This is episode 34 of the Leaders in Payments podcast featuring my special guest Richie Serna, the CEO and Co-Founder of Finix.
Finix allows software companies to bring their payments in house to basically embed payments into their overall software offering creating a better user experience for their customers and a new revenue stream for their business. This allows a software company to basically transform their business and cut out the middleman in the payments ecosystem and actually turn a historical cost center into a profit center.
Richie was born and raised in California and was the first in his family to go to college. He received his bachelor’s degree in political science at Harvard and started his career in management consulting.
Last year Finix had 15 employees and now has 85 on a path to 150 or more by next year. The company recently announced an extension to their Series B round of funding to $75 million, led by Lightspeed Venture Partners with participation from American Express Ventures, bringing their total funding to $96 million.
Finix is building and rebuilding the financial infrastructure at a global scale. They describe it as the “fourth” platform. The first three are the internet, the cloud and mobile services and each of these have become ubiquitous. The same trend is expected to happen in financial services and payments. So, payments eventually becomes an expectation of the software solution and that is why Finix wants every software company to become a payments company.
According to Richie, “it is never a straight line” and every fintech has their up and downs. And there’s so much opportunity in payments and fintech.
