Fintech revenues are projected to grow sixfold from $245 billion to $1.5 trillion by 2030, according to a recent report from the Boston Consulting Group. Banking fintechs are expected to constitute almost 25% of all banking valuations worldwide by 2030, a forecast that has led to billions in venture capital funding, the creation of around 30,000 startups and the launch of new products from tech and financial services incumbents.
Berkeley Payments is a unique company in our space, the fintech industry,” says its CEO, Lawrence Tepperman. “We aren’t a typical startup. We have grown bootstrapped a hundred percent from day one.”
The typical fintech startups worldwide received a record $140 billion in total funding in the banner year of 2021, which dropped to $75 billion last year (but was up from $50 billion in both 2019 and 2020), according to CB Insights. Still, at the end of 2022, there were 312 fintech unicorns worldwide, up from 250 at the end of 2021. According to the Boston Consulting Group, the 2022 “plunge was merely a short-term correction in an otherwise long-term positive trajectory.”
These well-funded startups, however, follow the typical grow-at-any-cost business model, “signing up customers like crazy, and doing it at a loss,” says Tepperman. In contrast, he highlights the stability and peace-of-mind offered by Berkeley to its customers: “We’ve been growing at 30% to 40%, we have been profitable every year and we reinvest that money back into the company.” Following a different business model, “we are focused on execution,” says Tepperman.
Berkeley Payments was established in Toronto in 2005 and until about five years ago was focused on just one market segment: providing prepaid cards, used for loyalty, rewards, promotions, and incentives programs by Canada’s top banks. When Tepperman became Berkeley’s CEO in 2018, after working in a variety of executive roles in the financial services industry, he started to transform the company into a comprehensive Banking-as-a-Service (BaaS) provider.
Today, Berkeley’s has a single platform that facilitates for businesses in North America the development and implementation of any payment programs they want to establish for their customers, fully branded as their own. “The reason no one’s ever heard of Berkeley is because nothing ever says Berkeley,” explains Tepperman. “From our call center to our websites, to everything that our customers and their customers see, they only see their own brand name.”