Episode Details

The speed of change is super-rapid and nowhere more than in payments where advance rapidly leapfrogs advance. For the past two years “orchestration” has been The Thing (see eg LFP213 a deep dive into that topic). However now we have the latest greatest kid on the block the idea of curation. If orchestration solved the challenge of the techies namely replacing many APIs with one – a natural leap forwards – it did not solve the businesses challenges with negotiating a whole bunch of biparty arrangements contract et al. Curation promises to fix all that by creating a single counterparty – the curator – as an intermediary.

Aran has a super-impressive long track-record in the payments industry and his latest venture – Paytrix – has impressive backers such as Bain Capital and raised some $18m for an A Series in a tough time for tech raises.

Bootstrapping to be a Tier 1 counterparty is not simple matter and Aran guides us through not just what the curation model is but also the challenges of not slowly walking up the mountain to the heights but getting there super-rapidly.

Topics discussed include:

• holidays or “time with the kids”?
• Aran’s impressive career from leaving school at 16 and enduring the Royal Marines for a whole three days to CEOing and driving B2B payments change
• mixing ideas and reality
• how the 21stC payments trajectory has led to curation being the next necessary route forwards
• “orchestration was basically about making the CTO’s life easier”
• which market segments this works best for
• serving larger customer segments
• their needs
• the business advantages of the curation model for supplier and purchaser
• regulated entities which hold the money as EMIs
• why do ideas get thought of or executed when they are and not before?
• the origins of the idea in a pub
• the easier route for startups is not to get regulated and not to try and interface with Tier