Unified commerce and European payments are under pressure as merchants juggle fragmented vendors, local debit schemes, and country-by-country compliance. Tedd Huff, CEO of fintech advisory firm Voalyre and founder of Fintech Confidential, sits down with Niv Liran, Chief Product and Technology Officer at Unzer, to break down how one platform serves over 85,000 merchants across Germany, Austria, Switzerland, and Denmark.

Niv explains how Unzer consolidated 13 acquired companies into a single system using a one-application-per-purpose rule, why local language sales and compliance expertise outperform global common-denominator approaches, and how open banking and the European Payments Initiative are creating new payment rails. The conversation gets specific on merchant migration tactics, daily workflow savings from eliminating multi-vendor reconciliation, and where AI-powered tools fit for small businesses within the next three to five years.

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1️⃣ Gate your best features to the new platform so merchants have a reason to migrate without being forced.

2️⃣ Ask prospects to walk through their daily actions before pitching; let the pain sell the solution.

3️⃣ Set a one-app-per-purpose rule before consolidation starts to prevent political gridlock across acquired teams.

4️⃣ Test every partnership against two filters: does it help the merchant, and will consumers actually adopt it.

5️⃣ Connect directly to local accounting software in each market; it locks in retention and kills reconciliation overhead.

Guest

Niv Liran on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nivliran

Unzer: https://www.unzer.com

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About the Guest

Niv Liran is Chief Product and Technology Officer at Unzer. He entered fintech at Groupon in Berlin solving chargebacks on billions in monthly volume, then held leadership roles at Rocket Internet and AUTO1 Group, where he scaled the tech department from 5 to over 350 employees. He holds a B.Sc. in Computer Science and an MBA from INSEAD.

About Unzer

Unzer is a payments and commerce platform serving more than 85,000 merchants across Germany, Austria, Denmark, and Luxembourg with unified online, in-store, and back-office solutions through its UnzerOne platform.

About the Host

Tedd Huff, CEO of fintech advisory firm Voalyre and founder of Fintech Confidential. Produced by DD3 Media, Fintech Confidential brings you the people, tech, and companies that change how you pay and get paid.

Chapters

00:00 Episode Highlights

01:02 Welcome to Fintech Confidential

01:10 DFNS: Wallets as a Service (sponsor)

02:32 Meet Niv Inbar

05:08 Why Unified Commerce Is Hard

07:02 Falling Into Payments

09:46 Unser vs Stripe Adyen

11:30 Localizing Across Europe

12:44 One Platform Consolidation

15:12 Merchant Migration Playbook

17:43 Merchant Day to Day Example

20:21 Skyflow - Your Privacy API (sponsor)

21:18 Taming Local Debit Schemes

23:29 Selling ROI and Reducing Risk

26:29 Partnerships Open Banking EPI

29:20 EPI and Digital Wallet Future

31:06 Market Consolidation Ahead

32:27 Crystal Ball Unified Commerce

35:26 AI Agents for Small Business

37:32 One Sentence Founder Advice

39:11 Wrap Up Key Takeaways

41:03 Hawk AI - Realtime Fraud Monitoring (sponsor)

41:47 Disclaimer

Today's guest, he doesn't just chase the hottest trend just

because they sound cool, his vision actually work in the real world,

what we do is we take the complexity on us

just as incredibly difficult to execute well,

and migration is your problem as a company.

Some taxes were taxes on taxes.

I mean, it was just nuts as we were in there.

We give it all in one.

There was one contract, one application.

For one purpose,

the line between payments and business software become invisible.

You can do a lot of stuff that's good for the

merchant, but if the consumers don't adopt it, there's no point.

Technology should solve problems and not create new ones.

AI will be a major driver of that.

Small businesses don't advocate

real time payments.

Have become almost a standard,

more than 55% of payments are still done in cash.

Making it hard on them only makes it harder on you.

Basically a consolidation going on in the market launch into

the wonderful world of FinTech.

Nev, I need to get your opinion on something

to be fair with so many advices I would like to give, but you

are basically running out of runway.

