Fipto’s Platform Play: Starting with Payments to Build the Infrastructure for Future Blockchain Financial Services

Fipto’s Platform Play: Starting with Payments to Build the Infrastructure for Future Blockchain Financial Services

In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Patrick Mollard, CEO and Co-Founder of Fipto, a blockchain payments platform that’s raised $16 million, revealed a vision that extends far beyond processing payments. His three-to-five year outlook positions Fipto not as a payments company but as the infrastructure layer for blockchain-based financial services that largely don’t exist yet. The question isn’t whether he’s right—it’s how he’s timing a bet on a future that’s still emerging.

Payments as Entry Point, Not Destination

Patrick frames Fipto’s current focus with clarity about what it represents strategically. “We want to start with payments because that’s probably the most obvious use case for blockchain today. We want to be at payments what Internet was at email. So really facilitating almost point to point payments.”

The analogy is instructive. Email wasn’t the internet—it was the first killer application that demonstrated the internet’s value to mainstream users. Once people understood email, they could grasp other internet-enabled services. Patrick sees payments playing the same role for blockchain adoption among corporate clients.

Payments offer several advantages as the wedge use case. First, the value proposition is immediately clear. International B2B payments via blockchain are faster, cheaper, and more transparent than correspondent banking networks. Corporate treasury professionals don’t need education about why speed and cost reduction matter—they live with those pain points daily.

Second, payments create frequent touchpoints. Companies that adopt blockchain for payments interact with the infrastructure regularly, building familiarity and trust. This repeated usage creates stickiness that makes expanding into additional services more natural.

Third, payments generate the revenue that funds expansion into less mature use cases. Patrick can’t build infrastructure for blockchain-based financial services that don’t generate customer demand yet. But he can build payment infrastructure that generates revenue today while positioning for tomorrow’s opportunities.

The Conviction Behind the Platform Vision

Patrick’s long-term vision rests on a specific belief about how blockchain technology will evolve. “We are convinced that there is a whole world of new financial services that will be used by corporate clients based on blockchain technology in the future. And again, we want to be the actor that facilitates access to those financial services for our corporate clients.”

This conviction shapes everything about how Fipto builds. They’re not optimizing solely for payments—they’re building infrastructure that can support multiple blockchain-based financial services. The wallet management, compliance controls, governance frameworks, and integration capabilities they develop for payments become reusable infrastructure for future services.

The architecture matters here. By building token-agnostic infrastructure rather than payment-specific solutions, Fipto creates optionality. When new blockchain-based financial services emerge—whether it’s decentralized lending, tokenized securities, or use cases not yet imagined—Fipto’s infrastructure can support corporate access without requiring fundamental rebuilding.

Why “Facilitates Access” Defines the Strategy

Patrick’s phrasing—”facilitates access”—reveals the specific layer where Fipto positions itself. They’re not building the blockchain-based financial services themselves. They’re building the infrastructure that lets corporate clients access those services.

This positioning addresses the persistent challenge Patrick identified in founding Fipto: blockchain tools exist that solve real problems, but corporate clients can’t actually use them. “How do I open a wallet? How do I make sure it’s done in a secure and safe manner? How do I make sure also that the flows I receive and send out are done in full compliance? And also, how do I get access to the corporate governance layer that I’m used to as a corporate.”

These infrastructure problems don’t disappear as new blockchain-based financial services emerge. Every new service creates the same corporate adoption challenges: wallet management, security, compliance, governance, integration with existing systems. By solving these problems once at the infrastructure layer, Fipto can enable corporate access to multiple services without building each one from scratch.

The Market Timing Risk and Mitigation

Building infrastructure for services that don’t fully exist yet carries obvious risk. What if blockchain-based financial services beyond payments don’t materialize at the scale Patrick anticipates? What if they emerge in forms that require different infrastructure than Fipto is building?

Patrick mitigates this risk through sequencing. He’s not betting the company on future services emerging. He’s building profitable payment infrastructure today while creating architectural optionality for tomorrow. If blockchain-based financial services proliferate as he expects, Fipto is positioned to facilitate corporate access. If they don’t materialize as quickly, Fipto still has a viable payments business.

