Social Impact Tech: Arik Shtilman of Rapyd On How Their Technology Will Make An Important Positive Impact
Someone needs to own the global payments challenge — and that’s Rapyd. Rapyd understands that businesses and consumers need to pay and get paid faster, and that money needs to move freely across borders without incurring delays or excessive costs en route.
In recent years, Big Tech has gotten a bad rep. But of course many tech companies are doing important work making monumental positive changes to society, health, and the environment. To highlight these, we started a new interview series about “Technology Making An Important Positive Social Impact”. We are interviewing leaders of tech companies who are creating or have created a tech product that is helping to make a positive change in people’s lives or the environment. As a part of this series, I had the pleasure of interviewing Arik Shtilman.
Arik Shtilman is CEO and co-founder of Rapyd, the leading fintech-as-a-service platform. Arik founded Rapyd in 2016 with a singular goal in mind: to provide all the tools businesses need to create payment, payout and fintech experiences anywhere in the world.
Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series. Before we dive in, our readers would love to learn a bit more about you. Can you tell us a bit about your childhood backstory and how you grew up?
I grew up in Israel and got my first computer at the age of four. One of the biggest things that shaped me as an entrepreneur was that I had seen the beginning of the internet — I had to teach myself how to use a computer using a translator and after that I was hooked. After my high school education, I enlisted in the army at the age of 18 and left at 21. My time there gave me routine, structure and helped gain perspective in terms of what matters and what doesn’t. That said, I decided in that period that University wasn’t for me, so I skipped it and went to start my first company.
Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you began your career?
My first company was a cloud computing company in the unified communication space. When we started the company, there was no such thing as “cloud computing”, but over the years the business and technology evolved into “cloud”. In 2009 I was working with the biggest unified communication company in the world, and I was trying to convince them to build an API for developers in the cloud to use their capabilities. I pointed to a small start-up called Twilio that does similar things. The big company of course said it is stupid and not required…fast forward the big company went into chapter 11, and Twilio became a publicly traded company worth 10x what the big company was worth at its prime
None of us are able to achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person who you are grateful towards who helped get you to where you are? Can you share a story about that?
My passion for technology and innovation was sparked by my mother. Had she not brought me my first computer at the age of four, I don’t think I’d be where I am today. Imagine a small child in Israel who didn’t speak any English and had to use a translator to understand how to use a computer… I’d say that’s pretty entrepreneurial for a four-year-old
Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?
“There’s no such thing as I can’t.” When I was 18, I joined the military and that mindset was drummed into me. Since then, I made that idea that’s living in my head come to life and maintain a progressive attitude.
You are a successful business leader. Which three character traits do you think were most instrumental to your success? Can you please share a story or example for each?
3 key traits and actions are instrumental:
- Remain ambitious through your wins.
- Have confidence in yourself and an open mind throughout your challenges.
- Choose to surround yourself with smart, talented people to build world-changing products.
I think it’s fair to say that every entrepreneur, Branson, Bezos or Musk would say the same thing. I’ve been on a journey filled with life-long lessons so I know these three things to be true. I built a successful company from the ground up that I then sold after 10 years, then wanted a different challenge — so decided to start a brand new venture. The challenges I faced along the way in the venture’s early days gave me the confidence to remain entrepreneurial and take risks. That’s how Rapyd was born, through a case of trial and error surrounded by other dedicated problem solvers. Together we decided to pivot from our original business idea to solve the most important challenges at hand — to build a unified payments infrastructure equivalent to the cloud — and Rapyd was born.
Ok super. Let’s now shift to the main part of our discussion about the tech tools that you are helping to create that can make a positive social impact on our society. To begin, what problems are you aiming to solve?
The complexity of the payments landscape is a major growth inhibitor for business expansion. To make their businesses work, all companies must integrate multiple payment providers and systems, each with its own unique architecture. Add in the need to meet local tax, licensing, regulatory standards and the time and cost spent facilitating payments keeps on rising. And that’s just for one country. Cross-border trade or global expansion means doing all of these things in multiple jurisdictions, which means the complexity of payments soon starts to hold back growth.
We make international payments and transactions across FX seamless and easy for businesses of all sizes — giving them cross-border agility that otherwise would be out of reach. We set out to build a scalable fintech to provide financial services and infrastructure for other businesses to build on top of.
In short, Rapyd solves global complexity that otherwise hinders cross-border expansion for businesses of any size.
How do you think your technology can address this?
Someone needs to own the global payments challenge — and that’s Rapyd. Rapyd understands that businesses and consumers need to pay and get paid faster, and that money needs to move freely across borders without incurring delays or excessive costs en route.
Our technology solves global complexity because the Rapyd infrastructure is both global in nature and ‘hyper local’ in each market, sensitively attuned to local payment preferences, with 1000s of local partners fully integrated with its platform.