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Welcome to FinTech Confidential series leaders one-on-one, where we sit down

with FinTech leaders to learn about what drives their passion for FinTech

leadership lessons, and for their business through their life stories.

I'm your host, Ted Huff, and today's guest is NIV ln, the Chief Product

and Technology Officer at Uner niv.

I'm super happy to have you here today and.

Man, you've got one heck of an impressive background from Rocket Internet to

Groupon and now leading ER's, unified commerce platform all across Europe.

Uh, happy to have you here, man.

Thanks a lot and thanks for having me.

Super happy to be here.

So let me tell you a little about today's guest.

His background is really interesting because it combines computer science

with an MBA from NC ad, which is exactly the kind of mix you need

when you're building products that actually work in the real world.

He cut his teeth at rocket Internet and on places where you learn where you gotta

move fast and solve real problems without getting caught up in theoretical nonsense.

Now what makes NIV different is his approach to product development.

He doesn't just chase the hottest trend or build features

just because they sound cool.

He focuses on what the merchants actually need to run their businesses better.

And when he looks at payment systems, he sees the complete customer experience.

And when he evaluates software, he thinks about how it affects the daily operations.

His team builds products that merchants can understand and use without

needing a computer science degree.

His leadership centers on making complex systems feel simple.

He believes technology should solve problems and not create new ones.

And that approach has shaped how SER serves over 85,000 merchants across Europe

with their unified commerce solutions Now.

NIV oversees this platform that connects sales channels all into one system.

He gives the merchants real-time data and streamlined operations instead of

juggling five different systems and logins and getting lost in all of it.

And his vision is really driving how businesses manage payments

and operations from one place.

Now that sounds incredibly simple.

As you can imagine, it's just as incredibly difficult to execute well.

So before we dive in, you know, I, I, as you and I were talking previously,

you look at all these different things and what you're doing at Unser really

hits home for me 'cause I spent a number of years building unified

commerce solutions for public companies.

They all.

Fall under Global Payments today, but it was Heartland Payment Systems

and TSIs and Pay Pros to name a few and, and like I even did a bunch of

work with the folks over at VE and I remember working on one of the

projects and we had a retail specialty store that was downtown Chicago and.

We thought, Hey, this is gonna be easy, you know, no big deal.

And then we got into the multi-layer taxation pieces

at the product catalog level.

And it was just crazy.

I mean, if you think about it, we had city tax, state tax, federal

tax, county tax, and they were all happening simultaneously.

Some taxes were taxes on taxes.

Some taxes were only based upon percentages.

I mean, it was just nuts as we were de in there.

And the one mistake.

That we don't never wanted to make, because when you deal with

angry merchants, the compliance nightmares just seem to keep

going and going.

So that experience gives me the utmost respect for what you

and the Unser team are attacking daily across multiple European markets.

Uh, it it, it's just.

It's crazy because we have state by state and county by county, you guys

have country by country, currency by currency, language by language.

I mean there's so many different mechanisms that come into that.

So I'm, I'm super happy to have you here, man.

I want you to also kind of help us understand, now that I've, now

I've explained how I understand the complexity piece of this.

How did you go from.

Rocket internet to answer like what does that journey look like?

And I kind of call it the falling into FinTech story.

It's actually quite an interesting story.

So thanks for this lovely intro, first and foremost, and I, I think challenges across

markets or counties or countries or are different, but, but basically the same.

And we can probably expand on that later.

How did I end up at doing so?

That's a funny story.

So how did I fall into FinTech?

So I graduated in S 2011 with a huge student loan and was

hired to Groupon actually.

Yeah, I, I moved to Berlin in Germany and first day my boss comes to

me and says, Hey look, I know you came in to do product management.

We actually have some issue with payments.

We get something called chargebacks.

And yeah, you need to live with it.

And that's pretty much the style of Groupon on Rocket Internet, right?

They throw you into the pool and it's a sink swim.

And that Groupon hyper scaling those days, it was basically billions

of of dollars in monthly volumes.

