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Trends on the Fintech Market
Why to use Verestro?
Verestro architecture and choice of products
Verestro's products for various regions
What are the Advantages of the Verestro Fintech-as-a-Service Platform?
Own Payment License or Dependence on a BAAS provider - how does Verestro solve it?
How does Verestro differ from standard software companies?
What is Verestro not doing?

Trends on the Fintech Market

There are various important trends that are impacting the financial technology market at the moment. We try to focus on several of them to stay competitive and propose services which improve user satisfaction, conversion and bring more revenues to our partners. In this article I would like to focus on a few of these ongoing changes:

Embedded Finance - more and more applications, marketplaces, partners would like to include financial solutions inside their applications. It seems that flexible and not expensive payment solutions are necessary to build a new value proposition in many markets. From lending, through insurance, loyalty platforms, merchants, discount programs, employee benefits - all of them can find useful value in fintech solutions.
Focus on revenue generation - every financial product must bring value which can be counted in dollars. It used to be expensive to set up a card issuing solution, but it is no longer the case. You can implement and test various financial technologies during 2-3 months. You can have cards with their own visuals, and send money transfers globally easily. Once it becomes easy, all partners focus on solutions that can bring direct revenues per user, per transaction. High cost is no longer a problem today.
Multi-functionality, multi-acquiring, multi-issuing, multi-processing - there used to be specialised players focused on a particular segment. You had to choose different vendors for card issuing, accounts, money transfer, eCom payments etc. But today it is more and more important to find partners that can offer various solutions, provided by multiple banks, multiple processors under a single roof. Connections between various products bring the most value as thanks to it you can build more sophisticated use cases
Fraud and AML management - flexible but superior approach to AML, KYC, fraud management is becoming a king. The strategy focused on declining all high risk transactions does not work any longer. Financial players and regulators learned that it is necessary to build rules that enable processing of various types of transactions in a secure way, in line with rules.
Cryptocurrencies - it seems that after years of ups and downs cryptocurrencies became part of our world. It is difficult to imagine that there will be a hard block for this technology. It is important to start thinking about it as part of financial technologies that bring global value in different use cases.

At Verestro, we focus on those trends to ensure that we can deliver exceptional value for our customers.

Krzysztof Drzyzga

Why to use Verestro?

In this article I would like to explain why it is beneficial to leverage the Verestro Fintech-as-a-Service Platform.

Keeping pace in the fintech landscape

Let's start with a description of the problem. Today's financial and payment technology world is a complicated monster. There are new technologies appearing and disappearing every year or even every month. You must invest into new APIs, new interfaces, new frameworks, new security and regulatory requirements. And on the other hand, you have growing costs of IT development. Maybe, during the last years the growth of salaries slowed down a bit but in general one of the biggest costs in your P&L is IT expenditures.

Innovation as a challenge

Let's imagine that you would like to be on top of many innovations in financial technologies. You would like to invest into QR payments, eCom, contactless etc. And you would like to do it of course in high quality. It means that for each of these functionalities you would need a few people to develop and later maintain and host these solutions. A few people means usually 50-100k USD monthly costs for 6-12 months or actually forever. Really forever, because technologies are changing, new frameworks are required, updates are needed.

We think that actually it does not make sense that everybody does it on their own. It would take a lot of time and a lot of money. It is much better and easier if we invest into these technologies and our customers will cover just part of the costs involved in development and maintenance of these platforms. Additionally, we give benefits of compliance with security, legal, regulatory requirements to simplify customers' lives. How does it work?

Verestro’s solution: All-in-One Fintech-as-a-Service Platform

The philosophy is pretty simple. We work on our own, or with Mastercard, with banks, with payment institutions on new products. We are implementing them one-by-one on our platform and thanks to this you are getting a big set of financial technologies in one place. You do not need to manage multiple vendors, you do not need to learn new technologies. You are focused on users, usually you are focused on front-end, core functionalities and your costs are much lower. Our standard fees are lower than AWS or Azure costs of hosting only... but at this price we provide not only hosting but also applications, APIs, connections, regulatory compliance, PCI DSS, business solutions, admin panels, frontend if needed etc.

So, if you want to make use of investments done by multiple parties in the world, get in touch with us!

Verestro architecture and choice of products

Below simplified example of Verestro platform architecture. Before every project please decide which functionalities are you going to use.

Please tick bullet points which are needed in your project and deliver it to our sales team:

We are constantly adding new value added functionalities. Check if we have not added something new in the meantime :) Contact us.

Verestro's products for various regions

Our mission at Verestro is to provide cutting-edge fintech technologies and make them affordable to everyone. We work with banks, fintech providers, payment schemes, payment gateways, merchants, corporations and small businesses and develop a BAAS / FAAS platform. However, as "payments" is a regulated business, we are not able to provide all our services globally at the moment. Below we describe key products we distribute in particular regions.

