In this episode of the Connector Podcast, host Koen Vanderhoydonk interviews Robert, a representative of Belgian payment provider Paynovate. Robert explains that Paynovate holds an EMI licence from the National Bank of Belgium and offers a full suite of electronic payment services—including card issuing and acquiring, POS terminals, e‑commerce processing, IBAN accounts, wire transfers, direct debits, open‑banking APIs and, soon, stable‑coin support. The company differentiates itself by providing this end‑to‑end stack to “everyone”, especially high‑risk or niche industries that traditional banks often reject. To manage the associated compliance burden, Paynovate has built internal reg‑tech processes with multi‑layered (four‑eyes, six‑eyes, eight‑eyes) checks and partners for identity verification, sanctions screening, and PEP detection, while retaining orchestration in‑house. Product‑wise, Paynovate has moved from a custom‑development model to two packaged solutions: a payment‑terminal offering (holding ~15 % of the Belgian market) and the Exospend platform, originally an expense‑management tool for SMEs that now also provides white‑label IBAN‑and‑card‑as‑a‑service (BaaS) capabilities. The company stresses productisation to reduce complexity and speed deployment. Strategically, Robert stresses that technology is only part of the value proposition; flexibility, compliance expertise, and rapid adaptation to customer needs are core differentiators. He notes that profitability and product‑market fit matter more than the sheer number of EMI licences in Belgium. Looking ahead, Paynovate plans to launch stable‑coin services and focus on international expansion into the Middle East, Southeast Asia, and North America rather than adding new products domestically.
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Welcome to the Connector Podcast, an ongoing conversation connecting fintechs, banks, and regulators worldwide. Join CEO and founder Koen Vanderhoydonk as you learn more about the latest available trends and solutions in the markets.
Welcome to another podcast from Belgian fintech, from the Connector together with one of our very prominent companies here in Belgium, Paynovate, represented by Robert. Robert, can you explain us who you are and what your company does?
Hello, Koen. Happy to be here. Likewise. So Paynovate is a Belgian payment provider. We have an EMI license provided by the National Bank of Belgium. And we kind of do it all. We provide the full scope of electronic payment processing. We do card issuing, card acquiring, POS terminals, e-commerce, IBAN accounts, wire transfers, direct debits, and even, it's been granted to us 2 weeks ago by the National Bank.
Congratulations.
Open banking.
Nice.
So I think that besides cash, And even for cash, we have partners. But besides cash, we do it all.
I think that on its own is a very special proposition, isn't it?
It's very different from our competition. It's closer to what the big banks could be providing because big banks also provide it all. Maybe not open banking, but okay, usually. And the second difference is that we can provide that to Everyone.
What does that mean?
Well, everyone means, of course, everyone, but more exactly, it means that even people having specific needs or people coming from sectors, industries that do not benefit from the enthusiasm from the traditional financial players can come to us.
So you basically open up shop, but how does that comply with compliance?
Well, it requires, of course, depending on the customer and on the industry of the customer, a much tougher compliance work, which is exactly what we do. So we prefer to say yes and tell the customer that it might cost more, But that we can be able to do it first and then happy to welcome the customer as a customer instead of just saying no because it's easier. And for this, we implemented well procedures that depend on the risk level of the customer, of the industry. It could be a four eyes, six eyes, eight eyes principle. Sometimes we ask another. third party to make an additional compliance check or 2 third parties to make additional compliance checks. Sometimes it's a very big process, but in the end, it allows us to safely accept customers that would have been rejected otherwise.
And is it just a matter about you accepting it and somebody else doesn't, or is there also a timing aspect as well?
It depends on the customer case. We are active all over Europe, which means that it could depend on the country, it could depend on the customer, the industry, the business case, size, volume, risk. That's a little bit more what makes the difference between us and the competition is we are flexible. We can adapt to each specific business case.
Well, you earlier said that it's pretty unique that you offer a full gala of solutions. Would you mind to highlight maybe a couple solutions that you think or that you position as very special in the market?
We tried to be both able to provide it all while at the same time trying to be as productized as possible, which means not to build specific custom solutions or do development work every time we welcome a new customer. And that was a bit complex to achieve, and we struggled a bit for several years. Today, I think that we found the right combination, We work mostly with, I would say, 2 packaged products. One is payment terminals. We have like 15% market share in Belgium now and we're expanding abroad.
Which is very significant.
