The following interview is a conversation we had with Patrick Mollard, CEO & Co-Founder of Fipto, on our podcast Category Visionaries. You can view the full episode here: $16 Million Raised to Build the Future of Blockchain Payments

Brett
Hey, everyone, and welcome back to Category Visionaries. Today we’re speaking with Patrick Mollard, CEO and Co-Founder of Fipto, a blockchain payments platform that’s raised 16 million in funding. Patrick, welcome to the show. 

Patrick Mollard
Thank you, Brett, for hosting me. 

Brett
No problem. So were joking there. In the pre intro, I did a very american pronunciation of your last name. I butchered it. I didn’t want to insult you with trying to say it with that nice french accent. So how do we properly say your last name? 

Patrick Mollard
Patrick Molard. But it’s fine. No worries. 

Brett
All right. Amazing. Amazing. Well, Patrick, let’s dive right in. Talk to us about what you’re building today. 

Patrick Mollard
So today at Fikto, we’re building an infrastructure, payment infrastructure that is an alternative to what is existing. And I think we’ll be discussing this later on in the podcast. But basically, the ambition is to combine the best practices of traditional payments with the best of the new technology that is being talked about a lot at the moment, being blockchain. 

Brett
Take us back to the early days, the founding of the company, 2022. What was going on in your world that put you in a position to have this idea and decide to go out and build this company? 

Patrick Mollard
Yeah. So from my previous experience, I was working for Fintech, doing International B2B payments, and actually made three statements that led to the founding and the creation of Fipto. The first one is that I saw that international payments were still not up to the level of expectations of service of the corporate clients that do international payments in terms of speed, transparency, cost, predictability. And that, to me, is linked to the technologies that are being used today, which is voice messaging broadly, and correspondent banking networks. So that, to me, was the first statement. The second one is that we saw, and I saw that there were new tools available to corporate clients to perform these type of flows. 

Patrick Mollard
Again, international payments, mostly those new tools were based on blockchain technology, which was interesting because structurally they solve most of the payments I just mentioned. So speed, transparency, predictability, and cost. But they bring along quite a few challenges. Also for corporates that want to have access to these new type of tools. How do I open a wallet? How do I make sure it’s done in a secure and safe manner? How do I make sure also that the flows I receive and send out are done in full compliance? And also, how do I get access to the corporate governance layer that I’m used to as a corporate. So no signature threshold and things like that. So that was interesting also because that was something that was not existing. 

Patrick Mollard
And the third segment is basically, has become, our vision is we’re convinced that there will be more and more financial services based on blockchain technology in the future. So the mission of crypto today is to facilitate access to the new financial services to corporates. 

Brett
Ian, talk to us about the time from when you launched the platform to when you had your paying customer, your first paying customer, you had revenue coming in. How much time passed? 

Patrick Mollard
Actually quite a bit of time, because we are in, I think, a great industry with a lot of potential, but also quite complex. Building the platform required us to build a whole core banking system. So from a solutions perspective, it took quite a bit of time. We’re 30 people today at FPTO. Two thirds of the company is product and tech. So we invested heavily in that. And also we are licensed, we are a regulated industry, so we needed to obtain the licenses required to operate. So that’s what we’ve done in March 2023, when we got registered as a virtual asset service provider with the AMF in France, we also recently obtained our registration as a wasp in Luxembourg. So all in all, were able to launch a real first version of the platform and the solution early this year. 

Patrick Mollard
And we got our first paying customers in Q one of this year. 

Brett
And how hard is that working in an industry like blockchain, where there’s just a lot of volatility, even just from 2022? I guess the volatility has been positive, probably right from 2022 today, it’s been good. But the years leading up to it, a lot of volatility. What’s that like, building in an industry where there is so much volatility? 

Patrick Mollard
Yeah. So for us, the volatility, when it’s a bear market, we say we’re not too impacted because we’re building on the technology behind it. So the blockchain and we at Fipto are totally agnostic of the tokens that our clients want to use to perform their payments. So in a bull market, I must be honest and also say that we are not that much impacted, although, and I will come back to that later. I think for us, what the critical point is adoption. And obviously in a bull market, that’s obviously a positive. When institutionals like Blackrock are investing heavily in ETF’s and things like that’s obviously a supporting factor for us. 

Brett
Makes a lot of sense. 

Brett
And what’s that go to market motion look like? How are you acquiring customers today? 

Patrick Mollard
So that from assumption has obviously been an important focus area for us. We started by building the solution as an API first solution. So basically today crypto offers three main APIs. One that enables our clients to open wallets in the coins and tokens they want to use to make their payments. And also obviously IBN accounts in euros to be able to send us the funds in order to use cryptocurrencies afterwards. So that’s the first API. So management of wallets and IBN accounts. The second one is converting from one token or currency to the other, and the third API is receiving and sending funds out of these wallets and accounts. So that was the focus API first. But then we realized that actually selling an API is very difficult. So we developed a platform that is the first client of our APIs. 

Patrick Mollard
And the logic behind that is that we are convinced that in the end, our ideal go to market strategy is to be able to integrate our APIs into third party systems and softwares that are actually used by corporate clients. So for us, treasury management systems are great targets and we are actually working today with Kiriba to integrate our solutions in their solutions. So that’s the idea. But again, we built a platform to be able to sell it to customers in order to convince the players like Kiriba and other TMSs and potentially ERPs that they should actually integrate us. And yeah, from our experience, that’s the only way to go. 

Brett
What about marketing from a marketing strategy perspective? What does the strategy look like right now? Or what are you thinking it’s going to look like as you move ahead into the next six months? Twelve months. What’s that marketing strategy going to look like? 

