Latest / Leaders In Payments / Lena Hackeloer, CEO/Founder of Brite Payments | Episode 265

Transcript

Lena Hackeloer, CEO/Founder of Brite Payments | Episode 265 · 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 when we work with bigger retailers of bright.
• 0:21
  Speaker 2: we typically do business cases together with them where we align on certain assumptions around basically what the volume shifts could look like and we model certain payment costs and there is a huge amount of money to be saved, not so much as the payment fees, but primarily on the lack of fraud and charge backs.
• 0:44
  Speaker 3: That was Lena Hackalore, the founder and CEO of Bright Payments, and she is my special guest on this week's episode, episode 265 of the Leaders in Payments podcast, and I'm your host, Greg Myers.
• 0:55
  Speaker 3: Bright Payments is an account to account payment method in Europe, and they also provide instant payouts.
• 1:00
  Speaker 3: Lena leveraged her fintech career to start Bright Payments in 2019.
• 1:05
  Speaker 3: She provides some great insights into the future of payments and has some powerful advice for those just starting in our industry.
• 1:11
  Speaker 3: We've got a great episode ahead, so let's get started.
• 1:13
  Speaker 3: Hi Lena, Thank you for being here and welcome to the Leaders in Payments podcast.
• 1:23
  Speaker 2: Hi, greg, thanks so much for having me.
• 1:25
  Speaker 3: Absolutely so let's just dive right in, 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, and we'll dive into your professional background in a minute.
• 1:36
  Speaker 2: Excellent, I'm Lena.
• 1:37
  Speaker 2: I'm the founder and CEO here at Bright Payments, a second generation based in Stockholm, sweden.
• 1:41
  Speaker 2: However, I am born and raised in Germany, so I come from Western Germany, a town called Dortmund actually, where I grew up and also went to school.
• 1:51
  Speaker 2: I used to spend my entire childhood there, all the way up until graduation and high school, and then after that, started moving a little bit all over Europe and eventually also to the US, and then ended up in Sweden in 2010 when I started working for Klarna, which I'd like to think is one of the better known fintechs in Europe at this point, but that wasn't the case back when I started, so I spent some time living in the UK and France and Norway and then eventually I moved to Sweden.
• 2:21
  Speaker 2: So that is in the background.
• 2:22
  Speaker 2: Very much in short.
• 2:23
  Speaker 3: Awesome.
• 2:24
  Speaker 3: Well, let's talk about Bright Payments, and I just want to spell it B-R-I-T-E for those who are listening.
• 2:31
  Speaker 3: If they go look it up, they will spell it correctly Bright Payments.
• 2:35
  Speaker 3: So tell us what Bright Payments does.
• 2:38
  Speaker 2: So at Bright, we are focused exclusively on instant, account-to-account-based payments, meaning we allow consumers to pay online using only their bank account and also to receive payments using only their bank account, which may sound like nothing special if you think about the nature of online banking nowadays, but what we've done is that we've turned this into a payment method, so our primary customers are merchants, who go ahead and they integrate our payment methods and then offer them to consumers in return.
• 3:07
  Speaker 2: So that means that we can fuel anything from classic e-commerce to financial services, to marketplaces and the likes, but also, of course, for the instant payout segments, companies like insurance companies that are looking to pay out claims to their customers, or, for example, the gig economy, where we allow companies to pay their freelancers, for example.
• 3:30
  Speaker 2: So we handle various money flows always online, always account-to-account-based and always instantly.
• 3:37
  Speaker 2: That's one of the corporate positions of our payment methods that we handle all of our payments instantly, and we do that on the back of, first of all, open banking, so we leverage open banking to process our payments, but we have also built our own proprietary platform called the Bright Instant Payment Network, bright IPN, which is a pen European instant payment network that spans, at this point across almost 25 countries, so we're fairly spread out all across the continent, allowing customers to pay and get paid with Bright.
• 4:10
  Speaker 3: Okay, and when did you start the company?
• 4:12
  Speaker 2: I started in 2019.
• 4:14
  Speaker 2: So very much after open banking became a topic in Europe, which means that we're actually able to leverage the open banking APIs.
