Building Through the Storm: How One Founder Built a Unified Fintech Platform From the Ground Up

In the volatile landscape of modern business, resilience is often regarded as a key trait for success and survival. But for Serhii Zakharov, founder and CEO of the payment ecosystem PayDo, resilience became an architectural blueprint. Guiding ventures through complications revealed a common, critical weakness in the digital economy: its financial infrastructure was not only fragile but also fundamentally fragmented.

This realisation didn't lead to a pivot in marketing or a temporary operational fix. Instead, it cemented a core philosophy that has defined Zakharov's entrepreneurial journey: lasting value is built by solving foundational, often invisible problems. His path from building single-point tech solutions to developing an integrated global payment platform highlights how foundational innovation can create long-term business value and influence broader industry practices.

The First Lesson: Look Deeper Than the Prototype

Every entrepreneurial journey identifies a gap in the market. Zakharov's early career identified a gap in trust. While working with digital businesses, he observed that new financial technologies were often solved for speed but not for certainty. A prime example was the early iteration of Open Banking.

The technology allowed money to move between banks instantly, but a critical flaw remained for merchants. They received confirmation that a payment was initiated, but had no guarantee it was successfully received. This gap created liability, risk, and stifled adoption.

His response went beyond a short-term workaround and aimed to address the issue at its core. Through his first fintech-focused IT venture, WhiteTech, Zakharov's team engineered a system that enabled confirmation of funds receipt from the payer's bank with greater reliability. This solution addressed a key trust gap in Open Banking, helping it move toward broader commercial viability. The solution contributed to growing adoption within the industry, illustrating a recurring theme: some of the most impactful innovation occurs behind the scenes, at the infrastructure level.

Pivoting to the Systemic Problem: The High Cost of Fragmentation

Solving point problems exposed a larger, systemic drain on business growth. Zakharov saw that companies were assembling their financial operations from a patchwork of providers—one for banking, another for card processing, separate platforms for fraud screening, FX, and mass payments. This fragmentation consumed capital and focus: ops and legal teams faced repeated onboarding, finance battled disjointed data, and engineers maintained a fragile web of APIs.

The strategic insight was clear. The next major opportunity wasn't another "best-in-class" point solution, but a best-in-flow integrated ecosystem. This vision became PayDo. The goal was ambitious: to unify the entire financial stack—encompassing global business banking, merchant acquiring, card issuing, and e-money solutions—into a single platform under a single contract and API.

Execution meant bypassing intermediaries. Zakharov led the pursuit of direct infrastructure, securing critical partnerships and access to core financial infrastructure. This removed layers of cost and complexity, but more importantly, it created a controlled environment where integrated innovation could thrive.

Within this ecosystem, PayDo deployed innovative solutions that solved multiple client problems simultaneously:

• The non-redirect e-wallet has been associated with improved checkout conversion rates and reduced friction for merchants.
• Dedicated C2B Open Banking Collections Accounts have supported the use of instant bank transfers as a scalable, reconcilable payment method.

Zakharov's approach proved to be a replicable framework, not confined to payments. It is a mindset focused on identifying and rebuilding foundational layers that are cumbersome in any sector.

The Entrepreneurial Takeaway: Build the Basement

Serhii Zakharov's journey offers distilled lessons for founders navigating today's complex markets:

1. Solve for Trust and Certainty First: Adoption of any new technology hinges on it being reliable. Build the mechanisms that create unwavering trust before scaling the user base experience.
2. See Fragmentation as a Strategic Opportunity: When customers are forced to stitch together multiple services to achieve a goal, you have identified a chance to build a more valuable, integrated solution. Focus on eliminating their operational drag.
3. Control Your Core Infrastructure: Relying on intermediaries cedes control and erodes margins. Where possible, secure the direct licences, memberships, and partnerships that allow you to own the quality and cost of your service delivery.
4. Innovate Within Your Own Ecosystem: The most powerful product enhancements are those that increase the value of your entire platform, creating seamless workflows that would be impossible across disparate providers.

"The easy work is on the surface, building features," Zakharov concludes. "The enduring work is in the basement, laying the pipes and foundations. That's what supports scalable growth—for your company and for your clients. When you build the basement well, everything above it becomes more stable, more valuable, and far easier to construct."

In an entrepreneurial culture often captivated by disruption, Zakharov's story is a compelling argument for a long-term vision. It champions the rewards of building foundational infrastructure that transforms complexity into clarity and, in doing so, contributes to a more stable platform for future innovation.