Serhii Zakharov, Founder and CEO at PayDo, speaks about the shift from fragmented fintech solutions to unified financial infrastructure. In conversation with CP Media, he explores industry maturity, regulatory complexity, embedded finance, changing customer expectations, and the role of all-in-one platforms in the future of global payments.
From Fragmented Fintech to Unified Financial Infrastructure
The fintech sector has been evolving rapidly over the past decade. Where do you see the industry today in terms of maturity and consolidation?
The industry has clearly matured, but I would not say it has fully consolidated yet. Over the past decade, fintech has solved many individual problems very well by acquiring, wallets, open banking, payouts, FX, and compliance tools, but many of these solutions have developed as separate layers.
That created innovation, but it also created fragmentation. Today, the market is entering a new phase. Businesses no longer want to manage ten different providers for ten different parts of their payment operations. They want fewer relationships, clearer infrastructure, better reporting, and more control.
So I see fintech entering a consolidation phase, but not only through mergers or acquisitions. The more important consolidation is happening at the infrastructure level: bringing accounts, acquiring, open banking, payouts, compliance, and reporting into more unified ecosystems. That is where I believe the next stage of fintech maturity will be defined.
Operating across multiple jurisdictions remains one of the biggest challenges in financial services. What are the key lessons you’ve learned about navigating global regulatory environments?
The biggest lesson is that regulation cannot be treated as something separate from infrastructure. If you operate across markets, compliance has to be built into the system from the beginning, not added later as an administrative layer.
Every jurisdiction has its own expectations around licensing, onboarding, AML, reporting, capital flows, and risk appetite. If a company underestimates that complexity, growth can become very fragile. I have seen many businesses focus only on market opportunity and underestimate how much local regulation shapes what is actually possible.
At PayDo, we have always taken the view that compliance, technology, and commercial execution need to work together. Businesses need clear onboarding, transparent pricing, strong risk controls, and infrastructure that can support different payment flows across markets without creating unnecessary complexity for the client.
Fragmentation in banking infrastructure continues to be a major issue. Why has this problem persisted for so long, and what will it take to meaningfully address it?
Fragmentation has persisted because much of fintech evolved around specialised products rather than complete ecosystems. One provider solved acquiring, another solved open banking, another solved payouts, and another solved wallets. Each product may work well on its own, but merchants are left to connect everything together.
That creates duplicated onboarding, multiple contracts, different compliance processes, disconnected reports, and constant reconciliation work. The cost is not always visible immediately, but it becomes a real operational burden as companies scale.
To address it meaningfully, the industry needs more coherent infrastructure. That means one onboarding process, one operational point of contact, unified reporting, integrated compliance logic, and payment flows that work together rather than in isolation. An API alone does not solve fragmentation; the infrastructure behind it has to be designed properly.
Customer Expectations and the Next Wave of Digital Payments
Embedded finance is gaining traction across industries. Do you see it as a lasting structural shift or more of a cyclical trend?
I see embedded finance as a structural shift, but only if the infrastructure underneath it is strong enough.
The idea is simple: financial services should become part of the customer journey rather than a separate process. But embedded finance only works when users barely notice it. If the payment flow becomes slow, confusing, or unreliable, then the entire embedded experience fails.
So the real question is not whether embedded finance will grow. It will. The question is whether providers can support it with reliable onboarding, compliance, routing, settlement, and user experience. Without that foundation, embedded finance becomes another layer of fragmentation. With the right infrastructure, it becomes a natural part of how digital businesses operate.
Over the past 2–3 years, how has customer behavior changed in terms of expectations around financial services and payments?
Customers have become much less tolerant of friction. Businesses now expect financial services to be fast, integrated, and easy to manage. They do not want to spend time coordinating multiple providers, reconciling reports manually, or waiting through unclear onboarding processes.
At the same time, end users expect payments to feel seamless. They want fewer redirects, faster confirmation, familiar local payment methods, and reliable payouts. In many sectors, even small friction at checkout can affect conversion.
So the expectation has shifted from simply having access to payment services to having a payment infrastructure that works in the background. Customers want clarity, speed, and reliability without needing to understand the complexity behind it.
