Bankera's Co-founder Vytautas Karalevičius Talks How to Choose A PSP Partner

Bankera​ is an international payment services business, offering solutions to individuals and companies, with a focus on digital businesses.

Fazzaco got a chance to interview Vytautas Karalevičius, Co-founder at Bankera, to discover more about what factors should be taken into consideration for a forex broker in choosing a PSP partner.

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Fazzaco: Hi Vytautas, thanks for joining Fazzaco. Could you tell us more about yourself and Bankera?

Vytautas: Bankera is a banking alternative for digital businesses. Bankera is offering SEPA and SWIFT dedicated IBANs and Visa debit cards for its clients as well as business loans, payment processing, card issuance, white label and virtual IBAN solutions. Currently, we have more than 170 team members working on our products.

Fazzaco: Could you please give us a brief introduction to your B2B and B2C services?

Vytautas: From our perspective we have two types of each B2B and B2C services. It is either is our client business (B2B) or retail customer (B2C) or is our business client using its account for B2B or for B2C/C2B payments.

For business clients we offer dedicated IBANs, Visa business cards, SEPA and SWIFT payments, multicurrency accounts, payment acquiring and business loans.

Also, we help our business clients to expand their offerings by enabling them to issue payment cards, virtual IBANs or even use our white label solution.

For retail clients, we also offer dedicated IBANs, physical and virtual Visa cards, SEPA and SWIFT payments. Also, Bankera mobile app for iOS and Android is already being tested by a selection of users and will be available to the public next quarter.

Fazzaco: What are your edge in 2B service?

Vytautas: We treat every client, especially business clients as VIP and assigned each of them a dedicated business relationship manager. This not only helps to get clients onboarded rapidly, but also to learn about their needs and issues and there possible to offer tailor-made solution or adjust our product to serve their needs even if that requires additional IT job.

Also, we are always willing to walk extra mile to better understand our client’s business module, so it helps us to onboard clients with innovative business models.

Fazzaco: Can you introduce your bug bounty program? What's the purpose of it?

Vytautas: Yes, we do have a bug bounty program. As we take security of our systems seriously, in addition to in-house IT security team, we incentivize external professionals to test our systems and spot any vulnerabilities before they are utilized by bad actors.

Fazzaco: What strength should a PSP have to succeed in the market?

Vytautas: First, it should never compromise on compliance as that is the key difference between PSPs being in the market for a decade or even longer. Secondly, being open-minded about new industries as it is an easy way to lose the market share, by de-risking and creating market opportunities for new emerging PSPs.

Fazzaco: What factors should be taken into consideration for a forex broker in choosing a PSP partner?

Vytautas: In addition to obvious things such as trustworthiness, substance etc, its approach to compliance matters a lot. As if PSP is not taking compliance seriously, it might be a sign that it is not planning to be in business for long. Also, it can be a red flag, that it is also not taking other issues such as security of IT and funds seriously enough. So, if you get your forex business B2C account opened in a day, you should rather worry as for a compliant business it should take couple of days to conduct a proper due diligence on your case.