This approach differs fundamentally from startups that build for markets that don’t exist yet. Patrick isn’t creating demand for blockchain-based financial services—he’s positioning to capture demand when it emerges while generating revenue from the use case that exists today.

The Integration Strategy That Enables Platform Ambitions

Patrick’s vision of becoming the corporate access layer requires more than good infrastructure—it requires embedding in corporate workflows. “What’s important, as I mentioned earlier, is to be able to integrate our solutions into third party systems and softwares,” Patrick explains, citing their work with Kyriba and focus on treasury management systems.

This integration strategy is essential to the platform vision. If Fipto remains a standalone application, they’re limited to services corporate clients access directly through the Fipto platform. But if they integrate into treasury management systems, ERPs, and other corporate software, they become infrastructure—the invisible layer that enables blockchain functionality wherever corporate clients work.

Integration positioning also creates defensibility. Once Fipto’s infrastructure is embedded in the systems corporate treasury teams use daily, switching costs increase substantially. A competitor would need to replicate not just the infrastructure capabilities but also the integration partnerships and embedded presence in corporate workflows.

What Success Looks Like Three to Five Years Out

Patrick’s vision positions Fipto as something specific: “We want to be the actor that facilitates access to those financial services for our corporate clients.” The metric of success isn’t becoming the largest blockchain payments processor—it’s becoming the default infrastructure layer that corporate clients use to access blockchain-based financial services broadly.

This would mean corporate clients open wallets through Fipto, manage compliance through Fipto, integrate blockchain functionality into their systems via Fipto APIs, and access new blockchain-based services as they emerge through Fipto infrastructure. Payments would represent one service among many, unified by Fipto’s role as the corporate access layer.

The addressable market Patrick cites reflects this broader vision: “That’s a 200 trillion revenue market.” He’s not describing the payment processing market—he’s describing the total corporate financial flows that could eventually involve blockchain technology in some form.

The Parallel to Cloud Infrastructure

Patrick’s strategy parallels how cloud infrastructure companies approached market development. AWS didn’t wait for all cloud-native applications to exist before building infrastructure. They started with the obvious use case—compute and storage for web applications—while building infrastructure that could support services that didn’t exist yet.

As new use cases emerged—machine learning, IoT, blockchain services, and countless others—AWS’s infrastructure could support them because they built general-purpose infrastructure rather than application-specific solutions. Companies that built on AWS early for simple use cases found expanding to new services frictionless because they were already using the infrastructure.

Fipto is attempting the same pattern for blockchain financial services. Start with the obvious use case that generates revenue today. Build infrastructure that’s general-purpose enough to support future services. Position as the corporate access layer so that when new services emerge, existing customers can adopt them without leaving the Fipto infrastructure.

The Execution Challenge of Building for Tomorrow While Selling Today

Patrick’s vision creates a specific execution challenge: building infrastructure with future optionality while remaining focused on today’s payment use case. Too much focus on future services risks diluting the current product. Too little investment in architectural flexibility risks getting trapped in a single use case.

The team composition Patrick describes—two-thirds product and tech in a 30-person company—reflects this challenge. Building general-purpose blockchain infrastructure for corporate clients requires sustained technical investment. You can’t bolt on future capabilities easily if the core architecture is payment-specific.

But Patrick also can’t market to corporate clients based on services that don’t exist yet. The sales motion focuses on payments—the clear, immediate value proposition. The platform vision informs architectural decisions and partnership strategy, but it doesn’t dominate customer conversations until those future services actually materialize.

Why This Timing Might Be Right

Patrick founded Fipto in 2022, timing that aligns with several converging factors. Stablecoins are gaining mainstream traction, providing corporate-friendly tokens for blockchain payments. Regulatory clarity is emerging across jurisdictions, reducing adoption barriers. Institutional players are investing heavily in blockchain infrastructure, legitimizing the technology for enterprise buyers.

These factors create the foundation for blockchain payments to achieve meaningful corporate adoption—the wedge use case that generates revenue today. But they also suggest that additional blockchain-based financial services will emerge over the next several years as the technology matures and corporate comfort increases.

Patrick isn’t trying to create this future—he’s positioning to facilitate corporate access when it arrives. That’s the difference between visionary and premature. The infrastructure work happens now. The platform payoff happens as the market matures. And payments provide the revenue bridge between today and tomorrow.