Since Satoshi Nakamoto published their seminal whitepaper in 2008, a trillion-dollar economy has emerged around crypto and Web3. Today, over half a billion people hold crypto globally. It’s remarkable growth. But the question everyone involved in the ecosystem has is: how do we attract the next half a billion users?
That’s a question Banxa is working to answer.
Banxa is a leading crypto infrastructure that makes it seamless for anyone to buy and sell crypto. Its on- and off-ramps are integral to the crypto landscape and are trusted by renowned names like Trust, Bitcoin.com, and MetaMask. If you've ever converted fiat currency into crypto using these platforms, chances are you've encountered Banxa.
We spoke with Banxa’s Head of Payments, Greg Rikkhachai, to learn more about the company's vision, why payments matter so much to its business, and how it’s using Primer to make buying and selling crypto as simple and seamless as possible to bring the next half a billion users into Web3.
Greg, let’s start with you. You’ve worked in payments for over 15 years and in multiple roles. What changes have you seen?
It's been quite a journey. When I started, payments weren't in the spotlight like now. Back then, most transactions happened in person, using cards or cash—it was a routine process with little strategic significance.
That’s obviously not the case today. Payments are, or are becoming, central to every business. We all know the reasons for this, and it’s been great to witness payments move from the background and become a key strategic pillar for businesses.
What excites me the most is that I don’t think we’ve reached the end of this journey. I foresee a lot more change coming that will further cement the critical role of payment in businesses and the digital economy.
At Banxa, you’re at the forefront of the next generation of the digital economy. Why did you decide to join Banxa and work in Web3?
I joined Banxa in late 2021 when the crypto space was buzzing with activity. Coin prices were hitting record highs, and NFTs were booming. It was hard not to get excited about crypto’s potential.
But what attracted me to the role was that everything in Web3 was fresh—no established playbooks existed. This presented a significant challenge but also an exciting opportunity because every project I’d work on would have the potential to make a real impact on Banxa and the broader ecosystem.
Tell us about your journey at Banxa.
As we all know, the crypto industry shifted in 2022, not long after I joined Banxa, leading us into a challenging crypto winter over the past few years.
Given the drop in crypto activity, the business has faced several challenges. However, it has also created opportunities for us to rethink our strategy. For instance, we redirected our focus from centralized exchanges to decentralized applications, which aligns better with our offering. Today, we serve approximately 70% of the market, collaborating with platforms like MetaMask and Trust Wallet.
We also started focusing on cost optimization, diversifying our revenue streams, and elevating our core product offerings. Our recent financial results validate these decisions, which have put us on the right track to build a sustainable business.
What does that mean for payments? And why have you chosen to work with Primer?
Payments are playing an increasingly important role in our overall strategy.
As we already work with most of the major decentralized apps, our main focus isn't acquiring new customers. Instead, we want to ensure Banxa adds value for our current customers. This includes delivering higher authorization rates, allowing our customers to offer a range of payment methods, and optimizing the cost of managing payments.
To achieve these goals, we’ve had to examine our payment stack. We've connected with different payment processors and methods without much of a plan over the last few years, leaving us with a messy and inefficient system that’s hard to manage and optimize.
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It was clear that adding an infrastructure layer to combine all these services in one platform solved this problem. Doing so would allow us to improve payment performance using smart routing, quickly introduce new payment services, add backup processors for redundancy, and start implementing advanced strategies like using fallbacks to recover failed payments.
We considered building this ourselves but didn’t want to deal with PCI compliance. After exploring various options, we chose Primer because it offered the most comprehensive solution with the flexibility to tailor the platform to our needs. The Primer team also understood our business inside out. They discussed our unique use case and how we could achieve our goals. That was what I was looking for, and it made Primer the standout partner.
You’ve been live for a few months now. What’s the experience working with Primer been like? Are there any early wins you’d like to share?
It's been fantastic. The transition to going live was seamless, and the results have been immediate and overwhelmingly positive. Our conversion rates have increased, and our customers are noticing the difference—and they're sending more volume our way.
In the first half of 2024, we recovered over US$7 million in revenue using Primer's native Fallback functionality. This is a significant achievement. We suspected that some payments were being incorrectly declined, but we had no idea the impact was this substantial. Enabling Fallbacks in Primer's Workflow was seamless, requiring just a few clicks. Primer's dataset and decline code mapping then efficiently targeted transactions likely to succeed with an alternative processor.
What are your goals for the rest of the year?
Over the next few months, we'll gradually transition more traffic into Primer while expanding our payment options to include Apple Pay and Google Pay. From there, our focus will be optimization, constantly fine-tuning our performance.
But what really gets me excited is what's on the horizon later this year. We'll be exploring ways to make payments a point of difference for Banxa. This could involve streamlining the payment process with tools like network tokenization or creating a seamless one-click checkout. Alternatively, we might concentrate on excelling in specific regions, payment methods, or currency pairs. Or perhaps we'll dive into something entirely new in the Web3 space.
With Primer as our payment backbone, we can pursue these innovations. I can't wait to collaborate with the team and see what we can create together.
Get in touch to learn how Primer can help make payments a strategic growth level in your business.
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