Ep. 114 - Bootstrapped and Unapologetic: Building payments orchestration for different verticals, with Fyntek

Alexander Rea (0:00)

I didn't have a clue. I had this assumption that instant bank transfer was already going to be a reality, somehow, someway, in the US market. And we were far from it. And ACH, I've kind of discovered, it was like a promise, not a payment. Payment's on the way, could arrive, could be credited, or it could, you know, perhaps be returned. I think everyone's always trying to figure out where's the line between entertainment and gaming, right? And gambling. That's up for debate, and it always will be up for debate. I'm all about digital goods. I think that's where the future lies. The US market, there's a lot of fraud, you know, people buying card lists off the dark web and stuff. So you have to get really robust really quickly. There was like 300 new companies almost overnight, and all of them had issues finding payments. Some of our largest clients who are doing really big volumes are at 92% acceptance, and that's not a number that we manufacture. So for us, if we can capture you an extra 5% acceptance on a million dollars, that's an extra 50,000 in revenue in your pocket.

Justin Hanna (0:59)

Welcome back to The Payments Shed Podcast here in New York City. Today we are joined by Alex Rea, CEO and co-founder of Fyntek.

Alexander Rea (1:07)

Yeah.

Justin Hanna (1:07)

Alex, thank you so much for joining us. Thanks for coming in. Tell us a bit more about yourself and kind of what got you into the world of payments.

Alexander Rea (1:13)

Yeah. So I've been in payments for quite a long time, about 12 years. I started just selling technology into the gaming space. I moved to Malta about 2014 and then, yeah, Trustly decided to pick me up as a genius sales exec. So that was my entrance into the payment space. Yeah.

Justin Hanna (1:34)

Good. And close up about kind of about Fyntek.

Alexander Rea (1:37)

Oh, Fyntek. So Fyntek, honestly, is my third iteration of a business. We do two things.

We're a payments advisory. So we help a lot of clients, particularly in the gaming space. Most of them are either diversifying their gaming vertical, so they need help with compliance, or they're coming into the US market for the first time and they don't have all the necessary items. The second part, obviously, is our payments platform. So we are, you know, helping aggregate those solutions and give them a place to manage their payments.

Grant Evans (2:08)

I'm really interested in the fact that you guys haven't raised at all. Obviously, we're in a time where payments companies can, I would say easily, but like it's easier than maybe other sectors to go and raise money and obviously you've come to the US for a competitive market. Like what has been behind the decision not to take that external capital?

Alexander Rea (2:25)

I think it's partly by choice. And then the other part is, you know, we went into a really niche vertical in gaming, one that's like highly scrutinized. We started off in sweepstakes.

And so, you know, the capital market looking at sweepstakes, which is very scrutinized, I could imagine that, you know, weren't looking to pick up a business that solely focused on that. So for us, we kind of knew that we weren't really in the place of being able to raise capital. And then the other side was, I live and die on my sword when it comes to gaming. So part of me knew that if, let's say, a VC came in, perhaps we'd get into pigeonhole, into logo chasing or something like that. And for me, I like working with the tier two, tier three clients in the gaming space.

Grant Evans (3:08)

I think we've got actually in like 110, 115 episodes, we've not actually had like a gaming specialist or kind of conversation about gaming, but what we have talked about is regulation across states and the complexity in the US market around that and gaming particularly. Again, I'm talking to you around like, why choose the US over the UK and EU maybe, but like, you're very limited in some ways by the states you can actually operate into service gaming companies, right? How was the decisioning around US over UK or Europe as a launching pad?

Alexander Rea (3:41)

That's a good question. It's actually really to do with what happened to me personally as to why the US was the big focus. I came out to the US in 2020, which is an interesting time. Everything was a bit chaotic. My wife, we met in the UK. I moved out here and I was really hesitant. I tried to convince her to stay in the UK because all my clients, all my business, everything I knew was in Europe. Then suddenly ended up in California where there's no regulated gaming at all. In a country that scrutinizes iGaming in general. I thought, what am I going to do here? Then I got picked up as an operator for eSports Entertainment Group, who had me as their head of payments. I was like, okay, great. We've got a position here. Then I saw that as the years went on, gaming got a lot more liberalized. I think we're over 25 states now.