Interview with Boris Gussen - CFO SMG Swiss Marketplace Group

Deloitte: IPOs are currently a major topic on American stock exchanges. You yourself went public last year. What were the most important drivers for this strategic decision? Were there alternatives to an IPO?

Boris Gussen: The IPO was a goal for SMG Swiss Marketplace Group from the very beginning. When we were formed in 2021 through the merger of Scout24 and TX Markets, the IPO intention was already communicated. Therefore, it was less a question of whether an IPO should take place, but rather a matter of timing.

This can also be explained by our origin story. With the merger, the ownership structure changed; the previous major investors relinquished their respective controlling stakes. The IPO was the logical continuation of this change. Our strategic ambition was clear: we wanted to create a nationally strong player that could also compete on equal footing with European peers in international comparison.

We originally planned with a window of three to four years, but started preparations early. About a year before the IPO, we targeted autumn 2025. The fact that the IPO could be executed precisely in September 2025 was a team achievement that we are very proud of.

Choosing SIX as an exchange was a clear choice: We are a Swiss company, and our business is deeply rooted in the Swiss market. SIX further provides good access to the international capital market.

Deloitte: What were the greatest challenges in preparing for the IPO from a CFO perspective?

Boris Gussen: The greatest challenge was the enormous parallelism of tasks as a young company. After our founding in 2021, we had to simultaneously manage post-merger integration in 2022 and 2023, modernize our technological foundation, and build a convincing track record for our equity story. This meant: accelerating growth in the middle of integration, increasing profitability, and expanding margins.

The hot phase of an IPO typically lasts six to twelve months – but the fundamental groundwork begins much earlier. From a CFO perspective, the focus was on converting accounting standards, compliance and governance matters, collaboration with banks, and complex stakeholder management: existing shareholders, three Global Coordinators, multiple law firms, investors, and of course our own employees. Such a project cannot be managed by a small group. It requires many engaged and competent people in the right positions.

A decisive success factor was also change management. While the relevance of the IPO was obvious to me as a CFO who was there from the beginning, we had to bring the organization along. Showing employees what the IPO meant for our culture, daily work, and future opportunities for us as an organization was essential.

Deloitte: What challenges do you see in managing a Swiss multi-brand platform group? Conversely, where do you see the greatest advantages and synergies?

Boris Gussen: Within SMG, we combine different business models – transactional marketplaces as well as classifieds. Customer groups and dynamics therefore vary. While, for example, the real estate sector is characterized by high demand with scarce supply, the automotive sector is highly competitive and requires high visibility for garages. General Classifieds – Ricardo, tutti.ch, and anibis.ch – serve entirely different customer segments.

This diversity brings complexity, but at its core, all follow the same logic: they are two-sided marketplaces with flywheel effects that can be managed well through KPIs and data. The challenge lies in unlocking cross-cutting synergies and setting standards without losing the necessary customer proximity and market orientation. We therefore manage our units as independent profit centers with their own profit responsibility and the necessary entrepreneurial freedom for investments. At the same time, profitability and maturity levels differ significantly. Capital allocation is therefore always an important topic.

A major lever was also technological standardization. After the merger, relatively heterogeneous systems came together – Homegate and ImmoScout24, for example, ran on different architectural approaches. We invested heavily in modernizing platforms and cloud migration. In the first phase, this tied up capacity for product innovation, but it is paying off today: data is more readily available, development cycles are faster, and AI-based product development has become much easier. This has created good conditions for the future.

Deloitte: How do you balance investments in new features (that users see) and technological infrastructure (that users don't see)?

Boris Gussen: Both are important. Modern technological infrastructure is the foundation for visible innovation. Developing new products or features on outdated on-premise systems is significantly more difficult, consumes resources, and slows down your own innovation speed.

By now, we have a solid foundation that allows us to strategically direct resources toward product innovations and be much more agile. Key topics such as security and fraud management can also be implemented much more effectively.

Infrastructure investments thus create the same value for our users as visible features: they are the invisible basis for sustainable innovation.

Deloitte: How is the international marketplace/classifieds environment developing at the moment and what role does AI play in it? Where do you see the most important opportunities and risks for marketplace operators? And what role does AI play in the further development of the finance function?

Boris Gussen: In the international marketplace and classifieds environment, the discussion around AI has intensified even further over the past year – this was also noticeable around our IPO in the capital market. Established business models are under pressure from technological dynamics, and not just in our sector. For SMG, however, this primarily creates opportunities.

We understood AI early on as a strategic enabler: on the one hand, in visible features for all users – such as "Ricardo AI," which we launched over two years ago, AI-based creation of listing texts, automated background removal on AutoScout24, or conversational search. On the other hand, as an efficiency driver for professional partners such as real estate agents or garage owners, where AI directly integrates into industry-specific workflows and significantly simplifies administrative processes. And not least, AI works behind the scenes on the platforms, for example to optimize user experience and prevent fraud.

We are monitoring technological developments very closely, particularly Large Language Models (LLMs) and their influence on search behavior. Currently, we see no threat to our business model in this. Nevertheless, the principle applies: we must not rest on our laurels. The ambition must be to continuously create measurable added value for users and advertisers.

This reflects the strategic evolution of marketplaces in general: previously, these were primarily intermediaries for customer contacts. Today, demanding professional customers expect marketplaces to act as comprehensive partners. Data, performance, and efficiency are at the center. We therefore bundle our AI activities very strategically to deploy new technologies in economically meaningful and value-creating ways.

In the finance function, we also see many opportunities to use AI and have already successfully implemented initial applications. We see great potential, for example, in automated document and data recognition, in account reconciliation processes, in cash management and treasury, as well as in tax declarations. From my perspective, agentic AI applications have only been reliable enough for the past few months to provide real added value. With the performance of the latest LLMs, we are now reaching a point where such tools also make sense in the finance function.Our goal is to establish AI use cases not only in the finance function but also in other cross-functional areas systematically and in a structured manner. The crucial balancing act lies in realizing efficiency gains without compromising data integrity. Especially in finance, it is not enough for processes to simply become faster – the results must also be reliable.