Meet Mollie, effortless payments for businesses of every size

Can you tell us about your background and what brought you to Mollie?

I’m the managing director of the UK and Ireland markets for Mollie, one of Europe’s fastest-growing financial service providers.

I started my FinTech career at PayPal back in 2008, when it was only really just emerging as a new market. My first role was as business manager, which I had worked in before at AmEx, before working my way up to global director of systems integrator partnerships.

After a stint in entrepreneurship and a senior role at a business payments provider called Super Payments, I accepted a role as the MD of UK & Ireland at Mollie, where I still work today.

Besides my responsibilities at Mollie, I’ve also invested in a few early-stage startups. I’ve also worked as a guest speaker at the London Business School in the past.

Tell me about the business: what it is, what it aims to achieve, who you work with, and so on?

Mollie is one of Europe’s fastest-growing payment service providers. It offers businesses a simple, scalable, and secure platform to accept and manage customer payments. It’s designed for ease-of-use and accepts a wide range of payment methods, including credit and debit cards, Apple Pay, PayPal, and Open Banking solutions.

With Mollie, businesses both big and small can streamline their checkout processes, reduce friction, and improve conversion rates across all manner of platforms. That said, we work mainly with e-commerce businesses, online retailers, and subscription services, including Gymshark, Tails.com, Soak&Sleep, Mazda, and Wild Cosmetics.

Besides its simplicity, one of Mollie’s most valued USPs is its flexibility and transparent pricing. Unlike traditional payment providers, we don’t lock our customers into long-term contracts, but use a transaction-based revenue model to offer them a cost-effective and scalable solution instead. This makes it an attractive solution for smaller businesses with plans to grow fast.

So far, Mollie has gained strong market traction across Europe, attracting businesses looking for a modern, efficient, and user-friendly payment partner. We’re positioned as a challenger to legacy payment systems, supported by rapid growth and investor support, especially as demand for digital and Open Banking solutions grows.

How has the business evolved since its launch?

Since our founder, Adriaan Mol launched the business in 2004, aged only 18, the business has developed a huge amount.

While initially conceived as a platform simply to accept payments and manage money, Mollie’s functions now encompass payments, reconciliation, reporting, fraud prevention, and financing too. It’s a simple solution for any business seeking a modern, efficient, and user-friendly payment partner.

In terms of size, the company has expanded into a large multinational company. It now serves more than 250,000 businesses and employs 750 people with offices across Europe in Amsterdam, Ghent, Lisbon, London, Maastricht, Milan, Munich, and Paris.

How are you funded?

The company most recently raised €665 million (£553 million) in equity funding in 2021, achieving a €5.4 billion (£4.5 billion) valuation. That funding round was led by Blackstone’s growth equity investment business, Blackstone Growth, and supported by EQT Growth, General Atlantic, HMI Capital, Alkeon Capital, and TCV.

How does Mollie answer an unmet need?

Mollie answers several significant unmet business needs, especially for e-commerce businesses across the UK and Europe.

Complex, confusing, and fragmented payment systems are inefficient and a drain on resources for many of these businesses. Mollie offers a single, scalable, and secure platform that streamlines payments, reconciliation, reporting, and financing for them, meeting the demand for an effortless, simple payments solution.

One element of simplicity that Mollie offers is with cross-border payments. These can present a real challenge for many businesses, since payment regulations differ between local markets. Through exclusive partnerships and local knowledge, Mollie can navigate this issue to facilitate faster and smoother operations.

A dedication to flexible, transparent, and customer-centric service is also part of Mollie’s solution. Many traditional financial service providers lock customers into long-term contracts, and customer service is left wanting. Mollie uses a transaction-based revenue model instead, where businesses only pay a fee per processed payment, making it a cost-effective and scalable solution, particularly for fast-growing smaller businesses. Its 4.6-star Trustpilot rating from over 9,000 reviews for fast, reliable, and helpful assistance is a testament to its customer service quality.

What are some of the biggest challenges the FinTech sector faces today, and how is Mollie addressing them?

Security presents a major challenge for FinTech today. Mollie’s latest research revealed that three in ten SMEs had experienced account takeover attempts where someone tried to gain unauthorised access to their online business accounts.

This type of activity seriously threatens their viability. Businesses suffer an average loss of £10,800, and 27% report losses ranging from £5,000 to £20,000 over the past 12 months.

Many small businesses lack the resources to cover even a single incident of hacking or fraudulent activity. It’s up to FinTech providers to offer them the security they need. And that’s exactly what we’re doing at Mollie through our Acceptance and Risk tools, for example, which protect businesses through intelligent optimisation and customisable fraud prevention.

What does the future look like for Mollie?

Mollie has ambitious plans for both geographic and product expansion in the near future. It is now actively entering new markets across Europe, having recently launched in Poland, Portugal, and Sweden, which marked its entry into the Nordics.

We’re dedicating a lot of time and money to the expansion of our product too. We want to offer an all-in-one solution for businesses that goes far beyond payments to banking and financial reporting. Our existing products, such as Mollie Connect and Mollie Capital, are a testament to this.

These developments are all in service to our continued ambition to offer a simple, scalable, and secure means for businesses to accept and manage payments.

What do you think the future of the FinTech sector will look like?

Itʼs impossible to avoid talking about AI here — a major development genuinely worth following in FinTech.

AI will essentially make everything faster, smarter, and safer for both customers and merchants. For example, AI-powered predictive analytics will soon be able to figure out what payment method a customer will want to use based on their previous interactions with a business. Itʼll make it much easier for businesses to spot fraud too, as well as automate a bunch of different processes on businessesʼ backend, like invoicing.

Weʼre going to see payments go through some significant innovation over the next ten years, powered by AI.

Dave Smallwood is the UK MD of Mollie.