Brite Payments Group’s CEO Lena Hackelöer sat down with Payment Expert to discuss the early rise of the second-generation fintech from its roots in Sweden.
Hackelöer delved into the importance of instant payments in the current payments industry, discussing the positives for both merchants and customers.
“When we talk about instant payments, we’re talking about a few seconds for payments which have benefits both for the consumer and the merchant,” said Hackelöer.
“From a consumer point of view, making a fast payment is always nice, receiving a fast payment is especially nice… It’s not a common standard today.”
With the rapid nature of ecommerce payments and the need for a quicker service from consumers, instant payments have become an increasingly popular method of payment to not appease customers but to attract new customers too.
However, before Hackelöer founded Brite Payments, she worked with the now popular ‘Buy Now, Pay Later’ service Klarna. She reflected on her time at Klarna when a real shift in alternative payment methods was happening, also discussing what she has applied from her time at Klarna and applied it now at Brite.
“I ended up spending seven years there and at that time, one of the things when I look back now is that there really was no best practice in payments,” commented Hackelöer.
“It was the beginning of the rise of alternative payments and a lot of the growth in the category as we know it today, was still in its early days back then.
“If I look at today’s payment landscape in 2022, we’ve seen the rise of several payment companies, we’ve seen their strategies when it comes to their offering from a shift to consumers and their experience being several monetization models when it comes to payments.”
Hackelöer went into detail about many more topics during the interview, from the challenges of starting a company on the eve of the COVID-19 pandemic, to what Brite Payments has in store in the near future.