The European Union
- Key customers: banks, fintech, payment providers, merchants, businesses, insurances, lendtech etc.
- Key products: all products described in our Developer Zone, including technology and regulated payments solutions.
- Taking into account market dynamics, our key focus is on:

North & South America
- Key customers: banks, processors, payment schemes, fintech.
- Key products: we are focused on selling technology platforms because we do not have a payment license at the moment; we do work with various partners like Paymentology or Girasol to provide end-to-end payment solutions; we can offer payment accounts and cards in Europe if customer has office in Europe.
- Taking into account market dynamics, our key focus is on:

East Asia incl. India
- Key customers: banks, processors, payment schemes, fintech.
- Key products: focus on technology products around tokenization and money transfers; we can offer payment accounts and cards in Europe if customer has an office in Europe.
- Taking into account market dynamics, our key focus is on:

Middle East & Africa
- Key customers: banks, processors, payment schemes, fintech.
- Key products: focus on technology around tokenization and white label; we can offer payment accounts and cards in Europe if customer has office in Europe:

What are the Advantages of the Verestro Fintech-as-a-Service Platform?

Each time we approach our customers, we are asked what advantages over the competitors our solution brings. In this article I would like to describe a couple of points which differentiate us among this pot of financial technologies vendors.

Advantages of the Verestro Fintech-as-a-Service Platform

1. Speed

200% faster than building everything in-house. Instead of building every fintech product yourself, You can use our platform and You will have all of those services much faster and at lower investment costs. Let’s take card issuing for example. To start issuing cards You need to cover very costly and time consuming areas. You have to:

build Your architecture and its individual components like data core center to manage cards, '
have all kind of backends to tokenize the cards,
create admin panels,
integrate with Mastercard or Visa platforms,
create the SDKs to integrate them with Your mobile interface,
finally find or build Your own processing facility,
and obtain a license of an official payment institution.

It may take from 1,5 to even 3 years and cost You a fortune counted in millions of euros! Choosing a Fintech-as-a-Service model is way more efficient as You simply do it all in 3 months.

2. Cost-Effectiveness

Our services cost up to 50% less than those of the competition! Often customers complain of high costs of fintech services. The cost of implementing our fintech services is one of the lowest in the industry, due to the maintained cost discipline, the location of the software house in the relatively cheapest country in the EU in terms of personnel costs, and the accumulated experience of more than 65 completed implementation projects.

Thanks to the subscription-based Fintech-as-a-Service sales model, the cost of our services is also significantly cheaper than the cost of developing such services in-house. As in the above-mentioned example of card issuing, the cost of card issuing program may exceed 1-2 m euros where in fintech-as-a-service case You will be only charged for a setup fee not higher than 20 k euro and then You will need to pay a monthly fee for the maintenance dependent on the type of cards You issue 4-8 k euro per month. Isn’t it a good deal?

3. Long-Term Financial Stability

We are profitable, no loans, not dependent on investor money. We have Mastercard as a shareholder. You get a partner with long term financial stability which is extremely rare in our industry. Before signing any agreement with any vendor of financial technologies please make sure You double checked their financial condition usually available in the investors tabs on their official websites. You don’t want to wake up one day with Your customers cut off from their payment cards.

4. Flexibility

Direct contact and flexibility! At Verestro,You get in touch with decision makers and we are ready to listen to Your needs. As long as You are not violating financial, AML rules - we are happy to be flexible and update our rules to Your needs.

Even though we would prefer to sell our off-the-shelf products like card issuing, tokenization, money transfers or a business expense management system, we all know, sometimes, some customisations are simply unavoidable. We have wide experience in tailoring the products to our Partners' needs.

5. New Revenue Streams

Generate new revenue with our fintech products! Our clients value rapid implementation of fintech services because it allows them to start generating revenue or reduce costs faster from such services as payment card issuance and cross-border transfers, online payments.

Based on our experience and optimized processes and API/SDK ,it takes 4 times less effort to launch new products and start generating revenues on them. One of the good examples of the way You can quickly start earning on Your payment cards is a Fees module. Simply set up the fees on each issued card and start to earn from the first day of the project.

Contact

If You want to challenge some of the above-mentioned statements, feel free to book a call with one of our sales representatives at sales@verestro.com. We look forward to hearing from you!

Adam Mizołek

Own Payment License or Dependence on a BAAS provider - how does Verestro solve it?

If you are a fintech provider, there is one single risk of choosing a BAAS partner - long-term dependence on a regulatory license of the partner. We will focus on this topic in this article and explain how Verestro's proposal differs from all other BAAS providers.

