Community Member of the Month: Trenda

This month, we are spotlighting Trenda, a market intelligence platform built specifically for retail banking. Trenda brings expert-curated news, product data, trend radars, feature comparisons, and competitor benchmarking together in one place.

The Swiss startup participated in this year’s TQ Accelerator: Digital Finance as it prepared to expand into the German market.

For this interview, we spoke with Sascha Gysel, Co-Founder of Trenda, and Dominic Vincenz, Chief of Staff.

Sascha leads Trenda’s platform strategy, product vision, and technology roadmap. Before co-founding Trenda with Thomas Stüssi, he drove innovation and trend scouting at UBS and headed a leading digital banking think tank.

Dominic leads Trenda’s growth and expansion, including its entry into Germany. His background spans serving ultra-high-net-worth individual and family office clients at a large Swiss bank, venture building in FinTech and digital assets, and private equity investing at a FinTech fund.

Q&A

Market intelligence is something every bank talks about, but few seem to have a structured way of managing it. How does Trenda fit into the daily work of your customers?

Most banks have plenty of information about the market and their competitive landscape. What they often lack is a structured way to organize, share, and act on it. Trenda provides that structure by bringing expert-curated news, product data, trend radars, feature comparisons, and competitor benchmarking together in a single platform built specifically for retail banking.

Strategy, product, digital, and innovation teams use it to track market developments, understand customer behavior, and see what competitors are actually doing. As a result, decisions are based on verified market signals rather than gut feeling. And because everyone works from the same view and can collaborate directly on the platform, the bank maintains one shared picture of the market rather than fragmented ones.

Today, Trenda serves retail banks and consultancies in Switzerland and Liechtenstein. Germany is next, and other industries and markets will follow.

You’ve managed to become the market intelligence platform for over 55 leading retail banks in Switzerland and Liechtenstein, which is an impressive achievement. What do you think convinced banks to trust your startup?

Three things, mainly.

First, relevance. Most innovation intelligence tools deliver broad, generic content that a retail bank still has to translate into something actionable. We curate for one market, with experts who know that market, so the insight is usable from the first click. We use AI extensively to gather, filter, and structure information, but in a world where almost everything is crawlable, expert judgment becomes even more valuable. The real differentiator is not access to information, but knowing what matters and why.

Second, independence. We’re not a consultancy running a platform to sell the next advisory project. Banks know our content is driven only by what’s relevant to them.

Third, proximity. We have recurring calls with every client, collect feedback, and show them what’s new. Our own Swiss development team ships several releases a day without downtime, so a good idea can be live in days instead of sitting on a roadmap for the following year.

And in a market this small and connected, reputation travels. Once a few well-regarded institutions were on board and getting value from Trenda, others felt comfortable following. We don’t take that for granted, so we try to become more valuable to our clients day by day.

As part of our community, you’re surrounded by ambitious founders building in very different industries. What’s one lesson from your entrepreneurial journey that you’d share with other startups currently preparing for their own next stage of growth?

We’re bootstrapped, not VC-backed, and that shapes how we operate. We can’t spend our way through a wrong assumption, so we test ideas through small experiments, learn from real client and market feedback, and only scale what works.

Most of what Trenda offers today grew out of that process rather than a master plan. It may be a slower way to grow, but it builds discipline and keeps us focused on solving real customer problems.

After establishing such a strong position in Switzerland, you’re now preparing to enter the German market. Why is now the right time, and what opportunities do you see there?

Getting information has never been easier. However, getting insights that are relevant to your specific bank is still hard, and large language models are widening that gap rather than closing it by creating information overload. That’s exactly the problem we solve, and it isn’t a Swiss problem.

Germany is the natural next step: the same language, a culturally close market, a familiar banking landscape, and a market many times the size. We’ll scale our platform and transfer the curation model, and our participation in the TechQuartier accelerator in Frankfurt gives us the network and local presence to expand in a focused, deliberate way.

Every banking market has its own dynamics. What differences have already stood out to you between Swiss and German banks, and how is that influencing your go-to-market strategy?

Fewer than we expected. Germany looks like a much larger version of what we know, with the same questions on the table.

Two things do stand out. The first is structural: alongside the individual institutions, there are large banking groups and central players, and understanding how those pieces fit together takes time.

The second is pace. International players and neobanks are pushing into the German market harder than they currently do in Switzerland, which raises the cost of not knowing what’s happening around you.

That means we are entering Germany the same way we built Trenda in Switzerland: working closely with a handful of early partners, listening carefully, validating our assumptions, and expanding step by step based on what we learn.

Fast-forward five years: What would make you say your expansion into Germany has been a real success?

If German retail banks reach for Trenda by default when they want to understand their market, the way our Swiss clients do today, that’s success. Not because they hold a subscription, but because they trust what they find there and because it genuinely helps them stay competitive in a market that keeps moving.

Finally, imagine there is a German bank reading this interview that is interested in being among the first to join Trenda’s expansion. Why should they get involved early, and what opportunities do early partners have to shape what comes next?

We’re actively looking for pilot clients in Germany, so the timing is ideal. Early partners get the market intelligence capability that most Swiss retail banks rely on today, without having to build it themselves.

And they get to shape it: several of our strongest Swiss modules started as ideas from client banks, and that is how we intend to build in Germany too.

Find out more about Trenda here.

If you are interested in joining our startup community, learn more here.