Disrupting the Payments Industry | Inside PumaPay

You don't come naked and you don't wear pajamas. You can wear whatever you want.

My little sister has a standing desk, but also a biking desk.

Oh, zero volatility and 100% liquidity. This is where everything happens.

Hi guys, I'm Molly Jane from Cointelegraph and we are here in the beautiful country of Cyprus to look inside Pumape.

Pumapay is a blockchain based payment system. Its unique Characteristic is its PumaPay pull payment protocol. While most payment systems work with pushes, when one company sends or pushes a transaction to another, Pumapay lets companies pull money, making a blockchain based subscription service a reality.

Where are we right now?

We are at the Puma Pay offices in Limassol, Cyprus.

And how long have you guys been in this office space?

We've entered here in March 2018, so that'll be a year and a half.

Puma Pay, based in Cyprus, has employees from all over the world. The office looks like a mini Silicon Valley tech hub with graffiti covered walls in electric colors and employees dressed in shirts and sneakers sitting in small soundproof hubs for meetings.

Pumafay aims to disrupt the entire payment space. And we are combining the flexibility and ease of use of payment cards, credit cards.

So who's over here sitting in this open office space?

So this area is our marketing team and the designers and the copywriters.

And what about here? So this is your office, I assume that's my option. You have a standing desk?

I do.

Have you always had a standing desk?

For the past three and a half years, since the deck started to make its problems.

So does it help really?

Yeah, yeah. I spend at least half my day standing. It's. You can put it down, then you can sit. But I spent half my day standing. It's much more convenient.

My little sister has a standing desk, but also a biking desk. Oh, yeah. So maybe that could be your next one.

Yeah. That's very cool.

Just from doing research. You know, in the field of crypto payment processors, that seems to be something that sets you guys apart.

Exactly. Prevailing method of using cryptocurrency is that me as a customer, I have to put your address. As a merchant or another person, I have to put your address and send my funds to you or push it to you. And we inverse the mechanic of the transaction. And now with our unique architecture of smart contracts, which we call the pull payment protocol, we allow you, the merchant, to connect with my wallet. And subject to my approval of the terms and conditions that you Present to me. You're allowed to pull funds directly from my wallet.

What? It kind of reminds me of on Venmo, which is like a fiat transferring app, you can set your friend a trust and then you can pull money from them. So it's about trust in a way.

Yes, exactly. It's about trust. And this opens the door to a whole universe of payment methods that were not possible on the blockchain before, like subscription payments, top up billing model, utility payment, paper time, paper use, etc. And we centered our solution around these, as we call them, advanced billing models. The pull payment protocol allows infinite flexibility when it comes to business logic, and it allows any business to use it. And the system adapts itself to the business business logic and not the other way around. Since we started the ICO, we signed over 100 very known brands. Yeah. That they want to work with our technology. Among them are famous brands like Fashion TV, Wix.com, pornhub, Ren24 and many, many more. We have already started the onboarding and the integration with a few of them.

Do you guys have any sort of dress code here? Are you guys trying to be like Silicon Valley? Everyone comes in T shirts and sandals.

Yeah, you can. As long as you don't come naked and you don't wear pajamas, you can wear whatever you want. I mean, most of the people come very, very casual. So this is the main space of the office. It's divided to two. Here we have the engineers, the head of teams are working. Here we have a large team in India and they operate them from this desk. And this is where all our smart contracts are being written by our dear blockchain architect, Yorgos Cortelos. On this side we have the product team, ui, UX and the QA team. So in this area, this is where everything happens.

So could you tell me more about the collaboration with pornhub? Because that really was like a big deal. I remember last August when it happened and there was that promotional video that was very funny and well done. So like all over the media. Well, we could send Pulapay.

He's right. With that cryptocurrency, the transfer would be immediate. And with their pull payment protocol, they'll be able to automatically pay for their subscriptions every month and they would leave us in peace. Best of all, HornHub accepts it.

Sir, how do you know that? We penetrated that industry and we managed to hook many companies and to make them early adopters of our technology. And among them also pornhub, Blockchain and Cryptocurrencies they solve real problems for any high risk industry. And the adult entertainment is one of the high risk sectors. We can define risk as the risk of the customer regretting the transaction and then trying to cancel it. So in dating platforms, casinos, gaming, and porn as well, there's a high risk that the customer will regret it and then will ask his bank or credit card company for the money back. And according to the rules of MasterCard and Visa, whenever the customer asks for the money back, it's called the chargeback. They don't ask questions, they take the money from the merchant account and they give it back to the customer. Then the merchant can dispute, they can present proof that the customer, indeed they consume the services, et cetera, et cetera, Maybe they will get their money back. It will cost them a lot of money. But if they cross a certain threshold of transaction, which is currently 1%, if 1% of your transaction are being charged back, you are at risk of your account to be terminated by Visa and MasterCard. And to prevent this, high risk companies, they employ large teams of people who review the transaction before they approve them. They reject transaction, they have transactions, they have a lot of false positives. They employ AI solutions. It has a cost both in operating these solutions and in rejected transaction that could have materialized into real sales and no chargebacks. And one of the core features of blockchain is that transactions are final and immutable. So as our system combines the benefits of credit cards and blockchain, this is one of the advantages that we bring to high risk companies such as adult entertainment companies.

What about the graffiti on the walls? I've noticed because like I said, graffiti graffiti normally is outside of buildings, not inside them.

Yeah, but we wanted to create a young and relaxed and invigorating atmosphere, so we hired a graffiti artist to do it. You can see it throughout the entire office, also in some of the rooms. This artist's father is a very talented carpenter and he did all the customized desks that you see here. So.

So it's like a family.

Yeah, family of artists. Another reason is that since it's considered to be high risk, the credit card companies, they charge a lot of money as processing fees. It can get up to, at some settings can get up to 15%, which is crazy. And we decided, since we want the high risk companies to use our solution, we decided that our protocol will have no transaction fixed, so it's free for use. The only fee that they have to pay is the Ethereum network gas processing fee. But they don't pay us anything per transaction. So for these companies, they're saving a lot of money.

How do you guys plan to deal with the volatility of cryptocurrencies?

Yes, that's a very good question. One of the first feedback that we got from businesses is that they wouldn't want to integrate with our system because of the volatility, the expected volatility of our token. Our token is the facilitator of the entire system. Our token is the sole means of value transfer over the protocol. And if it fluctuates, then they have a risk here. So we solve this by integrating with a fiat settlement layer which allows the merchant to lock the rate of the PMA token at the moment of the transaction. So if the merchant nominates the price, let's say $10 in fiat at the moment of the transaction, this rate is locked. We present this rate to the customer, they know that they now they have to pay, let's say it's a one to one rate. Now they have to pay 10PMA tokens and at the same moment the merchant, we guarantee the $10 for the merchant and the 10PMA token for the customer. And at the end of the week or the months, according to the setting, the merchant will send the PMA tokens to the fiat settlement layer and will receive their funds as fiat directly to their bank account. And this also saves them the hassle associated with crypto exchanges. Open opening account liquidation, liquidity problems. So it's zero volatility and 100% liquidity.

And what's the story behind Puma Pay? Why Pumas?

It's a cool and catchy name. At the beginning we thought of LionPay, but PumaPay, it's more catchy. And then when you say the PUMA Pay pull payment protocol sounds lovely.

Puma pay raised $117 million in their ICO. And the company's technology seems to have no limits for the possibilities it can open up for disrupting the entire payment system.

Cointelegraph, like subscribe and hodl.

Sa.