In this way, Rapyd acts as a single partner for payments and payouts anywhere, and a single solution for removing the complexity of payments management — all underpinned by industry-leading security, compliance and local market expertise.
Can you tell us the backstory about what inspired you to originally feel passionate about this cause?
Prior to Rapyd, I was a cloud expert and entrepreneur. After three years in the military, I decided that I wanted to skip University and start my own company. I and three other co-founders bootstrapped the business and built it into a multimillion-dollar organisation. The company ran for 10 years, and we sold it in 2013. After this, it was on to the next challenge. We realised that there was a gaping hole slowing down the global commerce industry: there was no platform that enabled businesses to accept and send payments without having to build their own infrastructure.
That’s when we had the light bulb moment for Rapyd — to build a scalable fintech to provide financial services and infrastructure for other businesses to build on top of. Now, we’re building the world’s most expansive global fintech platform.
How do you think this might change the world?
At Rapyd, we’re aiming to liberate global commerce.
High inflation, rising interest rates, geopolitical tensions, distribution issues, the long-lasting impacts of the pandemic are hurting business confidence and creating chronic insecurity. Companies have been forced to bolster their supply chains, move away from unreliable territories, hold higher inventories and build capabilities closer to home. Others have had to hastily pivot their strategies to mitigate local market risks and capitalise on opportunities wherever they emerge.
Responding to continued economic uncertainty requires payment flexibility. Companies need to move money, send and accept payments with greater agility and speed than ever before. Rather than try to take on these challenges themselves, businesses need to offload payment complexities entirely.
They need access to a unified payments infrastructure — the payments equivalent of the cloud — to mitigate risk, unlock growth, enable cross-border trade and commerce, and forge deeper customer relationships. And they need a global payments partner that will keep payments simple and seamless wherever they operate, allowing them to move money, send and accept payments with freedom.
Keeping “Black Mirror” and the “Law of Unintended Consequences” in mind, can you see any potential drawbacks about this technology that people should think more deeply about?
Compliance differs from country to country and there are new or updated regulations all the time, so working on a global scale makes this incredibly challenging. That said, it also made us realise early on that we needed to be the compliance and regulation problem solvers so that other organisations didn’t need to worry about it. We handle all of this today. Our initial learnings taught us that organisations looking to operate across borders need a platform like Rapyd — one that provided them with the necessary infrastructure to scale globally and would take the stress out of these kinds of issues.
Here is the main question for our discussion. Based on your experience and success, can you please share “Five things you need to know to successfully create technology that can make a positive social impact”? (Please share a story or an example, for each.)
- Take time to learn about different regions and their cultures you are going to start working in. You need to understand that nuances are different in all of them. For example, I give different fireside talks varying by country; taking into consideration the cultural differences between Israel, the United States, Europe, Singapore, etc. I present differently because just like a tech product, there is no one size fits all for the best way to reach people. You must adapt to your surroundings and in this case your audiences.
- It is not mandatory to have a disruptive technology in order to build a big company and have a positive social impact. Sometimes it is enough to just take an existing technology and make it better with some twists that will solve the challenges people have. Payments is a great example. Rapyd didn’t invent payments, but we just focused on solving the challenges of people/businesses with existing payment solutions and technologies.
- At the start of your journey focus on the first product and the customer second. I have found that the customers that have been with you from the inception might push you into a direction that is not where you want the product to be. The vision is different, and founders sometimes make a mistake and run after a specific client need and not after the long term product vision. This order will of course shift later in the lifetime of the company to be more customer-focused.
- Be willing to make mistakes. Be bold, be confident, and problem-solve. If you don’t take action until everything is absolutely perfect, you may have missed your chance. It is better to do something imperfectly than take no action at all.
- Remember that you don’t need to solve every single problem at once. Take it step by step. Creating something that makes someone’s day or job even 1% easier, or 1% less stressful, is worth it.
If you could tell other young people one thing about why they should consider making a positive impact on our environment or society, like you, what would you tell them?
If not us, then who? The future is in our hands.
Is there a person in the world, or in the US with whom you would like to have a private breakfast or lunch, and why? He or she might just see this, especially if we tag them. 🙂
It would probably be Michael Jordan. I grew up watching him play in the NBA and admired that he was always pushing himself and people around him to win. He had a fearless mentality, an endless drive to win and always worked hard to be the best. I’d love to have a conversation with him about his mindset
How can our readers further follow your work online?
By following us on LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, or Facebook, or by checking our website for the latest news and developments.
Thank you so much for joining us. This was very inspirational, and we wish you continued success in your important work.
Social Impact Tech: Arik Shtilman of Rapyd On How Their Technology Will Make An Important Positive… was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.