Latest / Leaders In Payments / Thomas Müller, CEO of Rivero | Episode 372

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Thomas Müller, CEO of Rivero | Episode 372 · Leaders In Payments

• 0:01
  Speaker 1: Welcome to the Leaders in Payments podcast, where we talk to C-level leaders from across the payments landscape.
• 0:06
  Speaker 1: 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.
• 0:14
  Speaker 1: We will also hear stories from our guests about their journeys to the top.
• 0:18
  Greg Myers: Hello everyone and welcome to the Leaders in Payments podcast.
• 0:20
  Greg Myers: I'm your host, greg Myers, and on our show today we have a very special guest, thomas Mueller, the co-founder and CEO of Revero.
• 0:28
  Speaker 1: So, thomas, welcome to the show.
• 0:29
  Greg Myers: Thanks for having me.
• 0:30
  Greg Myers: Great to be here, great.
• 0:31
  Greg Myers: Well, let's start out by having you 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, sure, sure.
• 0:39
  Thomas Muller: Happy to do so.
• 0:40
  Thomas Muller: Yeah, I'm originally from Germany, the southwestern part of Germany, like, known for the black forest, that is there.
• 0:49
  Thomas Muller: I went to university in Stuttgart, a slightly larger city in Germany, but then, after finishing university, I actually moved to Switzerland so that's now some 15, 16 years ago so quite some time and actually also then here where I live in Zurich in Switzerland is also where actually the company Rivero got started in 2019.
• 1:12
  Greg Myers: Okay, great, well, let's talk about Rivero, so tell our audience what the company does.
• 1:15
  Thomas Muller: So what we do is we build software as a service solutions for the financial industry.
• 1:20
  Thomas Muller: More specifically, our customers are licensed entities with the international payment network, so MasterCard and Visa are probably the most known examples, but we also support them if they work with other payment networks such as Amex, china, unionpay, discover, etc.
• 1:39
  Thomas Muller: And we offer, as of today, two products.
• 1:43
  Thomas Muller: The first one is called Kayo.
• 1:45
  Thomas Muller: With Kayo, we help them to manage their scheme compliance, as it's called, meaning whenever you are working with the payment networks, of course you have to adhere to a fairly big catalog of requirements, because that's ultimately, of course, what makes these payment networks work so well internationally, and this is quite a big effort to stay up to date with all the changes to these rules.
• 2:11
  Thomas Muller: And with Kayo, we have developed a software solution to help banks with that, because we didn't find any player in the market that actually is offering something like this, even though it's at the very center of payments, right, and it's at the very center of payments, right, and it's at the very center of having a license with the payment networks.
• 2:28
  Thomas Muller: And then the second product we have is called Amico, and Amico is a solution that helps specifically issuing banks, meaning banks that put out payment cards to deal with the domain of fraud recovery and dispute management in a way more efficient manner.
• 2:45
  Thomas Muller: So in that area we are certainly not the only player in the market.
• 2:49
  Thomas Muller: There are also other companies providing dispute management software.
• 2:53
  Thomas Muller: But I think where we differentiate ourselves is that our approach is an end-to-end approach, meaning all the way to the customer of the bank, meaning the cardholder.
• 3:04
  Thomas Muller: So we do that by offering a virtual agent.
• 3:07
  Thomas Muller: You can think of that as a chatbot that the bank can integrate into their digital channels so we can have that conversation with the cardholder about the problems they are facing.
• 3:17
  Thomas Muller: And then on the other side we have a tool for the back office employees at the bank to manage those cases.
• 3:23
  Thomas Muller: And we are also directly integrated again with the payment networks, meaning it allows us then to send these disputes, or sometimes called chargebacks, directly into the network and that allows to a very higher degree of end-to-end automation than what traditional tools in the space allow.
• 3:42
  Greg Myers: Okay, you mentioned banks or financial institutions as a customer.
• 3:46
  Greg Myers: Who else are your end customers?
• 3:48
  Thomas Muller: So it is really the focus on those banks.
• 3:52
  Thomas Muller: However, within the space of banks that hold a license with the payment networks is nevertheless quite a list of different entities.
