.jpg)
Leaders In Payments
Leaders In Payments
David Rintel, CEO of Finby | Episode 442
Europe isn’t one payments market; it’s dozens of overlapping preferences, currencies, and rails that can make cross‑border growth feel like threading a needle. We sit down with David Rintel, CEO of Finby, to explore how a one‑stop, proprietary stack can tame that complexity while giving merchants real control over speed, features, and cost. From rebranding TrustPay to Finby to securing a new European license, David shares why staking out a distinct identity matters when your strategy is to build infrastructure, not just resell it.
We dig into what merchants actually need to win in new countries: curated payment methods that fit both their target market and their business model. David breaks down where cards still win, where local methods like BLIK and iDEAL dominate, and how recurring billing, chargeback rules, and settlement flows shape conversion and risk. He explains why direct scheme memberships beyond cards unlock first‑mile access to features, lower latency, and better product roadmaps and how a unified API can turn new market launches into configuration rather than fresh builds.
Regulation gets real, too. EU‑level rules rarely land uniformly; national transpositions drive edge‑case complexity, while mandates like SCA and instant payments remake the pipes. David’s advice is blunt and useful: stop trying to predict the winning rail and instead design for adaptability - teams, partners, and tech that bend without breaking. If you’re leading payments for a cross‑border brand, you’ll leave with a clearer playbook for method selection, integration depth, compliance guardrails, and the mindset to stay ahead of constant change.
Welcome to the Leaders in Payments Podcast, where we talk to sea level leaders from across the payments landscape. We'll be discussing the products and services that impact the payment space today, as well as trends and predictions for the future of payments. We will also hear stories from our guests about their journeys to the top.
SPEAKER_02:Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Leaders in Payments Podcast. I'm your host, Greg Myers, and today's special guest is David Rintel, the CEO of FinBee, formerly known as TrustPay. And we'll get into that rebranding in a minute. So, David, thank you so much for being here and welcome to the show. Thank you for having me, Greg. So if you don't mind, can you walk us through your professional journey and how you got there?
SPEAKER_01:Sure. Even though it's not really much of a story or much of a journey, the idea of TrustPay, which was originally my father's, came around in sort of 2008-2009 when I was still finishing uni back in the UK. So I literally started working on the paperwork for a license application while I was still finishing my master's degree. And this is by and large the only thing I've ever done since. So my CV is you know rather lacking in that regard.
SPEAKER_02:Great, great. So let's talk about FinBee. So can you tell us what the company actually does?
SPEAKER_01:In a nutshell, we are today at least, uh, we're a pure play e-commerce payment provider. We focus on sort of mid-to-large merchants with a cross-border focus or a cross-border ambition, if you will. And it is we see ourselves sort of as a payment service provider, even though underneath we are an acquirer, so we're principal members of Visa and MasterCard. We're also members of a number of other different local and regional payment schemes, especially in Europe. And our ambition really is to provide a seamless sort of one-stop shop for cross-border merchants with a European base or a European focus.
SPEAKER_02:Okay. Are there specific verticals that you focus on?
SPEAKER_01:So already once you define yourself as a pure play e-commerce, cross-border focused player, you've sort of narrowed down your categories pretty significantly as a big chunk of e-commerce ultimately is sort of rather rather domestic. By definition, sort of digital goods, like games are oftentimes easier to scale cross-border. So we do have uh we do like digital goods, even the more domestic types like like media, for example. But it's really our focus is anything that has a cross-border ambition, which sort of adds the the cross-border complications. That's where our sweet spot really happens to happens to be.
SPEAKER_02:Well, you recently went through a rebranding. Can you tell us what that means for the company? What's changed and why now?
SPEAKER_01:So the the the story there is trust pay as a name makes an awful lot of sense or made an awful lot of sense. It has two very you know sort of important English words in it, and it tells the message pretty accurately. The only problem there is that we were not the only ones with the same or similar idea. So the sort of trust something pay something space has become rather crowded in terms of names, and it became rather difficult to sort of differentiate yourself. So for a while we have been thinking that we should claim a space for our own, some a more distinct identity as the company grew and matured. And um sometime last year we have decided to obtain an additional license in Europe, in Malta for that matter. And already then we knew we sort of wanted to rebrand. And we have decided to time the rebranding alongside us having obtained the regulatory license, and that sort of all came together late August, early September. So we decided to rebrand this this past September. It's you know pretty exciting, even though for for me bittersweet to an extent, because I sort of thought of myself as the CEO of TrustPay for 15 years, or you know, being associated with TrustPay for 15 years. Uh, but it's a it's a new chapter that we found very sort of exciting and uh you know just marks a new stage of our revolution, if you will.