• 4:23
  Speaker 2: So the company, at this stage, is a little over four years old.
• 4:26
  Speaker 2: We launched in 2020.
• 4:28
  Speaker 2: So we're licensed in Sweden, with passporting all across Europe.
• 4:32
  Speaker 2: So this is our third year of full operation, if you will.
• 4:37
  Speaker 3: And just so that the audience and I completely understand.
• 4:41
  Speaker 3: So if I'm going to a merchant that has Bright as a method of payment, I'm going to see that as a choice, just like I would see to pay with Mastercard, visa or any other kind of payment method.
• 4:51
  Speaker 3: Is that correct?
• 4:53
  Speaker 2: Yes, precisely so.
• 4:54
  Speaker 2: We are actually a consumer facing payment method.
• 4:56
  Speaker 2: The solution is plug and play.
• 4:57
  Speaker 2: So, unlike other actors in the market, we don't offer an infrastructure that merchants can build their own product on top.
• 5:03
  Speaker 2: We are actually the full-fledged product.
• 5:05
  Speaker 2: So consumers will always be aware of that.
• 5:09
  Speaker 2: They're using Bright and we're also receiving all the funds when we have a merchant.
• 5:12
  Speaker 2: So there's no separate bank accounts involved and merchants need to have our settlement accounts.
• 5:16
  Speaker 2: We do all of that.
• 5:18
  Speaker 2: So we're not AB2B widely able play, but rather a fully-fledged consumer facing payment method.
• 5:24
  Speaker 3: Okay, and then you also have to connect with banks.
• 5:28
  Speaker 3: So tell me how that kind of process works with the consumer clicks on it.
• 5:33
  Speaker 3: I'm just trying to kind of walk through a use case.
• 5:34
  Speaker 3: Consumer clicks on bright, then what do they do?
• 5:37
  Speaker 2: Exactly so.
• 5:38
  Speaker 2: We are connected to more than 3800 banks across Europe at this point, and what we mean by that is basically that those are the banks that we offer consumers to pay through, precisely as you say.
• 5:49
  Speaker 2: So, basically, if you picture yourself being a consumer, you would go to any checkout.
• 5:53
  Speaker 2: You would choose pay with bright.
• 5:55
  Speaker 2: What we would show you is all the available banks in any given market.
• 5:58
  Speaker 2: You would then proceed to choose the bank that you bank with, authenticate yourself and choose the bank account you want to make the payment from and then sign off on the transaction.
• 6:08
  Speaker 2: That's it.
• 6:08
  Speaker 2: So you don't need to sign up, you don't need to download anything.
• 6:12
  Speaker 2: There's no passwords involved.
• 6:13
  Speaker 2: All you need to make a payment with bright is actually a bank account in the market that you live in, and then you're basically ready to go.
• 6:21
  Speaker 2: We're quite focused on the consumer experience, so what we've done is we've actually boiled this process down that usually consists of two authentication steps into one authentication step for all returning users.
• 6:33
  Speaker 2: So when you come back one more time after already having used us, what happens is that you'll be landing straight on the bank account that you used to make that payment last time.
• 6:43
  Speaker 2: And what I mean landing on the bank account.
• 6:45
  Speaker 2: What we'll show you is effectively your bank and the current balance and the account, nothing more.
• 6:49
  Speaker 2: So it's not that you get to see all of your transactions or anything like that, just basically this as an entry way to make a payment from this particular bank.
• 6:57
  Speaker 3: All right, so it saves me putting my 17 digit number in and all that painful things that consumers often have to do.
• 7:05
  Speaker 2: Precisely.
• 7:05
  Speaker 2: You would never have to do that with bright, because we go ahead and fetch that directly from your bank, actually.
• 7:09
  Speaker 2: So all you do is you authenticate with top of mine information.
• 7:13
  Speaker 2: So think of it as same credentials that you would use to log into your online bank.
• 7:17
  Speaker 2: That's all you'll need.
• 7:18
  Speaker 2: So in many markets you can take Sweden as a good example what you would use as your personal number and then you would authenticate with what we call bank ID.
• 7:26
  Speaker 2: In most other markets in Europe, you would just authenticate through your online banking app on your phone.