So chargebacks were becoming a problem.

And I, first thing I did, I called my account manager, the payment provider

and asking, Hey, what are chargebacks?

Why am I as a merchant even responsible for them?

I mean, I didn't steal the crowd, the card, right?

And if somebody steals my wallet, goes to the kiosk, buy something with 10, 10

euros of cash, I don't go to the kiosk guy and tell him, Hey, gimme my money back.

So I had to learn the hard way how payments work, how to deal with

chargebacks, and this was a very, very hard plunge into the wonderful world

of, of payments and then FinTech.

That's so funny.

I can't tell you how many times that I've had conversations

with clients who not only are.

Merchants, but also on the side of the payment provider that that is

looking at it like, okay, well how do I maximize the win rate on chargebacks?

And it's so funny how it continually goes back to that.

And I thought about it the same way you did for a long time of like, why?

Why?

Why is the person accepting payment responsible for it?

Just a unique dichotomy that it's got there, but.

That kind of gives us an idea of how difficult and how complex

the payments ecosystem is.

And that doesn't even mean beyond just a chargeback.

It's you have the local regulations, you have the national regulations, you

have multiple regional regulations, and then you've got, as I mentioned

before, different currencies and a whole bunch of other stuff.

I know how complex it is to roll this out in North America, and I even have

some experience in Europe, but help me understand the gap that Unser is

filling in the market with the unified commerce platform that maybe other

solution providers like an Adian or a Stripe or a, a typical payment

processor is just not quite there.

So I, I think it's a multifaceted the answer.

And then to understand it, you basically need to look at what

are the solutions we are selling.

Versus the solutions that the competition is selling and also the target market.

And what we are selling is essentially a combination of online payments, in-store

payments, so retail payments and the whole back office and infrastructure

to support an SME in the work.

So we provide not only the terminals, the API access for

the website, but we also provide.

Product catalog, software, inventory management.

If you are in the beauty or at a gastro vertical, we provide a reservation module.

We provide kitchen management if you need to run a kitchen, and so on and so forth.

So we really specialize in certain verticals where

others are not specializing.

There's of course the element that we are a local player.

We have local language support, which is very important in Europe,

it's in most European markets.

It's if you just give English support or sales, you can sell, but you're

targeting a different size of merchants.

So your average neighborhood retailer, brick and mortar,

mom and pop show, they would.

Want to deal with an English speaking salesperson.

So that's just one example.

So how do you, how do you balance that need

for that deep localization?

You just talked about supporting the local languages, the accounting standards,

the regulatory requirements, while still maintaining a, a scalable platform.

Well, we need to, we are focusing on, on our coal

markets, which is our Germany, Austria, Switzerland, and Denmark.

And we have local people on the ground.

So when we sell in Austria and we sell in Germany, and we sell

in Denmark, we sell in Danish.

And this also gives us the very hyper refined local experience.

So we speaking about regulations, speaking about compliance requirements,

those difference in compliance between different, those different markets.

It goes all the way from your K-Y-C-A-M-L depth and duties to

transaction monitoring, to how often do you need to recheck the customers,

and also how, which types of merchants you can accept in every market.

And this takes a very local favor of flavor.

If you're a global player, you can do it, but then you have to have

some kind of a common denominator.

It's impossible if you run one platform to this.

Supposed to to support merchants in the US and in Europe and in Brazil

and in Asia to have this, this specialized local freight rule.

So

it's, it's someone who's.

Guided multiple companies through major platform consolidations,

technology transformations.

I'm, I'm really fascinated by how your Unser one project taking multiple acquired

companies, creating a single unified platform, it's one of the most challenging

technical and organizational undertakings that I think anybody can take in FinTech.

So take us behind the scenes of what it's like to consolidate these platforms.

Into wan.

And what were the biggest technical and organizational challenges

you faced during that process?

First, I would say it was a lot of fun.

We acquired the bug 13 companies in, in, in over time.

And one thing that was clear to to us as management when we joined this ride

was we have multiple payment platforms.