• 4:02
  Thomas Muller: So customers that we have can be kind of like the retail banks you bank with right.
• 4:07
  Thomas Muller: It can be like something like, I don't know, like a Deutsche Bank, like an ING, something along those lines, but it can also be more or somewhat more behind the scenes hidden player.
• 4:19
  Thomas Muller: So you also have more and more these so-called banking as a service providers that basically offer cards as a service to others, and then we would very often nevertheless partner and work with the banking as a service platform.
• 4:35
  Thomas Muller: And, of course, if I talk about banks, I mean by that both kind of like the very established players that sometimes are called the incumbents established players that sometimes are called the incumbents but also the new banks, the challenger banks, especially once they have reached a certain size, where they then also start having a bigger card portfolio.
• 4:53
  Thomas Muller: So I would say our sweet spot is usually with banks that have a million and above cards in the market.
• 5:00
  Greg Myers: Okay, and are your solutions global in nature, so you can have customers across the world?
• 5:23
  Thomas Muller: Oh yeah, that's actually some maybe specifics in a given market that you can make your product even more compelling if you also factor in maybe some domestic or maybe European rules.
• 5:36
  Thomas Muller: But really the great thing is that the products, as they are right now, can be deployed around the globe without making bigger changes to the product.
• 5:45
  Thomas Muller: That, of course, doesn't mean we are already serving the global markets.
• 5:50
  Thomas Muller: Our focus, of course, we started in our home market, switzerland certainly not a bad market to start as a fintech and now we are already active across seven, eight different European countries.
• 6:01
  Thomas Muller: We keep having a bit of a focus for some of our sales activity on Europe, but from a marketing point of view, we are even already also exploring some other countries outside of Europe and our ambition certainly is to leverage the fact that our products work globally, meaning we want to become a global player.
• 6:20
  Thomas Muller: Okay, and you mentioned it's a SaaS solution, so I assume that's a monthly fee?
• 6:22
  Greg Myers: There's no, okay, and you mentioned it's a SaaS solution, so I assume that's a monthly fee.
• 6:26
  Greg Myers: There's no transaction fees.
• 6:28
  Greg Myers: Can you walk through maybe the SaaS model a little bit Sure, yeah.
• 6:34
  Thomas Muller: Also there we really try to have kind of like an easy, straightforward model.
• 6:36
  Thomas Muller: So for both of the products, the price, which is a monthly or annual SaaS fee, exactly as you expected probably from a modern SaaS product, and the price is derived from the amount of schemes that you work with, meaning if you only use Kayo or Amico for only one scheme, it's somewhat cheaper than if you use that for two, three, four, five schemes.
• 7:04
  Thomas Muller: Of course also the value becomes larger.
• 7:06
  Thomas Muller: And then the other dimension is, in case of Amico, how large your card portfolio is, Meaning if you and that's usually a tiered-based pricing right as a price tag, maybe as long as you are below a million cards, and then a different price if you are maybe between a million and one and a half million cards.
• 7:25
  Thomas Muller: And for Caio, it's based on the regions you operate in.
• 7:30
  Thomas Muller: As a bank right, Do you have a license with, maybe visa for a single market or maybe for all of Europe.
• 7:37
  Thomas Muller: So we really try to keep the pricing model straightforward as well.
• 7:41
  Greg Myers: Okay, one more question about the company how do you go to market?
• 7:44
  Greg Myers: Do you have a sales team, do you have a partnership channel, sort of?
• 7:47
  Greg Myers: How do you go to market?
• 7:48
  Thomas Muller: Yeah, that's a great question.
• 7:50
  Thomas Muller: So, of course, like every startup, we tried all of the above right.
• 7:54
  Thomas Muller: So you have to kind of like figure out what works for you.
• 7:57
  Thomas Muller: Now, for us, our main channel is, in fact, our own marketing and sales team, where we have both, of course, some sales resources here at our headquarters in Zurich, but we already also started to hire a bit more of an international sales team.
• 8:12
  Thomas Muller: So we also have account executives, for example in the UK, in London, who cover certain international markets.
• 8:20
  Thomas Muller: So, yeah, I would say most of the leads and deals we generate come from our own outbound, but also more and more inbound channels.
