ALUMNI SPOTLIGHT: EVERYPAY
In 2012, the founders of EveryPay realized payment gateway solutions available to businesses in Estonia were not good enough. In an interview with the fintech’s current CEO and co-founder Lauri Teder, he shares, “Their terms were not entrepreneur friendly and the technical solutions were just not very good. And we thought that we could develop a better payment gateway.” In November 2015, they had a public launch with LHV bank and by October 2016 EveryPay processed 33% of Estonian e-commerce card payments.
The fintech participated in the first class of the Mastercard Lighthouse Program in 2018, establishing several wider connections to banks and other parties they had previously reached out to. According to Teder, their growing connection with Mastercard helped them reach their goals in the Baltic markets. Today, EveryPay offers a fully cloud-based payment gateway platform for banks and acquirers, providing digital payment solutions with relevant tools to manage the acquiring side of e-commerce. As it has from the start, the company focuses on fulfilling the needs of the merchants, continuously working with adding new features to keep up with changing consumer behavior and payment trends.
Discussing these industry trends, Teder shares that more companies want to move online and that the effects of Covid-19 have only accelerated this trend. “Even before the Covid-19 situation, online payments grew at 10-20% annually. Digital payments used to be a very niche requirement from the merchants and now it is actually a usual requirement.” In other words, online payments are more important than ever before. Teder further explains, “If you are selling something in a physical store, you know that you need a POS device to accept card payments. More stores are also realizing they need a decent online payment solution.”
According to Teder, the pressure is two-fold. First, merchants need a good and simple way to add different payment methods to their digital environments where they interact with their customers. On the other side, there is a resultant mounting pressure on banks selling these kinds of services to provide a good solution. Many companies often get payment acceptance services from these home banks. “The problem then is that the banks might not have a good solution available, and as a result merchants move to a third-party payment provider like Adyen, Stripe or some other regional player,” explains Teder. This is where EveryPay comes into the picture,
“We help banks stay relevant. We see that with a decent digital payment platform, banks are better able to keep their customers and improve their acquiring revenues. We are seeing that banks instead win back customers from third–party PSPs.”
Lauri Teder
CEO & Co-founder
After adding open banking payment initiations to their platforms, Everypay has enabled merchants to get the same service from their home banks and in effect more easily keep all their financials in the same place. As Teder explains, “the merchants want to get financials from as few service providers as they can,” and EveryPay makes this possible.
For EveryPay, the Covid-19 pandemic has fortunately only boosted their concept and business further. A good example Teder likes to use is one that hits close to home. Every year during the spring, his mother buys strawberry plants at a local farm, but this year she managed to order the plants online. “I think it explains really well the change in people’s habits,” he says. These behavioral changes have been felt at EveryPay as well. In March, the fintech received a surge in requests to quickly deliver e-shops. Nevertheless, with many sales events and physical meetings with banks cancelled, Teder admits it has been difficult to win new partner bank relationships.
Despite this difficult year, the fintech is encouraging banks to embrace these changing times and seek collaborations with innovative fintech companies. Teder urges that it is important in order to ensure access to financial services during lockdown is at least maintained if not increased. EveryPay was also recently named one of Central Europe’s fastest growing technology companies in Deloitte’s annual Fast 50 Competition and is now considered to be the largest tech company within the digital payment solution space in their region.
