What is Payhawk?
We are reinventing how business payments work. We are building the most efficient credit card backed by powerful financial software to help companies stay in control. We help finance teams manage all company payments – company cards, bank wires, cash payments and reimbursements for their business entities in more than 30 countries today.
Our USP is two-fold. First, we are the most enterprise focused product on the market and we work with fast-growing multinational companies. Second, we are the most comprehensive product that includes bank accounts and payments in more than 30 countries.
What is your favourite thing about being a founder?
The opportunity to build and recruit a stellar team to help us execute in a massive market opportunity. I am also a product person, and I love the challenge of iterating multiples times on a problem. It takes a lot of iterations to strip down a problem to its basic form and create a simple and clear solution that solves it.
Which founders or businesses do you see as being the most inspirational?
I love to see success stories coming out of the local ecosystem – i.e., Central and Eastern Europe. Companies being founded in our region are still considered underdogs, due to the limited financing options and lack of strong domestic markets. Every entrepreneur that has managed to break out of this environment and create a world-class product is an inspiration.
How is the way people handle their finances changing?
Businesses still rely on a set of disconnected systems to manage their spending. It’s a mix of company cards, business banking, expense management tools, invoice management and workflow tools. Payhawk is a system that manages all of that with great automation capabilities, which bring manual work down to zero.
The future of fintech is very bright, and we expect a lot of innovations from fintech companies targeting businesses. I think traditional banks are here to stay, but their value and proposition needs to adapt and evolve to digital first requirements.
What’s next for Payhawk?
We are expanding our presence in multiple regions. Right now, we have an open headcount of 210 positions across Berlin, London, Barcelona, Sofia, Paris, and Amsterdam. We plan to add affordable cross-border payments and close the loop on all payments within a single system that is tailored to large scale organisations.
Hristo Borisov is the cofounder and CEO of Payhawk.