In fintech, everything happens 'here and now'

What were the drivers of such great growth in Fenige and where does the company see opportunities for further development? What is the value that fintechs provide in relation to traditional financial institutions? These and many other questions are answered by Marcin Chruściel, CEO of Fenige.

Our first conversation took place exactly two years ago. You were a company with many challenges, but also very ambitious plans for development. Please remind readers what Fenige is today and what it builds its business success on. Because we would undoubtedly like to talk about it today.

Marcin Chruściel: We are an acquirer, a licensed domestic payment institution, supervised by the Polish Financial Supervision Authority. A global technology partner for fintechs, merchants and other payment organizations.  

To put it simply, Fenige takes care of processing various types of online payments. We connect end-users – cardholders with mechanics, i.e. merchants, so that they can accept online payments on their platform.

Who are your solutions aimed at?

M.Ch. We operate in the European Union. We position ourselves in the market between merchants (shops, service companies) and customers who use such services. We operate in the B2B model. Our end user is the aforementioned store, service, wallet or place where customers can make payments.  

Years ago, Fenige started building its offer with card services, Visa and Mastercard provided all the market coverage – now we have expanded our payment services to include BLIK, Google and Apple Pay, as well as openbanking solutions. On the basis of these products, we have built 3 pillars of services, on which we rely today and which we are intensively developing.   

One of them is services related to the acceptance of payments by merchants.  

The second pillar is withdrawals to the card, the so-called payouts - where funds from e.g. wallet to card are transferred in less than 30 seconds, regardless of where in the world.  

The value that we provide to the merchant in the context of this service is "here and now". Nowadays, everyone wants to see the transferred amount literally "immediately" in the account, no one wants to wait, everything happens almost immediately. And this is the domain of the fintech world, "waiting" does not suit us. This is what sets us apart from traditional banking.

And the third pillar of  our business is money transfers. We started with transfers from card to card. It is used when we have two individual clients who want to transfer funds between them. What are their options? Today in Poland we have BLIK (we need to have an account with Blik to transfer funds), and this happens quite quickly, but it only works in Poland. Fenige, on the other hand, operates on the entire European market and has created such a pan-European service. We have combined several payment methods and now we can also send funds from BLIK to a card, and from a card to a bank account. This allows customers to send any amount in one of Fenige's 156 currencies at any time, and the recipient will receive the funds in 30 seconds, no matter where they are in the world.   

When WP2 appeared in the company's shareholding structure over 2 years ago, Fenige was teetering on the edge of profitability and had a lot of procedural challenges. Now you are the largest and most profitable company in our portfolio, with a multi-million turnover. What are you today and what brought you so close to your great success?

M.Ch.: I think that the best summary of our activities and effects will be shown by numbers. The three main measures of our business efficiency in the past year were: PLN 74 million in revenues, over PLN 12 million in generated profit – and all this with a transaction volume of USD 1 billion. So, we can say that we are a "transactional unicorn".  

It would not have been possible if we had not expanded and strengthened the team, which practically doubled in the previous year - we reached the level of employment of 110 people. I would like to take this opportunity to thank my very committed team. I can see that everything resonates in it – both commitment and organizational culture, in which people find themselves fantastically and we work well together.

If we are talking about business growth drivers, as I mentioned, our payout service fits very well into market needs. We were one of the first entities to offer such a service. Our other pillar products did not develop so dynamically at that time, but they also had growth.   

The area of our activity is a total red ocean. We are looking for the so-called blue lagoons there, for us this lagoon turned out to be payouts. We can see how competitiveness is increasing, how more and more entities are starting to offer the same service. We are aware that we will have to fight for the market, for competition and for prices. We will continue to look for more "blue lagoons" or more space in the areas where we already operate.

Another element of success is  the business pivot, we have changed our commitment to the money transfer service. The card-to-card transfer service is no longer as innovative as it was a few years ago. We rebuilt many processes, adapted the service to the market, and thanks to this, shifting the burden of business to payouts allowed us to generate nice business results.  

Proper market research was also an important factor in the growth.  As part of the new business strategy and where we are going - we remodeled pricing, pricing policy, marketing communication, rebuilt processes, and adapted products to the market.   

There has been a redefinition of internal processes - as a company, we come from startup life, i.e. an environment when a company is built with low costs and simple solutions. However, when a startup grows, enters the next phase of development, scales, it also has to enter a different mode of organization and management. Other tools and processes are then needed not only to arrange themselves in a much more extensive way, but also to meet extensive regulatory requirements and certifications (KNF, Visa, Mastercard). For all this, we need the professionalization of the company, which took place in 2023-2024.   

You operate in a highly regulated industry - as a licensed payment institution. To what extent do legislative requirements make it difficult to run a business, and to what extent do you think that regulation puts the market in order and gives security to your customers?

M.Ch.: High regulatory requirements are not only for us, but also for the entire market, for all entities similar to us, i.e. for our competitors as well. We can see today that not everyone is able to keep up with the pace of regulatory changes and adapt to them. For this reason, smaller entities are out of the question in this business race.   

