Striga’s Way of Assisting FinTech Companies Add Crypto Payments to Their Applications. The Founder Story
A startup journey full of ups and downs
If you were to ask me about the most popular and steadily growing industry in the world right now, I would probably say it’s FinTech.
That’s why, I believe startups working on products that enable FinTech companies to take their solutions to new heights have a quite big potential for growth considering all of the complicated problems they are solving for their customers.
Having said that, I have a natural curiosity when it comes to learning more about these types of companies.
Let me introduce you to Striga — a platform that provides financial services infrastructure for companies in crypto, banking, and issuing fields.
I had an opportunity to interview the Founder of this Tallinn-based startup, Prashanth Balasubramanian, and ask him about their story, mission, and challenges his team had to go through along the way.
Enjoy!
Tell Us About Striga — How Would You Describe Your Solution in the Simplest Way?
Simply put, Stiga is the easiest way to add crypto & fiat payments to an application in Europe without any of the legal and technical overhead.
What Are the Biggest Problems That Your Platform Is Solving and For Whom?
From our experience, merging crypto and fiat payments together, such as neo-banks, wallets, exchanges etc., is an extremely painful experience.
The process typically involves obtaining licenses, building banking relationships, and integrating up to 12 different providers with a total price tag of up to $2 million and at least two years of effort spent before onboarding a single user.
In order to solve this problem, we’ve built a developer friendly set of APIs for businesses to build their payment flows as they require without doing any of the heavy lifting.
Let’s Talk About Your Founder Story. How Did Your Founding Team Start Working on Developing This Solution?
In the early days of Bitcoin, while I was working at a FinTech and studying Computer Science, moving money from India to Europe was extremely time consuming and expensive.
Using Bitcoin as a payment rail worked to solve this problem. That’s why, we decided to build a platform that enables companies to build innovative payment networks utilizing the latest and greatest in Bitcoin and crypto, by merging the old and the new.
Tell Us About Your Current Team. How Many People Work At Striga?
We’ve accomplished a lot with a small team of extremely talented and motivated individuals. At the moment we have 12 people in the team with a high expertise in engineering, compliance, and legal fields.
What Have Been the Biggest Challenges to Grow Your Company Until Now?
Merging old and new systems has been a challenging journey.
Traditional financial institutions have a certain way of doing business. They are often resistant to change, which leads to complex and expensive roads to navigate when connecting Bitcoin and crypto tech with legacy payments infrastructure, such as banking and card issuing.
Overarching all of this is compliance — once we overcome the technical and financial barriers, adapting to an ever evolving regulatory environment is an enormous challenge for any licensed entity.
What Are the Future Milestones and Objectives That Your Team Is Trying To Reach?
We have successfully established our footprint in the European Union and while crypto is borderless, traditional finance is very much built inside walled gardens. Our mission is to bridge the gaps between emerging economies one at a time with our sights on Asia, MENA, and Africa regions in the near future.
Finally, What Would Be Your Advice for Every Up-And-Coming Founder Who Wants to Start Their Journey in the Startup World?
Remember that persistence is the name of the game — nearly every big company today was a startup at some point.
Looking back at the early days of Striga, there were lots of moments when we as founders could have given up building this company and started focusing on other career paths. However, we stayed persistent, and our hard work has paid off.
To Sum Up
I’d like to say thanks to the whole Striga team for sharing their story with us and giving their insights on what their startup life looks like.
The challenge that the whole team is tackling is very interesting, and I’m very excited to see how their solution develops over time. Thank you!
