Interview with Justin Benson (CEO, Spreedly)
What’s your company’s USP and what solutions do you offer?
Fast-growing, innovative commerce services win by providing a great customer experience. A key part of that is to provide a compelling, frictionless, payments experience.
These innovators grow via new markets, offers, partners, acquisitions, and new business models. However, this innovation and growth strain their traditional, siloed payments infrastructure — compromising customer experience. These innovators can’t wait for their payment infrastructure to catch up. Their innovation demands more flexibility than a single payment provider or endpoint can provide. That’s where Spreedly comes in.
We give innovators flexibility via a powerful payments infrastructure. Businesses can secure card data in our PCI compliant vault, and use tokenised card data to transact with hundreds of payment gateways and endpoints around the world. All through a single API. These innovative, commerce services are providing a really simple, repeatable front-end experience to their users, and using Spreedly to hide and manage all the complex routing that’s going on behind the scenes.
We offer the foundation for businesses to build innovations that drive revenue — and deliver compelling customer experiences. And we’re growing incredibly fast too — processing over $10 billion in transactions per year.
What are the major challenges for your business?
First and foremost is awareness. We’re providing a horizontal solution offering in a world of vertically integrated payment stacks. Making fast growing commerce companies aware that we’re out there, is a huge part of our challenge. We’ve actually had customers refuse to do a case study for us as “we don’t want our competitors finding out you exist!”
The second major challenge is keeping up with our customers. If you target fast moving commerce companies, they expect you to understand their DNA and expect you can move quickly with them. There are incredible revenue opportunities for these companies – but their needs for flexibility in their payments infrastructure hinders their growth.
That business challenge is the opportunity for Spreedly – to provide a powerful payments infrastructure that meets the needs of these innovators. We’re proud that SeatGeek, Pushpay, Cabify and hundreds of other fast-growth companies depend on Spreedly to help drive online commerce.
How does your business extend financial inclusion and social impact?
A core mission of Spreedly is to make our world-class payments infrastructure accessible to innovators around the globe. We support over 200 payments gateways and endpoints in over 100 countries and have customers on every continent. These customers are building incredibly powerful solutions for diverse industries – from events and festivals to retail and charitable giving.
By giving them the flexibility to build great payments experiences that support their models, we’re helping to multiply the impact of innovators around the world.
