Creating a Company to Meet the Digital Payments Challenge
Introduction
The digital tsunami is transforming society and business as new technologies collapse barriers not only between industries but within industries, eliminating middlemen, putting companies in direct contact with their customers, and creating an entirely new business ecosystem.
Black Dragon Capital℠ works hard to identify and support the companies that are powering the digital transformation, companies that will create new categories of service that the tsunami makes possible.
The firm invests in and guides companies that promise to solve industry pain points in ways that others cannot while having a significant impact on technology, spending, and value. The goal is to grow these companies into market leaders.
Sometimes, however, Black Dragon finds an opportunity that no company has yet addressed. This is particularly true when we can see the friends and members of a community that we are an active part of suffering. When that happens, it creates the company that will seize the opportunity.
That’s how Payveris came to be a company designed to meet the urgent need for a viable alternative digital payments system (even more urgent today as our socially distanced world responds to COVID-19 by moving most of its transactions to digital applications) and to protect an essential part of our communities, the community based financial institutions that fund the American Dream.
The market need
The financial services industry’s payment networks weren’t designed for the digital money-movement era
Black Dragon and its principals have been engaged with community financial institutions for decades. We have friends and partners in the community, it has provided for our families and we have written books and hosted rallies to highlight their importance. As an investor, Chairman and CEO of Open Solutions, the firm, and its principals, helped a disruptive financial services technology player grow into an almost $1.5 billion company. Open Solutions created an open architecture banking technology platform that effectively gave banks an “operating system” focused on the needs of individuals and groups, one community at a time across the globe. Open Solutions’ platform allowed financial institutions to tailor product offerings, grow revenue, realize efficiencies, and serve customers across geographies and jurisdictions. Open Solutions is now a part of Fiserv. See Open Solutions Case Study at https://blackdragoncap.com/2020/01/case-study-in-brief-open-solutions/.
Even earlier, in the 1990s, Black Dragon and its principals helped found and back a media and e- commerce company that grew to hundreds of millions in revenues, went public and was sold. As part of its solution it had to address the online payment issue at a time when none existed during the early stages of the internet revolution. Their early understanding of e-commerce technology and the payment issues set a foundation for future strategies. It was clear that digital payments were an emerging area with an abundance of issues and opportunities.
Conventional payment systems are part of the traditional banking system, which evolved in an earlier, slower-moving era. Financial institutions were created centuries ago to facilitate commerce. Their mission was and is to provide the basis of a strong economic system that in turn supports a strong society. To do that, they need to operate in a safe and sound way, terms that are in most regulatory language around the world. Because of the history, financial institutions are often formed or regulated by a sovereign state, country and often charter type (i.e., commercial bank, credit union, retail bank, etc.) and rules and regulations that determine how they will take in and distribute funds to facilitate the exchange of goods and services. Overtime….