• 8:27
  Thomas Muller: Right that customers just find us on Google.
• 8:30
  Thomas Muller: Right, come to our website.
• 8:31
  Thomas Muller: Book a demo call.
• 8:32
  Thomas Muller: However, we also do work with partners, and they are.
• 8:37
  Thomas Muller: Probably the most noteworthy one is Visa.
• 8:40
  Thomas Muller: So we are, in fact, a Visa FinTech Connect partner and, quite proudly, the first one in Switzerland.
• 8:47
  Thomas Muller: So we were the first to be vetted as a Swiss FinTech by Visa to join their Visa FinTech Connect program, which also means whenever somebody at Visa, for example the account managers at Visa, are in talks with their banks and they voice challenges in the area of scheme compliance or dispute management, visa would then also basically make a referral towards Rivero and point those banks our direction.
• 9:14
  Greg Myers: Okay, great.
• 9:15
  Greg Myers: Well, you sort of answered this, but maybe you could kind of summarize it and then add to it, if you need to, about what differentiates you from your competitors in this space.
• 9:23
  Greg Myers: Sure, sure.
• 9:25
  Thomas Muller: So for Kayo and I know it's always a little bit dangerous to claim that as a startup, but really, to the best of our knowledge, there is no competitor right.
• 9:33
  Thomas Muller: We are not aware of any other SaaS software company that offers a solution similar to Kayo that allows you to manage your compliance.
• 9:42
  Thomas Muller: Of course, there are a lot of players in the market that aim at helping banks with general banking regulation compliance, which, anyway, is a more country-specific or region-specific topic.
• 9:55
  Thomas Muller: But for the area we are in, meaning your compliance with the payment networks, we are not aware of another player.
• 10:02
  Thomas Muller: Also, visa.
• 10:04
  Thomas Muller: Our partner is not aware of any other player, and I guess they should know, right?
• 10:08
  Thomas Muller: So we are proud to say that we don't face competition there.
• 10:12
  Thomas Muller: However, when it comes to Amico, as I mentioned already earlier, we are not the first and only one to provide a dispute management solution for banks.
• 10:20
  Thomas Muller: I would say what sets us apart there is, first of all, we are, I think, the youngest solution, which, of course now you might say is not only an advantage, right?
• 10:30
  Thomas Muller: Maybe banks also then think about like, well, but it's a startup, you know, will they still be around in a couple of years from now?
• 10:37
  Thomas Muller: And of course the answer would be we already have a fairly large customer base and arguably, yeah, also maybe more of a scale up now than a startup.
• 10:45
  Thomas Muller: But I think one or a couple of the USPs we have is that, first of all, our solution is software as a service, as opposed to most of the other products in the space that are very traditional software products right, where the bank's IT has to basically install it, operate it, etc.
• 11:02
  Thomas Muller: And then I think arguably probably the biggest USP is simply our degree of automation and the fact that our solution is not just a solution for the back office case handlers, but it's a solution also all the way towards the consumer, you, the customer of the bank.
• 11:23
  Greg Myers: Okay, okay, so where do you think this is all headed in the next, say three to five years?
• 11:27
  Greg Myers: Certainly you can answer in a macro level about payments as a whole, or certainly within your domain, however you want to answer the question.
• 11:30
  Greg Myers: Say three to five years, certainly you can answer in a macro level about payments as a whole or certainly within your domain, however you want to answer the question.
• 11:34
  Greg Myers: But where do you see it headed in the next three to five years?
• 11:36
  Thomas Muller: Yeah, I really like that question.
• 11:37
  Thomas Muller: So maybe starting a little bit kind of like the area that we cover, but I'm happy to also speak a little bit maybe to the bigger domain of payments.
• 11:46
  Thomas Muller: So I think for us and the areas we cover certainly, the next years are all about taking it to the international stage.
• 11:55
  Thomas Muller: I mean, there are so many markets that we haven't even started to develop and I think the topics we cover are topics that need to be addressed globally and we believe there is a lot of opportunities.
• 12:08
  Thomas Muller: And now, speaking a little bit more to, I think, where I see in general the area of payments going, which of course is also related then a bit to where we see the evolution of our products, is kind of like that.
