Orum’s Category Creation Journey: Building the Future of Money Movement

Most fintech startups try to build a better version of existing products. But in a recent Category Visionaries episode, Orum founder Stephany Kirkpatrick revealed how her team identified an opportunity to create an entirely new category in financial infrastructure – and how they’re educating the market about possibilities that didn’t exist before.

Finding the Root Problem

The journey began with a fundamental observation about human behavior. As a financial planner, Stephany noticed that “you could give great financial advice, but you were always going to have people who didn’t want to follow that advice because they were afraid that they couldn’t access their money in those just in case moments.”

This insight pointed to a deeper infrastructure problem. As Stephany explains, “You’re in San Francisco, I’m in New York right now. We could get a massage on demand in our houses in under an hour. If we want to get our money from point A to point B, we’re talking about five to seven days without a product like what Orum has.”

From Feature to Category

While instant payments might seem like just a feature, Orum saw it as the foundation for a new category of financial services. “If what we’re building at Orum had existed a decade ago, you would have never built Venmo,” Stephany notes, highlighting how infrastructure limitations shape product possibilities.

This vision led to a broader mission: “Our vision is to power a better financial system where everyone has the freedom to build to their potential. We think that we’re building the scaffolding required to rethink today’s existing constraints and empower real change in the way that financial system works.”

Building Market Understanding

Rather than just selling features, Orum focused on educating the market about new possibilities. “We spend a lot of time making sure that people know not just under the right kind of instant payout feature, but how to truly optimize it. So we’ll do marketing campaigns together, we’ll do webinars so that their customers can understand features,” Stephany explains.

This educational approach extends across diverse industries. As Stephany notes, they serve “the brokerage crypto, the creator economy is a huge space for us. We love earned wage access, factor in logistics, gambling, gig economy, insurer tech… because these are all places where time to money is a huge problem.”

The Barbell Strategy

To accelerate category creation, Orum developed what Stephany calls a “barbell strategy” – serving both enterprise and innovative startups: “We have a barbell strategy that says, hey, if we take on enough bigger, larger fi, we can also take on all the small brand new innovative things.”

This approach allows them to build credibility with enterprises while fostering innovation among startups, creating a virtuous cycle of category growth.

Looking to the Future

Orum’s category creation efforts extend beyond current capabilities. They’re asking deeper questions like “what role does identity and fraud and thus data around those two vectors play in ultimately optimizing both payments and financial services in the future?”

The goal isn’t just faster payments – it’s fundamentally transforming how financial services work. As Stephany puts it, “It’s a whole new frontier when you stop having to ask how or how fast to move money.”

For founders looking to create new categories, Orum’s journey offers a crucial lesson: sometimes the biggest opportunities come from solving foundational problems that everyone else takes for granted. As Stephany concludes, “We want to be always that first phone call that you make when you’re thinking about building a company and you know you’re going to do payouts or you’re going to do money movement because everything else that you’re building should go faster as a result of working with a partner like Orum.”