Spreedly, Interview with CEO Justin Benson

Justin bensonFollowing the close of an additional $2.5m round led by Belgian vc e-Merge, we interviewed Justin Benson, CEO of Spreedly, the Durham, NC-based fintech company that is disrupting the payment market with its innovative solution for online merchants.

FinSMEs: Hi Justin, can you tell us a bit more about you? What’s your background?
Justin: Professionally speaking I’ve spent the majority of my career in sales and marketing and working with SaaS companies. I helped build an enterprise SaaS company to around $15 million in recurring revenue before being acquired. I’ve always focused in on technology companies; working with and selling to technology.
Personally I’m originally from Australia but have lived in the States for over 20 years including the SF Bay Area, Boston and now Durham NC.

FinSMEs: Let’s speak about Spreedly. Which problem do you want to solve?
Justin
: Today in payments merchants and marketplaces need to select a provider that meets their wide range of developer and business requirements. API’s tokenization, credit card processing rates, fraud, international/currency, marketplace support etc. We see them all making trade offs. We want to build just great software for payments. Our customers then have the flexibility to work with the payments providers that best solve their business requirements. No longer are they forced to compromise.

FinSMEs: A large market?
Justin
: Yes. The entire payments market.

FinSMEs: How does the solution work?
Justin
: It’s a modern payment gateway API. Customers integrate their mobile app/web service into Spreedly. We store and tokenize the card data. Our customers then select from more than 100 different financial partners and tell us where to securely send card data for processing. They can be a platform working with many merchants and use a lot of end points. Or they can be a merchant who is working with more than one provider.

FinSMEs: Where are you in terms of growth (employees, numbers, data about growth)?
Justin: Today we are 12 employees with around 300 platforms/customers. In the month of June, after 25 months, we saw more than $1 billion in TPV (total processing volume) go across our platform. We expect to cross $2 billion in annualized TPV in the month of October.

FinSMEs: You just raised an additional round of funding. How are you using the funds?
Justin
: From a prospect side we’re engaging with larger opportunities with every passing month. We’re also seeing an increase in interest from payment providers to work with us. So we’re hiring sales, marketing, support and account management to better attack and service those opportunities.
Also, as noted above, we’re investing in our infrastructure both in terms of hardware, software and developers to better scale the service. Performance and uptime is critical in payments and something we’re very focused on.

FinSMEs: Future plans?
Justin
: In payments there are merchants, platforms servicing those merchants and the payment providers themselves. We build a solid foothold in one of the three (platforms) Over the next 12 – 24 months we look to expand into the other 2 areas to compliment our current growth.

FinSMEs

30/10/2015

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