• 12:21
  Thomas Muller: So if you would have asked me this question maybe 10 years ago, I would have probably made a completely wrong prediction, because I would have predicted that in 10 years from now we will have less payment methods and less payment schemes.
• 12:36
  Thomas Muller: Right, I always assumed MasterCard and Visa will just continue their dominance and a lot of countries will simply not bother trying to really build alternatives to that.
• 12:48
  Thomas Muller: But the interesting thing is that, yeah, like I said, quite the opposite is true and I believe that will only continue from here.
• 12:55
  Thomas Muller: So, which comes also as a challenge for you as a retail bank, because, going forward, in order to serve your customers well, you also have to support a whole catalog of payment methods.
• 13:08
  Thomas Muller: Right, you're going to still support MasterCard and Visa because, right, you're going to still support MasterCard and Visa, because I think nobody's going to challenge the international dominance anytime soon.
• 13:17
  Thomas Muller: But you might also have to cover a successful domestic scheme.
• 13:22
  Thomas Muller: For example, here in Switzerland, we have Twint that is super successful.
• 13:26
  Thomas Muller: As a bank, you have to simply support that as well.
• 13:29
  Thomas Muller: Then you might be in a region, for example in Europe, where there are ambition to also create alternatives to the existing establishment.
• 13:37
  Thomas Muller: So you have, for example, the European Payment Initiative that has launched the Vero wallet.
• 13:43
  Thomas Muller: While it's, at the moment, only peer-to-peer, it has ambition to go to e-commerce and to the point of sale.
• 13:49
  Thomas Muller: So you're going to have to support that.
• 13:52
  Thomas Muller: And I mean, who knows, probably in a couple of years, even some sort of crypto maybe you know the Bitcoins, the Ethereums, but maybe also some CBDCs or the other forms of crypto will eventually enter the space of really becoming relevant in the retail payment space and probably also as a bank, you don't want to miss out on that right.
• 14:15
  Thomas Muller: You don't want to leave that to others.
• 14:17
  Thomas Muller: So my prediction for the future is where maybe a bank today deals with maybe two, three flavors of consumer payment methods.
• 14:25
  Thomas Muller: I think this will be more like five or six in the future, which is something that I'm not sure if banks in general are well prepared for that, especially when it comes to also providing kind of like a unified user experience across that, which is also now I'm coming a little bit back to our scope that we had at Rivero, which is also why we clearly have the ambition to take the whole topic of dispute management, of consumer protection with Amico beyond cards.
• 14:55
  Thomas Muller: We just started in the area of cards because cards are, I think, undoubtedly globally the most relevant form of consumer payments as of today.
• 15:06
  Thomas Muller: But yeah, like I said, I think there will be way more payment methods that the bank has to support and we want to provide basically our contribution to that as well.
• 15:15
  Greg Myers: Okay, great Thanks for sharing that.
• 15:16
  Greg Myers: So let's switch gears a little bit and talk about you.
• 15:19
  Greg Myers: So maybe talk about your professional background and how and why you started the company.
• 15:24
  Greg Myers: Yeah, yeah, happy to do so.
• 15:26
  Thomas Muller: So maybe different from what one would assume, my background is actually not at all originally in the financial industry or payments.
• 15:35
  Thomas Muller: My background is in computer science.
• 15:37
  Thomas Muller: So I studied computer science back in the day in Germany and then, after finishing university, I decided to actually specialize myself in the area of cybersecurity or, how we called it back then, information security.
• 15:52
  Thomas Muller: Now these days people just call it cyber, because I guess it sounds nicer, sounds cooler.
• 15:57
  Thomas Muller: So I also spent most of my career in different roles in the cybersecurity space.
• 16:03
  Thomas Muller: The reason why I then ended up not co-founding a cybersecurity startup which might have also not been a bad idea but a fintech, is because a few years before I started Riviero, together with my co-founder Fateme, I became the chief information security officer of the largest or second largest, depends on who you ask card issuer here in Switzerland.
• 16:27
  Thomas Muller: And as part of that role, of course, I got introduced to the world of payments and, quite honestly, at the beginning I thought like well, I'm here to do cybersecurity because I mean, payments is a bit of like a boring thing, right and a commodity.
