COMPANY

Name: PayCore.io

Legal Name: PayCore.io Limited

Location: London, UK

Founded: November 2018

Founder(s): Denys Kyrychenko, Denys Melnykov, and Dmytro Dzubenko

Website: paycore.io 

Social Media Following: 1.3k Likes on Facebook,117 Followers on LinkedIn, 20 Followers on Twitter

INDUSTRY – Global Fintech Market

Size: $127.66B in 2018 (Source: Business Research Company)

Projections: $309.98B by 2022 (CAGR of 24.8%) (Source: Business Research Company)

The PayCore.io story

PayCore.io helps e-commerce businesses manage their digital payment channels effectively and navigate the plethora of providers and methods. Digital payment technology enabled the rise of e-commerce, and this synergy has given rise to a vast ecosystem of solutions and providers. PayCore.io helps businesses find the right combination of global solutions and integrations to optimize payments for safety and profitability.

I interviewed Denys Melnykov, the Chief Operating Officer at PayCore.io, to find out more about the startup’s offerings and its journey so far.

Sharang: How would you describe PayCore.io as a company? 

Denys: PayCore.io is a cloud-based payment management tool with three distinct layers of functionalities which together simplify payment processing. The layers are the technical infrastructure, the payments management platform, and the plug-and-play software solutions. 

The infrastructure layer of our tool helps merchants simplify their payment processes by leveraging secure and stable connections with the APIs of PSPs across the globe. The second layer is the platform, which centralizes online payment processing and data management, and works as an optimization tool for both operational and transactional costs.

Our off-the-shelf SaaS applications provide the third layer with higher-level functionalities such as analytics, multi-currency pricing, merchant services, etc. Our SaaS solutions are mostly used by institutional players such as fintech companies and Payment Service Providers (PSPs) to build their own digital payment platforms. Alternatively, our SaaS solutions also help these players add special integrations to scale their existing infrastructure and drive a higher volume and frequency of transactions.

Sharang: What is PayCore.io’s USP?

Denys: Most small and medium businesses (SMBs) lack the expertise or the ability to invest in advanced payment technologies, which leads to inefficient business processes and unsatisfactory customer experiences. PayCore.io’s payments hub works as a single point of integration for over 500 payment providers and 200 payment methods. Our tools help businesses and institutional players save precious time and dollars in the software development process.

Our integrated checkout platform enables users to build customizable checkout pages that support multiple billing models, product types, and storefronts. The checkout pages can be combined with our smart payment routing engine that automates the identification of all available payment methods and payment routes in every currency.

Businesses can integrate the routing engine into their existing infrastructure or use it along with the checkout platform. The platform has an easy-to-use dashboard designed for non-IT staff to control and modify transaction flows, or add or suspend merchant accounts. Our clients can also dynamically modify payment options presented to the buyers based on location, transaction history, risk, and other factors, to ensure the best possible customer experience.

In addition to facilitating smarter payment processing flows, our solutions also allow the top management in businesses and enterprises to gain useful business insights from the data. The platform aggregates the transactional data on a central, unified interface and allows users to compare the performance of multiple PSPs and payment methods with real-time reports. The management can then use this data to evaluate the various payment options and decide which ones to optimize for better performance. 

PayCore.io’s founding team comprises Denys Kyrychenko, Denys Melnykov, and Dmytro Dzubenko. 

Denys Kyrychenko, the CEO of PayCore.io, is a software developer and serial entrepreneur with over two decades of experience in the technology and fintech space. He has previously co-founded and built two startups – Interkassa and PayMaxi, both of which were incorporated in Ukraine. At PayCore.io, Kyrychenko is responsible for overseeing key functions across all teams, in addition to heading the core technology team. 

Denys Melnykov is the Chief Operating Officer at PayCore.io. He has nearly a decade’s experience in executive leadership, having overseen areas such as production, strategic planning, operations, and finance within both domestic and international business environments. He is responsible for the sales and marketing functions in the company and also leads its strategic expansion plans. 

Dmytro Dzubenko is the Chief Technology Officer at PayCore.io. A software engineer and programmer with more than half a decade of experience, Dymytro leads the technology and product development functions in the company. 

Sharang: What was the idea behind PayCore.io? Was there any specific event or trigger for you or the team that led to the creation of the startup? Take us through your story.

Denys: The idea for PayCore.io was the result of the collective experiences of all the three founders. At various points in our careers, we were faced with the challenge of building or selling technology products to customers who did not understand them or were not entirely sure what exactly their business needed. With each of us having spent at least a decade in the fintech and IT industries, we noticed that a majority of businesses operating online were focusing largely on customer-facing, front-end features, while using unsophisticated tools for the more critical back-end processes. So you could say the trigger was the inefficiency of processes within the digital business ecosystem.

This led us to the idea for a suite of fintech solutions that would help players across the global digital business landscape centralize and standardize online payment processing. Additionally, we realized that many businesses also needed specialized systems to improve the visibility of their processes, mitigate risk, and ensure access to data in order to improve overall business efficiency.

Thus, PayCore.io was created with a mission to help businesses of all sizes, and operating across various channels, multiply their payment capabilities and reach by leveraging IT and fintech expertise, minus the heavy investments towards infrastructure development. 

Sharang: How has PayCore.io’s journey been thus far?

Denys: We began working on developing the initial product in Ukraine and spent around 2 years as a startup in stealth mode. In 2018, we moved our corporate headquarters to London from Kyiv. Soon after, we released the first beta version of PayCore.io for testing during Web Summit 2018 held in Lisbon, Portugal.

Soon after, we launched our white-label solution for banks and payment service providers in March 2019. This was followed by the launch of our checkout solutions in April 2019 and a payment card gateway solution for online merchants, in June 2019. 

PayCore.io currently serves around two dozen customers which includes SMBs and enterprises, and we have achieved profitability within just over a year of beginning operations. We began 2019 with around 100k transactions being processed through our platform and reached almost 5 million transactions per month by the end of the year. We also established 70 new integrations with payment providers and acquirers all around the world and brought 5 new payment service providers on to our infrastructure.

Sharang: What are your plans for 2020?

Denys: We’ve been working for quite some time now to enhance our offerings – a version 2.0 of PayCore.io with new products and features, and even a new website. In 2020, we also plan to enter new markets and expand our footprint to specific regions including the Benelux, the Scandinavian countries, and German-speaking countries in the upcoming months. 

We are set to launch our product sales in North America starting from Toronto in January and our aim is to enter the Asian market by the end of 2020. Meanwhile, we have also grown our team from 16 to 25 members over the past year, and are focusing on enhancing our customer and technical support to prepare for our global expansion. We expect to achieve 300+ successful integrations by next year and establish PayCore.io as one of the most connected fintech solution providers globally. 

Sharang: Do you anticipate Brexit to affect your plans for the future? 

Denys: In my personal opinion, yes, it is certainly one of the biggest challenges because Brexit will require the UK to reevaluate a lot of different aspects of trade and commerce with other European countries. However, on our part, we have ensured that all our solutions are compliant with the European Union’s financial and fintech regulations, including the revised Payment Services Directive (PSD2). To this end, we have introduced a set of new APIs that are PSD2-compliant to make sure our existing partners across Europe face no hiccups once Brexit comes into effect.

According to Denys, PayCore.io is also planning to expand into Asia and become one of the world’s most integrated payments platform in 2020. This would come after the company has gained substantial momentum in 2019, being recognized as one of the most loved startups at the Web Summit 2019 – one year after they released their platform at the Summit in 2018.