We have multiple platforms that do basically duplicate things.

So we set up a ground rule, we want to have one application for one purpose.

And when we had that, of course it's easy to say, Hey, we're gonna build

everything or we're gonna buy everything.

But actually we had it, so we had the great billing application, we had

the good gateway, we had, uh, a very nice back office for the merchants.

We had a good processing platform for connecting to acquirers, PayPals, and

there was one problem though, which is they were not connected to each other.

There were parts of different platforms.

So we had to basically go ahead and connect them, uh, not only technically.

But also make a coherent platform out of them and make sure that there's

one coherent organization behind self touching On the organizational part,

what we set out to do, we basically, we first of all did a deep analysis on which

module we take for which purpose, and we said, okay, that's all target picture.

Then we set out to connect them, which shows going a bit technical here, but

we chose Kafka to be kind of the bus that connects everything together.

Whatever was not connected because you still have legacy platforms connecting

from all kinds of sides of the universe.

Whatever was not connected and became part of one.

So one was still connected into our transaction link.

So we were, we are still getting a real time feed of all platforms.

We do have some merchants on those legacy platforms, but those.

Basically onboarding, crossing, so all the time, you know, merchants or

naturally or, or unnaturally, they switch.

Well, and you bring me to the next piece, right?

Is like anytime you build out or you consolidate or you decide that

you're gonna sunset a product, you always have this merchant migration.

How that was

fun.

How did you manage the migrating the migration of existing

merchants to the new infrastructure?

Without disrupting their operations, and especially as we all know, this

is a mission critical item for 'em.

We're moving real money on a daily basis through these transactions.

I think the key here is not to disrupt our daily operations, right?

So being merchant first, a migration is your problem as a company.

It's not the merchant's problem, and you don't want to make it the merchant's

problem by forcing them to migrate.

On the other hand, you want to progress on your technical journey,

and you, of course, it benefits the merchants to be on a newer platform.

It's more stable, it has more features.

Some of our older platforms, for example, they don't offer Apple Pay.

Yeah.

Online.

What we do is, is multifaceted approach.

So first of all, we make sure that one console one is better than

all the other platforms combined.

Otherwise, merchants, yeah, they just don't move or they have no, no reason

to move, and there's no value for us to tell them that, why they should move.

Where possible.

We basically kept the old gateways and the old technical platforms

bridged to and so on, so the merchant can do whatever they did there.

There's no disruption, but behind the scenes they're

already connected to and so on.

So that's one way of doing it.

The other way is to push them by letting them.

Basically onboard on new features only on the new platform.

So if they want Apple Pay, if they want Google Pay or other new things,

people coming to the market, we apologize and we say, Hey, you know, you

onboarded that platform 10 years ago.

It's no longer support supporting Apple Pay.

So if you want, we're happy to help you onboard.

And sometimes we help them to the level that we give them engineers.

Or budget to move to, depending on the size and and use case, but we give them

engineers or budget to help them move.

A lot of times as a, as a product person, we're trying to figure

out how do we manage, I hate to using the word planned obsolescence, but

how do we manage and how do we plan for moving people forward so we can

stop supporting older products and.

You know, we got really technical.

You got into the weeds and I appreciate that so much.

I love it.

But I wanna get a little bit tactical.

The one thing that I, I learned building solutions similar, Erwan,

when you look at retailers, uh.

Every vertical has its own unique need.

A restaurant operates different than a salon that operates different than a, A

hotel operates different than a Airbnb, operates different than an airline.

I mean, everything operates differently even though they're all doing the

same thing, which is taking payment.

Can you walk us through a specific merchant use case that.

Shows or explains how the unified approach of UR one changes their

day-to-day operations compared to what they were doing before

managing it with separate systems.

The status quo.

If you forget unified commerce, go to a normal retail retail store.

So if you add the retail store, you would sign up with some sort, some

kind of a software provider to provide you with your inventory management or

catalog system, whatever, small thing, accounting system, whatever small

things that you need to run your shop.