• 7:31
  Speaker 2: So no need to memorize any additional passwords or putting in long numbers.
• 7:36
  Speaker 2: Whatever you need to go and log into your bank.
• 7:39
  Speaker 2: That's what you can use to make a payment for pride.
• 7:42
  Speaker 3: You mentioned a few kind of merchant types that use the service.
• 7:46
  Speaker 3: Are there specific verticals or segments of industries that are more apt to use it, or can it be really any online business?
• 7:54
  Speaker 2: It can't really be any online business, as long as, of course, it's within our risk appetite.
• 7:59
  Speaker 2: There's, of course, as any other payment company, there's areas that we don't want to get involved in, but generally speaking, you could use us to pay anything online.
• 8:06
  Speaker 2: What I would say where our type of payment method is particularly strong is in anything that is consumed or delivered instantly, but also, of course, traditional e-commerce, where I would say, account to account is not as prevalent today, is typically in verticals where you would order multiple items with the intention of not keeping everything.
• 8:29
  Speaker 2: So, for example, fashion is a really good example, because a lot of customers will go ahead and order the same item in multiple sizes, or they're going to order they maybe have the intention to buy one sweater and they order five, and then they want to choose which one they want to keep, and they are typically you don't want to prepay, so that would be one of those verticals where maybe we are less strong as of today, but any other vertical, literally where there's a clear intent to buy, there's a really good fit to our product.
• 8:57
  Speaker 3: Okay, well, let's talk about the payouts side of it a little bit.
• 9:01
  Speaker 3: Was that part of the vision when you started the company, or was that something new that you've brought on since you started?
• 9:06
  Speaker 2: No, that was actually something we already have invested quite heavily in right from the get-go, primarily because there's a lot of use cases that benefit from both payments and payouts, and I think marketplaces is a really great example.
• 9:18
  Speaker 2: So, for example, we power Auctionnet, which is a really cool player up here in the Nordics.
• 9:23
  Speaker 2: They are essentially a marketplace for auction houses.
• 9:25
  Speaker 2: If you run an auction house and then you give an European market, you can sign up with them and then they become your online storefront.
• 9:31
  Speaker 2: So to say so, as in any marketplace scenario, you will have a buyer, but you will also have a seller, and they are right in the middle between those two.
• 9:39
  Speaker 2: So there is two types of money flows here.
• 9:41
  Speaker 2: The first one is the regular purchase situation, where somebody buys an item on the marketplace or basically on an auction house, and they need to pay for it, but then there was also a seller who's waiting to get paid for the item they sold, and we can handle both of these flows.
• 9:56
  Speaker 2: So that's a really good example, I think, of use case that actually needs both, but of course, there's also use cases that only need payouts, and this is, I think, very much a market segment that is overlooked today, because when we think online payments, I think we all think of online shopping and paying an online retailer.
• 10:13
  Speaker 2: That is really the classic use case, but there is a lot of payouts use cases as well, and I think I've given some example that there's many, many more that maybe you wouldn't think of when you think payments, but are actually pretty significant in terms of the number of transactions and also the amounts of funds that are being transferred.
• 10:31
  Speaker 2: So that was very much with us from the get go already.
• 10:34
  Speaker 3: What would you say?
• 10:35
  Speaker 3: Differentiates your company from your competitors out there.
• 10:38
  Speaker 2: I would say that sort of the high level of instant processing is a big part of our USP, and the reason for that is that it's not just very convenient and has a lot of value for the user, but it also takes away a lot of the credit and fraud risk that you would be used to from payment processing.
• 10:56
  Speaker 2: So, for example, if you compare us with credit cards, I think most merchants will be familiar with the pain of chargebacks and fraud, for example, and the fact that we authenticate customers using something super secure, such as their online banking app, but also the fact that the funds are being transferred so quickly, actually eradicates a lot of that risk and that makes the payment processing a lot more efficient for the merchant and, of course, a lot more predictable in terms of costs as well.
• 11:24
  Speaker 2: So that is a really big proposition and something that we currently invest a lot of time and money into to make sure that we can have the absolute highest instant coverage that we can possibly offer.