Patrick Mollard
Yeah, so we are convinced that we need to be seen as reference actor in our field. So we are focusing very much on content and creating useful context for our clients, also fostering adoption, as I mentioned. So that’s basically what we are focused on today. We also see that a lot of our business is done through events, so a lot of marketing efforts around these type of things. But yeah, content and LinkedIn ads are probably the two focus areas today for us. 

Brett
What about from a competitive landscape perspective? How do you think about the competitive landscape? Is it this blue ocean where there’s a large market there that you have to try to convince to get bought into blockchain, or are you battling for a small share of the market that’s crowded and there’s a lot of competitors in the space. 

Patrick Mollard
So I think from a competitive standpoint, there are a few actors in the market today, which for us is reassuring because it means we’re not the only ones convinced by the trajectory and where we’re heading. The fact is that today we see that obviously most of the first clients we have on the platform are early adopters. So clients that are actually exposed to web three and the blockchain from the activity they are actually doing. So those are clients you actually don’t need to convince. The adoption is already done and they are testing the flows on the platform, so it’s great to have them and we’ll be happy to grow with them. We also see that there is strong adoptions from the payment experts of the world. 

Patrick Mollard
So payment service providers, they are the ones that see the advantages of the blockchain in terms of speed, transparency, cost, predictability, everything that I mentioned before, and that’s a very large market with a lot of volume. So that’s where we’re focusing on today. And in the future, in my view, obvious that all corporate clients will use blockchain technology in some way or shape to perform their flows. And that’s a 200 trillion revenue market. So it’s a huge market. 

Brett
What are those conversations like with the market as you’re educating them about blockchain? Is the sentiment there? Like, do people get it? Are they bought in? Do they believe? Or does it still take a lot of convincing and persuading? 

Patrick Mollard
I think things changed quite heavily over the last. So we created a company two years ago. I think it has already changed quite a bit. So as I mentioned, I think there are the categories I mentioned. So the clients exposed to web three and blockchain, they don’t need convincing and the adoption is already done there. On the PSP side, I think that’s already done as well. If you look at larger corporates, I think that the discussions we have today are quite different from the ones we had two years ago. They are all convinced of what blockchain can bring to them and they also see very specific use cases where they can use blockchain, whether it’s repatriating funds or optimizing their internal flows, or adding an alternative payment method, for instance, or even paying suppliers in complex geographies. 

Patrick Mollard
So they see the real strength of this new technology. And I think adoption there will be facilitated when they are able to convince their legal departments, compliance departments that they can go for it. And I think their the fact that regulation is becoming more and more clear is helpful. The fact that institutional players again like BlackRock and others, are investing heavily in the field is interesting. And the fact that stablecoins, and potentially in the future central bank digital currencies are being investigated and stablecoins are gaining a lot of traction. Traction is very interesting. 

Brett
How do you think about the market category that you’re in? What is that market category for us? 

Patrick Mollard
We’re building an alternative payment infrastructure to what is existing, so don’t have really a name for it, but that’s where we see us now. 

Brett
As I mentioned there in the intro, you’ve raised 16 million to date. What have you learned about fundraising throughout this journey? 

Patrick Mollard
Throughout this journey and the previous one? I think what makes a huge difference is your ability to convince a lead investor, whether it’s for your pre seed round or your seed round or even in later series. I think what is paramount is to be able to convince one lead investor that will put the key items of the round on a piece of paper, on a term sheet, and from that point everything seems a lot easier. So I think that’s really the most important thing to focus on, is to make sure that you have that relationship with an investor and that will actually make you around and your life a lot easier. 

Brett
For founders that are building B2B blockchain technology, what advice would you have for them, just from a go to market perspective, based on everything that you’ve learned? 

Patrick Mollard
I think it’s important to identify where your market is. I think from our experience, we didn’t focus enough on our ICPS and defining our ICPS quickly enough, so really determining who are our ideal customer profiles and where they were being based in France, and it seemed to us obvious that it was Europe, but actually we see that the corridors where blockchain payments make the most sense are corridors where the existing technology are maybe less relevant. So it’s on countries in Latin America, in Africa, in Asia, and also between those geographies. So performing payments between Latin America and Asia. So I think, yeah, the most important thing is probably to really identify where your ICPS are and also from a geographical standpoint, where you need to be focusing on. 

Brett
Now, final question for you. Let’s zoom out three to five years into the future. What’s the big picture vision look like here? 

Patrick Mollard
For us, what’s important, as I mentioned earlier, is to be able to integrate our solutions into third party softwares. And I think the big picture is also that we want to start with payments because that’s probably the most obvious use case for blockchain today. We want to be at payments what Internet was at email. So really facilitating almost point to point payments. But we are convinced that there is a whole world of new financial services that will be used by corporate clients based on blockchain technology in the future. And again, we want to be the actor that facilitates access to those financial services for our corporate clients. 

Brett
Amazing. I love it. All right, Patrick, we are up on time, so we’ll have to wrap here for founders that are listening in, that want to follow along with your journey. Where should they go? 

Patrick Mollard
They want to follow us, so they need to go to our website, www.fipto.com, and we’re also on LinkedIn, obviously, and we can be followed there. 

Brett
Amazing. Patrick, thank you so much for taking the time. It’s been a blast. 

Patrick Mollard
Thank you, Brett. Have a great day. 

Brett
This episode of Category Visionaries is brought to you by Front Lines Media, Silicon Valley’s leading podcast production studio. If you’re a B2B Founder looking for help launching and growing your own podcast, visit frontlines.io podcast. And for the latest episode, search for Category Visionaries on your podcast platform of choice. Thanks for listening, and we’ll catch you on the next episode.