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Leaders In Payments
Leaders In Payments
Honor Gunday, Founder & CEO of Paymentwall | Episode 307
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As the visionary behind Paymentwall, Honor Gunday, Founder and CEO, reveals the remarkable transformation of his company, which began as a specialized payment solution for gamers and has since expanded to a global gateway, mastering over 150 local payment methods. In the vibrant crossroads of Istanbul and Miami, Honor's rich cultural experiences and academic endeavors at Stanford University fueled his passion for innovation, setting the groundwork for his ventures in tech. Gain priceless wisdom from Honor's entrepreneurial journey, which maps out how he navigated from managing fraud prevention to embracing the world of alternative digital payments.
Hear firsthand how Honor's linguistic agility transcends the personal, becoming a strategic asset in the diverse world of international commerce. As we unravel the compelling narrative of Honor's career, from the challenges of payment processing within the travel industry to his ventures like FasterPay and Terminal3, the roadmap for aspiring professionals in fintech becomes clearer. Discover the treasured virtues of knowledge, trust, and becoming indispensable, and how they forge the path to success in the dynamic intersection of technology, commerce, and innovation.
Welcome to the Leaders in Payments podcast, where we talk to C-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 2One API of Game Company would integrate us and gain access to all the local payment methods and be able to process payments and start making money. And then we expanded this business into credit cards and we built our own gateway, we built our own tokenization all these different things in the background.
Speaker 3That was Honor Gundy, the founder and CEO of Payment Wall, and he's my special guest on this episode of the Leaders in Payments podcast, and I'm your host, Greg Meyers. Payment Wall partners with all major payment methods in 200 local regions, including China, Brazil and Korea, to offer more than 150 local payment methods, including e-wallets, bank transfers, prepaid cards and cash options. Honor and I discuss the origin of Payment Wall and what makes it unique in the marketplace today. We also talk about where Honor sees the payments industry heading, as well as his passion for learning languages and how that passion applies to his business. We've got a great episode ahead, so let's get started. Hi Honor, Thank you for being here and welcome to the Leaders in Payments podcast. Thank you also. So let's dive right in. If you don't mind, tell our audience a little bit about yourself, maybe where you grew up, where you went to school, where you currently live, a few things like that.
Speaker 2I grew up in Istanbul, turkey, and Miami, florida. I spent the summers in Miami, the winters in Istanbul and I got exposed to something a little interesting there Miami being at the crossroads of Latin America and the United States and Istanbul being at the crossroads of Europe and Asia and even maybe Africa. That kind of played into my background today. I went to Stanford University after that, when I was 18. I did my Bachelor's of Science in Technology Management. It was an individually designed degree. When I graduated, I went to Expedia. I built their first cruise product in-house. I was a PM. Then I started incubating startups in Silicon Valley and Seattle, helping them outsource their development in Ukraine. I was one of the first entrepreneurs in Ukraine to start such a business. Then, finally, I got into the payments business and I currently live in Miami, in London and San Francisco San Francisco for the past 20 years. London more recently, for the past seven years or so, london has become a fintech hub. That's one of the reasons why I relocated here.
Speaker 3Makes a lot of sense. You've hit all the major worldwide fintech hubs. I guess let's talk about payment wall. Tell the audience what payment wall does Sure.
Speaker 2Payment wall started about 14 years ago. We started in the games space not gaming as gambling, but games. Then we expanded into different domains such as e-commerce, web services and so on. Monetization what we do is we integrated all the local payment methods in different parts of the world. As you would guess, when you launch a game, it's a digital service you end up with a lot of users from all over the world. Back when we started this on Facebook, there were so many users coming from Southeast Asia and different parts of the world. Other people didn't use credit cards there. We started integrating the local payment methods in those markets in Southeast Asia. Then we expanded to Europe and other markets and so on. With one API, a game company would integrate us and gain access to all the local payment methods and be able to process payments and start making money. Then we expanded this business into credit cards. We built our own gateway. We built our own tokenization all these different things in the background. That's what payment wall is.
Speaker 3Do you still mainly serve that vertical or do you have expanded beyond that vertical?
Speaker 2No, we expanded. Actually, Originally, we were just a platform that served games, because digital was easy for us. Then we expanded to e-commerce, travel, web services, SaaS, dating in the past not so much anymore and so on. We covered many different domains, but we just don't do anything. High-risk.
Speaker 3You have two other companies. You want to mention those and what they do as well.
