LFP239 – The Latest In Payments Tech – Curation Trumps Orchestration? w/Aran Brown CEO Paytrix

London Fintech Podcast

The speed of change is super-rapid and nowhere more than in payments where advance rapidly leapfrogs advance. For the past two years “orchestration” has been The Thing (see eg LFP213 a deep dive into that topic). However now we have the latest greatest kid on the block the idea of curation. If orchestration solved the challenge of the techies namely replacing many APIs with one – a natural leap forwards – it did not solve the businesses challenges with negotiating a whole bunch of biparty arrangements contract et al. Curation promises to fix all that by creating a single counterparty – the curator – as an intermediary.

Aran has a super-impressive long track-record in the payments industry and his latest venture – Paytrix – has impressive backers such as Bain Capital and raised some $18m for an A Series in a tough time for tech raises.

Bootstrapping to be a Tier 1 counterparty is not simple matter and Aran guides us through not just what the curation model is but also the challenges of not slowly walking up the mountain to the heights but getting there super-rapidly.

Topics discussed include:

• holidays or “time with the kids”?
• Aran’s impressive career from leaving school at 16 and enduring the Royal Marines for a whole three days to CEOing and driving B2B payments change
• mixing ideas and reality
• how the 21stC payments trajectory has led to curation being the next necessary route forwards
• “orchestration was basically about making the CTO’s life easier”
• which market segments this works best for
• serving larger customer segments
• their needs
• the business advantages of the curation model for supplier and purchaser
• regulated entities which hold the money as EMIs
• why do ideas get thought of or executed when they are and not before?
• the origins of the idea in a pub
• the easier route for startups is not to get regulated and not to try and interface with Tier 1 Banks who are only interested in mega volumes
• how to get credibility with Tier 1 regulators and Tier 1 Banks
• the importance of your team and investor base
• the challenge of even starting relationships with a Tier 1 bank
• how the flow of funds works
• qualitatively different risks involved in using payments chains
• the similarities/differences with clearing banks such as Clearbank
• the principal things that Paytrix are really trying to do and the gaps in the market as validated with exchanges worldwide
• enabling global businesses to collect payments in markets in which they are not based with the minimum of hassle
• “In the same way that the technical challenges are solved by orchestration the legal [and business] challenges are solved as well by curation”
• Paytrix’s path to developing their technology from start to today
• recruiting 50 techies in 9 months
• a key item in validating development speed
• the future of the curation market and challenges in getting there
• the falling out of commercial interest of crypto as an essential payments input
• where Paytrix is heading and focusing
• what Paytrix needs even more of today

And much much more

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