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Leaders In Payments
Leaders In Payments
Ran Grushkowsky, Co-Founder & CEO of MassPay | Episode 476
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Most payments teams obsess over money in, then act surprised when slow payouts drive churn, support tickets, and lost growth. Greg Myers sits down with Ran Grushkowsky, Co-Founder and CEO of MassPay, to unpack why “time to money” is becoming a product feature and why the companies that treat payouts as strategy will outpace the ones that treat it as plumbing.
We get into what MassPay actually does for corporate clients that need global payouts across multiple endpoints: local bank deposits, mobile wallets, cash pickup locations, push-to-card via Visa Direct, and even crypto. Ran explains the real challenge behind modern payout infrastructure: fragmentation. RTP, FedNow, wallets, and countless country-specific rails create a maze of integrations, compliance requirements, and operational risk. MassPay’s answer is a proprietary network with deep redundancy in every market plus smart routing that weighs speed, compliance fit, and total cost, not just the cheapest per-transaction quote.
Ran also shares what’s reshaping the space right now: stablecoins as a cross-border speed and hedging tool, the shift toward embedded compliance that lets platforms control their own onboarding and payout experience, and how AI is already improving payout success rates through data normalization and faster reviews. We close with leadership lessons on where the real moat is headed in fintech and why payouts can move from cost center to profit center.
Welcome And Guest Introduction
SPEAKER_00Welcome 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_02Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Leaders in Payments Podcast. I'm your host, Greg Myers. And today's special guest is Ron Gruskowski, the co-founder and CEO of Mass Pay. So, Ron, thank you so much for being here and welcome to the show.
SPEAKER_01Thank you, Greg, and great to be here.
From Teen Founder To Fintech Exit
SPEAKER_02So, before we dive into your career and the company, can you give us a quick snapshot of your personal background, maybe where you grew up, where you call home today, a few things like that?
Why MassPay Started During COVID
SPEAKER_01Absolutely, we'd love to. So again, Ron Groskovski, almost 41 years old, married to my wife Hannah. We have three kids, and we live here in Las Vegas, Nevada. I'm originally from Israel. When I started my career, it was actually quite young, age of 14. And that's when I started a company called TrueMP3s, where we essentially distributed music for electronic DJs. Electronic DJs, electronic music DJs would come to us and download it, kind of like an early iTunes, if you will. I was very fortunate to exit it by the age of 16. By that time, it was one of the largest in the world. And then at the age of 18, I moved with my parents to California, where I attended UC Berkeley on a full academic scholarship, studied computer science. I dropped out of Berkeley in favor of entering uh FinTech, my first entry into FinTech, that was an online remittance company called ATM Cash. And I studied that industry up until five years ago, when I sold my company called USend to Banco Inter out of Brazil. Now it's Inter and Co. And where I served as COO and CTO. It's a very short version of my banger.
SPEAKER_02Okay. And maybe talk about how and why you started MassPay.
SPEAKER_01So before we sold USAND, I have really good friends, Uziliao, Jeff Katz, they've been friends of mine for a long time. And we really wanted to do something together. And we felt that although we've I've added a lot of iron the remittances space and the banking world and created some really innovative products there, for business payouts, which is Lesma World, I was direct-to-consumer my whole career. But Jeff came primarily from the B2B side. He was the co-founder and CEO of Mercury Payments. We felt that he educated me about the B2B space, and we felt that it's underserved. And although these are great innovations under direct-to-consumer C2C, for businesses, especially during COVID, remember, this is early days of COVID, everything moved online. So people started earning money online in a secondary business. There was a big boom there. And we felt that we can really help reshape somewhat what we did, Jeff, on the paying side, me on the payout side, and Uzi on the on the internet side, with his amazing background, we felt we could do the same for businesses in Pets.
SPEAKER_02Okay. Well, let's dig into Mass Pay. Tell our audience what Mass Pay does.
