Finance and payments are not things I’ve ever formally studied or consciously built toward. So when I started going deep on a cross-border payments infrastructure company before a meeting, I expected to hit a wall pretty quickly.
Instead I found four distinct stories from my own journey where I had been solving payments problems without ever calling them that.
At Revv Growth
We were receiving money from clients in Spain, Dubai, and the US. PayPal was the default, and it technically worked, but the fees were quietly brutal. When the money landed in our ICICI account as USD, the bank took another cut on conversion. I started calling around to alternatives, spoke to several European payment providers, and discovered that most of them couldn’t even do click-and-pay. Bank transfers took two days to clear, and the European contacts I was speaking to were almost apologetic about it. One of them said that India’s payments infrastructure feels like a revolution from where they sit. I ended up finding Xflow through a LinkedIn post and a friend referral, integrated it, and we recovered around 15 percent in charges.
At Tiny Studio
I drove GTM for Capito, an automated collections product. The inbound flow worked well, but every time money came in, the payout to the other side was still manual, slow, and fragmented. We had solved the collection problem but the infrastructure underneath it was still broken, and that friction was sitting right at the seam where the product ended and operations began.
At Writer Corporation
In my first BD role, I got a cash logistics company signed with Airtel Payments Bank for their tier 2 and tier 3 expansion across India, and eventually became their national SPOC for the partnership. At the time I thought of it as a distribution deal. Looking back, it was last-mile payments infrastructure.
At Fashinza
I was the person manually coordinating vendor payouts across geographies over email, following up with finance teams, holding and releasing payments based on order milestones. It felt like just part of the job. It was actually me functioning as a human workaround for the absence of proper payment infrastructure.
The insight from going through all of this is not that I am a payments person. It is that operational people absorb payment friction all the time without naming it. The broken system does not announce itself as broken when you are inside it. You just build workarounds and move on.
The best infrastructure gets built by people who spent years doing manually what the product eventually automates. That is the origin story behind most fintech companies worth paying attention to.