• 16:42
  Thomas Muller: And I found out, working there for a couple of years, that actually payments are in fact, an extremely exciting space to the degree that I then later even ended up starting a company in the area, because I was kind of like attracted by the fact that, first of all, payments are so kind of like essential to our everyday life I mean, we pay multiple times a day, right Like our society wouldn't be able to function without consumer payments.
• 17:12
  Thomas Muller: But at the same time, working for an issuer, I also saw maybe especially with my technology background that a lot of things were done in an extremely old-fashioned, inefficient manner.
• 17:24
  Thomas Muller: That also led to a lot of frustration for me in my role also together with Fateme that I got to know working at that very same company, and then at some point we just decided look, there are now basically two opportunities.
• 17:38
  Thomas Muller: We can either keep complaining about all the things that are not being done well and efficient in this space of, especially on the issuing side, or we can do something about it and try to be more part of the solution, which was then basically the motivation to start Riviero in 2019.
• 17:58
  Greg Myers: Okay, great.
• 17:58
  Greg Myers: So what are you passionate about?
• 18:01
  Greg Myers: So, maybe one work-related passion and one personal passion.
• 18:04
  Greg Myers: So work-related.
• 18:05
  Thomas Muller: I think it is clearly everything around product.
• 18:06
  Thomas Muller: I think it is clearly everything around product.
• 18:10
  Thomas Muller: I find it extremely satisfying, you know, to have this experience of you.
• 18:17
  Thomas Muller: Have an idea, you talk to people about an idea and the idea could be maybe related to a whole product or just a feature within an existing product.
• 18:25
  Thomas Muller: You brainstorm it, you design it together with you know a designer, but also your engineering team.
• 18:32
  Thomas Muller: You implement it, you launch it and then you speak to your customers and they love it, right?
• 18:38
  Thomas Muller: I find that extremely satisfying and I think, yeah, that's why I would say that, even though I have my background in engineering and I'm kind of like a cybersecurity expert by training, what my true passion is is actually product and having this experience, which is probably also the reason why, at some point, I was motivated to try to start a company.
• 19:00
  Thomas Muller: Personally, I would say my biggest passion even though in the last few years I didn't have a lot of time for that, but that certainly would be traveling, being able to go to different places and have different experiences, especially also in the context of just seeing how different societies function right, like the Far East, like China.
• 19:20
  Thomas Muller: Japan is so different from the place I live in Switzerland, but Switzerland is also already quite different in certain areas compared to I don't know Germany, the Netherlands.
• 19:31
  Thomas Muller: So that's a big passion.
• 19:37
  Thomas Muller: But yeah, unfortunately I didn't have too much time the last few years busy building a company.
• 19:39
  Thomas Muller: But if one day I would get to retire early, this is what I would probably spend most of my time with.
• 19:45
  Greg Myers: Okay, okay.
• 19:45
  Greg Myers: So if someone comes to you and they're maybe right out of school or right out of the university and they're interested in a career in payments or fintech, you, as someone who hires people, they come to you and say, hey, what would you tell me to do to be successful in this industry?
• 20:00
  Greg Myers: What would you tell them?
• 20:01
  Thomas Muller: Oh, that's a tough one To be successful in the space of fintech.
• 20:04
  Thomas Muller: So in general, right, not necessarily from an entrepreneurial point of view, just as a professional you mean yeah, yeah, well, I would say there's probably a lot of kind of like, so to say, desk research to be done, right, and I think you really have to be willing to sometimes really go deep into the rabbit hole, right, because I think there's a lot of people in the fintech space, because also it is an attractive area to be in, I mean, maybe the biggest.
• 20:34
  Thomas Muller: How do you say we have probably already left the peak hype right?
• 20:38
  Thomas Muller: Currently there's more hype in stuff like ai and then maybe in fintech, compared to maybe a couple of years ago.
• 20:44
  Thomas Muller: But of course it's still a super attractive space to be in.
• 20:47
  Thomas Muller: But I think that also means you have a lot of people that kind of like really stay at the surface of thing right.
