Ronald Slabke likes to drill thick boards.

When he went to real estate financier Dr.

When Klein came to Lübeck, it was a small company with two dozen employees.

The main focus was on financing social housing.

The young man spoke of the Internet, of a uniform IT infrastructure that must find its way into the banking world.

The owner at the time didn't want to know much about it.

But Slabke believed in the vision, quickly programmed his own software that private customers could use to compare loan offers for real estate financing and bought the company from the owner.

Daniel Mohr

Editor in the economy of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sunday newspaper.

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Today, the Lübeck company no longer has two dozen, but 2,400 employees.

Ronald Slabke is her boss and the largest shareholder with a good third of the shares.

And he didn't just leave it at that one big slate with Dr.

Klein to set up one of the two large bank-independent sales companies for real estate loans alongside Interhyp.

"IT and banking have fascinated me since early childhood, I studied both, and combining them was a real challenge 25 years ago." A challenge that the industry has not yet fully mastered.

"Everyone should specialize, in sales or in risk management or in technology," says Slabke.

He sees his strength in technology.

As a platform provider for all banks.

Europace is the name of his offer, which is open to all banks.

In this way, every bank can contact every other bank and every bank-independent sales organization and conclude transactions.

dr

Klein and many other independent distributors are connected there.

Digital sales would not be able to work at all in construction financing without Europace.

In concrete terms, however, an advisor at the Ostseesparkasse can also quickly and easily see whether another bank has a better real estate financing offer for its customer than their own bank.

But why should the Sparkasse employee do that?

"The market has gained transparency," says Slabke.

“Customers know that comparing real estate loans is worthwhile.

After all, this is the biggest financial decision of your life.” And the banks know that too.

In other words, if word gets around that a bank only sells its own expensive loans, it may soon stop doing business.

Slabke suspected that early on.

In 2001 he teamed up with scientists from the University of Applied Sciences in Berlin.

They had developed appropriate software.

Today, the advisors of a number of savings banks, cooperative banks and private banks use the system.

A good one in five customers who go to a bank branch to take out a real estate loan does so via the Europace system, and the trend is rising.