Fintech Impact

In this 106th episode of Fintech Impact, Jason Pereira, award-winning financial planner, university lecturer, writer, and host welcomes Filipe Castro, co-founder and CIO of Utrust, to talk about Utrust’s growth strategy, how blockchain payment technology competes with credit cards and other existing forms of payment, the future of payment tech, and more.

Episode Highlights:

• 00:55: – Utrust is a platform that enables e-commerce merchants to accept various forms of cryptocurrency as payment.
• 01:24: – Filipe met his co-founders online in 2010 in cryptocurrency and blockchain forums.
• 03:30: – On the merchant’s side, they don’t have to worry about the accounting or conversion of cryptocurrency, because Utrust handles all of that automatically on the back end and the merchant simply receives their US Dollars or Euros or whichever currency they operate under.
• 04:28: – For the user, you select Utrust as your payment method, which takes you to the Utrust website and allows you to select and set up your crypto wallet with a QR code.
• 06:00: – Utrust currently has ten vendors using the platform because they had to select the optimal vendors to start the platform with in order to optimize the experience and collect the data needed to scale up effectively.
• 07:30: – Utrust has competitors, but most of the vendors that were interested in using Utrust approached them, not the other way around, partly because it’s free to integrate.
• 09:23: – Filipe believes Utrust is the best solution because it has the strongest community support and a seamless integration, which is crucial for a blockchain technology.
• 10:17: – Transaction fees are competitive with regular credit cards, at only 1%.
• 11:30: – Currency conversion happens almost instantaneously to protect both the merchant and the consumer, so the merchant gets the price they listed and the consumer isn’t overcharged due to fluctuating conversion.
• 13:04: – Utrust is compatible with any wallet that supports scanning a QR code.
• 14:38: – Having a diverse range of merchants on board with Utrust allows them to collect more accurate metrics to perfect the platform more quickly.
• 19:20: – For the user, there is almost immediate settlement of payment, and for the merchant you get a notification of incoming payment and the settlement depends on the cryptocurrency protocol.
• 22:37: – Filipe is paying attention to growing competition, but acknowledges that we are still in the building phase of this space where major players haven’t entered crypto yet.
• 27:30: – If Filipe could change anything, it would be for all the communities in blockchain to simply get along better and coexist better.
• 28:53: – The biggest challenge has been establishing a company culture and building a team as a startup.
• 29:45: – Filipe is excited by the way Utrust is changing the future of payments to empower consumers and merchants.

3 Key Points

1. Utrust gives online vendors more payment options to be more competitive.
2. Collecting metrics from a deliberately crafted pool of users will enable you to develop and scale your business more quickly.
3. The future of payments is a seamless digital experience.

Tweetable Quotes:

• “We always want to protect the merchant, just to make sure that whatever the quoted price that they put in their system, they’re going to get that minus 1%, always.” –Filipe Castro
• “We’re trying to get metrics to perfect the system. The best way to get different metrics is to integrate with different types of businesses that have different users, have different patterns of usage, sell different types of goods, have different frequencies.” –Filipe Castro

Resources Mentioned:

• Website – Jason Pereira’s Website
• Facebook – Jason Pereira’s Facebook
• LinkedIn – Jason Pereira’s LinkedIn
• FintechImpact.co – Website for Fintech Impact
• Utrust website
• Utrust Twitter
• Filipe Castro Twitter

Full Transcript