The inside track

Will Orde:

“Atoa. This is a payments platform that enables merchants to take payments directly from their customers’ accounts, rather than via a debit or credit card, which reduces costs. All the customer has to do is follow a link through a QR code.”

Julia Andre:

“Adfin. It’s a UK startup that helps small businesses and sole traders get invoices paid more easily. Using the platform, they can automate every step of the invoice-to-cash process.”

Jay Reinemann:

As new technology disrupts industries, companies are increasingly compelled to achieve that same level of internal cooperation. Many businesses have organizational silos without enough sharing of information between teams. As the pace of change accelerates, companies are finding they need to break down these barriers if they are to stay at the front of the pack. 

Lauren Kolodny:

“Nala. It enables people to send money into and out of Africa. Remittance flows into and out of the country have risen dramatically in the past 10 years, but most of those payments are expensive and slow.  To send money efficiently, Nala has built their own payment rails.”

William Bao Bean:

“24Seven Apni Dukan, a commerce platform that connects and fully digitizes mom-and-pop stores in Pakistan. By ordering collectively these stores can order supplies at wholesale prices and, using data from sales, receive trade financing. The app also gives stores a POS so customers can pay digitally. 24Seven will take a cut from the financing as well as each payment.”

Lauren Kolodny

Co-Founder and Managing Partner at Acrew Capital

Will Orde:

“As fraudsters use AI to optimize their outreach messages, fraud is becoming an even bigger risk for merchants and banks, who foot the bill. Merchants and banks don't want to add extra friction to the process for customers, with additional steps in a transaction, so they are embracing AI to identify the fraudulent ones in real-time. It’s an arms race, and this is creating a new market for AI-based fraud prevention tools.”

Julia Andre:

“A large portion of B2B transactions are still quite archaic in the way they are conducted. The process normally involves sending the customer a paper invoice with your bank information, followed by a bank transfer. But there’s a growing demand among businesses to have consumer-grade, seamless, embedded workflows and the ability to pay, buy, bank, exchange, invest, and borrow in one place. This has created an opportunity.”

Jay Reinemann:

“It’s hard to beat card payments—but open banking payments, which allow shoppers to directly pay from their bank through an account-to-account payment (A2A), are quicker, easier, and more secure. For businesses, open banking payments are also cheaper, and they don’t have to worry about a chargeback or fraud.”

Lauren Kolodny:

“We are on the brink of a significant transformation in the paytech sector, propelled by the ability of large language models to clean, structure, and standardize formerly unused financial data. Long-sought-after advancements in paytech such as true payment automation, dynamic pricing and software driven dispute management will be achievable...”

William Bao Bean:

“In many developing countries you’ve got hundreds of thousands of people working online doing freelance work. But their biggest challenge is getting paid. If you're in Africa, for instance, it can be hard to receive USD or GBP so people get paid in stablecoins then turn it into their local currency so they can pay for food and rent. An increasing number of companies are tackling this problem by offering good stablecoin exchanges.”