To illustrate the pace of these changes, let's look at the numbers. In 2024, we implemented or changed 57 internal regulations in Fenige. This means more than one regulation per week - resulting from external regulations, EU regulations, recommendations, etc., including the extensive DORA (Digital Operational Resilience Act) regulation.  

From a regulatory point of view, we are treated by the Polish Financial Supervision Authority in a very similar way to banks. So the requirements for compliance, risk management and AML m.in are very high. On the one hand, it helps in our business, because the competition does not always keep up, on the other hand - due to the number of new regulations to be implemented - it is very demanding, but results in greater security. We have to adapt at the regulatory level (procedures), tools and people - and invest in all of this. And a.o. this was due to a large increase in employment in the last year at Fenige.

Currently, we have a 3-person team dedicated to managing this area, and many other employees are involved in it. We care very much about the development of this area, because we are aware of how much it "weighs" in our business, and it will weigh even more in the future.

In the last year, you have significantly increased the scale of your operations. How does this translate into the organization of the company – processes, employment, building organizational culture after such a big business leap. How did you put yourself back together?

M.Ch. We are an agile organization - we can adapt very quickly to the needs of the market in terms of products, business, organization - last year showed this very strongly. Looking at the first three months of this year, it can be said that this growth dynamics should also be maintained for the coming months.   

We have an organizational culture that is open to dialogue. People find themselves in it, feel agency and responsibility for their work. We choose the team in such a way that people get involved, know how to find themselves here, bring a lot of ideas and action. There is also room for mistakes, for drawing conclusions, for discussions.

In my opinion, the work culture generally depends on people - "whatever team you build, you will get so far with it". That is why when recruiting - we are looking for people who are committed, open, efficient and inventive.

What is the key to choosing people for the team?

M.Ch. The recruitment process looks quite traditional, but the derivative of our work culture is the culture of the organization we have created.   

Importantly, coming to our office is a kind of "home to home". We have managed to create a place, conditions and atmosphere in which you do not feel that you are only at work and that this is the culture in which you function. People function very well in such an environment.

In recruitment processes, a very important element is not only substantive fit, competence, but also fit with the team. What is sometimes a question mark for me in recruitment - these are candidates who have worked in corporations - who have so far worked in formalized, multi-level structures, who look at a fragment of reality, are imitative, perform tasks ordered by the boss, and do not look at it on multiple levels. In an open organization, where creativity and openness to dynamics are valued, such an attitude and habits may not work.

On the other hand, I really like and value diversity, which works very well at many levels of management. Quality and distinctiveness are built on diversity. By diversity I mean a few things here. Age of employees - we have people 50+ in the team, but also people the age of my daughters, i.e. slightly over 20 years of age. Thanks to this, different ways of thinking collide, and this is very creative.

Diversity at the level of organizational cultures of different nationalities is also very valuable, and we have a dozen or so of them in the team, which came out quite naturally in the recruitment processes. The multilingualism and multinationality present in Fenige, despite the fact that most things generally happen in the company in Poland, and the balanced employment of women and men have a very good impact on work.

What place do you see for yourselves on the market in the future? What do you see as an opportunity for development?

M.Ch.: We have ambitiously assumed a plan of annual average growth of 30 percent.  

The first one, which we are currently working on very intensively, is to adapt to large scaling. We must be ready in terms of tools to scale the business. That is why we are undergoing another type of professionalization - process automation, implementation of new and scaling tools, technologies, and the use of AI in these areas.   

The second area is products, because we believe that we will be constantly looking for blue lagoons, new growth drivers in the products we already have. Such an element for this and next year will certainly be the entry into cross border payments, a very dynamically developing area of cross-border transfers. We are entering the area of global payout opportunities for all payment tools we can imagine. For example, a customer will come to us and say that they would like to make withdrawals to cards in China – on China Union Pay, and we already have this service ready.  

Thanks to our agility, we are able to provide this service all over the world. This will make us reach a group of recipients - companies that need to handle this type of payment. Customers have a choice - either they can make transfers through banks, which costs 5-10 percent and takes a few days in cross-border transfers, or with the Fenige service in simple settlement mechanisms much faster and cheaper.

We are looking for new industries because we see that the payment market is highly innovative. We want to provide products that are tailored to the needs and business models of our customers. And every now and then new models are being created, which we, with our competence and business agility in providing services, when we customize them for the customer, are able to deliver and settle them. This is how the payout service as a payment, tailored to the market and end customers, appeared. We didn't have the idea for the product, but the need shaped it.

And the third element determining the growth of Fenige is the fact that we are a Polish fintech, operating fully on the European market. We currently serve customers from 14 countries. We operate at the border less level in the European Union.   

What we are most interested in scaling in the next year is to expand beyond the EU and the nearest markets. We are looking at them intensively and we see the greatest opportunities for development in the Swiss market, in the UK and perhaps in the Middle East. We study market demand and appear at industry conferences in these regions.

This should be correlated with our observations about the local market – when we see that it is developed, we will decide to go further. We want to maintain the appropriate dynamics of the market on which we operate and gradually jump to the next ones. We are constantly vigilant as to the right moment to enter them.

Interviewed by Ewa Pysiewicz, April 2025