According to Flyfish founder Michael Zetser, the fintech world needs a sweeping revolution, primarily to ensure that the hundreds of millions of people who remained cut out of financial services can access them, and to spare businesses the need to use different vendors for each of the services they need.
Flyfish offers a unique marketplace concept to make, most if not all, financial services more accessible and convenient for everyone. In other words, you do not need to search for a financial service provider, instead, you open a Flyfish account, and Flyfish seamlessly provides you with the solution.
Flyfish, through its platform, has collaborated with various financial institutions and other financial service providers from around the world, enabling Flyfish to offer tailored solutions based on each client requirements.
"For every financial need, we find a solution"
Established at the beginning of last year, Flyfish aims to be the world's biggest marketplace for financial services, the intersection where all fintech meets.
"Using the BaaS model we connect multiple services to one single platform," Zetser said, referring to the protocol of 'Banking as a Service.' This single platform binds all the services together to work in harmony."
By acting as a bridge, connecting numerous fintech providers, Flyfish is able to consolidates all their financial services into a single, accessible product, catering to the diverse needs of essentially any client.
When a new customer opens his Flyfish account, Flyfish seamlessly connects it to all the needed services with a single, one time, onboarding.
Flyfish currently partners with about a dozen international providers, offering a wide range of services, including debit cards, IBAN accounts, crypto-exchange, payroll, and several payment methods.
As a one-stop shop for financial services, Flyfish aims to help both individual and corporate clients.
As far as individual clients are concerned, the startup strives to offers solutions also for those who are excluded from traditional banking services.
"When we talk about under-banking, we may instantly think of developing countries like some African nations, but people are usually very surprised to learn that even in the UK, about 14% of the adult population doesn't have access to a bank account and solely rely on cash transactions."
"Sometimes these people lack traditional education; sometimes they are somewhat off the grid, and earlier in their lives they did not need a bank account, and today, traditional banks do not accept them. This lack of access to banking services is a big challenge in both developing countries and the developed world."
According to Zetser, the way Flyfish is built allows it to work with the full spectrum of clients because it can match each of them with the right financial institutions.
"For every financial need, we find a solution" he said.
This also includes the needs of corporate clients.
"Let's think of a company with offices in Israel, Germany, and Cyprus" he said. This company will need to pay salaries in three different countries. It will also need to file and pay for taxes and other local authorities payments, and thus likely open and manage a local bank accounts in each country, possibly requesting a debit card from each. The company will need to go through the onboarding process with each institution it would like to work with, and will need to manage each account and access it separately. This is not efficient, time-consuming, and makes it more difficult than needed to keep track of the finances in each account"
With Flyfish, everything becomes easier.
"The company can enjoy the same services with one individual Flyfish account; we are the ones taking care of connecting to each financial service required," Zetser said.
At the moment, the Flyfish is focusing on the European market.
"We are working with the European Electronic Money Institutions (EMI’s), and we are already in the process of signing partnerships with several international vendors which will soon allow us to extend our reach to Australia, the US, and Asia," Zetser notes. "Additionally we are starting to accept clients outside of the European jurisdiction."
One of Flyfish's current clients is a well-established e-commerce company with offices in several countries across Europe and beyond.
"Before working with Flyfish, they had to manage accounts in at least four different banks, with all the resources that this entails" Zetser explained. "Now they enjoy a single point of access to all of them, they receive consolidated reports and can operate the bank accounts simultaneously from a single dashboard."
Another advantage of bringing a multitude of services to a unified platform is that customers often realize that there are additional financial products they could benefit from.
"For example, this e-commerce company decided to offer several of their employees debit cards," Zetser said. "They were not even aware of the need beforehand. When a company comes to Flyfish, we study their financial needs and find the right solutions for them."
Flyfish has been crucial in transforming the financial services experience for its customers, corporate and individual.
"There’s the story of a person in the UK who had never had a bank account and for whom the ability to start making and receiving electronic banking payments was life-changing," Zetser shared.
"There are about 1.4 billion people worldwide who do not have access to banking services," he added. "For us, access to banking is considered a basic human right, and one of our company's goals is to make this vision come true."
Zetser says that looking at the future, Flyfish aims to revolutionize fintech.
"In our vision, individuals or companies will not need to approach specific providers for financial services but rather rely on platforms like Flyfish for providing all the pieces they needs to complete their financial puzzle," he concluded.