You would sign up with cash share provider to give you the cashier functionality

where you select what the consumer bought, run loyalty programs and in the

end get the sum to pay and you would sign up with A-A-P-O-S point of sale

terminal provider that would give you the terminal and you would then check

out the consumer here, then look at the amount, go and put it in the terminal,

give it to the customer and pay.

What we do is we basically, and you would have three different suppliers to manage.

You would've three different contracts to sign.

You would have to somehow link those systems.

So the daily summary from the POS terminal aligns with the cashier

system, which then aligns the inventory with the inventory system.

We give it all in one.

Yeah, and it just works out of the box.

So you sign one contract with us, you get the cashier system, you have a web

interface to manage your inventory, your staff, their shifts, the online bookings.

What have you, and you also get out of the cashier system.

You get one terminal when you, where you can tap, I don't know, two eggs, one bird,

and a piece of cheese, and you just hand it head the terminal to the customer.

They tap and you're done.

And your inventory is up to date, your set is up to date, your

data is there, and real time.

You don't have to wait until any daily terminal downloads or whatever

stuff that was going on in the past.

And what you can also do, if you also run a website, you can go to our back office.

And a few clicks.

You get an API key.

You can connect it to a website and you're done.

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things that I found really interesting is I was launching products in

Europe was it was really easy for me to streamline and consolidate.

The credit card side of the house.

But when I got to the localization of each one of the debit networks

within each one of the countries, it became a lot more difficult.

And when I say a lot more difficult, I mean nearly impossible.

So help me understand how you're making that process smoother for the merchant.

What we do is we take the complexity on us.

A lot of countries in Germany, in in Europe have a local scheme.

Yeah.

In Germany, it's called J Card.

In Belgium, it's called bank conduct.

Denmark has something called Danko.

Those local schemes, actually in most of those countries, they dominate

at least the retail market and sometimes also the online market.

What we do is we take the complexity on us, so the merchant gets one

terminal in one contract, and they can process both normal credit cards,

visa, MasterCards, as most people know them, and the local schemes.

It's called local schemes.

On the same terminal.

What we further simplify is the merchant doesn't need to sign a separate

contract with Visa and MasterCard and with the local scheme, they sign one

contract and it, that's just with us.

So we will be move parties and provide us from the merchant and we take care

of settlement of funds in one go.

So the merchant doesn't get three or four different settlement

streams on a daily basis from three or four different providers in

three or four different formats.

Stations get one file and one revenue stream from us.

I love the fact of the consolidation because I can tell you that

in my travels it's not an, especially outside of the us it's not uncommon to

see two, three, sometimes four different pieces of, of terminal software, of

terminal hardware on the counter, depending on what it is that they're

taking payment from and or through.

When you have merchants that are evaluating whether to.

Switch from their current patchwork of solutions.

What is the the framework for demonstrating the ROI and

minimizing their perceived risk of.

Putting all of their eggs into one basket.

Admittedly, I mean, I'm, I'm in touch with a lot of merchants,

but that's a bit more on the sales side, and I am familiar with,

you know, how do we approach it?

You basically ask them, Hey, what are your daily actions today?

And here they, they will tell you, Hey, I have the cashier system.

I have the terminal.

I have to push a few buttons on the terminal to close the daily

cycle and get this file by May or whatever, whatever it goes.

I have to go to the cashier system, I have to close the

cashier system or close the day.

I have to count the cash in the cashier system, and then the difference has

to match with the terminal, and then I have have to match it manually or

find out why things are not matching.

Then I have to update my inventory because if I, if tomorrow I run out of, I don't

know, plastic cups, I have to buy more.

Plastic cups are not good from the environment, but many

paper cups.

Paper cups,

yes.

Yeah, paper cups, so, and.

That, that's quite a bit of daily actions.

And then you ask, okay, and at the end of each month, I need to collect

files from these four or five different sources and send 'em to my account.

And they charge me a lot of money.

And our pitch is, okay, look, when you sign with us, there's one contract.

You, if you have a downtime or an issue with the terminology, call us.

