Bridging the gap between online companies and transactional banking

FinTech Futures sat down with Martynas Bieliauskas, CEO of Swiss-licensed fintech Klarpay AG, to discuss the company’s approach to servicing global digital businesses with scalable transactional banking solutions.

What’s the biggest challenge digital businesses are facing today, in your opinion?

Martynas Bieliauskas, Klapray CEO

Coming from a digital entrepreneurship background, I have to say that one of the biggest challenges faced by digital businesses is access to efficient transactional banking. The conflict is that most banks apply risk assessment processes that are simply not adapted to a lot of fast-paced online business models.

On the flip side, online businesses demand their banking partners to provide services digitally and instantly through up-to-date technical integrations and protocols. Unfortunately, most legacy banks don’t have the necessary modern technical infrastructure in place to do that.

At Klarpay, we built the technology and operational focus necessary to help bridge this gap between traditional banking and online businesses by providing digital merchants with modern transactional banking and digital disbursement solutions.

How Klarpay’s offering compare to that of traditional financial services?

When we founded the company in 2019 our vision was to create a nimble all-in-one solution that will empower digital businesses through borderless, scalable, and omnichannel payment capabilities that improve manual procedures with technology and that can be tailored to their unique client base.

Today, Klarpay’s mission is to solve the widening gap between the banking and payment needs of online companies and the antiquated systems, processes, and experiences offered by brick-and-mortar financial institutions.

Klarpay is licensed as a deposit-taking financial institution under the Swiss Federal Banking Act. What does this authorisation enable you to deliver?

Klarpay: Act globally, transact locally

Acquiring a deposit-taking licence by the Financial Market Supervisory Authority (FINMA) enables us to provide digital entrepreneurs with a comprehensive business banking and payments service that includes everything from IBAN accounts and virtual debit card issuance to global payment acceptance.

The idea to create Klarpay and acquire the prestigious FINMA licence stemmed from our past frustrations in securing robust financial solutions for some of our previous online business ventures.

Our goal is for Klarpay to be as independent, secure, and all-encompassing a solution as possible in terms of technology, licensing, and payments infrastructure. 

What is in your opinion the future of paytech and how is Klarpay preparing for it?

Overall, we see a rapid move from point providers to fully integrated solutions for embedded financial experiences. This trend will only gain more momentum as the true potential for a digital API-led alternative to commercial payments relies upon an agile and efficient ‘behind the scenes’ payments process.

The other big trend we see is, of course, cryptocurrency acceptance. Crypto is real-time, cheap, and irrevocable; from the merchant’s perspective, it constitutes an attractive payment method.

Klarpay’s FINMA regulation gives us a unique competitive advantage when it comes to enabling cryptocurrency transactions, as Switzerland has been one of the few countries in the world to define a clear regulatory framework on how to convert crypto to fiat.

How important is it to remain agile and maintain a flexible technology infrastructure in a constantly evolving payments landscape?

If one thing is for certain, e-commerce is going to continue to grow. The digital-first generation will hit their spending years within the next decade, which means that online businesses will need to be even more adaptive to digital payment technologies.

We believe that Klarpay is well positioned to play an integral role in unlocking friction around banking, payment, and disbursement solutions for digital businesses now and in the future.