• 11:34
  Speaker 2: And IPN, the power network that I mentioned before, actually provides instant payments and markets where there is no public instant processing scheme available.
• 11:43
  Speaker 2: So that goes to show us how much of a focus this is for us.
• 11:46
  Speaker 2: Other than that, we're also fairly young as a business, which means that we were able to build our services you know, state of the art from scratch in 1919, 1920, and, of course, continuously ever since, whereas there's other players in the industry that have been around for longer that have also been focused on an account to account, but maybe not on the instant processing.
• 12:06
  Speaker 2: Maybe they were more focusing on the actual initiation of a payment, which, by default, most often is not instant in most markets across Europe.
• 12:14
  Speaker 2: So those are, I think, some of the core factors that we hear from merchants at least, are the reasons why they chose to work with us.
• 12:23
  Speaker 3: And correct me if I'm wrong, but account to account is much more popular in Europe than it is in the US.
• 12:29
  Speaker 3: Is that correct?
• 12:30
  Speaker 2: Yes, I would say so.
• 12:31
  Speaker 2: Yeah, and it's not a European phenomenon per se, because there's many markets across the world that have similar initiatives to open banking in Europe, whether that is South America, whether that's India or Australia.
• 12:46
  Speaker 2: This is sort of a global phenomenon.
• 12:48
  Speaker 2: It's on the rise, but it's definitely sort of more popular in Europe than at least in the northern parts of America, the United States definitely.
• 12:56
  Speaker 3: Okay, and you're today just doing business in Europe, is that correct?
• 13:01
  Speaker 2: That's correct.
• 13:01
  Speaker 2: Yeah, we're focused on Europe for the time being.
• 13:04
  Speaker 3: In the payments in fintech industry.
• 13:06
  Speaker 3: Before a transaction takes place or money is ever moved, there's a plethora of activity that takes place.
• 13:12
  Speaker 3: So, in collaboration with NMI, the fully integrated payment solution built to scale, we've launched the be solid campaign where, in this series, we're exploring everything that happens before the transaction with guests from leading companies like count, mastercard, trust, lee and more.
• 13:27
  Speaker 3: To listen to the latest episodes, visit leaders and payments calm.
• 13:31
  Speaker 3: Or NMI calm, slash resources, slash podcasts.
• 13:35
  Speaker 3: In a world full of squares and stripes, be solid when do you see the payments industry?
• 13:43
  Speaker 3: And if you want to answer it sort of from the lens of the segments that you work in, you can absolutely do that.
• 13:49
  Speaker 3: But where do you see the payments industry headed, saying the next three to five years?
• 13:53
  Speaker 2: Hmm, well, of course, open banking is definitely on the rise, so I see open banking payments replaced a lot of the card payments in Europe.
• 14:00
  Speaker 2: That is, of course, top of mind for me, given that this is my core business.
• 14:03
  Speaker 2: Either than that or otherwise, I wouldn't have started the company, quite frankly.
• 14:07
  Speaker 2: But the Overall sort of trend that I see is that there's more convergence Across the different markets, and I think this is maybe, from a, say, north American standpoint, something that can be quite daunting.
• 14:20
  Speaker 2: If you look at the different European markets, what we see is that there's still quite massive local differences, so every market will typically have their own local payment champions and local payment brands.
• 14:32
  Speaker 2: They're unique to that market or a subset of European markets, but there's few payment methods that span all across Europe.
• 14:39
  Speaker 2: Cards aside, and maybe you know some wallets, like recently, paypal is Is this fairly popular across Europe?
• 14:44
  Speaker 2: To varying degrees in the different parts, but still, and I would imagine that there will be more convergence as certain players, of course, expand beyond borders.
• 14:53
  Speaker 2: So that's definitely one thing that I see.
• 14:55
  Speaker 2: I also think that embedded finance is becoming a bigger, bigger topic across most pin markets and the way that we all interact with payments and I think, generally speaking, given that the regulatory field is Also becoming more harmonized across Europe, that of course also paves the way, along with some infrastructure Development, such as, for example, the SAPA instance scheme, that also also fuel this development.
• 15:20
  Speaker 2: So I foresee, and I also hope, that it's gonna become easier for larger Merchants across Europe to process payments all across the continent.
