Enfuce: Launching Card-as-a-Service with OpenWay

Enfuce is a cloud payment provider offering Card-as-a-Service on the Way4 platform to banks and fintechs. In our interview, Markus Melin, COO of Enfuce, talks about co-innovating with fintechs and what types of cards can be delivered as a service to startups and incumbents.

Enfuce runs issuing of credit, prepaid, fleet, multi-currency, and commercial cards on the Way4 platform installed in Amazon Web Services. Recently, OpenWay and Enfuce have jointly received a PayTech award as the “Best Solution Provider for Payment Systems in the Cloud”.

Here is the full interview recording. Additionally, for your convenience, the video is acсompanied by the interview transcript. Enjoy watching!

Launching any card as a service on Way4

Markus: Enfuce is processing payments, offering Сard-as-a-Service to our customers. We operate with fintechs, we operate with incumbents, meaning banks and established players. Enfuce has been a startup, it was founded in 2016. Now we consider ourselves to be a scale-up, which is sort of the next level.

One could say that we offer the whole nine yards of cards. With us, you can get a prepaid card. You can get a debit card. Credit card with revolving credit, and loyalty cards of different types. We have customers from fleet, we have fintechs who are offering to end consumers, fintechs who offer B2B cards, so we have a whole variety as our customers.

How is Enfuce different from other processors?

Co-innovating with the customers is one really important factor that we do. Like you mentioned about fintechs, they have novel ideas about how to do capabilities and new services to the market, or to make things easy for the customer. So that’s one thing. But also, the other thing is that we are innovating and improving the back-end processing for our customers, getting the information in. And that’s sort of making our customers’, the card issuer’s, life easier.

We offer the highest SLA in the market at the moment, so we give four nines as our SLA promise in availability. We can really support the company, not only in scaling up and only paying for what you use, but also we provide our expertise in helping our customers to get these sort of solutions built in the right way from the get-go to save time for them. 

We have to consider the consumer models and the business models for consumers. I think one of the models that is now most prominent is Buy Now, Pay Later, and I mean POS credit, in a way. Then if we think about Enfuce’s customers, like fintechs, they want to start small and to grow, and to pay only for the services they use. And that’s also then our business model, which is important that we can offer small-scale, but also big-scale, and scaling up in between.

What value does Way4 bring to you?

What we value from Way4 and OpenWay is the expertise in managing ledgers in different countries, the payment conditions, and the connectivity to schemas, so this is something we value. And I think it’s said so often that one should always focus on one’s own strength and try to find partners that can sort of add to their strength, and together, make it more.

Read more about Enfuce’s collaboration with OpenWay in our case study (link below).

How did the pandemic change your life?

Markus: A lot less traveling. I was able to spend more time with the family. That’s probably the biggest thing. I noticed that I don’t need to travel. I will be looking to have those meetings remotely as much as I can. Of course, meeting people for the first time and every now and then is important, but not always.  

Nothing is impossible, but if you’re meeting new customers, new business partners, you can’t develop a good relationship fast over video equipment. Of course, you have these video rooms, telepresence rooms, but it’s not the same.

Your impressions from OpenWay Club

Markus: That it’s great to meet other OpenWay and Way4 users and organizations, meet with colleagues – so that’s one thing. Of course, meeting the great OpenWay staff is always nice. And then lastly, as I said, it’s important to meet people and talk about different things, and in a little bit less formal setting.