Driving Momentum for Europe’s First and Largest Fintech Community

Since its launch in 2020, Barcelona start-up 11Onze has rapidly become the leading community fintech company in Europe. After the launch of its unique, private social network La Plaça / The Square last year, the company has grown both its membership and services by more than 50%.

With a focus on empowering its community through financial literacy and wealth creation, 11Onze has continued to introduce custom-made offerings and expand its membership base, all while racking up an impressive list of awards.

Today, 11Onze is Europe’s first and largest community fintech, filling a gap in the larger fintech sector with a unique mix of educational resources and digital commerce solutions. This includes 11Onze’s private social network La Plaça, its Les Peles digital currency, the El Canut universal banking app, its Marketplace, and an expansive content library.

While all of 11Onze’s digital experiences bring together educational elements focused on finance, economics, well-being, and sustainability, La Plaça provides those resources in a social networking format, implementing a fully-integrated Learning Management System (LMS) to deliver up-to-date and highly topical content. 

With 14,000  members and counting, La Plaça has also transformed itself into an online marketplace where members can purchase products and services, and where they will be able to sell goods and services to other members in the future.

Check out the demo video below to see La Plaça in action:

To date, La Plaça’s content archive has grown to include more than 1,212 videos and 1,131 online posts in three languages (English, Catalan, Spanish). It also has recorded high engagement rates across Facebook (73%) , YouTube (98%)  and Instagram (115 %).  11Onze also recently launched its Tik Tok profile, where it captured an astonishing engagement rate of 999% and 300k users in just 60 days.

La Plaça, meanwhile, has attracted 83% new users in the last three months, and those users have spent about four minutes on average on the site. Its best content is ‘La rumba dels calerons‘, which provides 20% of the traffic in the channel.

The depth of its engagement with the community is well evidenced in 11Onze’s return on investment (ROI) for its products and brand partners.  

Using Meta campaigns as an average ROI (or return on assets, ROA) for advertising campaigns; 11Onze’s numbers are quite impressive, especially considering how recently it was launched. .

Some of 11Onze’s products and brand partners have reached as much as 1.34 EUR for every euro invested, compared to Meta which can reach an average ROA of 1.5 EUR for every euro invested. 

In tandem with that high performance and rapid growth, 11Onze has also continued adding to its list of services and financial resources, going beyond La Plaça and extending into new regions and markets across the globe.

“The recognition that we have been receiving is a testament to the fact that small fintechs are able to compete with large banks when it comes to innovation and banking,” said 11Onze Chairman James Sene.

“La Plaça is what makes us unique. It’s an innovative fincom—a fusion of a social network and fintech to deliver community-driven financial services.” 

“We have launched environmentally conscious and innovative products and services such as Natulim (eco-friendly washing powder), 11Onze Segurs (insurance) and 11Onze Preciosos (gold),” Sene said. 

“Moving forward our members will also be able to sell their goods and services to other members. Our goal is to have a one-stop shop wherein our community can buy, sell, bank, and create wealth.”

“What is extraordinary about our product is its ease of use, capacity to engage, adapt and conquer user attention in the blink of an eye. Even individuals with low tech skills can action and use the platform on our end, which makes it far easier for our staff to be agile in terms of content development, allowing easy interaction by businesses and individuals with little technical knowledge.”

—Issac Sene, Product Head, 11Onze

Throughout this journey, WP Engine Agency Partner WONDR has played a crucial role, serving as an extension of 11Onze’s digital team and working extensively on the company’s retail and customer app while spearheading the La Plaça project from the ground up.

“We were thrilled when 11Onze asked us to start working on the La Plaça project, and we jumped at the chance to bring their vision to life,” said Dermot O’Shea, Founder at WONDR.

“We had already been working with 11Onze on the design of the retail & business app, and this was something we were invested in from the beginning,” he added. 

“Partnering with WP Engine and building on its platform allowed us to roll up our sleeves and do what we do best while ensuring that all the moving pieces around security, performance, and support were taken care of.”

With a wide list of integrations and customizations required to build the La Plaça site, O’Shea and his team leaned on the open source flexibility of WordPress to speed up the development cycle and create a digital footprint rooted in community-focused values.  

WONDR’s work on La Plaça included building the platform’s LMS with a 100% purpose-built, media-driven workflow incorporating Peles (Reward Points) for completing sections and courses.

Furthermore, enterprise-grade site performance has allowed 11Onze to provide a fast and consistently pleasant user experience with healthy Core Web Vitals metrics across both field and lab data.

”All of these efforts helped us build a beautiful, interactive site that directly met the needs of 11Onze and helped them quickly bring this powerful digital experience to market,” O’Shea said. 

“While this project would have taken eight or nine months to complete using a closed, proprietary system, WordPress allowed us to get it done in four weeks.”

While the work has been lauded by 11Onze users and internal teams alike, La Plaça has specifically been recognized numerous times for its digital innovation and community-building success as 11Onze continues to reach a growing audience of users. 

In May, La Plaça was honored at the 26th Annual Webby Awards as one of the best websites in the competitive Financial Services/Banking category, alongside industry giants such as Apple, Citibank, Morgan Stanley, and Bank of America.

Recognizing its collaboration with 11Onze on the La Plaça project, WONDR also recently received a Bronze Award for Best Responsive Design for Mobile at the 2022 Art Directors Guild LAU Awards, one of Spain’s most sought after design prizes honoring excellence across digital, product, visual comms, film, and packaging.

Capping off a trifecta of recognition, 11Onze was also awarded the acclaimed 2021 Vega Digital Award for best website in the social networking sector for its success with La Plaça and beyond. 

The Vega Digital Award highlights the vital role of digital pioneers in an ever-changing digital landscape. Out of nearly 1,400 entries, 11Onze captured the Centauri award for its innovative platform approach.

“All of this recognition simply validates the hard work the 11Onze and WONDR teams have done and will continue to do in service of this amazing initiative,” O’Shea said.

“Going forward, I have no doubt that this project will serve as a stellar example of the partnership between growing fintech businesses like 11Onze, digital product specialists such as WONDR, and the world’s leading managed WordPress provider, WP Engine.”

Find out more about WONDR’s work with 11Onze here, and visit WP Engine to learn more about our industry-leading Agency Partner Program, now the largest in WordPress.