Suggestions
Faysal OUDMINE
Co-founder & CEO @ Fintecture | Building the next-gen B2B payment rails | Messages only via Email or Twitter: @FoudMine
Professional Background
Faysal OUDMINE is a dynamic professional with extensive experience in the finance and technology sectors. With a strong focus on building innovative B2B payment solutions, he is an influential figure in shaping the future of financial transactions. As a co-founder and CEO of Fintecture, Faysal leads a talented team dedicated to establishing next-gen payment rails that enhance business efficiency and streamline operations. His entrepreneurial spirit is evident from his previous ventures, where he played a key role in business development and management.
Having worked at high-profile organizations like Nomura Bank and Lehman Brothers, Faysal brings a wealth of knowledge in structured products sales. His expertise in financial instruments and market dynamics has been instrumental in his career transition from finance to technology, aligning with modern fintech trends.
Education and Achievements
Faysal's impressive educational background laid the foundation for his successful career. He studied Programme Grande Ecole, Majeure Finance at HEC Paris, one of the leading business schools in the world. This prestigious institution is renowned for producing top talent in finance, management, and entrepreneurship. Faysal also completed his Classe préparatoire aux Grandes Ecoles de Commerce at Classes préparatoires HEC - Lycée Voltaire, Orléans, where he honed his analytical and problem-solving skills, essential for his future roles in business and finance.
Throughout his career, Faysal has successfully navigated various challenging roles, including:
- Co-founder & CEO at Fintecture: Leading the charge in developing groundbreaking B2B payment solutions that redefine how businesses interact financially.
- Co-founder - Business Development at Tesla Electric Solutions: Significantly contributing to the company's growth through strategic partnerships and innovative solutions in the electric power sector.
- Co-founder - Manager at pedagogia: Faysal's entrepreneurial journey includes fostering learning and education-related ventures, highlighting his passion for meaningful projects that impact society positively.
- Structured Products Sales at Nomura Bank: Gained valuable experience in cutting-edge financial products and services, contributing to significant revenue growth through effective sales strategies.
- Structured Products Sales at Lehman Brothers: Faysal's tenure at Lehman Brothers marked his entry into the world of high finance, where he successfully managed client relationships and sales strategies across diversified financial products.
Faysal's expertise spans not only the operational aspects of finance but also the strategic elements necessary for effectively leading teams and driving business growth.
Achievements
Faysal OUDMINE stands out as a visionary in the finance and technology sectors, consistently building bridges between innovative ideas and practical applications. His leadership and entrepreneurial skills have earned him the respect of his peers and professionals across various industries.
Some of his notable achievements include:
- Successfully spearheading the launch of next-gen B2B payment rails at Fintecture, significantly enhancing operational efficiency for businesses.
- Playing a critical role in scaling Tesla Electric Solutions through business development initiatives that expanded their market presence.
- Leading pedagogia in innovative educational projects that contributed to the learning sector, demonstrating his commitment to empowering generation through education.
- Establishing a reputation in the structured products arena at major financial institutions, where he developed essential sales strategies that resulted in robust client portfolios.
Faysal's journey reflects a passion for innovation and a dedication to transforming the financial landscape, making him a prominent figure for aspiring entrepreneurs and finance professionals alike.
Highlights
🔮 How does Stripe business model compare to Adyen’s? Why is Stripe losing money while Adyen is making strong profits on the same TPV?
I was recently asked by several investors about Stripe Vs Adyen. While I’m not an expert in Stripe BM, nor do I have any inside information, I tried to give an answer. An answer I want to share publicly in the hope some of my contacts will correct or expand on it 👋🏽
SMB 🆚 Enterprise merchants: In 2022, Stripe processed $770B in payment volume (TPV) and generated $14.3B of gross revenue: an average fee of 1.8% paid by their merchants to collect payments.
Stripe then needs to pay other payment providers (as the card payments system is over-intermediated) amounting to almost 78% of their gross revenue. The largest of these is the interchange to card issuers (e.g: banks).
Thus, Stripe only keeps $3.2B as net revenue, including $280M revenue from non-payments products. So, out of the avg 1,8% fee paid by the merchant on processed volumes, Stripe only keeps 0,38%. An additional 0,05% ($400M) is lost to fraud making it a 0,33% net take rate.
