Company: PayFuture
CEO, Founder, CTO: Zaki Farooq, Manpreet Haer
Website: https://www.payfuture.net/
About PayFuture
PayFuture fills a real gap in the market – merchants struggling to reach customers in emerging markets due to complex and fragmented payment systems. While most payment processors avoid these high-growth regions, we saw an opportunity not a problem.
Our mission has always been clear: make it easy for online businesses to expand into emerging markets through fast, reliable and high-performance local payment methods. This means making transactions simpler and ensuring their customers enjoy a seamless and secure shopping experience. By doing this, we’re not just helping businesses, we’re boosting local economies and helping them thrive in the digital world.
We use advanced AI tech to make our transactions safe and efficient. These technologies help build trust in our systems, which is vital for supporting financial inclusion in areas where many people don’t use traditional banking services.
How has PayFuture evolved?
Back in 2019, Zaki Farooq and I started PayFuture with just £500 each. From those early days, our goal was to make global e-commerce more accessible to emerging markets where traditional payment systems often don’t quite fit the bill.
We’ve grown fast. Our net revenue has increased by 1000 per cent, and our team has grown from just the two of us to over 100 people across the globe. All done without any external funding, just what we earned and reinvested back into the company.
PayFuture is not just processing transactions. We’re enabling businesses to enter new markets smoothly and efficiently, even when sometimes they can be very complex – our job is to make the complex markets seem simple to navigate. Looking ahead, we’ll continue to evolve our solutions to support our merchants’ growth and unlock new opportunities in emerging markets.
Why focus on emerging markets?
85% of the world’s population is in emerging markets. And digital adoption – use of mobile phones, for example – is increasing tremendously. We bridge the gap for merchants trying to reach these customers. Online businesses, in order to grow, have to go to emerging markets. We’re helping them become successful in these markets.
India, for example, is progressing massively in digital payments. The NPCI is releasing new products regularly, all aimed at inclusion. Bangladesh has seen big growth too, especially through local options like bKash. Egypt and Saudi Arabia are also developing fast and present huge opportunities. Each market has its own preferences, its own complexity, and that’s exactly what we thrive on.
What’s next for PayFuture this year?
In 2025, fintech’s influence on financial inclusion will become even more significant. With 1.4 billion unbanked people worldwide and roughly 345 million micro-enterprises lacking formal banking services, the need for solutions is urgent.
Our responsibility is to ensure our solutions are relevant and accessible. This means understanding each market’s unique needs, communicating clearly, and partnering effectively to offer a broad range of payment options. This year, PayFuture is committed to using our technology and expertise to bridge the financial exclusion gap and support economic growth where it’s needed most.
To help drive this next stage of our growth, we recently appointed industry veteren Praful Morar as deputy CEO. He brings decades of experience scaling payments businesses globally. We’re already working together on new market entry, licensing and acquisitions. His insight into regions like LATAM, Asia and MENA are incredibly valuable.
Success in emerging markets hinges on understanding local complexities. Our whole purpose is to make the complexity easy for the merchants. They just concentrate on their marketing. We take care of the rest.
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