What MassPay Does For Payouts
SPEAKER_01Sure. So Mass Pay serves corporate clients, global needs for Pets. So when you have a business that really needs to deliver across the world, across endpoints, mobile wallets, local bank deposits, cash pickup locations, push to card using the Visa Direct network, crypto. When somebody really needs to support all of these, that's where we come into play. We build both a proprietary network all over the world. We have more than 70 global correspondents. We have more than 14 US sponsor banks and partnership with Visa Direct as an enabler. We really offer a very comprehensive solution for clients who need to distribute cash either to support wider endpoints, support markets that maybe are hard to get into, but also support real time. Real time is a big feature that we have, both to do it with efficiency, cost efficiency, speed efficiency, and obviously do it in a compliant way, which we support. Really, if you think about it, our typical client are companies that care about somebody getting paid efficiently and fast. There are a lot of companies that have to pay, let's say, vendors, and frankly, they don't care if they get paid today or in five days. Those are usually not our clients. Our clients are companies that believe that offering a more efficient way to for people to get paid will either drive better adoption, reduce churn, or potentially even increase their revenue. We have clients that are marking up real-time availability of funds to generate more revenue. So these are usually our typical clients, and we add in significant value for those.
SPEAKER_02Okay. And are they typically, would you say, like mid-market and national size merchants?
SPEAKER_01So we don't work with tiny, tiny startups, but anybody a little bit over that and beyond, we do serve. Obviously, we have very large companies that we work with, but we also have mid-market. We do not discriminate. If somebody cares, that's really our motto. We care about people getting paid. And if we have we find a client that does care and obviously they have some volume, we usually would board them.
Solving Real-Time Fragmentation Globally
SPEAKER_02Okay. Well, what do you think is the biggest challenge that your company is solving for your customers right now?
SPEAKER_01First of all, is real time and fragmentation. So if you look in the US alone, up until maybe 10 years ago, we had primarily AC agent wires. But if you look today, we have RTP, we have FedNow, we have Venmo, we have Zell. There's so many options for people to get paid, more so in than in the past. Now multiply that by every country around the world. You see those migrations primarily towards real time, but not only. There are new mobile wallets, there are new ways for people to get paid. Obviously, you have blockchain, you have crypto. It's really hard to follow and integrate and support all of these treasury management, our integrations, these compliance issues. And we're really solving for that at scale. The other thing that we offer our clients is redundancies. So in every market we operate in, we don't just turn something on. We build in many pathways to access every endpoint. So I'll give you an example. If you look at Germany, we have seven institutions we work with that can deliver funds to a separate enabled account in Germany. One would ask why you need so many. Well, the obvious one is obviously redundancy, sometimes they have issues, maintenance, and we want to get fast availability of funds for clients. The other one is risk appetites. You might have institutions that only want transactions to individuals or ones that only want businesses. There are some that want transactions over a certain amount. Let's say only over 100,000 euros they feel comfortable with, like FX companies. Whereas others do not want anything over 10,000 euros. So we know how to optimize in real time every transaction to find the best matching institution. And then we get real-term quotes to offer our clients the best route, the most efficient route, both from a compliance perspective and therefore speed, but also as far as cost. So it's a very, very comprehensive solution globally that bottom line reduces time to money and cost for our clients.
Differentiators Pricing Support And AI
SPEAKER_02Okay. Well, what would you say differentiates you from your competitors out there?
