The future of payments can be Brite

When we pay with a “card,” wherever we are in the world, while traveling for business or pleasure, we need to use tens of filters and middlemen without knowing it. Why? because there is no cheap, secure, and fast enough network to link my bank to your bank.

That’s why banks need credit card operators, who in turn thrive in a complex global financial system where rents and inefficiencies create space for financial intermediaries. Enter FinTech, which some twenty years ago wasn’t even a word. Can technology help us commoditize money and payments while protecting merchants and consumers, plus their banks? Yes, as you read, our banks, mine and yours, will be there for a long while, as blockchain and crypto bro-s are still a niche.

This is why we talk to Lena Hackelöer, the Founder and CEO of Brite Payments, which is a start-up based in Sweden, which closed a US $60 Mill round in 2023 and wants to solve many of the inefficiencies in payments. This is our exchange.

Tell us a bit about you and your journey.

I was born and raised in Germany, but have lived across Europe until Klarna came into my life. I relocated to Sweden around 2010. With Klarna, the world known “Buy Now Pay Later” (BNPL) ecosystem, I built their B2B marketing and worked on the go-to-market strategy across Europe. BNPL became a new category, thanks to Klarna. That shaped my payments career, or my FinTech career. That experience gave me the confidence to step up. I became the CEO of another payment system, a stock listed company. Then, it was time for me to do my own thing. Brite is the answer to instant, account to account payments. It’s a new category, if you will. It’s a sovereign European payment infrastructure that we have built from scratch, now active in 27 markets.

Tell me a bit more about Brite, then. Who benefits from it?

Global payments, in a nutshell, run on US rails. What we have done at Brite is to create our own, EU sovereign – so to speak, payment network and system. It’s a proprietary tech infrastructure. The idea of instant, bank account to bank account, efficient and secure payments exist in places like Brazil or India, for example. We want to offer an EU alternative to digital payments, via our network, with tangible benefits for merchants and consumers. Merchants get from us lower costs, no fraud risks, no charge back headaches, with higher predictability and safety in handling digital payments. Consumers get a one-click and immediate way to pay (no need to leave the digital shop you are visiting). All of that at the speed of light (almost). Businesses can also make payouts with Brite, bypassing the usual time lags of wire transfers across markets.

What is the future of payments, in your opinion?

We need more efficient payment alternatives to credit cards for sure. We want to be the leading alternative. This needs to happen via a system that is independent from legacy financial infrastructure. Future payments must be more convenient. One area where we are working is our data solutions. Consumers who opt to share their information allow us to give actionable insight to players in the financial system, for better and more customized service or for stronger innovation in the space.

Lena Hackelöer is a trailblazer and a successful CEO. She deserves credit – no pun intended – for what she is doing. The space needs disruption, and we can’t keep paying fat fees to credit card operators. Not in the era of AI, VR, AR, Blockchain, etc… Merchants, especially, need every dollar back, as retail is always under pressure. To be seen whether consumers will want to give up the 3% cash-back of Apple Pay or the benefit of paying in pieces, like BNPL allows them to do, just as an example. Stablecoins, boosted by the Genius Act in the US, are accessible even without a bank account (just your internet connection), catering more to the people sitting at the margin of the empire (even in Europe). Brite is a valid project and a wakeup call to credit card operators, who tortured merchants thanks to their dominant position. Next time you pay for something, it may as well be a Brite day.

Have you read?
World’s Richest Royals. Global Financial Centres Index. World’s Richest People (Billionaires).
The Chief Economists magazine, UGGP News, and the CEO Policy Institute.