The Story of Fipto: Building the Infrastructure Layer for Blockchain Payments

The Story of Fipto: Building the Infrastructure Layer for Blockchain Payments

In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Patrick Mollard, CEO and Co-Founder of Fipto, shared the origin story of a company attempting to solve one of fintech’s most persistent problems: why international B2B payments still feel like they’re running on 1990s technology. The answer led him to build a $16 million-funded blockchain payments platform that bridges traditional finance with emerging technology.

Three Observations That Sparked a Company

Patrick’s path to founding Fipto in 2022 didn’t start with blockchain enthusiasm. It started with frustration. Working in fintech on international B2B payments, he watched corporate clients struggle with the same problems repeatedly. “I saw that international payments were still not up to the level of expectations of service of the corporate clients that do international payments in terms of speed, transparency, cost, predictability,” Patrick explains.

The culprit was clear to him: legacy infrastructure. “That, to me, is linked to the technologies that are being used today, which is voice messaging broadly, and correspondent banking networks.” These weren’t minor inconveniences—they were structural problems creating friction in trillion-dollar payment flows.

His second observation revealed the paradox at Fipto’s core. New blockchain-based tools existed that could structurally solve the speed, transparency, and cost problems plaguing traditional payments. The technology worked. But corporates couldn’t actually use it. “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?” Patrick recalls. “And also, how do I get access to the corporate governance layer that I’m used to as a corporate. So no signature threshold and things like that.”

Blockchain offered superior payment rails, but lacked the enterprise-grade tooling that corporates required. The gap between technological capability and practical usability defined Fipto’s opportunity.

The third observation crystallized into vision: “We’re convinced that there will be more and more financial services based on blockchain technology in the future. So the mission of crypto today is to facilitate access to the new financial services to corporates.” Fipto wouldn’t just solve today’s payment problems—it would build the infrastructure layer for tomorrow’s blockchain-based financial services.

Building a Core Banking System from Scratch

What followed was a masterclass in patient company-building. Patrick is direct about the timeline: when asked how long it took to get first paying customers, he answers, “Actually quite a bit of time.” The reason? Complexity stacked on complexity.

“Building the platform required us to build a whole core banking system,” Patrick explains. This wasn’t about shipping an MVP and iterating. It was foundational infrastructure work. Today, Fipto is 30 people, with two-thirds focused on product and technology—a ratio that reflects the technical depth required.

Then came regulation. “We are a regulated industry, so we needed to obtain the licenses required to operate,” Patrick notes. They secured registration as a virtual asset service provider with the AMF in France in March 2023, followed by Luxembourg registration. Only after clearing these regulatory hurdles could they “launch a real first version of the platform and the solution early this year. And we got our first paying customers in Q one of this year.”

From founding in 2022 to first revenue in Q1 of the current year represents roughly two years—a timeline that might concern growth-stage investors but makes perfect sense for regulated fintech infrastructure. You can’t shortcut core banking systems or regulatory approval.

The API Strategy That Required a Platform

Fipto’s initial go-to-market thinking was architecturally pure: build an API-first solution. They developed three core APIs—one for managing wallets and IBAN accounts, one for currency conversion, and one for sending and receiving funds. The logic was sound: integrate into existing corporate systems where payment workflows already lived.

Reality intervened. “We realized that actually selling an API is very difficult,” Patrick admits. Selling APIs requires customers who already know they need your specific solution and have engineering resources ready to integrate. For an emerging category, that’s a narrow wedge.

The solution preserved the API vision while addressing the sales problem: build a platform as “the first client of our APIs.” This wasn’t just a demo or reference implementation—it was a revenue-generating product that proved integration value. “We are convinced that in the end, our ideal go to market strategy is to be able to integrate our APIs into third party systems and softwares that are actually used by corporate clients,” Patrick explains. “So for us, treasury management systems are great targets and we are actually working today with Kiriba to integrate our solutions in their solutions.”

The platform creates a flywheel: direct sales generate revenue and case studies, which make larger partnerships like Kyriba more feasible, which then enable the API distribution strategy they originally envisioned.

Finding Product-Market Fit in Unexpected Geographies

One of Patrick’s most candid reflections concerns geographic strategy. “From our experience, we didn’t focus enough on our ICPS and defining our ICPS quickly enough,” he admits. Being based in France created assumptions about European focus that actual market data contradicted.

“The corridors where blockchain payments make the most sense are corridors where the existing technology are maybe less relevant,” Patrick explains. “So it’s on countries in Latin America, in Africa, in Asia, and also between those geographies. So performing payments between Latin America and Asia.”

This realization reshaped their strategy. Blockchain’s value proposition is strongest where correspondent banking networks are weakest. The innovation matters most where the legacy infrastructure fails most often. For Fipto, that meant shifting focus from European corridors to emerging market payment flows—a geographic pivot that only became apparent through observing where usage naturally emerged.

Navigating Market Volatility by Building on Infrastructure

Building a blockchain company means contending with volatility—both actual market swings and perception challenges. Patrick’s approach reveals strategic sophistication. “For us, the volatility, when it’s a bear market, we say we’re not too impacted because we’re building on the technology behind it. So the blockchain and we at Fipto are totally agnostic of the tokens that our clients want to use to perform their payments.”

This token-agnostic positioning insulates them from speculation cycles while allowing them to benefit from institutional adoption. “In a bull market, I must be honest and also say that we are not that much impacted, although, and I will come back to that later. I think for us, what the critical point is adoption.” When institutional players like BlackRock invest heavily in ETFs, it creates favorable conditions—but Fipto’s core value proposition persists regardless.

The Future: Payments as Entry Point, Not Destination

Patrick’s three-to-five year vision extends far beyond payments. “We want to be at payments what Internet was at email. So really facilitating almost point to point payments,” he explains. But payments represent just the first use case for a broader platform play.

“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,” Patrick notes. “And again, we want to be the actor that facilitates access to those financial services for our corporate clients.”

This positions Fipto as infrastructure, not application. As blockchain-based financial services proliferate, Fipto aims to be the layer that makes them accessible to corporate clients—handling the complexity of wallets, compliance, governance, and integration that prevents corporates from adopting new technology directly.

It’s an ambitious vision predicated on two beliefs: that blockchain will enable novel financial services beyond payments, and that corporates will need an infrastructure layer to access them. Patrick is building that layer now, starting with the most obvious use case—payments—while positioning for a much larger opportunity as the technology matures.

For a company that took two years to reach first revenue, patience appears to be a core competency. Building regulated infrastructure requires it. So does building the foundation for financial services that don’t fully exist yet.