• 20:54
  Thomas Muller: They can talk about maybe certain trends and maybe what certain players are doing.
• 20:59
  Thomas Muller: But I feel like fintech and just the subdomain of payments is so complex, way more complex than what maybe meets the eye at first, and I think in order to really make a strong career, you have to be willing to put in the work and do a lot of discovery, a lot of reading, a lot of learning and by that I don't mean just be on X all the time and just read the information nuggets, but I think you really have to go deep.
• 21:27
  Thomas Muller: I mean also, for us, in order to build the products we built, we had to go through hundreds or thousands of pages of MasterCard and Visa specification, and this is not the most attractive content to read, right, it's also not the most easy to understand content to read, but I think that can really put you in a position of yeah, can be your personal USP if you're just really an expert in the space, and I believe that applies not just to payments but to fintech in general.
• 21:58
  Greg Myers: Okay, okay.
• 21:58
  Greg Myers: So we've covered a lot of ground, obviously, about you and your background and the company and what the company does, and maybe a little about the future.
• 22:05
  Greg Myers: So anything else you'd like to add before we wrap up the show?
• 22:08
  Thomas Muller: Yeah, maybe, just since we now talked about it.
• 22:10
  Thomas Muller: You know what would I tell other people that want to get into the space, or what would I tell my younger self, for that matter, or what would I tell my younger self for that matter.
• 22:21
  Thomas Muller: So I would say what I would really like to encourage people is to try to start more companies in the B2B space, and I mean that especially in the context of payments, maybe even especially in the context of issuing banks, because, quite interestingly, you saw a lot of innovation over the past few years on the acceptance side, right With players popping up such as Adyen, stripe and even a lot more, even younger companies than that.
• 22:50
  Thomas Muller: But if you compare that to kind of like the issuing side of the payment market, most of the startups try to actually compete with traditional banking right, they want to be a neobank, they want to be a challenger bank, and I'm not saying they shouldn't exist.
• 23:08
  Thomas Muller: They should absolutely exist and challenge the status quo.
• 23:10
  Thomas Muller: But what I found interesting is that I feel like there's so much more opportunities to start a B2B company, enabling both the establishment and these growing neobanks with great products and services, because sometimes it feels like in the space we are in as a B2B SaaS focusing on the issuing side.
• 23:32
  Thomas Muller: There's not really a lot of other companies doing that.
• 23:35
  Thomas Muller: Of course, it's not zero, but if you compare it to the other side of, like the payment, the other side of the so-called four-party model, there's surprisingly few.
• 23:44
  Thomas Muller: And, yeah, I would love to see more, because then I would also have more companies to potentially partner with right, because we would all having the same challenges, and that is selling into the financial industry and convincing those issuing banks that they should go for, kind of like, a best-in-class approach and pick the champions in a specific area instead of going.
• 24:07
  Thomas Muller: What we see a lot these days is that these large issuer banks go for more for like one-stop shop approach, where they already have a big, established, maybe processing partner and they source all the services from them, even though they're usually not best in class in any of the areas they cover, which is also super hard to be right If you want to offer, like in quotes, everything.
• 24:31
  Thomas Muller: So, yeah, that would be certainly my message to potential startup founders out there that are passionate about fintech and payments Maybe consider finding also an area in the B2B space.
• 24:44
  Greg Myers: Okay, great.
• 24:44
  Greg Myers: I think that's a great way to wrap up the show.
• 24:46
  Greg Myers: So, thomas, thank you so much for being here.
• 24:48
  Greg Myers: I know your time is very valuable, so again, thanks so much for being on the show today.
• 24:52
  Thomas Muller: Thank you for having me.
• 24:52
  Thomas Muller: It was a pleasure chatting with you, great.
• 24:54
  Greg Myers: And to all you listeners out there, I with you, great.
• 24:56
  Greg Myers: And to all you listeners out there, I thank you for your time as well, and until the next story.
• 24:59
  Speaker 1: Thank you for joining us this week on the Leaders in Payments podcast.
• 25:02
  Speaker 1: Make sure you visit our website at leadersinpaymentscom, where you can subscribe to the show and where you'll find our show notes.
• 25:10
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