Strategic finance for payments and fintech
I work with payments, fintech and platform businesses to expand margins and build defensible positions. If you're weighing up a deal, a new market or an AI investment, 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 two groups:
01Payments, fintech and PE-backed businesses→ 02Fintech 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, clearing banks, and high-volume merchants. 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 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
Where revenue and margin really come from, and what to change to lift them.
- Product and pricing: roadmap, client segments and pricing tiers tied to gross margin, and dropping features nobody pays for.
- Go-to-market and cross-border: partner routes and commercial set-up for new regions and higher-value segments.
- Cost to serve: the full run rate from onboarding, KYB and risk to clearing, processing and reconciliation.
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
- To partners and customers in my network.
- To investors.
- Across the UK, Spain, the US and elsewhere.
Spain and the UK
- Since Brexit, a Spanish licence doesn't cover the UK, so Spanish fintechs need their own route in.
- Working out which route, and who to talk to.
- The same for UK investors and payments companies looking at Spain.
Ad hoc advice
- Happy to take a look at your numbers or your pitch before it goes to investors or customers.
- 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 soonThe Plan You Inherited
A signed-off plan leaves most of the commercial decisions unmade. Two lenses on what happens next.Read → ArticleTwo AI Systems, Same Output, Completely Different Economics
How your AI architecture determines whether costs scale with you or against you.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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