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Hi, my name is Stefan Willebrand, I am an entrepreneur, trader, investor and what I call a practical programmer.
I love to create financial tools for companies and individuals. I am an expert in financial operations and technical development covering all aspects of financial activities.
I have built and operated private, public and listed companies within both regulated and unregulated areas in multiple countries.
I love to solve problems with IT and I want to help and invest in services that I like. In areas where I can’t find great services I will start new ones!
This is my story…
The start
My interest in computers started when I was 7 years old. I started to program early on and I loved solving problems and to build games of my own.
Sports caught my interest rather late and I first tried my best to ride horses, then ice hockey and after that soccer. At the age of 15 I started lifting weights and got consumed by bodybuilding and later powerlifting which I competed in for a few years.
I have managed to orchestrate my life as to never work with anything that I did not love. My first (and only) employment that I held was with the local gym where I did a little bit of everything.
After a few years away from the computers I started programming again and looked at building an administrative system for the gym. Before I made any real progress on that project the financial markets caught my attention and I founded my own company in 1998 analyzing the global stock markets.
I loved writing about the markets and was very active on the message boards in Sweden under the name Steverino at DI Börssnack. A person on that board suggested that I should start my own company and sell subscriptions to my services so that was what I did.
My main interest was the US stock markets and I read everything that I could about the financial markets, I was an early customer at Amazon where I bought many books.
My business expanded and I became a writer for Stockpicker and then for the well known Swedish periodical called Privata Affärer.
Trading
During 2001 I expanded my trading operations and used my computer skills to develop mechanical trading systems. This is where I first got acquainted with Machine Learning / AI when I built neural networks.
I traded these systems on the US futures markets and paid a lot of attention to position sizing and risk management. My risk adjusted returns were great and my broker in Chicago suggested that I should start my own hedge fund.
At the end of 2001 I traveled to Chicago, took the test to become a CTA and then launched my fund in the US.
I continued to refine and build trading systems while exploring other related business opportunities and I hired a team to help me out with programming and trade execution. The commercial software that was available for building trading systems was not good enough so I ended up building my own testing tools and also the administrative systems needed.
I built my first fund administration system in 2002 and was able to display the real time result of my fund online to my investors, pretty cool for 2002. 😁 To this day I don’t understand why I did not start selling my software, I guess that I was just happy trading and building software for myself. 😊
In 2003 the London-based firm called London Capital Group became a client of mine after my friends in the US introduced me to the founder. We became close friends and I continued to eke out good returns.
Together with my US friends we set up a proprietary trading office in Skövde where we trained and capitalized 30 – 40 in-house traders between 2003 – 2005. In this first batch of traders is where I found a long time friend and colleague who has worked with me ever since, first as a trader and then as a software developer.
Building financial services
In 2004 my friend did an IPO and an exit from his creation called Capital Spreads which did Spread Betting and CFD-trading. When the dust had settled we decided to start a new venture to build a new Spread Betting and CFD-trading firm using technology that we built in-house.
I expanded the team in my Swedish office and began developing software for real. Spread Betting and CFD-trading is very similar to running your own sports book where customers trade with you on prices that you produce instead for on the stock exchanges. You cannot have any latency or you will get arbitraged and you cannot have any downtime.
In 2005 there were no cloud providers and we wanted to build our own real time trading website where you traded directly through the browser. We had to create our own private cloud using our own hardware and set up direct connections to price providers. We handled about 100,000 price changes per second without latency! We also created our own real time charting component using Flash. 😊
Getting our regulatory permissions and everything up and running took time and to generate some income we created some additional services during this period.
The real time robo advisor called Interactive Signals.
A currency exchange service for both physical and electronic currency called iFlexCash.
We started selling our charging package called iChartsOnline to other websites.
What a time! 😁
We got our first regulatory permissions in 2005 and set up an office in London which expanded to roughly 35 people over the following years.
First exit
In 2009 it was time to move on from Spread Betting and CFD-trading and I made an exit from that operation thanks to another group of friends in Germany to whom I am forever thankful. I had created many financial services over the years and each time I had to create the boring stuff first with account handling, transaction engine, financial instrument management and on and on.
I thought that someone should build a core system that was based on API’s instead of file transfers and we created Bricknode!
