Ep. 147 - Agents, Borders and a £20m Raise: Rebuilding Payments for Complex Commerce, with Ryft

Justin Hanna (0:05)

Welcome back to The Payments Shed Live here from Fintech Meetup in Lisbon. We are joined by Sadra Hosseini. Sadra, give us a little bit more information about yourself being CEO of Ryft and obviously the latest exciting news.

Sadra Hosseini (0:16)

Good morning, good morning. Thanks for having me. I'm Sadra, CEO and co-founder of Ryft. Ryft is the payments infrastructure for multi-party commerce. What that means is, we're moving towards platforms and marketplaces, kind of changing businesses, changing industries, and these businesses need complex payments. If you imagine you go to Uber Eats, you pay 100 pounds, 100 euros for your dinner. That needs to be split three ways, 10 pounds to the driver, 20 pounds to Uber and 70 pounds to the restaurant itself. The legacy guys were not set up for this.

We were built from the ground up for this, and then we will dig into agent e-commerce. This is kind of where the market is going. The exciting news, we've raised 20 million pounds from some incredible institutional investors such as Gresham House, Pembroke, and Ingenie, and that's to allow us to scale internationally into the EU, US, and then global from there.

Justin Hanna (1:16)

Amazing. I think spit authentication is some of the people we just talk about, but never really do it, right? When you spoke about the EU and the US, of course, larger merchants, which of these do you think is going to be harder to crack?

Sadra Hosseini (1:29)

Really interesting question. I think they're all difficult in their own ways. So US is difficult because it's a really big market, 61% market penetration with these platforms, which is two, three times kind of where Europe and UK is. But it's also very saturated. So you need a lot of cash to kind of go play in that market. EU is where it's exciting. It's, there's 20% year on year growth in that market, into 2030 and beyond, but it's very fractured. So every country has its own payment methods, every country has its own tax rules.

And it, you got, you need to localize different languages, different cultures. So that's the difficulty there. And then the third one to that was going after bigger merchants.

Bigger merchants have very different needs to your kind of smaller merchants. It's not, it's not purely about cost anymore. See, it's still a major factor. It then becomes about what's your conversion rate? What's your coverage rate globally? Can you do 20 different currencies? So it all kind of boils down to that. For us, I think the biggest challenge will be Europe, but that's also the most exciting.

Justin Hanna (2:39)

Do you think there's this big interest is where platforms are now becoming merchants and marketplaces, because they want to monetize the payment ecosystem for the merchants?

Sadra Hosseini (2:48)

Exactly, that's what we're seeing. These platforms, this is quite a nascent industry. This has really popped up over the last 10, 15 years. I think with the advent of Deliveroo, Uber, where these guys kind of really got that market moving.

But over that 10, 15 years, platforms are really taking off. And they're, up until now, they've been charging a SaaS fee, and then they've been saying, go to your normal payment processor, they'll do your payments, we'll sit outside of it. We don't want anything to do with that. Now they're saying, okay, I'm processing, the payment process is processing millions or billions, and I'm just charging 100 pound SaaS fee.

Why don't I become my own payment processor, but then going down that rabbit hole, you got to get the licenses, you got to build the tech house, it's going to cost you millions. So can you partner with someone who will allow you to become your own payment processor without having to build all that infrastructure? So that's what we're seeing in the market.

Justin Hanna (3:47)

What does a payments product built for European businesses who are scaling globally actually look like?

Sadra Hosseini (3:54)

Yeah, really good question. So going back to what I mentioned before, Europe is extremely fractured. Every country has its own payment method. So you go to Netherlands, you need Ideal, or WeRoad, the new one.

You go to France, you need CarBanker, you go to Germany, 54% of transactions are PayPal. So without having those, you're not going to win in that market.

And then for them, they also want to make sure to now, they've had to build these Frankenstein solutions where I'm going to get something from these guys and pull something from here and then do payouts with these guys. What we're finding, obviously, kind of being our business model is, can you put all of that into one package, give the full report in, give the right price in, one API, one unified API, so you don't have to, your developers have to constantly keep up with multiple APIs and then plug that in and you just scale with that. They don't want to have to think about that. They've got more, harder work to do, which is bringing customers, yeah, all that to deal with. Can we just get someone to do this, but we're making margin on everything that goes through? That's where it's excited about.