Speaker 2Yes, of course. As time went on we realized the need of the users being able to store funds in different currencies. And we also realize the US regulation didn't allow the storage of foreign currencies in the bank account, so we Encourage a lot of losses in currency exchange. So we decided to provide a solution to store funds in foreign currency to american and european Merchants. So we built a faster pay, which is a UK based wallet. It's an EMI licensed entity in the UK and we also applied for licenses in the US as well. So we now are licensed both in the US and the UK with that service.
Speaker 2And then we also decided to spin off the gaming focus solution as a separate entity, as it has a different need. Typically game companies require the payment provider to provide the customer service to the end users 24 seven and they also require some risk services because they don't have those people in the house. So we realize that most payment providers don't provide those, along with their regular credit card processing and so on. So we spun out terminal three as a solution that's geared towards these digital merchants. That needs payment processing but they don't have the know how to go to those different markets and optimize payments and Deal with the risk and VAT and sales tax and things like that. So it's a whole entire sales enablement module that we have on terminal three.
Speaker 3Alright, so back to payment wall. What would you say, differentiates payment wall from your competitors?
Speaker 2Well, in the past maybe let's say ten years I would say the alternative payments was the main differentiator, as most companies used to see alternative payments as something exotic. They actually used to use the term exotic and today most of the companies caught up with this trend. So I would not say that the alternative payments is a differentiator. But I think what differentiates us is the Fourteen years of experience that we have in those markets and local offices that we have in those places. We currently have twenty two offices all over the world In different places and all those team members Bring in the know how and we obviously are able to help the clients a little bit better, knowing the local markets, if they want to expand those regions. We won't just provide the payment solution but will actually explain how they can go to market in those places.
Speaker 3Okay, is it required to have a location in those areas or you just chose to do that?
Speaker 2Well, it's both, I would say. In some cases, due to compliance with local regulation, you have to apply for a license or you have to have Our maintain an office, and then you know if you're an ambitious company, you want to also serve the local markets in those places and get some customers. For example, we have deep penetration in the South Korean market with the office in Seoul for the past ten years. There we have clients that want to go global. We have big customers like Samsung and LG. They have relied on us to expand globally. So you want to maintain that relationship and provide the customer service. But then you have companies that want to go to South Korea. So having the local team there allows us to connect, let's say, american companies that want to sell in South Korea. So we act as a bridge. To be able to act as a bridge, you need to have two legs on both sides.
Speaker 3So I assume all of this is basically e-commerce or digital payments most of it.
Speaker 2Yes, I would say so. We're not really into POS payments or in-person payments. We're trying to go into that space, but we don't have any product at the same.
Speaker 3So obviously you have a lot of experience in the industry. So where do you think payments is headed, say in the next three to five years?
Speaker 2Well, this is a controversial Pandora's box we're opening with that question. Well, we have some interesting insights thanks to our relationship with some central banks. So in India we opened our offices about five, six years ago and the regulation is quite tough in India. We basically didn't want to pursue the license in India at some point in time, but then the relationships that we built in India helped us get exclusive rights for the time being for their UPI solution in the US and UK markets. We basically can enable American merchants to process payments with UPI From India, so users in India could purchase goods from the US merchants using UPI.
Speaker 2Now, what is UPI? Upi basically is a special, really fast transfer methodology that NPCI, the National Payments Corporation of India, which is a technology subdivision of the central bank there Invented. This is a copy of the Chinese system. That also is the back end of WeChat pay. So these real-time payments enable people-to-people payments, basically tapping the bank account and enabling the transfer of funds immediately, and this is an effort that needs to take place at the central bank level. So I see this system penetrating Every single market in the world, where you would just use bank accounts to transfer funds from one person to another and you can also pay merchants using QR codes or by tapping and paying and so on, and then remittance payments also happen the same way over the same network. So this is one big development that's going to change and maybe even disrupt the credit card business. It is already happening in Brazil with PIX. It has happened in India with UPI. In China, you have WeChat Pay and Alipay piggybacking on the same network, and they have also replicated this via the Tencent and financial investments in Japan and all across Southeast Asia. That's the biggest trend that the US still does not see as a daily way to pay.
Speaker 2Now, the second thing that we all hear at conferences when you have central bankers attending them, is the CBDC. Cbdc is currently live. That's the central bank digital currency. It's currently live in China. I actually personally witnessed the usage of this among my team members when I was in Beijing and Shenzhen two months ago, and you have basically now the banking applications supporting EU on, so you don't even need to use, let's say, a layer that can tap these UPI or the back end of WeChat Pay and so on. You can actually use the CBDC to transfer funds from one person to another. So you're basically transferring dollars from one user to another, almost like on the blockchain.