SPEAKER_02:Well, what's the biggest challenge that your company is solving for your customers right now?
SPEAKER_01:So if you are in payments in Europe, what you have seen over the past, what you would have seen about over the past decade or so, is a massive fragmentation in payments or payment methods or payment choices. And if you do what we do is we support, you know, we have to support a number of different markets. They come with their own different currencies, both of course on the processing and the settlement side. There is a flurry of payment methods that sort of new ones pop up, some become less popular, but they never really leave all together, so they still have some uh users who are very attached to them. So it's it's become rather complex. And our job in a nutshell is to reduce the complexity into uh into something that's seamless and simple for our customers, for for the e-commerce merchants. So we take all the all the mess that we as a payment industry create and try to squeeze it into a one contract, one integration, one reconciliation, one system environment. So it's it's taking, which of course has to evolve with the time. And there's something constantly going on. So it's taking the complex elements and simplifying them enough to make them useful for our customers.
SPEAKER_02:Well, what would you say differentiates Venbi from your competitors?
SPEAKER_01:So there are a number of different things, some things that we sort of do take pride in. It's the aforementioned one-stop shop. You come to us and you know, we want to make sure we can take care of all of your payment acceptance needs. Underneath, we have a couple other differentiating factors. We run on proprietary tech, which sort of makes a difference in terms of your ability to be flexible and to react to new developments. Anything from um sort of tokenization and click to pay on the card site through new payment initiatives popping up in Europe, buy now, pay later, and everything rather than in between. And the the last piece is that we are infrastructure builders. So as opposed to some of our competitors who are primarily acquirers and they see themselves as sort of acquirers first, we do have direct scheme memberships in non-card scheme schemes, be it Blick in Poland or Ideal in the Netherlands and a number of others, which allows us to have full control over the tech stack and be first in line for any new technical initiatives and product developments that the schemes choose to offer from time to time.
SPEAKER_02:How do you see the future of online payments in Europe and beyond and what key trends or opportunities will shape that journey?
SPEAKER_01:That's a very expansive question. You know, Europe as such, as a unified payments market, doesn't exist. So if you just take the European Union out of Europe, that's 27 countries, and you have a multitude of languages, a multitude of currencies, and every single country has some local quirk. And so the the level of divergence between Portugal and Germany is far greater than let's say California and Ohio in the US, where the payment preferences are by and large rather similar. So what we have seen over the past decade or so was a flurry of new payment methods and payment options. And they came to the market with varying levels and degrees of success. There are certain success stories, like in Poland, which launched in 2015, and in some eight years, eight, nine years, they achieved 70% market share on e-commerce from zero. You have ID in the Netherlands, which has been around for a while, and they've been recently acquired by EPI, about to be rebranded to Vero. Again, you're talking about some a local payment method with a 65% market share in the local market. Portugal, a country of 10.5, 10.8 million people, they have two proprietary local payment methods that only work in Portugal. And the list sort of goes on and on and on. Then you have the account-to-account transfers with sort of open banking and so which sort of join forces with some of the older account-to-account transfer solutions that have been in Europe for 15-20 years, and you sort of mix this all together, put some bin out pay later into the mix, and it becomes an extremely fragmented market where you sort of should look at it as more of a collection of regions or even collection of countries as opposed to a single European payments market. Now there are some attempts to consolidate, however, these attempts have not shown any results to date. And that's in a that's on a continent where if you just look at the ballpark numbers, over 50% of the population of the European Union lives in countries where the two major card schemes are not the dominant payment option in e-commerce. Now this sort of ranges from Ireland, which is completely, which is very similar to the United States in terms of payment preferences, to Poland, where cards are a minority payment method completely squeezed out by the local payment method called BLIC. So that's the no we can we can dwell on this for as long as you as long as you like. I think we could go on for hours and hours on the on the topic of European payments. Ultimately, it's been quite the ride, which doesn't seem to be coming to an end any anytime soon.
