Within three years of its launch, ConnectPay is already one of the fastest-growing Electronic Money Institutions (EMI) in Lithuania, the leading fintech hub in continental Europe. The company holds a secure second position among 80 Lithuanian EMIs by the volume of operations and third by the customer funds held in the account. ConnectPay's prime focus is on providing banking payment services to business and institutional clients. SEPA & SWIFT payments, multi-currency accounts, corporate cards, and merchant accounts are their most popular services.
Licensed in 2018, ConnectPay has grown from a team of 5 to a strong fintech family of 75! The company has increased its monthly payment turnover from 422 million in June 2020 to 918 million in June 2021.
The company stands for "Banking made easy" and their top priority is to simplify banking processes and enhance user experience. An integral part of the "Easy Banking" approach is the company's aim to build a "One Stop Shop" introducing all banking services under one roof.
Featuring a large and extensively experienced compliance team, the company can offer deep knowledge of different legal jurisdictions and industries. Even if it takes extra time and human resources to evaluate every case individually, walking that extra mile is what helped to build the company so fast.
Marius Galdikas joined ConnectPay at a very early stage of the company development, helping build it from scratch by leading the technology department. In less than a year of successful growth, Marius' CTO position acronym was complemented with the letter 'E'— making him the company CEO. Marius has always had a clear vision of turning a niche EMI into billion worth fintech organization with a wide range of services.
Besides being a technology-driven fintech enthusiast, Marius is also an example of pure positivity. He promotes simplicity and easy-going communication, along with a fair and respectful approach towards everyone. Marius' lifestyle is also a rare example of well managed work-life balance — he's a Thai Box enthusiast, kite-surfer, father of three & CEO.
ConnectPay closely cooperates with the Bank of Lithuania & the "GovTech Lab" agency to deliver time and effort-saving RegTech solutions. The goal is to automate regulatory reporting by enabling market participants to send microdata to the regulator in real-time, saving costs and time for both parties.
ConnectPay largely contributes to the Lithuanian economy — the company has paid 425K in taxes during Q1 2021, which is 111% more than the same period last year.
According to Marius, Big tech cloud providers, such as Amazon or Google, have played a major role in the rapid and efficient development of innovative cloud solutions and services. However, there has been rising chatter about the unbalanced concentration of power as a result of this ever-increasing migration of sensitive business data to the cloud. While security warnings might lead some companies to deploy a private cloud, Marius believes, in terms of risk, setting up infrastructure that matches the standards of big tech from scratch is a difficult and expensive undertaking and, at the end of the day, probably will prove to be a riskier choice than choosing a public service.
Public cloud providers, big tech included, have significantly contributed to innovation in the finance sector, whereas IaaS and SaaS solutions are usually the building blocks of every new company. Moreover, public cloud streamlines scaling, enabling to bypass capacity issues or sinking millions into underutilized infrastructure upfront.
When it comes to Artificial Intelligence-driven technology, it is gaining momentum in the digital payments market, both in backend operations and customer-facing payment systems. For example, a face-powered payment confirmation system helps to decrease customer effort in restaurants and shops to the bare minimum, which improves the experience. Furthermore, AI-based solutions are gaining more attention as they can assist with recognizing patterns and exceptions, minimizing fraud for complex, high-volume transactions. Human error is one of the more pronounced weaknesses, so using task-specific AI to recognize dubious transactions will have a significant impact on the overall fraud resistance of digital payment systems.
Without a doubt, the real impact of AI usage in the digital payments market will reveal itself over time. That being said, it seems a wider implementation of AI-driven integrations is inevitable, as it carries the promise of next-level actionable solutions that would sustain the growing demand for digital payments.
ConnectPay has been awarded as the best payment service provider by the Mare Balticum Gaming Summit in 2019 and again in 2020. Also, the company's deputy CEO Agne has been recognized as the Rising Paytech Star by Paytech Awards in 2020. ConnectPay was also recently named as one of the Best Fintech Companies to watch in 2021 by the Silicon Review.
When it comes to important and meaningful initiatives, ConnectPay has recently partnered with Wise and other fintech companies like N26, Revolut, Monese to tackle the IBAN discrimination issue. Additionally, the company has joined the Tech Zero task force to help fight the climate crisis and contribute to positive environmental change.
One of ConnectPay's strategic goals is to utilize open banking via merchant API that is powered by Payment Initiation and Account Information services (PIS/AIS). Open banking and the PSD2 directive have changed the banking sector dramatically by enabling and regulating the provision of access to client data to third-party providers. However, to have it working in practice, ConnectPay is faced with some major challenges such as:
Regulation interpretation & implementation differentiation per country/specific banks. Showcasing a universal integration that could be cloned country by country, bank by bank seems plausible but does not work in practice.
Lack of integrity in data and technical requirements throughout the market as PIS/AIS service implementation is still an object of interpretation.
When it comes to the ever-changing world of fintech, users are constantly looking for fast & simple solutions. Therefore, the revolutionary future of digital banking and the whole fintech industry is moving in that direction. Marius believes that cryptocurrencies and such initiatives as central banks' digital currencies are going to irreversibly change the world of fintech.
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