Speaker 2This is going to be revolutionary. It will maybe eliminate and disrupt all of our businesses in the payment space, unless there's a way for us to charge some fees and so on. Another problem that I see for the payments industry and fees is in India. In India, the central bank, the RBI, reserve Bank of India, basically did not allow payment providers to charge any fees to enable the propagation of this UPI system among the merchants. If the central banks dictate a no fee structure, I think the payment industry is dead. So we have a big threat, but at the same time, this presents an opportunity. Obviously, the early companies in this space are going to profit from this and so on, and this replaces basically the blockchain and cryptocurrencies in some ways.
Speaker 3Yeah, and you mentioned PIX. We're having on someone from Matera. I'm not sure if you're familiar with Matera, but they were heavily involved in the early days of creating PIX, so I've recently learned a lot about that, and certainly here in the US, I mean, you're well aware we have the Fed now that launched, and instant payments has been quite the topic of conversation for a while. So I definitely think you're onto something with the kind of being able to pay from your bank account and doing it in a seamless way. I think the US is far behind and I'm not sure how quickly we can catch up, but I definitely think that's a trend that I hear an awful lot.
Speaker 2Something surprising that happened during money 2020 was we were approached by people from the Fed. Typically, you don't see those people around at payment conferences. You might hear one or two of them giving a speech about the state of the economy or something like that, but you don't really see Fed people going around doing business development and talking to payment providers to give them access to the federal network. So I think things are changing in the US. Fed now is the first step of this. The second step is going to be to propagate this among the payment players and payment providers and so on. But again, for adoption at the user level, you have to have some additional incentives. People, I think, are addicted to credit cards in the US due to all the benefits that these mileage programs and so on provide, so that's going to be tough to get rid of. I don't think people are going to give up on their miles that they accumulate to go on vacation and so on.
Speaker 3Right, yeah, the whole consumer behavior is really going to have to change a lot in the US. I'm not sure it'll happen in my lifetime, but maybe I'm not sure, dari. Well, let's switch gears a little bit and talk about you. So you mentioned, obviously after college you went to Expedia and maybe fill us in. How did you get into payments? Why did you start payment, while what was attractive about maybe the industry? So tell us a little bit about that background story.
Global Payments and Multilingual Passions
Speaker 2Sure, the funny thing is I think I really was interested in doing something payments related. I started my first internet venture, I would say, when I was like 15, 16, building websites, community websites, social networks and things like that chat websites for people to join and build their own community website and things like that. So when PayPal launched, I was so excited I actually registered piggybankcom domain name. So I was like, oh, maybe I can build something for these community sites to collect funds. But then the financial system behind it is difficult to engineer for a kid I was only 16 or 17, something like that. At Expedia I was exposed to the payment APIs of Bivit. Bivit actually was a technologically advanced company based out of Europe I believe it was built by the ADIEN people and Bibbit eventually got acquired by Roller Bank of Scotland and then it ended up becoming world pay. Bibbit enabled credit card processing, but more international. So Expedia obviously as a business has a lot of international users.
Speaker 2We had to do cruise payments that were really sophisticated. You need to be able to take a deposit. You need to be able to take multiple cards from multiple people. You need to have really complicated bookings for cruises so you need to be able to charge for the flights to the port, the embarkation port. You have to charge for the flights back. You have to charge for the hotels, if you have any hotel stays before and after, and all these things become really complicated. If you have, let's say, a return, the person doesn't want to go on that cruise anymore, the family is not able to make it. You have to now process refunds for the whole entire transaction list. So it's a really complicated thing that you can sell online cruises. So I was exposed to the Bibbit APIs and Bibbit system and some other companies in the process, and I realized the importance of payments.
Speaker 2Now, when I built an e-commerce company, I sold laptops from Seattle to the UK. The UK had a special tax reduction. They were allowing importation of laptops tax-free. So I ended up building a service selling laptops from Seattle to the UK, basically benefiting from the currency differential and so on, and I was able to deliver laptops within two days in that market. But then at the same time, I faced massive fraud and I had to build systems to prevent fraud.