You don't, you just have one person to, to talk with.

Normally there are no problems, but you know, sometimes there

are, you will get only one.

Daily file.

Your cashier system will tell you how much cash should be in the cashier

and how much the terminal transactions you've done and will reconcile.

We'll cancel the whole need for this reconciliation.

We will connect to your accounting software because we are hyper localized.

We are connected.

It's called ization.

We are connected to your local accounting software everywhere, so you don't have

to contact your accountant to just have it and all of this stuff just.

It just works, right?

And we should, the pitch is basically setting the hustle, making sure

everything is more consistent, no need for cleanups or finding out what happened.

I love the approach of basically walking them through

the, okay, how do you do this?

Okay, this is how you would do it in this one system.

How do you do this?

This is the one little thing you would change.

From what we did before in our system.

Kind of walking them through that process of, look, you've got all these different

ways you're doing it now, but it's just, here's the, the single direction,

here's the single solution over here.

I really like that approach 'cause it's very consultative and really

walking them through the process of making sure that they understand

that this is going to make their.

Quality of life a lot better, and I really like doing that.

One of the things that that I thought was really interesting is, is your

recent, recent partnerships with MasterCard and really looking at the

open banking and then also joining the European Payments Initiative.

That really, really shows a strategic thinking about how you're positioning

Oser in the evolving payments ecosystem.

These aren't really.

A lot of people think about these as being separated pieces.

Really blending all these together really sets a different

perspective on, on how you're going.

How, how do you evaluate and prioritize strategic partnerships, particularly when

balancing the need to stay focused on.

The merchant experience and that unified commerce mission.

The base assumption and the thing with check first

is, is this good for a merchant?

So if things come in, there's, and there's tons stuff that we do with

MasterCard, they're a really great partner to us because they are.

In the for forefront of car technology and payment technology in general.

And MasterCard understands that the product they sell is

essential into today's world.

And they're trying to also understand how do we make it even better.

The way that the card schemes work require a lot of partnerships

with players like us to integrate.

And when something is broader our table, we basically say, okay, is

this gonna be good for merchants?

And, and as a second step, is this gonna be good for the end consumer as well?

Because you can.

Do a lot of stuff is good for the merchant, but if the consumers don't

adopt it, then there's no point.

Can you dive in a little bit deeper to the importance of

being part and and taking an active participation in open banking and why?

It's important that people understand that you join the European Payments Initiative.

The product is basically around letting people check out

with the bank accounts rather than with the credit cards.

And the product is important because it lets people that don't have credit cards.

If you look in Germany, for example, a lot of people don't have credit

cards and when you wanna pay online, the local scheme is not always

available online to all merchants.

Most people have a bank account, so it's basically bridging that gap and

it's also providing a very secure payment method for the merchants.

Credit cards, as we mentioned, uh, about half an hour ago,

credit cards have charged back.

They have fraud issues.

Open banking once the transaction is done, both sides of safe.

So this is one problem that open banking is trying to solve.

Moreover, open banking lets consumers with bank accounts from other

countries also shop in Germany.

So it's basically becoming a second type of rails.

For the consumers, in addition to credit cards and expense, the service

that 10 consumers get, and then in turn expense how many consumers can

actually pay on the merchant's checkout.

So they talk about EPI as well.

I think it'd be super helpful for everybody to understand

the importance of EPI, because we're familiar ish in North America with

the using a bank to make a payment.

We, in the US it's called a CH and players like.

Plaid have made it a little bit easier to do in the us but Europe obviously

with the open banking has, has made it even easier to more standardized.

But help us understand how EPI plays into, into your strategy.

So EPI is, uh, a pan-European effort that is going

on and trying to create an ecosystem for the digital logo or the digital

wallet for the European consumers.

Essentially a replacing cash, which is still, still, still has very high

penetration in some European countries and mostly in Germany, but still more, I

think for core, more than 55% of payments are still done in cash, believe it or not.

So API is trying to push consumers into having a digital wallet where

they can pay both online and offline.

And to do that, you have to connect two parts.

