What does it really take to build a fintech company that quietly solves one of the most frustrating problems that SMBs face every day?
In this episode of Tech Talks Daily, I’m joined by Pierre-Antoine Dusoulier, the founder and CEO of iBanFirst, for a candid conversation about entrepreneurship, timing and why cross-border payments have been out of business for so long.
Pierre-Antoine’s story begins in London, where his early career as a currency trader felt like a compromise at the time, but quietly gave him a front-row seat to inefficiencies that most people accepted as normal. That experience would later shape two companies and provide a very clear position on how money should move across borders.
Pierre-Antoine talks about his first venture, Combeast.com, one of France’s first FX brokers for private investors, and what he learned from selling it to Saxo Bank and continuing to run Western European operations. That chapter is important because it exposed the gap between how advanced the currency markets really are and how poorly SMEs are served when currencies and payments are bundled within traditional banks. Out of that frustration, IbanFirst was born in 2016 with a simple idea: treat cross-border payments as a specialist discipline, and not as an afterthought.
Today, IbanFirst serves more than 10,000 customers across Europe and processes more than €2 billion in transactions every month. We explore why growth has continued while many fintechs have slowed, from a product designed to be used every day, through proactive sales, to a new generation of CFOs and CEOs who expect the same clarity and speed at work they get from consumer fintech tools.
Pierre-Antoine explains how real-time currency exchange rates, payment tracking using SWIFT GPI and multi-entity account management are changing the daily reality for small and medium-sized businesses trading internationally.
We also talk about Brexit and how our roots in continental Europe provided an unexpected opening. Pierre-Antoine talks about why expansion into Britain, including the acquisition of Cornhill, made sense, and why London’s payments ecosystem continues to stand out in scale and depth. Along the way, he is refreshingly open about the heavy investments required in compliance, trust and regulation, and why almost a third of IbanFirst’s team focuses on operations and oversight.
Looking ahead, Pierre-Antoine lays out a bold vision for the SME payments market, predicting a future where specialists will replace banks in much the same way that fintech has reshaped consumer money transfers. As cross-border trade grows and currency volatility becomes a daily concern, his perspective raises an interesting question for anyone doing business internationally today:
If specialists already exist, why continue to rely on systems that were never designed for the way SMEs actually operate?
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