The payments industry is undergoing rapid and profound changes, driven by technological innovation, customer demand, regulatory pressure, and competitive dynamics. To understand the latest trends and what shacked the payments sector in 2023 and beyond, we sat down to talk to Vaida Saltenyte, Institutional Sales Executive at foqused.io, a payments partner network, to share the insights of the industry and daily bread and butter of the company. Vaida was one of the 11 influential women in fintech, presented in our first digital issue, as the Head of Partnerships at YouHodler, a crypto wallet, back then.
What is Foqused.io and what do you do?
Foqused.io is a payment partner network that specializes in high risk industries not only connecting companies from to various payment providers, but also helping to choose right payment partners, assess risks and help to strategically prepare for the business expansion plans. We have been in the industry for over six years, and we help companies to get a range of services, such as IBAN accounts (named, dedicated, pooled, virtual, b2b, c2b/b2c), card acquiring and issuing, crypto services (onramp, offramp, OTC), world wide alternative local methods, open banking, payment initiation and more.
Our focus area particularly, is not only quick turnaround finding partners for our client needs, but also sharing our knowledge of what we see is happening in the market so they can also be among the first ones to use the trends as their competitive advantage.
This is exactly what our customers love – the personalised approach analysing their particular needs and finding best suited solutions. So when the next time comes where they have questions or thinking about approaching new markets, we are the first ones they talk to.
Vaida, we spoke with you in the last issue as well, where you were representing a crypto wallet. Why did you decide to move to the payments industry?
Working at a crypto wallet as Head of Partnerships I was responsible not only for the marketing related business collaborations but also for payments solutions. As a crypto company being classified as a high risk business, I faced quite a few challenges trying to find banking partners to work with. I got rejected so many times. More and more I started to see a gap between the payment providers themselves not being fully able to understand the risk level of the business and companies who try to create value but get stuck in internal operational issues, like not getting a bank account or card processing.
Coming from the crypto industry I felt that pain practically daily and when the opportunity presented to me to help to make a difference, I took it and joined foqused.io
Who do you work with now? Who are your daily business contacts, providers, clients etc?
From one side, we work with Neobanks, EMIs, MSBs, MSOs, SROs, PIs, etc. who have built a set of services focusing on high risk merchants. And on the other side, we work with high-risk and medium-risk companies from different industries. From high-risk I can mention forex, gambling, crypto, adult, pharma, nutra companies and payment institutions themselves and from medium-risk it would be real estate, consultancy agencies, marketing, SaaS providers, shipping, etc. We help our clients to find the best payment solutions according to their needs, preferences and also company structures they have.
How does it work exactly? Is it a myth that by involving mediators, you might increase the costs for the companies?
As we have established long-term relationships with our providers, we have agreed on a revenue share model with them. This means that we do not charge any markups to our clients. This way, we can offer them the highly competitive pricing in the industry. You can see us as booking.com of the industry – some pricing can be even cheaper with us to compare if the companies would go directly to the provider. How is this possible? It is related to the number of companies that we bring to our providers and revenue volumes they generate through us. For some of our providers we are the biggest introducing partners, so they are happy to give us very competitive prices to offer the clients.
Moreover, payment partners within our network inherently give priority to clients we’ve introduced, recognising that all application submissions undergo meticulous review and preparation by foqused.io. This systematic approach is greatly appreciated by compliance departments.
What are the main challenges and opportunities for your business in 2023 Q3?
One very important challenge we face are the bad players of the industry. As anywhere where money is involved, greed gets to the game and causes damages and losses. Being in the industry for so long, we have seen many fraudulent cases, purposefully created fraudulent schemes, hence we function as a filtering mechanism for financial institutions, removing undesirable actors and transferring a pristine client portfolio to our network partners. Sometimes we also face inexperience and mistakes that could have been avoided, if people had a chance to talk to us.
Take, for instance, businesses in high-risk industries often stumble by misrepresenting their operations, resulting in the rejection of their account applications. We assist clients in crafting a comprehensive business profile, ensuring accurate business representation, and effectively elucidating the fund flow, a critical factor in their success.
We typically identify business opportunities through two primary channels. The first, as paradoxical as it may sound, emerges from the challenges faced by other businesses, often resulting from strict regulations and tight risk approaches. The second avenue involves market innovation and product expansion, such as open banking, payment initiation, crypto world and other alternative payment methods and solutions.
How do you measure the success of your business?
In essence, our focus revolves around three fundamental aspects: workload optimisation, revenue generation and customer satisfaction measured via retention rate. We were fortunate enough to have a steady growth for the last few years where we had to also adopt new technologies like AI to optimise our internal and some external processes. However, not everything can be outsourced, especially the human interaction while listening to the needs of our clients, with whom we have already worked for years. Starting from simple services we end up growing together i.e. by helping them develop a plan of strategic initiatives of expansion to particular regions or introducing new services and redundancy solutions. This particular part is what makes the difference, creates trust and brings approximately 90% of our clients back to us. I believe this number speaks for itself.