You have to connect the the demand part.

Which is consumers wanting to pay with the API, but you can have, if you

have, you know, a wallet full of cash and there's no merchants to accept it,

then you cannot do anything with it.

So we also need to open up the supply part, which is merchants who are accepting

it now for merchants to accept the digital euro, the, or digital wallet payments.

They need, if they're online, they need an API connection.

If they're offline, the terminals need to be able to do that,

and that's what API is about.

And we are part of the first adopters of this.

We are very happy about it.

They're about to go live, I think, in Q4.

And yes, it's a, I have very, very high confidence that this

will be hugely adopted in Europe.

And yeah, we will see where it goes.

There's this rise of embedded finance companies and point of sale

companies and payments companies, kind of like merging all together.

The one that comes to mind for me is Shopify, how they started online.

Now they're in person.

They used to outsource their payments.

They brought their payments in-house.

Uh, there's, so they did inventory used to be outsourced.

Now they've brought that in-house.

They've done all these different things.

How do you see the competitive landscape evolving over the next couple years?

I think we, what you're gonna see is consolidation.

So we are gonna see, as we spoke before, the age where there were people

who sell terminals, people who sell software, people who sell e-commerce

access is installing going away.

You can see this happening in the US right?

So you have today to and Square and merchants are basically what the terminals

tightly coupled with the software.

And if you wanna change the terminal, you have to change the

software and that's, it's a harder.

Effort for the merchant or tougher switch for the merchant, but it's

also more sticky once you've got it.

This transition is happening now in Europe where everything is basically

combining together, and I think this is happening both on the product level

but also on the the market level.

So players are consolidating this well.

So we, we did M and a. Other players are doing NMA and M and a, and you can see.

Basically a consolidation going on in the market.

Well, I appreciate that brief look ahead because we are seeing

these massive shifts happen, and not only how the companies that offer

these solutions approach it, but also the way that the businesses that are

purchasing these softwares and, and other solutions are looking at it.

Not only that, but we're starting to see.

AI agents start to pop into different things, starting to handle

like really complex workflows.

Realtime payments have become almost a standard at this point.

Everybody's trying to figure out how do I do it better, faster,

cheaper, which is kind of funny.

And the line between, as you mentioned, like the line between payments and

business software has really, really.

Almost become invisible.

It, I used to say it blur, it's, there's a blurry line, but now the

line almost seems to have disappeared.

What I want you to do is I want you to look deep into my crystal ball here.

Just look deep inside of it and I want you to look out three, five years

and tell me where do you see unified commerce heading and particularly.

Inside the European markets,

it's newly for commerce starting to spend not just local schemes

within countries, but local schemes across countries, first and foremost.

So if you are a European player, if you're based in Germany, but you sell all

over Europe, you should be able to start accepting payments from cross border.

EPI will also help with that by enabling cross-border instant

payments and europeanly.

Sorry, I don't know if pan-European is even, even in English, but the

pan-European payments, no matter where you're from in Europe and slowly

phase out local schemes, payments in general, I think all over the world

are becoming a commodity, right?

So merchants are not so much looking for pay just payments anymore.

They're looking for something for more embedded, more comprehensive solutions.

Unified commerce will start spanning ai, especially for

the smaller merchants where.

They have shop systems that are holding their catalog there.

They know what's available for sale.

The shop system also has the website and can actually suggest products with

the progression of self checkouts.

We see them more and more.

There's no reason why a self checkout would also not offer products at the

list available in the store, and by whatever reasoning they, I think the

consumer might be interested either it's.

Inventory discounted, or the consumer just bought bread and would like,

and why don't they get some butter?

Everything will converge even more than today and become a more comprehensive one.

Stop.

So one shop stop.

One stop shop solution that that's the computer size.

How do you like, I mean, you, you, you've talked about like these, all

these things converging together and, and that suggestion of, Hey, you bought bread.

Maybe you want to buy butter.

You, you bought a pair of shoes, you might wanna be buy a pair of socks,

whatever, whatever it might be.