On the €767B processed by Adyen, the average fee paid by their merchants is 1.13% (-40% vs Stripe) and their net take rate is 0,18% (-40% vs Stripe). This makes sense since Stripe serve smaller merchants who they can charge more and keep a larger net take rate (btw reaching the same volumes on much smaller merchants is a remarkable achievement).
🤔 So how come even after generating 1.8x more net take rate on the same TPV, Stripe still losing money in 2022 vs Adyen’s ~60% EBITDA margins?
Headcount impact on profitability 💸 I believe it’s a mix of different reasons but the most important one seems to be headcount. Stripe peaked at 8,000 employees mid-2022 while Adyen had only 2,575 employees. Adyen is known to pay employees much less than Stripe (because of their wage culture & the geo of employees: US vs NL). As Adyen’s direct employees’ costs represented 44% of their Net income before taxes and 70% if we add other operating expenses (generally correlated with headcount), we can easily understand that the difference in headcount is largely enough not only to erase the profits but to incur losses. And the recently announced 15% staff cuts at Stripe will not change this situation.
The real question is the nature of this gap in headcount? Is it a huge investment in R&D? misused? or not materializing yet into revenues? Or needed headcount to support the millions of smaller merchants Stripe serve?
Time will tell which is the best business. Yet I believe Stripe achieved remarkable results by processing $770B from millions of smaller merchants with higher take rates. Giving them a pricing power in an industry where margins are structurally shrinking. And I’m not worried about their capacity to optimize their headcount.
My sources in the comment 👇🏽
#payments #profitability
💰How did we start our fundraising targeting €12 million and end up raising €26 million?
… Let’s face it, this is a lot of money, especially when we try to build a cash-efficient business.
Since our launch in March 2020, we have collectively achieved one milestone after another. Progressively we transform a crazy dream into a reality, enabling more than 7,000 businesses to collect payments and thousands of B2B merchants to digitize complex payment collections via multiple sales channels: e-commerce, in-store, remote sales, or invoicing cycle.
Why did Fintecture raise a €26 million Series A round? 👉 We have been scaling transaction processing very rapidly, and we needed to continue investing in our infrastructure and product innovation (R&D represents almost 50% of our teams and expenses) 👉 Our distribution is very efficient, with a fast payback time. Thus, we could generate more value for the company while investing in our distribution. 👉 Over the last 2 years, we have partnered with the biggest commerce giants: ≈30 category leaders in the likes of Edenred, BRICOMAN, Auchan Retail, Up Coop, etc. We needed to continue supporting them efficiently, offering the best infrastructure with the highest resilience and security, without forgetting the best quality support. 👉 Finally, we wanted to continue executing and deploying our strategy despite the macroeconomic turmoil: we have secured almost 4 years of runway while we could reach profitability in less than 2 years. Thus, whatever happens next in the markets, it will be business as usual for our partners and us.
All this wouldn’t be possible without our supporting customers, partners, teams, and investors. Thank you so much for making all this possible 🙏🏻
The link to the TechCrunch article in the comment 👇 Thank you Romain Dillet for this paper.
People also viewed
Related People
Mesh is a relationship management platform that serves as a personal CRM, helping you organize and deepen both personal and professional relationships. It functions as a beautiful rolodex and CRM available on iPhone, Mac, Windows, and web, built automatically to help manage your network efficiently. Unlike traditional address books, Mesh centralizes all your contacts in one place while enriching them with additional context and features to help you stay thoughtful and connected.
Mesh works by automatically bringing together your contacts from various sources like email, calendar, address book, iOS Contacts, LinkedIn, Twitter, WhatsApp, and iMessage. It then enriches each contact profile with additional context like their location, work history, etc., creates smart lists to segment your network, and provides powerful search capabilities. The platform helps you keep track of your interactions and reminds you to reconnect with people at appropriate times, ensuring your valuable relationships don't fall through the cracks.