SPEAKER_01Quite a lot. First of all, we have our own proprietary network, which is quite substantial. Our model as a whole is very different. We do not lock clients to contract clients. We win their business every day. It's a literally month-by-month contract. They can opt out anytime because we know we deliver some tremendous value. We do not charge our clients for transactions that are not successful. That let it sink in. We incur costs if something doesn't go right, if somebody fat fingers their account number, something goes wrong. We have costs. We do not pass those along. That pushes us as a team to just perform better. So compliance is doing better because we want somebody to get paid efficiently, to document things properly, to reduce back and forth. Customer services operating efficiently because we want somebody to be addressed to be able to get them paid. Obviously, financial operations, technology, banking relationship, we do everything we can more than anybody else because that's the only way we get paid. So it really drives it, it ingrains it in the DNA of the company that we care about those people getting paid, and we only get paid when they do. So it creates a better alignment between us and them. And again, it drives us also to innovate. So we do have, for example, AI built into our core to help standardize and normalize the data to improve efficiency of delivery. We also optimize around human intervention. I'll give you an example. Let's say we have two institutions that can pay to an account in Mexico. And one of them is one cent cheaper than the other. On face value, you would go with a cheaper one, even though it's one cent. But the one that is a cheaper one cent requires some extra documentation to be filled up for transaction over$1,000. So the moment it's a human intervention, the overall cost of the transaction went up. So we look at overall cost of transaction and we optimize around that. And it requires a lot to be able to do that. So we do a lot that is different. It's really ingrained in our DNA. And really, that's what drives our clients' growth. And we have some really great stories by some clients that migrated from Legacy Solutions. And not only did we were able to reduce the friction of transactions and get people paid faster, they were able to increase the revenue by expanding to the territories. One particular client was able to charge significantly for real time compared to standard rates or standard speed, which ended up doubling the revenue. So it could be very, very meaningful for our clients. And ultimately, we have no churn. So we know that we are delivering some great via for our clients and satisfaction is through the roof. Granted, there are always issues, but we are there for our team for our clients. We have customer support 24-7, average response time under 10 minutes. That's a human being. So we really pride ourselves in supporting our clients through the good and through the bad. And we're really excited about what it is we're building for our clients. And frankly, our numbers show it. We have tremendous growth, double-digit month-of-a month growth for the last year. And we are just starting.
Verticals And Who MassPay Serves
SPEAKER_02Okay. And what are some of the main verticals? I would assume insurance may be one of them, but what kind of verticals are your typical clients in?
SPEAKER_01What question? So coming into B2B FinTech, we met with a bunch of potential investors and different strategic clients. And that question always came through. What are you focused on? And I understand why this question came along, because it's really challenging to address a vertical. You have to build the right compliance programs for it. You have to find the sponsor banks that are comfortable with it. You have to have the right infrastructure that can support it. But at MassPay, we knew from the get-go that we are looking to build something very massive and change the industry. So we invested heavily into building both banking infrastructure and compliance programs to support a wider array of clients. So I'm happy to share that we can support different types of verticals. We do have some, if you will, like big wins in some of them. Marketplaces is definitely one of them. I know it's kind of broad, but business that needs money in and money out, because for marketplaces, the money out is part of the product, we feel it is a really good fit and we are very complimentary because we're offering a very compelling offer. But as you said, insurance, very, very wide. Airlines, I mean, it's really, really, really wide, the types of clients we onboard. We have more than 300 clients live today, enterprise clients. And the idea is to try to serve anybody that cares about payouts. If you care about people getting paid, you're a good fit. If it's not a priority for you, you should go with something probably cheaper that is easier, but requires a lot more hands-on.
Stablecoins And Cross-Border Speed
SPEAKER_02Okay. Well, let's talk about the future a little bit. Where do you see the biggest growth opportunity in your segment of payments?
SPEAKER_01So we definitely see a trend with companies understanding the importance of payouts. I believe that stablecoins helped frame the attention of people who care about getting paid faster. About 10 to 15% of the volume today is related to stable coins. We have a great partnership with some of those issuers. And we noticed that in the US, you do not see a great adoption of stable coins for obvious reasons. The real value for the US residents or for US clients when it comes to stable coins is speed. But now that you have FedNow and RTP that is gaining more attention and more adoption, you can achieve the same thing without the complexity of moving it on-chain and off-chain. What we see more adoption is internationally cross-border for two reasons. One is speed. And the other one, we see it in markets where people want to hedge their earnings against the US dollars. And it makes it easy to do it with stable coins. So we see that stable coins are definitely helping reshape the attention of companies understanding speed. And mass pay, we were designed for speed. We were designed for real time. So we definitely see a lot more movement and understanding. Whereas maybe a year ago, we had to do more education. We feel the market is self-educating about the necessity of speed. They just don't know that the solution like us exists. So that's why we've we're starting to increase our profile. For five years, we really built a lot, a lot, a lot of infrastructure. And as of the end of last year, we started unlocking it. We do public announcement with visa, that's one of them. But others that are coming in the pipe that are really unlocking a lot of call it capabilities for our clients. And now we're really starting to go to market and growing aggressively. So we believe the growth is going to come from everywhere, just based on the early signs that we see. And that's with us even marketing. This is just starting to let the people know what this we do, but people are starting to pay attention.
