About Europace
As Germany’s largest transaction platform for private real estate financing and building society loans, Europace processes an annual transaction volume of more than €80 billion. To operate in the highly regulated German financial sector while driving the rapid development of its platform, it requires an organizational operating system capable of maintaining technical rigor while fostering human connection in a remote-first environment.
For Europace, that operating system is Slack. What began as organic adoption by individual product teams has evolved into the company’s digital backbone and a “collective brain.” With it, Europace has moved beyond simple messaging and created a unified front-end for its entire operation.
Christian Louis, Lead Link at Europace, describes the struggle before the transition: “Asynchronous processing wasn’t possible before. If anything, it was only by email. Then you had a huge pile of emails every day. Today, everything is nicely structured in Slack. It just makes working completely different.”
Peter Sauer, Director of Platform Technology at Europace, drives the point further with his own experience: “When I think about what my work would be without Slack, I imagine the email threads I used to get, and it’s like a horror scenario for me.”
“When I think about what my work would be without Slack, I imagine the email threads I used to get, and it’s like a horror scenario for me.”
Unlocking a decade of knowledge
In the highly regulated finance industry, the ability to trace the “why” behind any decision is vital. “Information at Europace doesn’t have an expiration date,” says Louis. “We grew up with Slack. It’s the digital architecture that holds 10 years of our growth together, so the context of a decision made three years ago is just as accessible as a message sent three minutes ago. And Slack has definitely become the memory bank of Europace.” In essence, it’s a searchable repository of every technical decision, product pivot, and market insight.
The recent launch of the new Slackbot has transformed this vast knowledge base into a proactive assistant. Many leaders now use it to curate their daily attention. Peter Sauer starts his day not by wading through hundreds of unread messages, but by asking Slackbot, “What needs my attention right now? Which projects are blocked?”
“I don’t have to read every message to stay in the loop,” he says. “Slackbot is my personal filter that turns 60 different initiatives into one clear, actionable overview, allowing me to focus my attention only where it’s truly required.”
By moving away from fragmented email silos to an asynchronous-first culture, Europace has also effectively eliminated the “meeting tax,” dispensing with unnecessary meetings and allowing the team to focus on what they do best – continuously improving the platform, supporting partners, and leading the German mortgage‑financing market.
Accelerating sales via Slack Connect
For Conny Merten, Director of Sales at Europace, the primary metric of success when it comes to communication is speed. The company has revolutionized its customer relationships by moving work out of stagnant email threads and into Slack Connect. Every major partner and prospective customer has a dedicated channel that provides a 360-degree view of the relationship.
This transparency has a direct impact on the bottom line. By having experts from legal, UX, and product departments live in the channel during pitches, the team can instantly answer questions of every kind.
Additionally, according to Peter Sauer, complex vendor contracts and product launches that would normally take six or seven months are now finalized in two or three months, thanks to quicker exchanges with external partners in Slack Connect effectively shortening project timelines by 50%. This is made possible by having a direct line to the right people, allowing deep technical discussions and contract management to happen in real time
The company’s high-speed collaboration moves beyond external providers to the entire business group to which Europace belongs, Hypoport SE. By using Slack Connect, Europace can control where and how collaboration takes place, ensuring equal footing for all. This approach breaks down corporate barriers and allows employees to collaborate directly in the same space
Just as sister companies benefit from this shared digital space, Conny Merten explains how this direct connection creates a massive advantage for the sales team: “We treat Slack Connect as a business multiplier because it makes everyone easily five times faster. We’ve cut our closing time by 30% and significantly increased the quality of our pitch. Slack Connect provides a direct line to the people who can help our customers.
What’s more, Slackbot helps her save time updating the stakeholders. “I don’t have to write anything myself; I can immediately provide other stakeholders with a summary. This is important for our partners.”
“We’ve cut our closing time by 30% and significantly increased the quality of our pitch. Slack Connect provides a direct line to the people who can help our customers.”
Operational rigor with automated compliance and incident management workflows
The speed with which information or support is made available was illustrated by a recent work experience student. “We had this student here two days ago,” says Peter Sauer. “He’s writing a master’s thesis on Function as a Service and how to integrate streaming. Super nitty gritty, small topic, but we talked about exactly that seven years ago, and Slackbot found it right there.”
According to Louis, every day it’s obvious that “Slack is by far not only a messaging tool,” it’s an enabler of growth and compliance. In a regulated sector, compliance can often become a bottleneck, but Europace has built necessary guardrails directly into its Slack workflows.
Previously, introducing a new tool required a “ping-pong” of messages and meetings that could delay projects for weeks. Today, when a new tool or service provider needs to be introduced, the team triggers a standardized compliance workflow that collects all essential data up front for an instant green-tick approval from the security lead. In short, by automating these recurring tasks and providing a direct link to all relevant documents in one channel, decision-makers can act immediately.
Technical incidents are managed with similar precision. Thanks to the integration of Rootly and Jira into a Slack workflow, a received incident alert instantly creates a dedicated channel, generates a ticket, and initiates a Microsoft Teams call link directly within the workspace. “The workflow handles the bureaucracy so our engineers can focus entirely on the fix,” says Louis.
He estimates that staying within this unified Slack interface saves him up to 20% of his time every day. Whether the team is pulling in Jira tickets for task tracking, accessing Miro boards to review collated project information, or checking incoming updates from GitHub, Slack acts as the primary lens through which all work is viewed. With the GitHub integration, tech teams are instantly pinged whenever there is a pull request or another item that requires attention, which allows them to coordinate code reviews faster. By not having to jump between tools, the team maintains focus where it’s needed.
This ability to integrate all the tools they work with ensures that the Slack backbone isn’t just a place for discussion, but a smart hub for the company’s entire tech stack.
Europace’s sustainable culture of autonomy
Europace operates as a holacracy, an organizational structure that thrives on decentralized decision-making. Slack is essential to this model, providing the transparency required for teams to function without traditional management oversight. The culture of autonomy is supported by a remote-first philosophy that emphasizes digital proximity and connection.
Annika Schwabel, Business Development Manager at Europace, uses daily automated pulse checks to maintain team health across distributed locations, ensuring that even in a company where a large share of employees work from home , human connection remains a priority. “Slack offers a ‘soft’ form of contact in a very ‘hard’ industry,” Annika Schwabel explains. “It builds trust faster than a formal email ever could, ensuring that even when we’re remote, no one feels isolated.”
Contributing to this mission are Slack’s native translation features, which are increasingly used internally by teams with many English‑speaking colleagues to bridge language gaps and ensure that multi-lingual teams remain fully aligned on mission-critical projects.
Europace’s success with Slack shows how seamless technological integration can elevate collaboration and results across a complex organization. With Slack as its digital backbone, the Berlin‑based fintech is equipped to move quickly, stay aligned, and evolve in line with its goals — from culture to compliance, and from partner collaboration to work with sister companies’.
Peter Sauer describes it best: “Slack is such an integral part of Europace that I can’t even imagine what it would be like without it. And I can’t even remember what it was like before we introduced Slack. It’s a completely different world.”