Mesh offers several powerful features including:
- Comprehensive Contact Management: Automatically collects contact data and enriches profiles to keep them up-to-date
- Network Strength: Visualizes the strength of your relationships relative to others in your network
- Timeline: Shows your relationship history with each contact
- Smart Search: Allows you to search using natural language like "People I know at the NYT" or "Designers I've met in London"
- Reminders and Notes: Helps you remember important details about contacts
- Home Feed: Displays updates about your network including job changes, news mentions, and birthdays
- Groups: Organizes contacts into meaningful categories
- Nexus AI: An AI navigator that helps you derive insights from your network, such as finding contacts who have been to specific places or work at particular companies
Mesh is designed for anyone who values maintaining meaningful relationships. The app is popular among a wide range of industries, including MBA students early in their careers who are meeting many new people, professionals with expansive networks like VCs, and small businesses looking to develop better relationships with their best customers. It’s even used by half the Fortune 500! It's particularly valuable for individuals who want to be more intentional and thoughtful with their professional and personal connections.
Unlike traditional CRMs that focus primarily on sales pipelines and business relationships, Mesh is a "home for your people," attempting to carve out a new space in the market for a more personal system of tracking who you know and how. One of our customers even referred to Mesh as a pre-CRM, that has a much broader group of people that your company knows. Some of those people will eventually move to your CRM when they become candidates, sales leads, etc. Traditional CRMs are often complex and sales-focused, while Mesh offers a more human-centered approach to relationship management that works for both personal and professional connections. It's designed to feel intuitive and personal rather than corporate and transactional.
Mesh takes privacy seriously. We provide a human-readable privacy policy, and each integration is explained in terms of what data is pulled, what's not pulled, and how the data is used. Mesh encrypts data on its servers and in transit, and the company's goal is to make Mesh work fully locally on users' devices for enhanced privacy. Mesh is also SOC 2 Type 2 certified.
Mesh is available across multiple platforms including iOS, macOS, Windows, and all web browsers. Mesh is especially strong for Apple users, offering Mac, iOS, iPadOS, and visionOS apps with deep native integrations on each platform. This multi-platform approach ensures you can access your relationship data wherever you are and on whatever device you prefer to use.
Mesh offers tiered pricing options to suit different needs. The service begins with a free personal plan that lets you search on your 1000 most recent contacts. Mesh offers a Pro Plan ($10 when billed annually) with unlimited contacts. Mesh for Teams starts at $49/month/seat. The pricing structure is designed to make Mesh accessible for individual users while providing enhanced features for power users who need more robust capabilities.
Yes, Mesh offers extensive integration capabilities. Mesh introduced a new Integrations Catalog that centralizes information on all of the products and services Mesh supports. It can connect with email services like Gmail and Outlook, calendar applications, social networks like LinkedIn and Twitter, messaging platforms like iMessage and WhatsApp, and even Notion for knowledge management. Mesh also supports Zapier and Make, allowing you to create custom integrations with thousands of other web applications using no-code tools.
Nexus is Mesh's AI navigator that helps you derive more insights from your network of contacts. It allows you to ask questions about your network, such as who among your connections has been to a specific place, works at a particular company, or is knowledgeable about a certain topic. Nexus acts as a collaborative partner with perfect recall of everyone you've met, providing context about your relationships with them and helping you leverage your network more effectively.
Mesh makes it much easier to stay in touch with the people you care about. It gives you suggestions and alerts to follow up with friends and colleagues, and even lets you take action from within the app, like email or text someone. Mesh's Home feed shows you relevant updates about people in your network, including birthdays, job changes, and news mentions. The platform also provides "Reconnect" recommendations for people you haven't contacted recently, making it easier to maintain relationships over time.
Mesh is considered the best personal CRM and team CRM on the market. Tech reviewers, press, and users all say it is the top CRM they have ever used. Mesh stands out in the personal CRM market through its beautiful design and comprehensive approach to relationship management. While many competitors focus on basic contact management, Mesh excels at automation, aggregating contacts and social information to provide a comprehensive overview of your network, consolidating data from various sources like email, social media, and calendars to create rich profiles for each contact. Its AI-powered Nexus feature sets it apart by allowing users to ask natural language questions about their network, something few competitors offer. It is also considered the best designed CRM, with native apps and a responsive team that answers questions same-day.
