Rapyd CEO Arik Shtilman: How to Thrive and Build Bold in 2023

Lessons from Rapyd CEO Arik’s Shtilman’s keynote from Rapyd Summit in Lisbon and Rapyd’s roadmap for 2023.

The businesses that will survive and thrive in 2023’s challenging economic environment all have one thing in common, resilience. Being resilient means a business is able to deal with shocks and adversity while continuously adapting to achieve growth in any environment. A key factor to achieving resilience is partnering with others to do the things that aren’t core to your business model. That’s exactly what embedded fintech is all about.

Resilience in business is the ability to deal with shocks and adversity and to continuously adapt to accelerate growth in any environment.

This is the age of cloud-enabled business, seamless trade, and the rise of the ‘default global’ company. The businesses powering this cross-border commerce transformation need to build on a fintech platform that provides the same level of connectivity and convenience for global payments that customers have come to expect from every other aspect of the online world.

According to Rapyd’s State of Cross-Border Commerce 2022 Report: 93% of Business Surveyed Say Cross-Border Commerce is a Top Priority

The Complexity of the Payments Landscape Is a Major Growth Inhibitor

Every year, billions of dollars’ worth of business opportunities are left on the table because of payments complexity. Commerce can’t happen fluidly and cost-effectively if companies can’t deploy fintech services and applications in new markets.

To make commerce work, companies must integrate multiple payment providers and systems, each with its own unique architecture and regulations. This piecemeal, build-it-yourself approach to payments is a desperately inefficient solution to a universal business problem.

The Need to Integrate Disparate Systems Across Multiple Countries Creates Payments Complexity

Rapyd Simplifies Global Commerce with One Integration to Embed Fintech Anywhere

When Rapyd started, embedded fintech was a new concept. Now it has become the hot topic in finance, and we’re still leading the way with a single integration to all the products and capabilities to power any commerce experience businesses want to build – think of Rapyd as the cloud for global finance.

Want to expand your business by accepting customers’ favorite payment methods in South East Asia or Latin America, or anywhere else? We can help. But these days, that’s table stakes. Let’s say you want to hold funds and transfer them into different currencies. Rapyd can do that. Or if you operate a marketplace and you need to accept payments, hold funds and disburse payouts to sellers. With Rapyd you can do all of that. Or, say you own a food delivery business and you want to pay unbanked gig-workers by pushing funds to virtual cards that you issue. With Rapyd, the possibilities are endless. 

The Four Basic Building Blocks of Embedded Fintech

Just four building blocks — accepting payments, sending payouts, holding and transferring funds and issuing cards — give businesses the ability to build just about any fintech application or commerce experience. 

By layering on other services, like global licensing and compliance, foreign exchange, fraud monitoring and identity verification, Rapyd lets businesses build the future of commerce. 

That’s how Rapyd delivers resiliency through embedded fintech. Businesses are now free to Imagine,  build, and grow without the time of expense of building costly payments infrastructure or needing to take on tasks that aren’t core to your business, like navigating licensing and regulatory standards in 190 countries. 

The “Quick to Partner” and the Dead

Here’s the big takeaway. What I have learned building and growing Rapyd through the global pandemic and now a global economic downturn is that there are two types of businesses, the resilient and the losers. The resilient businesses focus on partnership, collaboration and ecosystems. The losers try to go it alone. They spend a lot of time and money developing systems and infrastructure that aren’t core to their business instead of actually building their business.  

Back in 2018, Accenture conducted a study that found that 76% of business leaders stated that they believed their current business model will be unrecognizable in five years and that ecosystems will be the main change agent. 2023 is five years later. It looks like Accenture got it right. Ecosystems are now the orchestrators of the global economy. The businesses that learn to tap into these ecosystems will be the winners in 2023 and beyond. 

Rapyd’s Product Resilience Roadmap

Here’s a look at what’s coming from Rapyd in 2023 and how we will help businesses grow cross-border, make more money and operate with more resilience. 

1. Partner & Thrive

94% of tech executives consider partnerships a necessary strategy. In 2023 we’re focused on bringing together alliances with developer shops, technology and business partners to create more value from every transaction. 

2. Go Anywhere

We’ll be announcing a turnkey solution that lets businesses become multinational and to have a local presence in the markets they serve, and to manage funds internationally without the hassle of setting up and maintaining multiple local bank accounts.

3. Pay Anyone

Effortlessly send single and recurring local and international payouts to suppliers and vendors. Set up multiple payees in seconds, send funds with a click and track your payouts. 

4. Manage Expenses

Virtual and physical corporate expense cards with built-in expense controls, cash back on transactions, the ability to track spending in real time. 

5. Get Paid

Let customers pay into a local IBAN account with Rapyd Virtual Accounts. Set up local accounts to accept payments from 40+ countries like a local without the need to set up or manage local bank accounts. Plus, a more robust solution for card present transactions. 

6. Verify

End-to-end onboarding for Know Your Business and Know Your Customer via API and hosted solutions.