Serhii Zakharov
Serhii Zakharov

As his company marks its ninth anniversary, PayDo founder and CEO Serhii Zakharov talks to International Business Times about how the Electronic Money Institution sector has grown up, why fragmentation is the problem worth solving, and what a new European regulatory era means for payment firms.

PayDo turns nine this year. When you look back, how much has the Electronic Money Institution sector changed over that time?

Serhii Zakharov: Almost beyond recognition. When we started, an EMI was still a relatively novel idea to most businesses. The default assumption was that if you wanted to move money seriously, you went to a bank, and you accepted whatever pace and limitations came with that. EMIs were treated as a lightweight alternative for edge cases.

That has flipped. Today a serious cross-border business is just as likely to build its core payment operations on a regulated EMI as on a bank, because the EMI can do things the bank cannot, at a speed the bank cannot match. The sector matured from a novelty into infrastructure. What changed alongside it is the bar. Nine years ago you could launch on a thin setup and a good interface. Now the market expects real licences, real compliance, and real infrastructure behind the product. That shift is the single biggest change I have seen, and I think it is a healthy one.

PayDo describes itself as an all-in-one payment ecosystem. What does that actually mean for a client, and why is it your main point of difference?

Zakharov: It means a business can manage every part of its payment operation in one place, under one contract and one integration, instead of stitching together a dozen separate providers. One for card acquiring, another for bank transfers, a third for currency conversion, a fourth for payouts, each with its own contract, its own onboarding, its own reconciliation file.

I treat that fragmentation as a tax on growth. It is a cost that never appears as a single line on any invoice, but you feel it everywhere: in the finance team spending its week reconciling systems instead of doing finance, in the delays, in the operational risk of every extra connection. Our difference is that we remove it. We give businesses a client-first financial solution that consolidates acquiring, multi-currency accounts, Open Banking collections, payouts and FX into one ecosystem. That is not a feature. It is the whole point of the company.

What made that possible? Plenty of firms talk about being all-in-one.

Zakharov: The difference is what sits underneath. Talking about being all-in-one is easy. Being it requires direct infrastructure, and direct infrastructure takes years to build. We are a principal member of Visa and Mastercard and a direct member of SWIFT and SEPA. We hold regulated status across multiple jurisdictions. Each of those was a multi-year undertaking, not a switch we flipped.

That foundation is what lets us route payments through our own rails rather than through chains of intermediaries, and that is what genuinely removes cost and complexity for the client. A firm that resells someone else's infrastructure can only ever be as fast and as cheap as the layers beneath it. We chose the slower path of building our own, and nine years on, that choice is the product.

You operate across several regulated entities. What do you think about regulation as a business?

Zakharov: As a competitive advantage, not a cost of doing business. Our services are delivered through separate regulated entities, each authorised or registered for what it actually does in its own jurisdiction: an Electronic Money Institution in the UK, an authorised entity in Malta, and a registered Money Services Business in Canada. That structure is deliberate. It means when a client asks who stands behind a given service, there is a precise, accurate answer.

I have believed from the start that regulatory depth is something you invest in early, because you cannot retrofit it later. The businesses that treat compliance as paperwork, something to bolt on at the end, are the ones that struggle when the standards rise. We treated it as part of the product from day one.

On rising standards, the EU's MiCA framework is reshaping the rules around digital assets and stablecoins. How do you read its impact?

Zakharov: I read it as the market moving from experimentation towards infrastructure. For years, crypto and stablecoin services developed faster than the regulatory and financial systems around them. That created room for innovation, but also uncertainty for businesses that need reliable access to payments and settlement. A common European framework replaces a patchwork of national approaches, and for firms with cross-border ambitions that creates a clearer path to scale.

But I would say this clearly: a single rulebook does not remove the need for strong execution. Firms still need the right capital planning, reserve structure, governance and reporting. The advantage will go to providers that connect those capabilities early, rather than treating compliance, treasury and technology as separate projects. Regulation sets the floor. Execution decides who actually benefits from it.

And stablecoins specifically. A lot of businesses are curious but cautious.

Zakharov: Rightly so, and the caution is usually about the wrong thing. The demand from businesses was never for crypto exposure. It was for settlement speed. The real challenge is not the on-chain transaction, which is fast. It is the bridge back into fiat: the point where a company still has to pay suppliers, employees and taxes in ordinary currency. For stablecoins to be useful, that bridge has to work reliably, inside a properly regulated payment operation, not as a separate crypto process bolted on the side. The firms that get that right will be the ones that make it invisible to the client. The business gets the speed, without having to become a crypto specialist to get it.

You are speaking at Web Summit in Lisbon this year. Why should people come to hear you, and who is the talk for?

Zakharov: The talk is called "One Platform for Global Payments: Solving Payments Complexity for Digital Businesses," and it's on the MoneyConf stage on 11 November.

It follows the five stages almost every tech company goes through with payments. It starts with paying contractors abroad before the first sale, then comes the first provider that feels like first love, then the customer who can't pay the way you accept, and finally a stack of providers where one payment makes six stops before it arrives. Most people in the room will recognise their own stage. It's also personal: before PayDo I built a tech company and lived through every one of those stages myself.

The talk is for founders, CFOs and operations leads at SaaS companies, platforms and any business that sells or hires across borders. Everyone leaves with practical questions to ask about their own setup, starting with this one: if we opened a new country next Monday, could we get paid there by Friday?

Final question. What does the tenth year look like?

Zakharov: More of the discipline that got us here. The market is shifting toward a more institutional model, where authorisation, compliance and direct infrastructure increasingly define which providers businesses trust for the long term. We have spent nine years investing in exactly those areas, so in one sense the market is moving toward us.

My goal has not changed since day one. I want to empower modern digital businesses to manage all their payments in one place, without the fragmentation, the hidden costs, or the operational drag of stitching together a dozen providers. That is what real efficiency looks like, and it is what we are still building toward. I am a boxer, and boxing taught me that you win the late rounds on the training nobody saw you do. Nine years in, we are still putting that work in.