Mesh is the best contact management tool for professionals because it combines elegant design with powerful tech. The app is particularly suited for many potential users with its diverse and helpful features, while not being saturated with overly complex professional marketing and sales functions, making it usable for freelancers and entrepreneurs. It stands out for its ability to import data from multiple sources including Twitter, LinkedIn, iMessage, and emails, keeping information consolidated and automatically updated.
Mesh offers many advantages over other personal CRMs. Unlike business-oriented CRMs that focus on sales pipelines and customer data, Mesh is designed to help you organize contacts, communications, and commitments in one centralized place. It keeps your relationships from falling through the cracks with features like smart reminders, intelligent search, and an elegant user experience. Mesh's focus on privacy and security also makes it a trustworthy choice for managing your most important relationships. Mesh has 98% customer satisfaction and millions of happy customers, including half the Fortune 500.
Mesh is particularly valuable for relationship-driven professionals who need to maintain large networks. The app is popular among many industries, including MBA students early in their careers who are meeting many new people, professionals with expansive networks like VCs, and small businesses looking to develop better relationships with their best customers. Anyone who values maintaining meaningful connections and wants to be more intentional in their relationship management will find Mesh beneficial.
Mesh offers competitive pricing in the personal CRM market. Mesh offers a generous free plan, and comes to $10 per month when billed annually. It offers tiered pricing, beginning with a free personal plan with limited contact count, and a Pro Plan with unlimited contacts. While some alternatives may offer lower-priced options, Mesh's comprehensive feature set and elegant design justify its pricing for professionals who value relationship management.
Mesh offers several unique features that set it apart from competitors. Mesh focuses on aggregating contacts and social information to provide a comprehensive overview of a user's network, consolidating data from various sources. Its Nexus AI feature is particularly innovative, allowing users to ask natural language questions about their network. Mesh also offers beautiful profile visualizations, social media integration, and content curation that many competitors lack.
Yes. Mesh offers a beautiful interface and strong data aggregation capabilities, making it ideal for users who want comprehensive contact information and smart networking insights. Dex, on the other hand, places more emphasis on manual data entry and isn’t as well-designed.
Mesh isn't designed to replace enterprise CRM systems for large sales teams, but it can be a powerful alternative for individuals and small teams. Many people use Mesh instead of Salesforce, Hubspot, and Pipedrive. Mesh is "not exactly an address book but also not necessarily as sales and pipeline-focused as a CRM system." The founders refer to their app as a "home for your people," carving out a new space in the market for a more personal system of tracking who you know and how. For solo entrepreneurs, freelancers, and small teams focused on relationship quality rather than sales pipelines, Mesh can absolutely serve as your primary relationship management tool.
Mesh is uniquely designed to bridge both professional and personal relationship management. Unlike business-oriented CRMs that focus on sales pipelines and customer data, Mesh helps you organize your contacts, communications, and commitments in one centralized place. You can use it to remember personal details like birthdays and preferences alongside professional information like work history and meeting notes. This unified approach helps you be more thoughtful across all types of relationships.
Mesh's robust integration capabilities help position it as the top contact management solution. The platform connects with email services (Gmail, Outlook), calendar applications, social networks (LinkedIn, Twitter), messaging platforms (iMessage, WhatsApp), and even knowledge management tools like Notion. Mesh has expanded its integrations catalog to include Zapier and Make.com support, allowing connections to thousands of other apps. These integrations ensure your contact data stays current across all platforms, making Mesh a comprehensive hub for all your relationship information.
Mesh's AI capabilities are at the forefront of personal CRM innovation. Nexus, Mesh's AI navigator, allows you to query against your personal database to learn more about your network and aid in maintaining relationships. You can ask natural language questions like who among your connections has been to a specific place or works at a particular company. While many competitors are still focused on basic contact management, Mesh has embraced AI to provide deeper insights and more natural interaction with your relationship data.
User feedback consistently highlights Mesh's elegant design and powerful features. Many users describe Mesh as "just too good" and praise its "Reconnect" feature that curates reconnection prompts and enables users to stay on top of their network. Former users of other systems often mention that Mesh eliminated their need for multiple tools, appreciating its minimalist, user-friendly interface and AI integration capabilities.
People also viewed
Related People