In this episode of the McKinsey on Start-ups podcast, McKinsey executive editor Daniel Eisenberg speaks with Arik Shtilman, co-founder and CEO of fintech platform provider Rapyd. An edited transcript of their conversation follows.
Daniel Eisenberg: Hello and welcome to McKinsey on Start-ups, I’m Daniel Eisenberg.
When it comes to start-up fundraising these days, new records seem to be broken every quarter. But few digital sectors are booming as much as the business of money known as fintech. Globally, fintech raised more than $90 billion in the first three quarters of this year, almost double the pace in 2020, with 42 new fintech unicorns minted in the third quarter alone. Helping fuel this massive growth is the widespread belief that nearly every company, whether technically a financial-services provider or not, wants to be a fintech player in their own right.
That is because, as Arik Shtilman, the co-founder and CEO of Israeli fintech unicorn Rapyd, says, all sorts of companies “understand that the way to monetize the relationships that they have with their customers is through payments.” Shtilman, a serial entrepreneur, founded the global fintech-as-a-service platform provider to make it relatively easy and simple for any digital business to embed a wide array of financial services into their offerings. Prior to Rapyd, Shtilman founded ITNAVIGATOR, a cloud-based contact center and unified communications platform, which was acquired by Avaya in 2013.