The Elevator Moment: How Rapyd Found Their ‘AWS for Fintech’ Positioning

Some of the most powerful positioning comes from moments of pure frustration. In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Arik Shtilman shared how a post-pitch elevator rant transformed Rapyd’s market position and created an entirely new category.

The Failed Pitch Problem

In 2017, Rapyd had a solid product but a messaging problem. “Every single meeting we had was, ‘oh, we build this infrastructure for moving money in and money out. And it’s like an international network.’ And investors don’t like to hear this bullshit,” Arik recalls. With each failed pitch, they edged closer to shutdown.

The Breakthrough Moment

After yet another unsuccessful investor meeting, Arik vented to his co-founder in an elevator: “I do not understand why these idiots can’t get what we do. It’s very simple. It’s like Amazon AWS. But for fintech.” This moment of clarity sparked a complete repositioning of the company.

Creating a Category

Working with his CMO, Arik refined this analogy into something more formal. “Fintech as a service as a category did not exist before Rapyd. Me and my CMO, Mark Winnitz actually invented it,” he explains. The initial response wasn’t encouraging: “Everybody told us it’s stupid, but today everybody’s using it one way or another.”

Immediate Market Response

The new positioning transformed their fundraising trajectory. “From that moment that we were able to articulate AWS of Fintech, aka Fintech as a Service, we went from raising 5 million to raising more than 780 something million,” Arik notes. But more importantly, it helped customers recognize a problem they hadn’t been able to articulate.

Customer Realization

“Clients that had the need to more than collecting a payment with a credit or debit card said, ‘yes, I need infrastructure,'” Arik explains. “Because I need to move money in and then I need to store it and I need to KYC this consumer and I need to pay out the money. I actually need an infrastructure. But I never thought about it because I was using multiple providers.”

Market Education

The AWS analogy didn’t just simplify their pitch—it educated the market about the inefficiency of building financial infrastructure from scratch. Just as companies no longer build their own data centers, Rapyd argued that fintech companies shouldn’t cobble together basic financial infrastructure.

Future Impact

Today, Rapyd processes around $75 billion annually across 106 countries. But Arik sees this as just the beginning: “Fintech as a service in 2023 is at the same stage that cloud computing was in 2010… We will be a business that is worth 60, 70, 80, 100 billion dollars.”

For founders struggling with complex value propositions, Rapyd’s story offers a crucial lesson: sometimes the best positioning doesn’t come from marketing exercises or focus groups, but from the frustrated attempts to explain your vision in the simplest possible terms.