The Story of Rapyd: Building the AWS of Global Financial Infrastructure

The Story of Rapyd: Building the AWS of Global Financial Infrastructure

Sometimes the best companies start with the wrong idea. In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Arik Shtilman shared how Rapyd’s journey began with a failed attempt to compete with PayPal in the consumer wallet space.

Fresh off a successful exit and armed with capital, Arik and his co-founders launched Cash Dash in 2015, aiming to help travelers avoid FX fees. But they quickly hit a wall. “We stumbled into every single shit show that exists on planet Earth when you’re trying to build financial services product,” Arik recalls. “We had no knowledge in the space, like nothing. We didn’t know anything about it. Regulation, compliance, sanction screening, KYC, KYB, all this stuff that you need to deal with.”

By 2017, the situation was dire. With runway dwindling, Arik called a company meeting. “I already announced to the employees that I’m shutting it down,” he remembers. He had one final investor meeting scheduled—a last-ditch effort in a coffee shop with a family office. Looking for a way to explain his vision, Arik pointed to a currency exchange booth across the street: “I told him, you see this? I want to take them out of business.” The investor immediately committed $5 million.

This lifeline enabled a crucial pivot. While building Cash Dash, the team had created substantial financial infrastructure for their own use. Looking at the fragmented fintech landscape, they had an epiphany. “How can it be that there are no infrastructure players in financial services?” Arik wondered. “Every company is around three components: an acquirer, an issuer, a KYC specialist, an FX specialist. Like, what the hell is this mess?”

The comparison to cloud computing was obvious—before AWS, companies had to build their own data centers. Why were fintech companies still cobbling together basic infrastructure? This insight led to rebranding as Rapyd and creating the “fintech-as-a-service” category.

Today, Rapyd operates in 106 countries, maintains about 100 bank accounts, and serves 215,000 clients from small businesses to tech giants like Google and Uber. They process approximately $75 billion annually through their infrastructure.

But Arik sees this as just the beginning. “No, it’s not massive at all. It’s very small comparing to where it needs to be,” he insists. Drawing parallels to cloud computing’s evolution, he notes: “Fintech as a service in 2023 is at the same stage that cloud computing was in 2010. Think about what happened for AWS, Google Compute Cloud and Azure over this ten year time frame. This is where we will be. We will be a business that is worth 60, 70, 80, 100 billion dollars.”

What drives this potential? The constantly expanding market. “What people don’t understand about fintech infrastructure is that the total addressable market is increasing every year because the GDP is increasing, which means payments, by definition, are increasing,” Arik explains. “So there’s like this endless time that you need to support, which is the beauty of this industry.”

From near-shutdown to category creator, Rapyd’s story demonstrates how the biggest opportunities often emerge from solving your own problems—and having the vision to recognize when that solution might be worth more than your original idea.