It is. Together with e-commerce processing capabilities. And then we have this new platform that we developed. It's called Exospend. And Exospend was initially seen as a corporate expense management platform, allowing companies to have an IBAN account and cards for employees and vehicles and be able to really manage expenses.
Mm-hmm.
It was designed with the SME in mind, and more exactly, the small enterprise even compared to the medium enterprise. And then we decided to expand that product to make it available also without the expense management capabilities. So just an IBAN account and cards. And now we can also provide that as a white label solution for people who would like to have their own kind of mini bank to serve a specific type of customers they want to focus on. And with that product, we are able to fulfill not all, but most use cases we are presented with. And then we can do also the separate components. We can issue cards, we can provide IBAN accounts, a BaaS platform, banking as a service.
Mm-hmm.
We can provide e-commerce acquiring capabilities. the open banking and so on. But that is usually only for larger projects.
It's maybe a very strange question, but does it also come with complexity, the fact that you have such a vast variety of solutions?
Of course. It's very complex to manage. And that's why for us it was very important to not to have too many custom solutions for smaller projects and to have something which is fully debugged, normal for us, easy to deploy because it's just a product that it's ready and we have a few parameters and then it's ready. And that's much easier.
And do you see, because you mentioned that it took you 2 years to come where you are today, do you see then technology as your largest differentiator for you as a company?
Not only technology.
I'm happy to hear that.
Not only technology. Well, I mean, of course we are service providers, so somehow technology is always involved. But if we think about technology as the payment technology. Payment technology is part of our value-added proposition, but a big part of our proposition relies more on what we talked about, like compliance, flexibility for onboarding customers, being able to accept and welcome different use cases from different industries. And this is not directly related to payment processing. It's more KYB processes, it's more compliance checks, it's more people identification, this kind of stuff.
That brings you more into the regtech side of things.
In some way, yes, definitely.
And if you talk about regtech, would you then say this is something you also develop yourself, or is this where partners come in? And how do you look in more in general in terms of the partner landscape that you Work with?
As you understood, this is what we consider being part of our core business because that's a key component of our value proposition. So of course, for a key component, it's something that we developed internally.
And okay, I understand. But how does it work? Do you have other collaborative partners that you work with?
Of course, a lot of them. We have partners to verify, for example, identity cards to tell us, okay, this looks like a legitimate card, or no, that's fake. No, that's just one example. We have service providers for sanctions checks or for just to spot people politically exposed. And we have many, many, many other partners.
But it's then the orchestration that stays with you.
Definitely. And the key components like the onboarding process, to be able to correctly verify customers and as well as the payment processing.
Well, to maybe move a bit away from you as a company, I'd like to go into the helicopter together because I know you have quite good views on what's happening in the future. So if you look at Europe, there's many activity around PSP, e-money licenses. So what do you see is the future of this particular license?
For an EMI or payment institution license, as for any other kind of company, you must be profitable. It means that you must be able to generate added value and have a good product-market fit. The problem is that many people start and they think that, oh, it will happen automagically. But in the end, you must still be extremely flexible, reactive, trying to understand your market or your customers' needs better than the competition and being able to adapt to it. For me, it hasn't that much relationship with the number of licenses or anything like that. In Belgium, there isn't so many new licenses. I think Belgian National Bank, they think that they have enough and there is enough in the market to provide solutions and services to everyone. For us, that's not the main issue. Our main issue is to better understand our customers.
I really get it because that's probably the reason why you said earlier that your back office is nimble, is fast, is agile, and you sort of created a platform that can anticipate faster than your competition to what are the needs. Is that a good summary?
It's a way to describe it, yes. And we try to pay attention to how we developed platforms because we know that we will have to adapt, but we don't know how. So it was important to have something that we can modify, Quickly enough to be able to respond on time to new market opportunities or to new demands from our customers.
So we're almost at the end. Time flies. What is it that we can expect from Paynovate in the next 5 years?
For Paynovate today, as I explained, today we can provide it all because I forgot, As well, stablecoin. We know we choose stablecoins. We will start soon. It's ready technically. So for us, the future would probably lie more in international expansion than in product expansion here because we do it all already. Yes, that's what we see. Probably to the Middle East, Southeast Asia, and North America. as our first target markets to expand abroad.
Nice. Robert, I wish you all the best with this expansion. Thank you very much for your insights, and thank you very much also to the audience. Stay tuned for more news from the fintech industry. Thank you.
Thank you very much, Koen.
You're welcome.
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