• 15:31
  Speaker 3: Yeah, and you know you talk about open banking and sort of this account-to-account payments.
• 15:35
  Speaker 3: How is the popularity grown?
• 15:37
  Speaker 3: Is it like driven by merchants Encouraging consumers or is it banks encouraging consumers?
• 15:44
  Speaker 3: How to?
• 15:44
  Speaker 3: How to consumers like I mean, I think your everyday consumer doesn't say, oh, I'm gonna use open banking, like that's not what they do, right, but they see bright as a payment method.
• 15:54
  Speaker 3: Like how do you get more consumers more into account-to-account payments?
• 15:59
  Speaker 2: Hmm, oh, that's a very good question, actually, perhaps answering the first part of your question first, I would say that the popularity is actually accelerating and we see that sort of the number of open banking Europe users in Europe from 2020 to now next year, 2024, has basically almost Quadrupled, and that is the expectation that we have 2020.
• 16:21
  Speaker 2: So it's definitely something that has been accelerating and that is sort of a growing trend across consumers.
• 16:26
  Speaker 2: But you're, of course, perfectly right open banking as a concept is very abstract and I would say that 99% of consumers have no idea what open banking is to them.
• 16:35
  Speaker 2: The payment method will be something that is closer to a Pay with my bank concept, where they will see the bank that they currently use, they will recognize the logo and then basically, the fact that it's processed by bright is, of course, an all honesty, not gonna be the decisive factor at this point in time.
• 16:52
  Speaker 2: How other?
• 16:53
  Speaker 2: There's great examples across Europe where different providers have managed to carve out market position that has a very strong impact on consumer preference.
• 17:05
  Speaker 2: I think one fantastic example is Sofort in Germany, which I would say is perhaps the original account to account play in Europe.
• 17:12
  Speaker 2: That company, at this point I think it's 15 years old.
• 17:15
  Speaker 2: They were acquired by Klarna in, I think, 2014.
• 17:19
  Speaker 2: I was working in Klarna at the time, since I spent so many years there, and they actually, up until today, have more than 90% brand awareness.
• 17:27
  Speaker 2: So German consumers are already very much familiar with the concept.
• 17:31
  Speaker 2: And then that is actually.
• 17:32
  Speaker 2: It falls into the category of open banking, but consumer will not perceive it to be an open banking player, if that makes sense, so they will not label it that way, at least.
• 17:40
  Speaker 2: I am, of course, intimately familiar with Sofort, also because Pratt has a partnership with them, so any merchant that uses Sofort, they can actually use our instant payouts, because Sofort doesn't do instant payouts.
• 17:51
  Speaker 2: They only do payments, regular open banking payments.
• 17:54
  Speaker 2: That's why I know so much about it.
• 17:55
  Speaker 2: But this is just one example.
• 17:57
  Speaker 2: In the European market there already is great pick up amongst consumers and preference for this type of payment method, and there's other examples, but they're all focused on one market or the other.
• 18:08
  Speaker 2: They're not really pan European players at this point.
• 18:11
  Speaker 2: And with regards to your question as to what needs to happen to make this a more popular phenomenon, I would say that definitely the merchant plays a big role, right, because they stand to reap the benefits of streamlining their payment operations and by shifting away volume away from car processing to open banking.
• 18:28
  Speaker 2: When we work with bigger retailers at Bright, we typically do business cases together with them where we align on certain assumptions around basically what the volume shifts could look like and we model sort of certain payment costs and there is a huge amount of money to be saved, not so much as the payment fees but primarily on the just the lack of fraud and charge backs that come with the cost.
• 18:50
  Speaker 2: So in my point of view, the merchant sort of is the first instance to rule this out as a popular payment method because they have the incentive.
• 18:59
  Speaker 2: And if they position open banking payments or instant account account payments, which is how we like to think of our category, then of course the consumer preference will follow because they're being exposed to it by the merchant.
• 19:10
  Speaker 3: That makes a lot of sense.
• 19:11
  Speaker 3: Well, let's switch gears a little bit and talk about you.
• 19:14
  Speaker 3: So tell us about your journey to your role there as the CEO and founder at Bright.