At the beginning of your fintech journey, there is usually not enough time to cover all the topics and build every single payment license yourself. In fact, it does not even make sense. Therefore, fintech start-ups and scale-ups usually choose BAAS partners and develop their business with them.

Such a decision is actually an important risk for every fintech because you start being dependent on BAAS partners. Your customer gets registered to accounts and payment services of your partner and in the long run you are building a serious risk for yourself. Maybe you do not care about this problem at this stage but think of it. It is a super important risk. What can happen:

Your BAAS partner may increase prices and you will have to pay
Your BAAS partner has problems with a regulatory institution and you must follow new rules that regulator is pushing to the payment provider
Your BAAS partner has AML issues and your BIN, your cards are blocked because of other customers

There are many risks. At Verestro, we solve this problem in various ways:

We are not only BAAS but also technology provider - a lot of our projects are performed in cooperation with banks, payment institutions where we act as a technology provider only. We can also do it for you which means that once you get your own payment license, we can use the same technical infrastructure to issue your cards and open your accounts.
We are not dependent on a single payment institution - we work on multi-issuing, multi-bank, and multi-acquiring solutions, so that you can have a choice of payment institutions that you work with. It is a unique functionality of our platform. It enables you to work globally with multiple payment institutions or to switch payment partners once it is necessary for your business.
We work with multiple banks - we have cooperation with many financial institutions and banks all over the world and our core strategy is to bring you accounts and payments in all countries. You can choose IBANs and BINs from various countries. You can choose currencies, local payment solutions etc.

In conclusion, when you choose Verestro, you get long-term stability and a solution to this important risk. Contact us for more details.

How does Verestro differ from standard software companies?

Verestro is a fintech-as-a- service provider - so we are not really interested in one-off projects - we are not a software house. We prefer to become your partner and help you thrive with our licensed technology, providing support and advice at every single step of your journey.

Verestro is a company focused on developing, maintaining and growing multiple fintech products. Let me give you some examples:

If you are big manufacturer and you are interested in software to manage your production site - do not call us, it is not our domain of work, we do not want to focus time of our developers on such a project.
If you are a global web provider and you are searching for new ways of building web services incl. Artificial Intelligence - do not call us, it is not what we are interested in.
If you are a global technology company and you are interested in ERP software - do not call us, we are not interested in developing it for you.
If you are a bank, and you are planning to launch a new credit scoring system - do not call us, we are not interested in it today (however, we are planning to work on credit processes as it is close to our fintech domain).

But if you are searching for various financial or payment solutions, especially if they require multiple integrations, are connected with all accounts, card issuing, card acquiring, contactless and eCom payments - call us. This is our domain where we are very strong. We can build very difficult use cases, we can connect card issuing with acquiring, we can play with technologies.

In other words we are focused on fintech products. We perform multiple certifications with VISA or Mastercard to be able to deliver these products globally in the most effective way. The best way to use our platform is actually to learn how our products work and try not to change too many things. We implement them in the best possible way, combining experience from various projects, geographies, and industries. If you use such products 'as-is', you will feel the most benefits as you will find out that implementing new payment innovations can be super quick (1-2 months) and very cost effective (10-20k EUR).

Test us, partner with us, play with fintech technology in a cost-effective way. Build a fintech innovation pipeline with us!

Krzysztof Drzyzga

What is Verestro not doing?

Verestro is a Fintech-as-a-Service provider building a micro-service platform that enables our partners to launch multiple fintech innovations at very limited cost. Our core products are card issuing incl. global BIN sponsorship, tokenization through x-pays and other contactless payments, money transfer solutions, eCommerce payments, value added services incl. loyalty, virtual cards and expense management, white label apps and web front-end solutions.

In this article I would like to describe what Verestro does not do:

Verestro is not a software outsourcing company focused on implementing IT projects outside of the fintech scope for particular customers. We do not do it and we do not want to do it.
Verestro is not a software outsourcing company within the fintech scope if a particular development cannot be used as an additional benefit for the Verestro platform. We like technology projects that upgrade value of our multifunctional platform and deliver value for all our customers in the long run.

Let me give you more details on fintech products that we do not have live at the moment. But I can assure you that we will have them live soon:

We do not have softPOS solutions enabling mobile phones becoming payment terminals. But we will be working on it.
We do not have a full end-to-end mobile banking app. We have a white label app focused on fintech functionalities which - I think - can be treated as a mobile banking app, but we lack credit and investment related features. We can develop these functionalities for you if you are interested.
On the acquiring side we do not have all local payment methods implemented. We are focused on global ways of payments like cards, Apple Pay, Google Pay. We will implement more local payment methods soon.
Credit scoring - we do not have a credit scoring platform.

Our mission is: We are inspired by cutting-edge financial technologies and we make them affordable to everyone. If you are interested in going live with multiple payment innovations at an affordable price and extremely high speed, contact us!