Bricknode was built as a core platform for financial administration and on top of it other companies could create their own applications and benefit from the ecosystem. We wanted to obtain a regulatory securities license and use that with our own technology to become a no-name B2B brokerage service.
Building that platform took time 😊and to generate income I also created more businesses, primarily a lending business with the goal of becoming a bank based on its own technology. To centralize the ownership I founded a public investment company called Willebrand Invest (later changed to Untie Group and then to Steglan Capital).
It was through the lending operation that I gained another colleague who is now my closest partner and fellow co-owner of our businesses.
The lending operation expanded quickly and we worked hard to raise capital for lending and to support our growth. We expanded with more regulatory permissions and became a payment service provider so we could offer peer-to-peer lending which we did through a brand called Kreditbörsen.
In 2017 it became too exhausting to operate Bricknode and Untie Group separately as two knowledge intensive fintech companies with its head office in a small town. Thus we merged them into the public investment company and gathered all the businesses as subsidiaries within Untie Group.
We re-structured Bricknode somewhat and focused for a number of years less on selling and more on fixing bugs and making the platform better while the lending operation took steps to become a bank.
To reach the level where a non-bank lending operation would be self sustainable (because of high borrowing rates in the private market) a level of critical mass had to be reached for the loan portfolio. This meant raising more capital and in 2019 we spun Bricknode off to the shareholders and operated two separate groups with their own capital structures.
Within Untie Group we created a new banking app where users could manage their investments, loans, payments etc. which they had with us AND also stuff that they held with other institutions.
The pandemic of 2020
Just when we were expanding and growing massively the pandemic hit and all risk capital for lending dried up, bummer! 😟
We had to shrink fast and go into a multi year period of downsizing and de-leverage the loan portfolio to save Untie Group from going under.
Bricknode on the other hand could stand strong during the pandemic, it had already been downsized before and was now for the first time cash-flow positive!
IPO
While continuing to work on Untie Group during de-leveraging we could continue to expand Bricknode again and had different options in 2021. To grow further we needed cash to be competitive and we could either sell the company or do an IPO, we choose to continue and do an IPO.
The listing took place in November 2021 and the market was red hot with a lot of subscriptions for our offering. The growth targets were set high and with the new organization size we had a much higher burn so a secondary offering would be needed.
The financial markets rolled over in 2022 and capital was difficult to come by for micro cap companies that had a cash burn. Many options were explored but yet again we had to downsize fast to extend the runway.
M&A
In 2023 we decided to hook up with the Norwegian company Huddlestock through an asset sale that was completed in April 2023.
Huddlestock had several operating subsidiaries and also a regulated securities license which could be used together with the Bricknode technology to form the B2B Broker that we had envisioned from the start. I first took the role as CTO and later joined the board of Huddlestock.
The Bricknode system was created as a highly configurable and flexible platform and already in 2015 we looked at expanding the system with support for FIFO and Norwegian tax reporting but other things were prioritized higher. Now we had a new reason to look at this and 2024 was spent on merging organizations and expanding the software.
At the end of 2024 the Bricknode platform was operational with the first B2B customer in Norway and preparations were made for the next expansion phase.
In the beginning of 2025 Untie Group had finally reached a point where we could see an end to the de-leveraging period and could start thinking more about offence than defence again. We changed the name to Steglan Capital to mark the start of a new phase and some investments were made like in Digitala Kassan.
During 2024 I got engaged in starting a new ice hockey club called Skövde Hockey Club following the unfortunate bankruptcy of the former club. Using my experience from finance and technology I became interested in how new tools could be used to ease the pain and make the administration of sports clubs easier. Digitala Kassan is such a tool and I am looking forward to many more opportunities to follow in this area.
As this is being written in May 2025 we just took the next step with Bricknode/Huddlestock. Through another asset sale Huddlestock sold the Bricknode-companies together with the regulatory license to Done.ai Group.
This transaction enabled Huddlestock to become a significant shareholder of Done.ai while at the same time being able to focus on the expansion of its business in Germany and invest capital in a smart way. Done.ai has great distribution power and within this setting both the technology, domain knowledge and regulatory license can create value fast.
I have now been in the finance and tech business for 27 years and gone through many ups and downs. Experience is the absolute best teacher and I am looking forward to the next 27 years and to report on it through this blog!
