How Silverflow reached 10–15% month-over-month transaction growth by targeting the one infrastructure layer every bank and acquirer uses but no modern vendor had rebuilt | Robert Kraal

**SPEAKER_1** (0:08)
Welcome back to another episode of Builders. As always, this show is brought to you by frontlines.io, Silicon Valley's leading B2B podcast production studio. If you're bringing technology to market and want to learn from your peers, we have a library of more than 1200 interviews with venture-backed founders and marketers where they talk all things go to market. Of course, if you want to launch your own podcast, we offer podcasts as a service to more than 80 tech startups. The idea there is very simple. You show up and host and we do everything else. Now, with all that said, let's jump into today's episode.
Today, we're speaking with Robert Kraal, founder of Silverflow. Robert, welcome to the show.

**Robert Kraal** (0:46)
Thank you, bros.

**SPEAKER_1** (0:46)
What was your journey into payments?

**Robert Kraal** (0:48)
Well, actually, I've been in the payments for pretty much my whole life. So my first entrance in the payments was a company called Bibit. We started it back in the late 90s already. We sold it in 2004 to the Royal Bank of Scotland. RBS also at that moment bought a slightly bigger company called Worldpay, and they merged the two together, but they used most of the technology from Bibit, but they preferred the Worldpay name. So too, I always make the joke that there's probably still code in the Worldpay code base that I wrote back in the 90s. After that, I spent some time with the local Dutch payment service provider, I was a COO there for TripleL, which we sold to Dictata. Then my old buddies from Bibit called me again and say, hey, we're starting up something new, which was Adyen. I wasn't there from the start, but pretty much when we were about to go live, they want to have an ops team, so they asked me to be the COO there.
In Adyen, I've also been the founder of their acquiring proposition, so looking at their own licenses from Visa, from Mastercard, other card networks, and we're also looking at what's the best technology to connect to the card networks.
We looked around and we said, okay, listen, that's not too cool what's out there, so we decided to build it ourselves. That obviously is also the route for why I found the Silverflow seven years ago. Besides that, I'm involved with many other payment companies at this moment. That's a short version of my history in payments.

**SPEAKER_1** (1:55)
What was it like building in payments, what was that, three decades ago compared to today?

**Robert Kraal** (2:00)
Well, one of the bigger differences at that moment, there was pretty much no regulation. So today, there's a lot of regulation and a difference a bit country by country. So it was really cowboy time. Also, I think definitely at those times, the banks were not really prepared for e-commerce. So you could do things that are no longer allowed today. So merge a lot of different types of mergers and transactions over one account, for instance, which at that moment sounded quite logical. But today, you would not do that anymore.
But it was really pioneering. I mean, there were good times, there were also bad times because definitely the.com crash, for instance. I'm not sure if everybody remembers, but it was quite a hectic thing that companies were very overvalued and suddenly crashed in terms of valuation. Also, many of them, they just went bust because they didn't have enough funding.

**SPEAKER_1** (2:42)
How does the mania around the early Internet compared to the mania that we're in with AI today?

**Robert Kraal** (2:48)
I think that in the early days, when I started working in payments in the Internet, which is not really the early days of Internet because Internet in the Netherlands has been since 92 and I started in 97
I've been working on predecessor of Internet, probably since I was 15 or so, so a number of years before that as well. But at that moment, it was still, I couldn't explain my parents what I was doing, so to say. Why are you choosing for a career in Internet? What is it? Nobody uses this. This is the early 90s. I think that it's different. Certainly, there's a element of hype around it. It's going to be very big. But at the same time, it doesn't exist for too long and there are already many applications and many companies that are very successful.
Of course, I think people expect a lot from it. To a degree, I think I expect a lot from it as well. We're using it in our organization a lot as well. It is completely different. There's way more confidence now on applications or usable tools when you look at the AI spectrum compared to back in the days, when companies were just not making money, but people also didn't see the need, didn't feel the need. They just said, okay, listen, it will go over in a couple of years. I don't think AI will go over in a couple of years. Maybe the hype will go over a little bit, the valuations. My chance with AI is there to stay.