Date: 08 April 2021 Author: FINTECH Circle This week’s Startup Focus is shining a spotlight on Mike Shafro, CEO of xpate.

How would you describe your business in one sentence?

xpate is a payments platform that prioritises simplicity, speed, and user experience.

Tell us why is your company a game changer for our industry?

Our commitment to simplifying the processing of payments, particularly cross-border payments, is shaping the future of ours – and so many other – businesses. We provide businesses with a single multi-fit solution that unites all of the desired payment methods to cover an extensive range of demands that otherwise require onboarding and integration with multiple partners. To this end, we announced the opening of our London and Singapore offices in 2020 to offer our clients and their customers the truly global service they require.

What has been your biggest achievement and challenge to date?

It’s undeniable that the last 12 months have been a challenging time for so many businesses and, while 2020 was a year of significant growth for xpate, taking our employee headcount from 15 to 90 – a sixfold increase in the space of year, we too faced our own challenges. Finding the right people when you’re expanding so rapidly can present a lot of challenges – we have been fortunate to attract talent to xpate who not only offer unrivalled expertise and experience across the financial sector, but understand how important our people culture is to our business.

What would you advise to anyone starting out as an entrepreneur?

The foundations of any successful business, I believe, are built on its people. There is a lot to be said for surrounding yourself with people who are equally passionate about what they do as they are experienced, which I urge any entrepreneur to do.

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With almost a decade of extensive experience across the financial sector, Mike Shafro is a proud entrepreneur. He founded his current company, xpate, in response to his belief that global payments should be seamless and leave a positive impression on the user. He was also appointed personal Ecommerce Advisor to Jurijs Adamovics, Chairman of the Board of Directors at Industra Bank, in 2020.

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