Strategic finance for payments and fintech
I work with payments and fintech businesses, merchants and platforms, and the PE funds that invest in them, to expand margins and build defensible positions. I also advise early-stage fintechs and VCs across the UK and Spain.
If you're weighing up a deal, a new market, an AI investment or what you pay for payments, happy to talk it through.
When I set up ScalePoint in 2024, fintech valuations were still well below their 2021 highs, but AI looked like the start of the next wave. It was already clear that it would change how payments and fintech businesses make money and how buyers value them.
Before ScalePoint I spent ten years in payments at Citi, Mastercard and Luup, then nearly a decade at Edgar, Dunn & Company, latterly as a Principal, on more than 75 engagements for banks, fintechs, card networks, private equity firms and merchants.
I work with three groups:
01Payments, fintech and PE-backed businesses→ 02Merchants, platforms and marketplaces→ 03Fintech start-ups, founders and connections→Payments, fintech and PE-backed businesses
I advise leadership teams and investors across the payments ecosystem, including acquirers, PSPs, FX providers, open banking platforms and clearing banks. I also work directly with private equity funds and corporate finance advisers on due diligence, deals and the value creation plan that follows.
Deals and transactions
Before, during and after a transaction.
- Before: commercial and technical due diligence for buyers and investors, and exit readiness for sellers, pinning down the valuation drivers and the equity story.
- Carve-outs: what sits on each P&L once the business is split.
- After a merger: the integration plan to capture cost synergies, rationalise product stacks and align go-to-market teams.
AI strategy and economics
The AI you already have, and what to do next.
- Own or partner: where to build it yourself and where to partner, and the lock-in each one brings.
- Cost at full volume: what it will cost to run once it scales, and which model does the job at that price.
- What stays yours: the trade-off between performance, cost and your own IP and data.
Commercial and growth
What drives revenue and margin, and how to lift both.
- Markets and go-to-market: how big a segment or country market is, who is gaining share, and the partner routes and commercial set-up to enter it, including Spain.
- Product and pricing: roadmap, client segments and pricing tiers tied to gross margin, and dropping features nobody pays for.
- Cost to serve: the full run rate from onboarding, KYB and risk to clearing, processing and reconciliation.
Infrastructure and regulation
The rails, rules and systems behind the P&L.
- Replatforming and build or buy: the business case for moving processor, gateway or core platform, and which parts of the stack to own or buy in.
- Regulation: PSD2 and SCA, and now PSD3, the Payment Services Regulation and MiCA, and what each one changes for your product, fraud liability and costs.
- New rails: where open banking, instant payments and stablecoins replace cards, and what that does to your revenue.
Merchants, platforms and marketplaces
I work with merchants taking more than £1m a year in cards, and with the software platforms and marketplaces that take payments for their users.
Costs and operations
What you pay for payments, and what it takes to run them.
- Card acceptance costs: what you pay, what's negotiable, and the numbers for a renegotiation.
- Payment operations: advice on where your set-up is losing money, from failed authorisations to chargebacks, and what to change.
PSPs and routing
Who processes your payments, and how.
- Choosing a PSP or acquirer: the one that fits your business model and markets, with price as one factor.
- Routing and orchestration: whether multi-acquirer routing pays back through authorisation rates and fees.
Embedded payments
What you could earn from payments, and what could replace cards.
- Payfac or partner: for platforms and marketplaces, whether to become a payfac yourself or work through a PSP, and what each is worth.
- New rails: where pay-by-bank, instant payments and stablecoins can replace cards, and what that saves.
Fintech start-ups, founders and connections
I also work with early-stage fintechs, their founders and the VC funds that back them, with a focus on Spain and the UK.
Introductions and business development
- Partners and customers: introductions in my network, from acquirers, PSPs and banks to merchants and software platforms.
- Investors: VC funds and angels for an early round, and corporate venture teams at banks and payments companies later on. Happy to look at the pitch before the first meeting too.
- Where: mostly the UK and Spain, and also across EMEA and the US.
Market entry: Spain and the UK
- Into the UK: market entry for Spanish fintechs and payments companies, from post-Brexit licensing and which route to take, through to the first partners and customers.
- Into Spain: the same for UK fintechs and payments companies expanding into Spain, and for UK investors looking at Spanish companies, including who to talk to locally.
Reviews before it goes out
- Business cases, investment narratives and pitch decks, before they go to investors, customers or partners such as banks and card schemes.
- After years inside Mastercard and Citi, I can usually tell you how a bank or a card scheme will read it.
Recent work, projects and writing
Client names withheldThe case for pivoting from broker to payments
For a PE-backed FX and payments group: the valuation case for a pivot and replatforming, and the value creation plan behind it.Case note coming soonWho to build for, and where the growth spend should go
For a listed cross-border payments provider: segmenting B2B customers across 13 markets to decide where the growth budget should go.Case note coming soonFinancial intelligence product taken to production
An AI financial intelligence product I took to production myself, with integrations into FreeAgent, Xero and WhatsApp.Case note coming soonPipeline to cash
When the deals you expect to win turn into cash, with VAT and corporation tax included. AI reads your deals; code does the sums.Try it → Labs toolCard fee check
One acquirer statement in, your effective rate out, split into what the card schemes set and what your acquirer adds.Try it → Labs toolFX cost check
Paste the international payments from a bank statement and see what the exchange rate cost against the ECB reference rate.Try it → ArticleFintech and Venture Capital in Spain: A View from Barcelona
How big Spain's fintech and payments scene is, what Barcelona adds to it, and where Spanish companies tend to get stuck.Read → ArticleThe Plan You Inherited
A signed-off plan leaves most of the commercial decisions unmade. Two lenses on what happens next.Read → ArticleFintech Moats in an AI World
Why the next decade of fintech will be defined by infrastructure and operational embeddedness.Read →How to start
Drop me an email and we can talk it through. Every piece of work is agreed in a fixed-price statement of work, signed by both of us before anything starts, and I do the work myself.
martin@scalepointpartners.com
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