Making payments simple, fast and customer-centred: Interview with Shane Happach, CEO of Mollie

By Gaia Lamperti

Payments has become one of the most attractive segments in FinTech, but it is a competitive and high-demanding space and not all companies live up to the challenge.

Startup Mollie, whose bread and butter is payments, likes to be really good at what they do and prefers to do “a really good job at a few things rather than an average job at a great number of things,” as CEO Shane Happach points out. And its recent $800 million-worth funding round proved it, turning the Dutch company into one of the fastest-growing players in the sector and now Europe’s third-biggest FinTech.

IBS Intelligence met with Shane Happach, who was recently appointed as Mollie’s CEO last April, to discuss the company’s strong growth, expansion plans and its attention to SMBs.

Last June, Mollie secured $800 million in a Series B round. What did that mean for the company and how are you planning to invest the funding?  

Obviously, it went really well, I wouldn’t have changed a thing. But it was also quite intense, as I was new in the job, so I had to make sure I was representing the business. We already had great investors, but with this new round, we have even more great ones. Everybody has been super helpful and opened a lot of doors for us and I think they’re really interested in our plan which is all about delivering long-term value. The business is already healthy, but there’s so much more that we can do, like adding new geographies and hiring. We’ve been hiring a ton of people in every area of the business and we are always on the lookout for great talent. 

And what are the new geographies Mollie is looking at? 

The next one will be the UK, we’ve got a team in London, so we are hoping to launch soon, we have a soft launch actually coming up in a few weeks. After the UK, we want to be in big and meaningful geographies where our product has a good market fit and where the market is underserved by incumbent competitors. There are some obvious candidates, the next two or three are pretty clear, but no news to report yet. 

Mollie is founded on the proposition of granting access to the smaller merchants in the market. How is the company achieving so?  

What helps small companies become big companies is obviously being able to focus on their business and not being distracted by other things. There’s an inherent cost to taking payments, and for us to keep the overall overhead as low and as simple as possible for a small customer, means that they can spend their money and time on other things. I think time is the most valuable piece, so we’re making the product simple, easy to get going, easy to self-serve. We also value the possibility to talk to a human being if you need to, because big companies are obviously able to hire people full-time who only do payments and know exactly what they’re doing, but in a small company is pretty rare that somebody will do that. 

And how does ensuring SMBs’ growth benefit the overall economy, especially in the aftermath of Covid? 

Small businesses power a lot of economies, certainly the Dutch economy, there are 2 million small businesses here. So, I think having a robust ability to compete prevents that there are only three businesses. I think that SMBs are the heart and soul of most economies, and they bring a lot of innovation too. But for companies to succeed, they need to be able to get set up and get going. 

Mollie describes itself as a pioneer in the payment industry, and I have read somewhere that you are also the most loved PSP in Europe. It is great that you can boast that, but how was the journey to get there? 

Well, the business has a lot of DNA. When Molly started, it was very unique because there were very few small companies that had an online-first approach. Now we are not the only ones anymore, but what we do, we do it really well and being loved, well I think that is customer service. For many businesses customer care is a cost they don’t want to bear, while in our case, it really sets us apart because we make companies feel like they’re important, even if they’re really small. We put human beings on a lot of tasks that could be automated and make ourselves available, we’re not hiding behind an invisible wall, that just makes it more personal and helps a lot.  

Mollie started with payments but now your service offering has expanded, and you have a quite big array of other financial services… 

Payments is a very attractive space, but in reality, it’s only 10% – 12% of what a business would spend its money on. So, there are lots of other categories that are adjacent but related where I think customer-centric approach, attention to product and design, and user simplicity can be applied. We see a lot of space in working capital for small businesses, in expense management, and in corporate card programs. All these things are required for a company to operate but we still see a lot of companies underserved in these areas. 

Let’s talk about the safety aspect of transactions, how is Mollie addressing that?   

One of the major regulation changes in Europe has been the effort to stamp out card fraud. Mollie actually does a lot of bank-based payments and those tend to be more secure. Most of fraud is concentrated in the in the card market, we’re mainly an alternative payment provider, so we do also have card traffic. We have a fraud service right for a small business that’s simple for companies to consume, so we help them with more of an out-of-the-box product that also allows them to make some customisation, changes and so on. In the payments industry all have a responsibility around transaction monitoring and European regulation is pretty strict on making sure that you know your customer data, and any kind of anti-money laundering protocols need to be really strong, so all of us are constantly upgrading in that area. 

Does Mollie have any plans for the future that we can discuss today?  

Oh yeah, we’ve got a lot of plans. What we’ve said publicly is that you can expect to see us in more geographies, and if we nail the financial services categories that we’re focusing on, there’s plenty more to do after that. We’re trying to be reasonable, methodical, and the approach is that we want to do a really good job at a few things rather than an average job at a great number of things. In that sense, there’s a little bit of wait and see, but we think it’s the right thing for us and for the customers.