Super Says The Future Of Payments Is Free
Samir Desai harboured dreams of a long holiday.
He’d just exited Funding Circle, the UK fintech that helped SMEs get easier access to loans and other financial services. He’d scaled the business with two friends from university, taking it public on the London Stock Exchange, and even steering it through its most challenging days during the pandemic.
And so an extended break felt deserved. But he couldn’t shake off the idea of starting a new business: an idea around bringing the ‘free’ ad-supported model to the payments business.
Resisting the temptation was futile. He took the company, Super Payments, to Saul and Robin Klein at LocalGlobe, who immediately recognised the potential for Desai’s vision and joined a seed round, alongside Accel and Union Square Ventures. Phoenix Court-backed Latitude, our growth-stage fund, also backed Super in a later round.
The potential of Super is nothing less than to create a new, ‘free’ paradigm for the market that powers our economy—and it’s certainly living up to its name.
Its application of open banking and AI is facilitating a new approach to payments, helping businesses to remove processing fees on transactions and, in the process, drive more repeat customers. Samir’s vision for bringing a free model to payments is being propelled forwards with the platform already processing over $1 billion annually and witnessing 3.5 million UK customers already using Super to pay.
In this Voices that Matter interview, written for the Red Book Series, Samir speaks about returning to entrepreneurship, the lessons learnt from scaling Funding Circle, and his ambition for Super Payments.
Q What made you want to start another fintech after exiting Funding Circle?
A I stepped back from Funding Circle in October 2021. It was a 12-year journey for the three of us who were friends at university, from building a successful business through to listing on the London Stock Exchange.
It was a crazy ride, through things like Covid and recessions. I’d thought about taking some time off, but vaguely had the idea for Super Payments.
I was like “Screw it. I’ve just got to build this thing and see if it can work!”
Q How did you get the idea of bringing the free model to payments?
A I just observed that a lot of the largest markets in tech tend to trend towards free business models. Search, social and music, in some respects, with Spotify’s freemium model plus video with YouTube. These businesses make money through data. That model was increasingly starting to move into fintech with businesses like Robinhood which does free stock trading and Credit Karma which offers free credit scores. To some extent Revolut as well. I was looking at payments, which is the biggest market there is. There’s hundreds of trillions of dollars worth of volume that goes through payments.
And yet, there was this very, very expensive model where businesses pay, you know, 1%–5% depending on whether it’s a credit transaction with Buy Now Pay Later or a card transaction. And it just didn’t really make any sense to me. I felt, you know, there was so much data on top of payments, probably more than search or social or any of these other categories and that there should be a way to reinvent payments.
Q What does Super have in common with Funding Circle?
A I like the fundamental rewiring of business models. That’s what Funding Circle was and, in many ways, that’s what Super Payments is. It’s trying to reinvent the business model of payments, which is a much larger space.
Q How does it work and where do you make money?
A At its simplest level, we offer free payments. There are certain areas like card payments where we pass on unavoidable costs, but we don’t add any markup on top, unlike traditional payment companies. We use innovative new rails, like open banking. We’ve invented our own credit product in partnership with lenders that can essentially be free for merchants. We make money in two ways, so we are paid a commission from lenders if users choose to pay with credit. We also have an advertising product. We serve ads at the end of checkout and if you click on that and decide to purchase we get paid a kind of cost per click. So it’s essentially eliminating the payments and making money from credit broking and ads. We have other revenue streams we’ll add in the future as well.
“I like the fundamental rewiring of business models. That’s what Funding Circle was and, in many ways, that’s what Super Payments is. It’s trying to reinvent the business model of payments, which is a much larger space.”
Q Who are your customers?
A The sweet spot is merchants between £15 million of turnover right the way up to £1billion. I think every business, once they understand how this works, will want to do it. It’s a no brainer.
Q Where are you as a business?
A We’re currently only in the UK at the moment and are profitable per payment.
We intend to launch in the US later this year, followed by Europe in 2027.
Q Are you trying to appeal directly to consumers as well?
A The mission of the company is to power free payments for businesses and more rewarding shopping for customers. We’ve had about a million people sign up. A lot of the rewards come through the ads. Typically, a merchant will offer something to a customer, like rewards or discounts.
What that means is a lot of customers sign up and get an account with Super which allows them to track all their different payments, rewards and credit in the instance that they use the user credit product from one of the lenders in our app or online. So it is a two-sided marketplace in that respect. But the primary people we focus on, and where it all starts is from the merchant.
Q How did the investment from LocalGlobe come about?
A I’ve known Saul and Robin for many, many years. Eventually I came in, pitched them both. They were very keen. Accel and Union Square Ventures also were very, very keen. So we closed the round in May or June 2022 and started building. We got the thing up and running in early 2023 we built a prototype, then iterated very fast from there.
Q How did the experience of scaling Funding Circle influenced your approach to building Super?
A When we started Funding Circle there were three of us and none of us were very technical, and so we outsourced a lot of the technology development, and it took me years to sort that out. This time, we invested in a senior technology team who built the entire system for rapid iteration.
We probably took a little bit longer to launch, but it gives us greater flexibility.
Q What’s your ultimate goal for Super?
A That we build a very large, important business that saves customers and merchants incredible amounts of money, and that goes back into GDP, growth and general well-being. An even bigger prize would be if we move a lot of the market to this kind of model, where payment companies all had to eliminate these taxes on merchants and customers. Building a big business and having a meaningful impact is always the dream of the entrepreneur.