SPEAKER_02:So your merchants, if they're selling across countries, how many payment methods do they have to offer? It seems like there's this might be this huge dashboard of potential options. It seems like that just you know becomes very complicated. So how does how does that work? How do merchants decide what to offer?
SPEAKER_01:So I I think this is where the job of a payment service provider comes in. I like to think of ourselves sometimes, much to the dismay of our marketing and sales team, as a butler of sorts. So if you as our prospective customer, even our existing customer, say, I like to, I am based out of Poland, so I know the Polish payment methods, but I like to sell in acceptance from the Netherlands or from Portugal, then it is our job to come in and say, okay, if you want to be in the Netherlands, you should be using ideal. You don't want to list all of the available European payment methods for every single country, especially since some of them are strictly local. If you want to go into Portugal, you may want to consider multibanco and MBWA. Things get even more complicated though. It also depends on your specific acceptance criteria, specific product. So many of these local payment methods do not support recurring billing. So if you want to accept IPL, that's great. There are no chargebacks, it's it's very convenient, it's extremely cheap. If your business model requires recurring billing, it's not going to work. You can go for separate direct debits. They work on recurring billing, but they're an absolute nightmare in terms of chargebacks because you have a essentially what amounts to an eight-week no questions asked money back guarantee, which can be extended up to 13 months. So you have to, is it suitable for newspapers and streaming services? Sure. Can you sell high-value physical goods with a payment method that is a no questions asked money back guarantee? We wouldn't risk it. So it is sort of our job to come in and say, okay, these are the payment methods which we believe are relevant to you, both in terms of your underlying business model and in terms of the geographies that you target. And then comes the contract and the integration. But you have to sort of handhold some of the customers in terms of what they should choose where, and also update your platform and update their product teams in terms of the product developments that these payment methods and payment schemes come up with. So the earlier example of no recurring billing on payment methods like ideal or Blick no longer applies to Blick. The payment scheme on its own launched recurring billing as an option earlier this year. But to make things a bit more complicated, they have introduced, I believe, three different subtypes of recurring billing, each with a slightly different integration stack, different chargeback rights, and slightly different regulations. And this is just a payment method, which is very important, but it only covers Poland.
SPEAKER_02:So a couple follow-on questions. I think this is a great area to kind of go deep in. And you mentioned you owned your own tech stack. So how automated is it for a merchant to move into another country? Is it is it more work on their end and it's more like click the button on your side, or is that kind of not the case?
SPEAKER_01:So once the initial integration and certification and everything else is done, that's our job. That's the heavy lifting that has to be done by us as a provider. In terms of the contractuals, it's a you just tick the box in a menu, pretty much. So there isn't an awfully complicated process there. And all of the integrations or all of the payment methods sit on the same stack and they're available within the same API. Now, naturally, different payment methods might have slightly different characteristics or slightly different fields you need to submit. But if you've managed to pull off cards, even with a rather deep integration, you will be okay with these local payment methods too. And we offer everything from hosted payment pages where the merchant only ever needs to literally add a button to, you know, add a button to its checkout down to sort of embedded fields and or dynamic fields as they're called, all the way to sort of very sort of deep server-to-server integrations on card acquiring. So we we offer a suite of technical solutions based on the level of investment that the merchant wants to put in, and also of course based on the based on the payment method itself.
SPEAKER_02:And one more question always comes up in my mind: the regulatory environment, compliance, I mean, all of those things. I would think, given all these different payment methods and countries, it's got to be a challenge. So how do you address that?