Industry Trends Embedded Compliance Options
SPEAKER_02Okay. Well, what does success look like for your company over, say, the next three to five years?
SPEAKER_01We are looking to be the most dominant player in payouts and beyond, we are having writing a lot of value for our clients to be able to efficiently serve everything that surrounds payouts. So that means compliance, that means taxes. We already have embedded solutions to just streamline the process. We really want our clients to focus on what it is to their business. And they don't have to become fintech companies. And unfortunately, today, regardless of who they use, they kind of have to become payout companies or fintech companies because there's a lot that needs to be managed around successfully sending somebody money, especially Crosswater. So our goal is to streamline the process. And just based on the attention and the growth that we are seeing today, we're very confident we're going to be able together, frankly, in two years. I think in three years, we're going to be a much more dominant player, household name, if you will, in the fintech space.
SPEAKER_02Okay. Well, if we zoom out a little bit, what are, in your opinion, some of the biggest trends that are reshaping the payments industry today?
SPEAKER_01So as I said, I think real time is definitely a big player. Embedded compliance. We do see a lot of clients, a lot of companies that are coming for some of the legacy player, where those players actually onboard their users. So that pushing the compliance to them. And frankly, they like to control the experience. And they should. There is nothing unique about compliance that meant that something needs to be outsourced to another player. We believe that a lot of companies are going to have to adapt and change to, I'm talking about payout companies or payment companies, adapt and change to support what we call embedded compliance because clients demand it. They control the inbound, the onboarding flow. There is no reason to control the outbound as well. So we see a lot of movements there. And frankly, understanding that just ACH or just wires, it's just not enough. We have a saying in our company that if you pay people with goats, they'll take goats. It does not mean they want to take goats. And oftentimes we have clients who come to us, especially ones who come from card programs. We've seen it time and time again. Where early on we had a big client that was issuing those cards to all those people all over the world, and they wanted to migrate to us, and they tell us it's a requirement for you to have a card program. So we launch a card program. And we start issuing cards and we made it available and they migrated all the clients and they had hundreds of thousands of people that they paid. And I think we had under 40 cards. And when they saw the numbers, they were like, what's going on? Like, well, if you give people better options, they'll choose better options. If you only give them cards or a five-day HCA, they chose the card. But when you give them great options, they're gonna choose that. And I think there is a growing understanding of different leaders in organizations that this could be a competitive advantage, a retention tool, and as I said before, also an ability for them to generate more revenue out of it, a profit center. So instead of a cost center of paying somebody, they can generate revenue from it. And we are seeing, and again, a year ago, two years ago, we had to really like hammer it into clients, and it didn't sit. Today, we are getting more clients that are coming to us and already telling us, I understand it. I believe that this could be a good fit, and I believe this trend is going to continue.
Agentic Commerce And AI For Payouts
SPEAKER_02Okay. So you mentioned stable coins earlier. So obviously, you know, that's a big topic that we often talk about. You mentioned real time, another one, embedded. I mean, another big everything is embedded these days, big buzzword. AI, you kind of mentioned. What are your thoughts on like agentic commerce? It may not affect you directly because you're sort of on the payout side, but just curious your thoughts overall, just from uh being an industry expert, kind of what agentic commerce looks like in the future, having bots buying for people.