Speaker 2So all of these experiences combined made me realize that payments is the way to go. But then I had built an advertising company on Facebook that was incentivized advertising. So let's say a person was playing games and let's say they didn't want to pay because they didn't have a credit card or they didn't trust the game at the time and they wanted to just get some credits for free. We would let them go subscribe to Netflix as a free trial. Netflix would give us $20 CPA and then we would give the user some credits inside the game that would enable them to play one round or two rounds and so on.
Speaker 2And I realized that if we complimented this with payments, that we would even have better attraction, because we would offer both a way to pay without paying and also a way to pay for things that you want to pay for all the alternative payments. So that's when I decided to stop doing the advertising business and switch over to doing full-time payments, because I saw the need for alternative payments in these digital goods sales. So that's kind of the transition from my childhood to how I built.
Speaker 3PayMeWall. Great Thanks for sharing that. So what are some things you're passionate about? So, maybe one work related passion and one personal passion.
Speaker 2I think I'm one of those people that combined my passion and my work. I grew up multilingual and I always wanted to make use of my language skills. I grew up in Istanbul. What In Miami, my parents spoke Turkish at home and then I would speak English outside, and then when I moved to Istanbul with my mom, we spoke Turkish all the time, but then I attended a school in French. I went to a French high school, so all my classes were in French and I started studying Italian. I started learning Spanish in Miami, because that's the main language in Miami nowadays. So I became multilingual and I studied Russian at Stanford for two years and I studied some Japanese, some Brazilian Portuguese.
Speaker 2After a spring break trip to Brazil and I wanted to use these languages in my job, during my work day, I applied actually to the international team at Expedia. They didn't hire me. I think they didn't want someone multilingual that would be a threat for their own jobs. So I ended up basically thinking about how I can combine my language skill with my work and I think that's when the payment wall idea and my hobby for learning languages and so on kind of combined together and I got to travel a lot. I got to use my languages. I got to experience different cultures and try to learn new things about different cultures. It's been really fun and I still want to explore more countries and learn more about them and figure out how we can help them with payments. There's more to do, so it's a fun experience. This is not just a job. This is actually a passion. We make money while pursuing our passion. It's not too bad.
Speaker 3Yeah, Well, I'm impressed because I haven't mastered English yet, so I'm very impressed. I've always been impressed with people who can speak multiple languages. It's just something that has never been in my wheelhouse, but I'm glad there are people out there that can certainly do it. Well, this next question before we wrap up. I always love to get people's perspective and obviously you have quite the international perspective. So if someone is interested in payments, maybe they're just coming right out of college and they come to you and they say honor, I'm interested in getting into fintech or payments and maybe even working there at payment wall. What would you tell them they needed to do to be successful?
Speaker 2Being hungry, I think, is the most important thing and after that, working to be indispensable for the company is when you're working towards that goal of being indispensable, you cannot give up and you have no turning back and you get to get trusted and trust is the most important thing in payments and you start building relationships so people can trust you and you are useful to them, and then you start growing. I think if people come into the payment space to make a lot of money, that doesn't happen that quickly. I mean, it might happen if your startup is really successful and so on, but there's a lot of startups nowadays starting in the payment space, in the fintech space. So I think if somebody really wants to be an expert in payments, they have to be hungry for knowledge, they have to be curious, they have to study how credit cards work, how these different payment systems work, they have to learn these end to end. So I have to say, the people who joined us back, maybe five years ago, eight years ago and so on now they have left our company and they have joined different e-commerce businesses, digital businesses, and they lead those companies on the payment side.
Speaker 2So, for example, tiktok has many team members from us. You have people from Adyan from our team, many different companies around the world from our team who have learned about payments from us and we had the global exposure so that really gave them a whole comprehensive, base, global understanding of how payments work around the world. That allows them to predict what's going to happen next in different markets, because there were no WeChat Pays before, there were no PayPal's before, there were just credit cards. Now you have CBDCs we're talking about, or UPI. Things are changing and looking out to the other countries allows you to guess what's going to happen in your country.
Speaker 3Thank you for sharing that advice. So we're going to wrap up the show, but before we do, is there anything else you'd like to discuss?
Speaker 2I think that's all it's been fun.
Speaker 3Yeah, absolutely Well, honor. Thank you so much for being on the show today. I know your time is very valuable, so I really appreciate you being here.
Speaker 2Thanks, for your time as well. Thank you.
Speaker 3Absolutely, and to all you listeners out there, I thank you for your time as well, and until the next story.
Speaker 1Thank you for joining us this week on the Leaders in Payments podcast. Make sure you visit our website at leadersinpaymentscom, 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.