You bought shampoo, you might wanna buy a conditioner.

I'm just, I'm thinking like things that would go together, right.

Like, how do you think emerging technologies like the AI agents

and advanced automation will change how the, the small and

medium sized businesses manage?

Their overall operations, whether it be financial or or otherwise.

I think it would basically break traditional silos, right?

You used to have the payment side or the data side, or the operation silo, and

these will just be combined together.

So AI that you, the socks with the shoe.

Once you check out, AI will know, okay, I, first of all, socks

and shoes go great together.

Why don't they offer it more to consumers on a much larger scale?

Right?

So you and I, we know that socks go with shoes, but.

We don't know, maybe black socks will go better with white shoes or, you

know, there could be all kinds of combinations that we cannot think about.

Furthermore, data becomes available in real time, right?

In the past you would've to wait for the daily run and daily update

and some other things go on.

To get the picture of your business.

Now you can get it in real time and you will be able to get an even more

comprehensive picture in the future.

And I think it goes also into daily operations, right?

And AI will be a major driver of that.

So if AI sees, you know, inventories running down usually

on Tuesdays on this type of item.

Now this already works at the IKEA level, Zara level, the large enterprise level,

small businesses don't have it yet.

And AI enables scaling is down, but propagating it down to the small

and medium business layer who cannot afford an AI inventory management

software department to build it, but they will be able to get it from us

and from other players in the market.

The things that were typically reserved for the top 1000

retailers with these technologies.

Really allow that to filter down into the mid market and small

business side of the house.

Maybe not everything, but it starts to give them that a bit of advantage.

They're not as far behind, and I think that's, that's a super important

piece that, that you brought up there.

Now because we, we tend to run into lots of FinTech founders

and people that have great ideas.

If you were to run into somebody and they were to chase you down at a conference,

and they're like, NNN, N, I need to get, I need to get your opinion on

something, and they were to say, what piece of advice do you have for me?

And I only have time for one sentence, what would it be?

That's, yeah, I, to be fair, there's so many advices

I would like to give, but.

My learning from the past, especially if you're a founder, you wanna start

something new is get the right team.

I know it's maybe a bit.

Expected, but I think team is so important.

You only, especially as the founder, you don't get to make as many

mistakes as a large company, right?

So in a large company, if you hire, if you mishired one out of 100 people for the

same function, not good as a founder if, if it's your first employees, especially

the first employees, you are basically running out of runway on the wrong

people and getting the wrong results.

So that would be my number one advice.

It's really interesting when I get to hear.

Similar but slightly different advice from a number of different

executives in FinTech, especially those who understand the importance

of leading a great team like you do.

And I, I really appreciate you coming on today, sharing your

perspective and experiences around building one of Europe's leading

unified commerce platforms.

Thank you.

It was a pleasure.

The first thing that I want to kind of give everybody ideas, like

the takeaways that I have from today, really, there's three big ones, right?

Is one, the European Market's complexity really has creates opportunities for

localized solutions that the global players and folks from outside of the

region really, really struggle with.

Second is unified commerce.

As NIV said, isn't just about payments, it's really about creating an operating

system that helps merchants run their entire business much more efficiently.

And last but not least, successful platform consolidations, as we talked

about, requires so much more focus on an organizational change management

as well as technical layer, and also keeping in mind that the customer

is the one that you're serving.

Making it hard on them only makes it harder on you.

And for any FinTech leaders listening or thinking about similar transfer

transformation, you know, N'S approach to prioritizing the experience while

building for scale is by far one of my favorite playbooks to run.

I want to thank you for sticking with us on Leaders one-on-One.

These conversations they're designed to, to give you more than

just a surface level sound bites.

They're here to show you how real operators think, lead, and

make things happen in FinTech.

And if you got value from today's episode, make sure that you're

subscribed and don't miss the next one.

You can find us on YouTube, Spotify, apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen.

And if you wanna dive deeper into what we're tracking behind the scenes,

sign up@fintechconfidential.com and share with someone who's serious

about where fintech's going.

And as always.

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