SPEAKER_01:So that there is the the regulatory landscape for Europe itself, which is dynamic. And then uh I've seen the you know, I've seen Americans having a very sort of strong view of how overly regulated Europe, the regulations relating to financial services are pretty uh they're pretty stringent. The issue is that even if you have European level regulations, in most cases, they go through national implementations or as they're known, transpositions, into the 27 local or member state legal systems, and there is always a level of divergence in terms of how these are implemented. So it it can create a bit of a bit of a challenge, to say the least. Also, you have sort of many new regulatory initiatives, the instant payments mandate that came that really kicked in, I think, October 5th, so 10, 11 days ago, through new evolutions of PSD and many others. But this is not something that necessarily should affect the merchants. This is the job of the payment providers to handle. Sometimes there is no getting around it, like when the strong customer authentication mandate was rolled out throughout Europe, that required effort across the entire ecosystem, and it affected it affected the merchants, the consumers, and everyone else, because it was just a system-wide security upgrade, which works now, but the there are certain dathing problems, uh, shall we shall we say?
SPEAKER_02:Okay. So what does success look like for your company over the next three to five years?
SPEAKER_01:So for us, we are uh we we are still an independent companies. We were bootstrapped to begin with, we've never taken any outside investors. So in three to five years, we'd still like to be growing organically, and we still have very strong organic growth. Ideally, we still like to remain independent because it gives you the ability to react more quickly, be a bit more contrarian sometimes than some of your other peers, because ultimately it is you have no outside investors to to answer to, so you only have sort of yourself to to play. We'd like to be a sort of a still nimble provider being able to adapt to new trends and staying at the at the top of our game, so to say, uh for lack of a lack of a better term. So it's it's in in naturalist to be bigger, stronger, yet still independent.
SPEAKER_02:So if you could go back to the start of your career, what advice would you give yourself?
SPEAKER_01:I would list all the different mistakes I have made, be quite the list, and then knowing myself, I would try to heed my advice and just make different mistakes anyway. The benefit of hindsight is is a great thing, and we could go on for hours how back in uh 2012 I thought that cards were on this sort of end of history march, and there would be nothing else in a decade. Boy, I was wrong. And and many, many sort of other other predictions that I sort of made internally, where I thought to myself, and I can just tell myself, you know, boy was I boy was I wrong, and it just comes in again and again and again. But but I suppose the f the the philosophy that sort of we have adopted over time, and it's a it's a lesson that I have learned personally, is not to try and predict the future too much. I I I don't think I'm a I'm a great fortune teller. It is it comes down to can we remain and can I personally remain nimble in various different versions that the future may take and not put all of my eggs in one basket and just remain nimble and rather sort of quick on your feet? And if you lose, you don't lose everything and you don't lose that that big. And this is a lesson that took me a while to learn, but it it is something that uh I believe is a very valuable lesson in life.
SPEAKER_02:So, what's one thing that payment leaders that might be listening today should be thinking about right now?
SPEAKER_01:If you look at everything that's that's that's going on, especially if you're exposed to the world of cross-border payments, and this goes back to my original fortune-telling analogy. I think it is important to ask yourself a question whether you believe that your team, your mindset, your your tech stack, and importantly your suppliers are have the mindset, the ability, the capability, whatever you may want to call this, to react to the changing environment. Because we we are going through a period of major changes or rather significant instability, and this goes, of course, well beyond payments, and things that we thought were out of the realms of the possible 24 months ago, are now just here, and they might be here to stay. And you may not know what the future holds, and you likely don't, well, at least certainly I know I don't. But how ready are you, and how ready is your organization to adapt to change? And it may come from agentic commerce and AI, fraud, regulation, fragmentation as a result of geopolitics, or everything and nothing that I've mentioned above, but they can all spell major change. And you should be flexible in your thinking and you should be ready to adapt, which is a mindset thing, it's a it's a technological question, um, and it's a question of which partners have you selected to accompany you on the journey.
SPEAKER_02:Well, David, this has been a great conversation. Is there anything else you'd like to add before we wrap up the show?
SPEAKER_01:No, I think if I start again, I will speak for another 35 minutes, and that would bore your listeners to tears.
SPEAKER_02:No, it's been a great conversation. Well, I really appreciate your time today and and being on the show. I know your time is very valuable. So again, thank you so much for being here. Thank you. Thanks for having me. And to all your listeners out there, I thank you for your time as well. And until the next story.
SPEAKER_00:Thank you for joining us this week on the Leaders in Payments Podcast. Make sure you visit our website at leadersinpayments.com, where you can subscribe to the show and where you'll find our show notes. If you enjoyed listening, please share on your social channels as well.