Recently I had the chance to sit down with Mr Romain Mazeries, CEO of the payment solutions company MANGOPAY, which is one of the KPMG Hub for Entrepreneurship's members. We talked about his company, its recent acquisition, and why mangos are in the mix.
Can you describe MANGOPAY?
MANGOPAY is an end-to-end payment technology that enables marketplaces, crowdfunding platforms, and collaborative consumption platforms to accept payments online, escrow funds, and automate the pay-out. The clients can fully customise the solution.
Today, over 900 European platforms use MANGOPAY's API with more than 10 million people globally paying or investing via MANGOPAY's system. Being a white-label API the vast majority of these users won't even be aware of MANGOPAY'S involvement.
What's its origin story?
In 2009, Céline Lazorthes created leetchi.com, a website to collect money for birthdays, personal crowdfunding, or charity projects. The company needed a payment solution and no service existed that was totally customisable from end to end. So MANGOPAY was created. Today, leetchi.com is Europe's leading money pool website with more than five million clients in 150 countries, and it's supported by MANGOPAY of course!
And you were acquired by Crédit Mutuel Arkéa (CMA)?
Yes, last year. With the support of a big European bank, we have been able to sign some important contracts and gain greater brand awareness. People appreciate MANGOPAY's technology and now I think it's become even easier to choose us as we are part of a major banking institution. Three of our new clients are among the top ten marketplaces in Europe.
What about from CMA's perspective: how do you fit into their world?
We have had a relationship with them for over five years as we worked closely with them on leetchi.com. CMA is known in France as an innovative bank and they've acquired a lot of FinTech companies in recent years like Fortuneo or more recently Keytrade Bank, which are innovative online challenger banks. From the beginning, one of our main service providers has been a CMA company: Payline by Monext. So the synergy between our products has been strengthening over the years.
I think that MANGOPAY represents an exciting opportunity for CMA to expand its market-share. They had the Payment Service Provider, i.e. the company that was able to accept card payment, but they didn't have a payment solution like ours which processes complex transactions using electronic money and manages all the regulatory rules.
There are plenty of payment solutions out there... why has MANGOPAY gained traction?
The main difference is that we don't just process payments: we offer a customisable technology from pay-in to pay-out. MANGOPAY enables platforms to accept multiple payment methods, split the payments for different vendors, and escrow the funds for as long as you need while also automating the pay-out. It's truly a complete end-to-end service offering!
MANGOPAY also has a European dimension. If you're in Luxembourg and want to enter the German market you can use Sofort or Giropay which are national payment methods. For the UK, you'll be able to use Direct Debit thanks to our partnership with GoCardless. In Poland, PL24; in the Netherlands, iDeal. Most importantly we offer a very high end that is built for scale alongside a best-in-class customer service team and a very competitive pricing model.
And one last question... why mangos?
Tech companies named after fruit seem to have done well—Apple, Orange—so Céline Lazorthes, founder of Leetchi Group, tried it out on leetchi.com... and here we are with MANGOPAY.
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