• 19:19
  Speaker 2: Yeah, I have a bit of a peculiar, I think, journey, given that I didn't become an entrepreneur until after I became the CEO of another large payment company here in Sweden.
• 19:30
  Speaker 2: So, as I mentioned earlier, I started out in Klarna, joined the business when I was just 25, so pretty much straight out of college, and I was very fortunate because I worked for the founder of Klarna for many years.
• 19:41
  Speaker 2: So I witnessed this extreme hypergrowth and fantastic journey that they went through firsthand.
• 19:47
  Speaker 2: When I started, we were just over a bit of 100 people when I left for a few thousand.
• 19:52
  Speaker 2: And at Klarna I was very focused on building marketing, primarily B2B marketing actually, since that was very much the focus.
• 19:58
  Speaker 2: Klarna also underwent this journey where they first focused on their merchant population and once there was a very large, you know number of merchants offering the service.
• 20:07
  Speaker 2: Only then they shifted more and more focus to the consumer so also a B2B to C play, similar to what we do at Bright and I spent my years there and eventually, after seven years, took the very heavy decision to leave, which was difficult.
• 20:20
  Speaker 2: You know, it's a great company and I first became the CPO and then later the CEO of another BNPL player in the Nordics called Clearow Financial Services and in Clearow I started looking more at basically the payment ecosystem as a whole, because we were covering a number of different payment methods, not just BNPL, we also did direct consumer offerings.
• 20:42
  Speaker 2: I took a bit of a step back and started thinking about okay, what are the categories in Europe that are going to be growing for the down the road, and I stumbled upon a counter account as a massively growing category.
• 20:53
  Speaker 2: I started to understand sort of what I thought were the benefits of a counter account and how they could appeal basically to the different stakeholders primarily, of course, merchants, but also consumers and on the back of that I decided to start Bright.
• 21:07
  Speaker 2: So I had already done, shall we say, quite a classic career in online payments before I started to, or before I decided to, start my own business.
• 21:16
  Speaker 2: So I have a lot of admiration for people that start businesses right out of university.
• 21:21
  Speaker 2: It's not my journey, mine is different, but that's how I ended up here, and now I can't really see myself doing anything else.
• 21:29
  Speaker 3: Thanks for sharing that.
• 21:30
  Speaker 3: Well, what are some things you're passionate about?
• 21:32
  Speaker 3: So, maybe one work-related passion and one personal passion.
• 21:37
  Speaker 2: Work-related.
• 21:38
  Speaker 2: I am very, very curious by nature, so I love to work with our merchants.
• 21:42
  Speaker 2: I think it's super interesting to understand the different business models, beyond just, of course, what we can do for them.
• 21:48
  Speaker 2: It's always fantastic to understand your customers' challenge to get me wrong, but I think that just basically anything that is online commerce in the wider context is really, really interesting.
• 21:58
  Speaker 2: So I really love to spend time with merchants and understand how they operate.
• 22:02
  Speaker 2: You know, looking at warehouses even Back in the day in Clarena, people used to joke about me because I would be so interested in seeing how packages are being sent and all these things.
• 22:11
  Speaker 2: So I'm genuinely really, really passionate about e-commerce and that's probably because I've been doing it for about 15 years, even if I'm on the supplier side of things, of course.
• 22:18
  Speaker 2: And on a more personal note, I love to travel.
• 22:21
  Speaker 2: Having lived in all these different markets, of course, is not a coincidence.
• 22:24
  Speaker 2: So I love to be in different markets, learning under countries, learning different languages, spending time locally, and that is, of course, something I can combine with our geographic spread of pride quite often, so I can get really passionate about spending time, for example, in Spain, where we have another large office.
• 22:42
  Speaker 2: So that's.
• 22:44
  Speaker 2: Another passion of mine is just basically spending time in as many different places as I possibly can.
• 22:49
  Speaker 3: And what advice would you give?
• 22:51
  Speaker 3: Let's say, someone's coming to start at your company Maybe they're coming right out of university and they say, hey, I want to build a career in payments or fintech.
• 22:59
  Speaker 3: And they come to you and they say, lena, what do I need to do to be successful in this industry?