Different industries adopt fintech solutions at different speeds. Which sectors are currently driving the most demand for modern financial infrastructure?
The strongest demand comes from digital-first and high-velocity sectors where payments are central to the business model. This includes iGaming, digital commerce, marketplaces, SaaS businesses, crypto platforms, gaming companies, and other online businesses operating across borders.
These sectors usually face more complex payment requirements. They need acquiring, local payment methods, multi-currency accounts, payouts, FX, reconciliation, and compliance support. In iGaming, for example, conversion rates, local payment coverage, and reliable merchant services are critical because the environment is high-volume and highly regulated.
These industries are often the first to expose the weaknesses in traditional infrastructure. If your systems can support them, they are usually strong enough to support many other high-frequency digital business models as well.
Corporate expense management and payouts are undergoing significant change. What key trends are shaping this space right now?
The main trend is that businesses want more control and visibility over money movement. Expense management and payouts are no longer isolated finance tasks. They are part of a wider operational infrastructure.
Companies need multi-currency capabilities, local and international payouts, virtual and physical cards, clear reporting, and better reconciliation. As businesses scale across markets, they cannot rely on disconnected systems for each function.
The shift is toward an integrated infrastructure where accounts, cards, payouts, and reporting work together. This allows finance teams to reduce manual work, improve oversight, and manage operations more efficiently across different countries and payment flows.
Trust, Compliance, and Unified Platforms in Global Payments
Partnerships between fintech companies and traditional financial institutions remain critical. How is this relationship evolving, and what defines a successful partnership today?
The relationship is becoming more infrastructure-led. In the past, fintech and traditional financial institutions were often discussed as competitors. Today, the more important question is how they work together to deliver reliable, compliant, and scalable financial services.
Traditional institutions bring stability, regulatory depth, and access to core financial rails. Fintech companies bring speed, product focus, and the ability to solve specific customer problems. A successful partnership combines these strengths without passing complexity to the end customer.
For me, the key is alignment: clear risk appetite, transparent onboarding, strong compliance standards, and infrastructure that can actually support modern payment flows. Partnerships fail when they are built only around access. They succeed when they are built around operational reliability.
Security, compliance, and user experience often pull in different directions. How can companies balance these priorities without compromising on any of them?
The balance comes from designing infrastructure properly from the beginning. If compliance is added at the end, it creates friction. If user experience is designed without risk controls, it creates exposure. If security becomes too heavy, adoption suffers.
The answer is not to choose between them. The answer is to integrate them. Risk rules, compliance checks, onboarding logic, transaction monitoring, and payment routing need to work as part of the same system.
A good user experience does not mean removing controls. It means making those controls intelligent, proportionate, and less visible to the user where possible. The best financial infrastructure should feel simple on the surface because the complexity is handled properly behind the scenes.
Against this broader backdrop, what role do all-in-one financial platforms, including PayDo, play in shaping competition across traditional payment rails and global financial infrastructure?
All-in-one platforms are becoming increasingly important because businesses no longer want payment services that solve only one part of the problem. They need infrastructure that connects accounts, acquiring, payouts, FX, compliance, and reporting into one operational environment rather than multiple disconnected systems.
For PayDo, innovation has focused on reducing fragmentation at the infrastructure level. Instead of requiring businesses to manage separate providers for bank transfers, acquiring, treasury visibility, payouts, and reconciliation, we built a unified ecosystem where these functions operate together through one platform, one integration, and one commercial relationship.
Over time, that infrastructure has continued to evolve alongside how businesses move money globally. Recent innovations have included direct acquiring capabilities, C2B open banking collections, integrated crypto–fiat workflows, instant crypto payouts from fiat balances, and real-time settlement infrastructure designed to simplify historically fragmented payment flows.
The objective is not to replace traditional payment rails, but to make them work together more efficiently and transparently for businesses operating across borders.
Going forward, competition in payments will increasingly be shaped by who can combine reliability, regulatory strength, operational simplicity, and infrastructure flexibility within one ecosystem. Businesses do not only want more payment options anymore. They want the flexibility to operate across different payment flows and markets without increasing operational complexity. That is why infrastructure simplification and greater operational control are becoming increasingly important as companies scale internationally.
