Coriunder – The PSP as a Startup approach

With a background in law, finance and coding, Eliad Saporta wants to offer entrepreneurs the right tools to start, develop and complete their vision. This is why the team joined together to found Coriunder, the backend-as-a-service that enables PSPs and startups to focus on adding value to their core services. 

In this interview, we discuss the challenges that PSPs/Startups face in the early years and how can Coriunder’s services help them. We also have two success cases and we touch upon new regulations like PSD2 and GDPR. 

Could you elaborate a bit more on your team’s background? What is their expertise and what was the idea that joined the Coriunder team together?

With a wide background in the payments and telecommunication industries, we teamed-up to help startups with the task of launching their new venture. 

By serving only as consultants leveraging from our past experience, we were able to spec the product rather than build it. We quickly came to the realization that it wasn’t enough for us and we wanted to help the startups reach the MVP stage.

One of the core strategies of Coriunder is to supply the systems and tools necessary to assist startups and payment service providers (PSPs) to get to the market as quickly as possible. Given our wide and extensive experience with operations and support teams, we know the payments industry well.  

New PSP entrants often face similar challenges as established PSPs when it comes to innovation and focus. Unfortunately, many PSPs spend more time and money than anticipated in developing the daily onboarding and ongoing management tools, and often fail to create any “special sauce” to offer customers before venture capital funds run dry, forcing the entity to compromise where it matters most. 

For a PSP in today’s market, it is no longer just about lowering the cost of processing.

For a PSP in today’s market, it is no longer just about lowering the cost of processing. Providing Value Added Services (“VAS”) is instrumental so customers can drive new growth. Whether the demand is for client facing interfaces or easy to use API for developers, we supply the value-added services to allow clients to build their ideas. 

Our solution is built upon our payment gateway, which serves as the catalyst to offer our value-added services related to customers, business owners, resellers, affiliates and others. Our platform is built on the latest technology and is certified PCI Level 1 compliant.  

What are the main problems startups face in the early years and how do you help these companies overcome them?

One of the main challenges facing both PSP and startups is the need to reach the working demo stage as fast as possible. Some offerings allow a PSP to build sales demos, but at the end of the day, these partial solutions will prove to be problematic when attempting to implement them due to lack of detail functionality. This means that the PSP/Startup will have to start the process all over again and push the launch date further away. 

We offer our customers a development-staging environment with all of our API available for free

We offer our customers a development-staging environment with all of our API available for free, giving the PSP/Startup the ability to build an app or service without the cost required to develop the backend. With our cloud based back end, we provide a free plan and SDK for any startup to build their front-end product to speed up the integration process. We have a plan for each stage of a startup’s life cycle to ensure success.   

This is the reason why we look at the PSP as a Startup and know how to tailor our solutions to all types of companies.

How do you help startups scale-up and can you share a success support story with our readers?

I will share two success stories where our backend solution was critical in assisting our clients to launch their services quickly: (1) a credit scoring startup and (2) a technology PSP provider.  

ConfirmU is a social credit scoring startup aimed to bridge the gap for the unbanked communities. Their solution, along with a chatbot interview, can analyze the user’s social profiles.  The end result is a credit score of the borrower’s likelihood to repay the loan. 

With the use of our back end, the company is able to focus on the psycholinguistic analysis and on building the customer onboarding. Data collection is done by using our API layers. ConfirmU launched a working version within 2 months on a very limited budget and are now expending into the global market.

The other success story, PayFlock, is a technology PSP with a wide background in the payments industry. The company decided to build its offering by connecting its proprietary front-end solution with our back end, leveraging our integration with TSYS. The entity boarded its first merchant within a two-month window. Now, they offer online shops/mobile wallet/ecommerce integrations and much more.

What other segments and industries do you serve?

Our company serves mainly the ecommerce, fintech, IOT and insurance markets. We find that these startups have significant system needs but can also effectively leverage the benefits of using our free APIs.

How GDPR / PSD2-ready is the Coriunder service and what advice do you have for companies in the lead-up to these regulations?

We see a great potential with both PSD2 and GDPR. PSD2 allows new market players to leverage the use of our API to build a great offering. We currently are adding a service layer into our solution to assist our clients with the process of registering as a service provider. 

GDPR is a whole different story. We embraced GDPR and are working hard to finish the implementation of our GDPR-as-service tools. Since we are providing our customer with an onboarding tool, we can collect and store the data on behalf of our clients. Our clients can leverage these tools when the need arises.

About Eliad Saporta 

Eliad Saporta is the Managing Director at Coriunder. With a background in law and an MBA in finance, Eliad has always been drawn to product management and design. He worked as a consultant for various companies, assisting them in their efforts to build products in the payments ecosystem. However, he now wants to help entrepreneurs not only by assisting them, but also by offering the right tools and services for building their vision. 

Coriunder is a backend-as-a-service platform for fintech and ecommerce companies. Whatever your services might be, Coriunder provides you with reach management tools to monetize your solution and enables you to expand globally with our Payment optimization tools and a single point of integration for all of your services.