Mobile payment built on SEPA direct debit instead of card schemes.
Context
paymy was a mobile payment venture through exigo capital with an unusual orientation for the market environment of the time: deliberately not built on card schemes but on the SEPA direct debit procedure — with the goal of significantly reducing transaction costs compared to card-based systems. The product addressed both peer-to-peer and merchant payments.
Underneath paymy sat the United Financial Systems (UFS) platform — an independent payment processing and bank integration vehicle, held as partner and CTO (not as founder). UFS provided the processor and bank connections; paymy built on top as the consumer and merchant application. This separation between platform infrastructure and product brand later reappeared in many fintech stacks.
Contribution
Founding and CTO responsibility for product and platform architecture on the paymy side; in parallel, partner and CTO role on the UFS side for the processing layer. Build-up of the direct-debit-based payment processing, mandate and onboarding mechanics for payers and merchants, consumer and merchant interfaces. Central design task: handling the SEPA-typical eight-week return period and the resulting merchant and platform risk in cases of abusive or contested collection — solved through scoring, limits, and mandate verification.
Stepped out at the end of 2014 to focus on other topics; the paymy.de domain remains in place.