• Arik Shtilman, CEO at Rapyd


• 20.01.2023 12:00 pm
#payments

The businesses that will survive and thrive in 2023’s challenging economic environment all have one thing in common, resilience. Being resilient means a business is able to deal with shocks and adversity while continuously adapting to achieve growth in any environment. A key factor to achieving resilience is partnering with others to do the things that aren’t core to your business model. That’s exactly what embedded fintech is all about.

Resilience in business is the ability to deal with shocks and adversity and to continuously adapt to accelerate growth in any environment.

This is the age of cloud-enabled business, seamless trade, and the rise of the ‘default global’ company. The businesses powering this cross-border commerce transformation need to build on a fintech platform that provides the same level of connectivity and convenience for global payments that customers have come to expect from every other aspect of the online world.

The Complexity of the Payments Landscape Is a Major Growth Inhibitor

Every year, billions of dollars’ worth of business opportunities are left on the table because of payments complexity. Commerce can’t happen fluidly and cost-effectively if companies can’t deploy fintech services and applications in new markets.

To make commerce work, companies must integrate multiple payment providers and systems, each with its own unique architecture and regulations. This piecemeal, build-it-yourself approach to payments is a desperately inefficient solution to a universal business problem.

The Four Basic Building Blocks of Embedded Fintech

Just four building blocks; accepting payments, sending payouts, holding and transferring funds and issuing cards — give businesses the ability to build just about any fintech application or commerce experience. 

By layering on other services, like global licensing and compliance, foreign exchange, fraud monitoring and identity verification, Rapyd lets businesses build the future of commerce. 

That’s how Rapyd delivers resiliency through embedded fintech. Businesses are now free to imagine, build, and grow without the time or expense of building costly payments infrastructure or needing to take on tasks that aren’t core to your business, like navigating licensing and regulatory standards in 190 countries. 

What I have learned building and growing Rapyd through the global pandemic and now a global economic downturn is that there are two types of businesses, the resilient and the losers. The resilient businesses focus on partnership, collaboration and ecosystems. The losers try to go it alone. They spend a lot of time and money developing systems and infrastructure that aren’t core to their business instead of actually building their business.  

Back in 2018, Accenture conducted a study that found that 76% of business leaders stated that they believed their current business model will be unrecognisable in five years and that ecosystems will be the main change agent. 2023 is five years later. It looks like Accenture got it right. Ecosystems are now the orchestrators of the global economy. The businesses that learn to tap into these ecosystems will be the winners in 2023 and beyond.