Global Fintech Interview with Ralph Dangelmaier, CEO & Board Member at BlueSnap

Please tell us about your fintech journey so far. 

I started in fintech about 30 years ago. I began my career in banking and then went to an early stage fintech company that helped to create regulatory reporting for banks in the ’90s – at the time, that was a pretty big deal, and then we were able to capitalize on the advent of the Internet at a pretty early stage. Following this, I worked at a company called P&H where we built Internet banking products for banks to sell to businesses. We were the first business banking product online, and it was successfully sold to ACI where we helped the company grow dramatically. I was there until about 2013.

It was at that point when I started to see the eCommerce market take off. I met with companies like PayPal, Braintree, Stripe and Adyen because I thought they were doing something really cool. It was also at that point when a group of investors had bought a company in Israel, and I was impressed by their core concept and infrastructure. I recognized that if we could take what they have and bring it to the rest of mainstream North America and Europe, we’d have a real viable company and product to sell to merchants – and that became BlueSnap’s origin story.

Given the changes in demands and changing needs of users from fintech, how has the BlueSnap product evolved over the years?

Over the last couple of years, businesses have been caught reacting and adapting to several unprecedented circumstances, including the COVID-19 pandemic and an inflationary environment.

During the pandemic, BlueSnap was focused on automated account receivable solutions to help businesses navigate challenges of the evolving health crisis and to improve cash flow as well as predictable income. In the current landscape, we are now seeing a paradigm shift for payments, as innovations from this sector are being used to help companies diversify into new industries to edge past the competition. This is especially important now given recessionary pressures, as businesses are looking for unique ways to cut costs while also driving revenue generation.

As a result, BlueSnap has focused on building out our embedded payments-as-a-service product suite.

Embedded finance is an umbrella term for the integration of financial services into non-financial businesses or platforms, which is trending upwards right now. This essentially allows businesses to offer financial services to consumers and other businesses, eliminating the need for end users to engage with a third-party. Within this equation, and where BlueSnap can help, is embedded payments, and that’s where the biggest opportunity is today. Analysts are forecasting that the total addressable market for embedded finance will be $800 billion by 2030, and $500 billion of that will be embedded payments. Our embedded payments solutions allow software platforms to embed payment functionality directly within their platforms so that clients do not need to integrate with another service to accept payments.

BlueSnap’s solution gives software platforms full control over the experience, including onboarding clients as merchants, accepting payments, executing payouts and more.

Also Read: Global Fintech Interview with Jairo Riveros, Managing Director of the Americas at Paysend

Can you talk about some of the most innovative secure authentication solutions today that according to you are set to create new benchmarks for the fintech segment?

I think the European Union’s Second Payment Services Directive (PSD2) is setting the benchmark for security in fintech. There is already a huge adoption for PSD2 and SCA (Strong Customer Authentication) in the EU and UK. We are seeing PSD2 introduce stricter security measures to protect online transactions. These additional authentication factors to verify a user’s identity can be anything from a password, second authentication on an additional device or a biometric like a fingerprint.

How do you foresee the secure payments and secure authentication segment shaping up in 2023? What will be some of the key features that would emerge in the fintech space?

Authentication factors are becoming increasingly table stakes in the world of financial technology and securing payments. The fintech industry is constantly improving its ability to work collectively surrounding topics such as security, fraud, risk, compliance and more, especially as more payment providers like PayPal and Zelle come into the limelight for instances surrounding security breaches.

How is BlueSnap leveraging AI in order to solve the complexities of payment?

BlueSnap has been using business intelligence (BI) and artificial intelligence (AI) for quite some time now. BI and AI together are key to optimizing our intelligent payment routing to determine the best path to route a transaction for approval and to maximize savings on cross-border transactions.  It is also key for the tools integrated in our global payment orchestration platform, such as Kount.

Also Read: Global Fintech Interview with Manish Bhai, Founder and CEO at UNO Digital Bank

What are some of the biggest challenges you face when marketing your new idea and trying to better the overall customer experience for them?

At times, there is an educational component to overcome when we look to market new ideas and improve experiences for our customers. For example, BlueSnap is empowering businesses to harness the benefits of global payment orchestration.

Payment orchestration capabilities can enable businesses to customize on a global scale, adjust their services by region, product, and sales channel, increase authorization rates as well as eliminate unnecessary fees. However, there are varying definitions of payment orchestration as more providers begin to lean into this trend, which could create confusion for businesses. This is just one example of how emerging payment trends and technology require us to make our offerings as clear and informative as possible so that customers can understand what they truly need and how BlueSnap can work specifically to support.

We’d love to know what are your predictions for the tech domain for 2030.

I think over the next 10 years, we are going to see a huge increase in people buying from platforms and the use of eWallets. As the world becomes more digital, we’ll see a need for more enhanced security follow directly behind.

Also Read: Global Fintech Interview with Kevin Doerr, Chief Product Officer at DailyPay

Tell us about some of the top FinTech/Other B2B events that you’ll be participating in (as a speaker or guest) in 2023. 

I will be attending the ETA Senior Leaders Conference. Additionally, BlueSnap will be participating in upcoming Money 20/20 events both in the E.U. and U.S.

Thank you, Ralph! That was fun and we hope to see you back on globalfintechseries.com soon.

[To share your insights with us, please write to sghosh@martechseries.com]