• 23:03
  Speaker 3: What advice would you give them?
• 23:06
  Speaker 2: I would say perhaps the most important thing is to develop a genuine interest in not just the immediate area that you're working in, but also in basically everything that is surrounding the, your business and the wider industry as such, because payments is complex, right.
• 23:22
  Speaker 2: I mean we, we notice this over and over again when we recruit people that are not from the payments industry.
• 23:28
  Speaker 2: We have a lot of people here at Bright that have over a decade of experience, some even two decades of experience in fintech and especially in payments.
• 23:34
  Speaker 2: But if we have new colleagues joining that come from you know, for example, from the B2B South space, but the without payments experience, for example, you realize like wow, it's actually quite complex, right.
• 23:46
  Speaker 2: Like understanding the different roles, the different players plays, or what's a PSP, for example, compared to a payment company, to car processing, to the APM, the alternative payment methods space, and I think this is quite essential to understand if you want to successfully navigate and get a better sense of like what are the challenges and how can you appeal to different stakeholders.
• 24:08
  Speaker 2: So you know, widening your lifting the view and widening the perspective, I would say, is the number one thing.
• 24:14
  Speaker 2: Secondly, of course, there are at this point in time and this is quite different to you know, 15 years ago, when I started my journey in fintech is there is actually best practice at this point?
• 24:25
  Speaker 2: When we first started out in Clarna, or when I started just a few years into that journey, there was no such thing as best practice because everything was new.
• 24:33
  Speaker 2: Now you can actually spend time and you can research the actual journey that some of these payment businesses have been on and the way that their business models have evolved, especially in comparison to the markets that they operate in, and you can see how companies have pivoted.
• 24:47
  Speaker 2: You can see now, for example, take a wallet like PayPal.
• 24:50
  Speaker 2: You can see basically how their consumer proposition would have evolved from when they first started to where they are today, and I think there's a lot to be learned, a lot of inspiration to be taken from that.
• 24:59
  Speaker 2: So I would encourage everybody who sort of spends time or wants to have a career in fintech to just spend time, underline, sort of in learning the underlying or understanding the underlying, basically, mechanics of the industry and also trying to learn from how business models have evolved, because I think it will really help you get a broader understanding of where you can take your business and what your contribution to that journey could be.
• 25:23
  Speaker 3: I love.
• 25:23
  Speaker 3: That idea of having curiosity in this space is very complicated.
• 25:29
  Speaker 3: I mean, I've been in it for 20 years and I probably know 2% of what I you know about the industry, because there's just so much and it changes and to your point, you know the other thing that's happened, I think, in the last 10 years, or maybe even last five years, at least I know in the US you can now take fintech courses in college and, of course, right, we didn't have that before you know.
• 25:53
  Speaker 3: So to your point about learning about best practices and how companies have pivoted, based on the industry dynamics that mean we just didn't see that before.
• 26:01
  Speaker 3: So I think you know, I think that's a great answer.
• 26:03
  Speaker 3: So thanks for sharing that.
• 26:05
  Speaker 3: Well, lena, we've covered a lot of ground about you and your background and obviously about Bright, the company, and where you see it heading.
• 26:13
  Speaker 3: Is there anything else you'd like to add before we wrap up the show?
• 26:16
  Speaker 2: No other than thanking you for getting the opportunity to spend time with you here.
• 26:19
  Speaker 2: I myself really enjoy listening to podcasts, listening to other founders, so it's great to get the opportunity to have a chat with you.
• 26:26
  Speaker 2: So thanks so much for having me.
• 26:27
  Speaker 3: Absolutely.
• 26:28
  Speaker 3: Thank you, and I know your time is very valuable.
• 26:30
  Speaker 3: So again, I really appreciate you being here.
• 26:33
  Speaker 2: My pleasure entirely.
• 26:34
  Speaker 2: Thanks so much.
• 26:34
  Speaker 3: Thank you, and to all your listeners out there.
• 26:37
  Speaker 3: I thank you for your time as well, and until the next story.
• 26:40
  Speaker 1: Thank you for joining us this week on the Leaders in Payments podcast.
• 26:43
  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.
• 26:50
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