SPEAKER_01I think the agentic is definitely applicable to us because today people are thinking on the agent as doing purchases on your behalf. But soon he's gonna manage a business and you have to pay a contractor or you have to pay somebody else as part of the transaction. So payouts is definitely something that we are looking and working to integrate into various agents. If you will, we are B2A, business to agent, and we are definitely have a B2A strategy. Working on that, partnering with different AI companies to streamline the process of payouts. Whereas cards or money in is somewhat streamlined, Visa MasterCard. They've done a great job of standardizing how do you take a card online? Payouts, a little bit more nuanced. So we are working and developing some protocols to help streamline that. We definitely see that people might get more comfortable by calling outsourcing certain tasks to AI. Over time, they're gonna get more comfortable allowing or giving a budget to an agent to spend on our behalf. I think it's coming faster than people appreciate. So we are definitely paying attention and investing in it. We also invest heavily in AI in our core. I didn't mention it, but I'm gonna give you some use cases where it really helped optimize transactions. I give you a simple one: Alipay. We have three different providers, local providers that can send money to Alipay in Asia. Two of them ask for the name to be in Latin characters. One of them is asking for it to be in Chinese. We're not gonna ask our client to send us every variation of every name or field when they send money. So we are leveraging AI to normalize data, just again, to optimize, to make sure transactions get paid efficiently. And LLMs and AI has been doing um tremendous for us. Helps us speed things, compliance reviews, compliance underwriting, all of these are being powered by AI with the oversight of humans. So as a company, we were able to scale tremendously by not increasing the human footprint, just providing superpowers to our employees, leveraging AI, both as external tools, but also embedded into our system. And we've seen tremendous results with it. So we're very, very bullish on AI.
Leadership Advice And Payments Moats
SPEAKER_02Okay. Well, a couple of final questions. If you could go back and give yourself advice at the start of your career, what would it be?
SPEAKER_01It's a lot bigger than I anticipated it would be. Everything I've done. I always came in because I was just very interested in whatever it is I was, the problem was I was solving. You know, as I say, for me, being in tech and making it very lucrative, it's just a great bonus. I love what I'm doing. But going back and telling myself that the impact I will do is tremendous and also focused on that. I was very focused early on on having fun, which was great because I've accomplished a lot and really helped shape some industries. But if I would have the over the eyesight that I have today on focusing on positive impact and the positions and the power, if you will, that I was able to obtain, I would probably be able to do a little bit better than I did. Not that I regret anything. I think I've done a lot of great things. But looking at what, you know, great power comes great responsibility. I wish I would have known it back then. I think I probably could have done more. And I'm glad that I have this platform at MasterPay to really try to do better in the world using companies.
SPEAKER_02Okay. So two final questions. One is what's the one thing that you think payment leaders that might be listening today should really be thinking about right now?
SPEAKER_01Technology that used to be emote, therefore, that's why people invested so much money into it, is no longer going to be emote. AI is democratizing access to technology, and the value is gonna be, it's not even diminishing return, it's significantly declining over time. Soon you're gonna have somebody who's talking to an LLM and building the most complex technology and algorithms that exist out there. The emotes is more around contracts, banking infrastructure, licenses, sophisticated algorithms, IP, and I believe that most companies still haven't made that mental change, mental shift. And I think that they should. Otherwise, it's just gonna phase out.
SPEAKER_02Okay. Well, final question What would be the one key takeaway that you would want people to have after listening to this episode so specifically around mass pay?
Closing And How To Subscribe
SPEAKER_01I think that companies should care about payouts. I think that people don't pay as much attention to it. A few years ago, a lot of people were talking about becoming a PayFAC and optimizing their money in. If you look at the curve of money in, that is a curve that is going towards zero. The margins on interchange, the margin of money in is not going up. However, payouts is still a very complex problem. Mass pay is really simplified for companies, but it's still a great opportunity to make money there, to create a wow experience, especially since your competitors are likely still not doing it, and really be able to grow and leverage essentially an underutilized asset. People do not appreciate the value of payouts. We've seen it firsthand, what it can do to businesses. And it's really our job to educate people on whether they use Mass Pay or not. Yes, we know that we are the leaders and we know we keep on innovating and pushing the envelope, but regardless of whether they use us or not, they should invest in creating a better experience. But people who are using the products are getting paid faster. Obviously, we've seen the trends with earned wage access, where a lot of people care about getting paid more. We believe this is applicable to any type of transaction. And companies who would leverage it and adapt it sooner are going to reap the fruits.
SPEAKER_02Okay. Well, Ron, I think that's a great way to wrap up the show. So thank you so much for being on today. I know your time is very valuable, so I really appreciate you being here.
SPEAKER_01I really appreciate it, Greg.
SPEAKER_02And to all you listeners out there, I thank you for your time as well. And until the next story.
SPEAKER_00Thank 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.