherlands to integrate banking and accounting. After three years, the company was merged into Ageras, where Thomas took on the role of Chief Revenue Officer. In this position, he became commercially and operationally responsible for all Ageras companies and led the integration into a single entity. Alongside Tellow, the companies included B2B neobank Kontist, invoicing software Zervant, payroll company Salary, and accounting software Billy. During his tenure, Ageras also acquired the B2B neobank Shine.

All of this led to 2024, when Thomas decided to launch GoDutch with a simple vision: “There needs to be better banking.”

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Better banking means two things for Thomas.

First, transparency. Many people don’t realize it, but banks earn far more than what they charge you. All the money in our bank accounts generates interest and other income for banks—but we never know how much. GoDutch changes that by providing real-time insights into what they earn from your account. And there’s an even better aspect, which brings us to the second point.

Sharing. Not just with the end user, but also with the environment and communities. GoDutch shares up to 40% of the income they generate from your account and card activities and offers 1% cashback on top. But the startup goes further, empowering users to operate climate positive themselves by offering in-app offsetting of their company footprint. Users can also choose to donate part of their earnings to charities like War Child to support children growing up in conflict zones, KWF to fight cancer, and JustDiggit to restore savanna in Africa.

The company is off to a strong start. From day one, Thomas has focused GoDutch’s growth strategy on partnerships, and it seems to be paying off. The number of users is increasing by 15% month-over-month, with zero marketing spend. GoDutch currently serves over 3,000 businesses and processes around €30 million a month.

The product team is focused on building the best banking product possible. “We aim to learn fast: what works, what people love, and what gets ignored. At first, we were worried that our product might be too simple. It has everything you need from a banking app, but we wondered if people would expect more secondary features or screens. But in reality, they love it because it's so simple—it just does what they need and nothing more. What we thought was a weakness turned out to be a strength.”

With zero marketing expenses and a small, efficient team, GoDutch is growing fast. The company can finance its own growth, team, and operational costs. But Thomas wants to scale even faster. He has built a solid foundation for the banking app and is now ready to accelerate further. GoDutch expects to hit 10,000 active accounts by the end of the year.