ALUMNI SPOTLIGHT: NEXPAY
In December 2020, nearly 12 years after Bitcoin’s initial launch, the market saw Bitcoin at record highs, surging to over $24k on the weekend of December 18th and even bigger heights in the months to follow. Cryptocurrency and Bitcoin have grown increasingly popular in recent years thanks to its promising applications in decentralisation, as well as growing credibility with companies like Tesla and Microstrategy moving significant amounts of their treasury assets into Bitcoin. Despite its popularity, for most companies, there is still high barriers to move their treasuries into cryptocurrencies due to many obstacles in banking and the regulatory landscape.
That’s where Nexpay (previously Globitex) enters the space, by helping companies bridge the gap between FIAT currencies and digital assets with their EUR banking solution. Founded in 2015, Globitex was initially a company hoping to fill the need for an institutional grade commodities crypto exchange platform, that has over time developed into Nexpay – a leading Banking solution for the digital assets’ businesses in Europe.
Nexpay was a member of Lighthouse Program in Fall 2019, joining right as they were creating a new product and strategy and wanted feedback. Founder Uldis Tēraudkalns says gaining admission to the Lighthouse Program was a “stamp of approval that we are a good enough product to be selected by this program amongst a strong group of companies.” As an already established company with experience, they still found the program helpful, using the Lighthouse Program for guidance on which market they should enter next. The Program advisors helped them further focus their strategy. Nexpay had been looking for product-market-fit around different spheres of the ecosystem – fintech for retail, lending, payments. The program also helped establish the necessary relationships to become principal members of MasterCard. Tēraudkalns believes that the current focus of the business should remain on serving B2B clients as their service offering and expertise can create more value in the space.
“Before we went into the Lighthouse Program, we were trying to service everybody, both retail and business. Since then, we have refined our approach and have become laser-focused on business clients”
Uldis Tēraudkalns
CEO
With a goal of providing premium banking services for fintechs of the future and digital assets business, Nexpay has identified industry trends just at the right time, as crypto has become a hot topic in recent years, with some applications, such as DeFi, having overnight success. Since Nexpay straddles the line between fintech and e–money, they are able to bring a somewhat unique outlook on various industry trends. In terms of the fintech industry, Tēraudkalns worries that it’s becoming saturated and that the companies that truly stand out in bringing new services to the table make it a difficult industry to break into: “there is now a push for diversification of services for fintech”.
Despite the challenges of Covid-19, Nexpay managed to grow exponentially, leading to the launch of their banking business under Nexpay’s new brand earlier this year. Thanks to the team’s hard work, they were able to onboard more clients than ever before and continue improving their product and service offering. As a result, their payments volume increased 20-fold as they reached a record milestone of over 2 billion EUR in transactions through Nexpay. We look forward to seeing their progress!
