EndMont
FinMont helps travel merchants optimize their payment strategy by reducing the overall cost of payments and increasing acceptance rate globally.
FinMont is built using the latest cloud technologies with built-in tokenization for advanced payment data security.
What is your 30-second pitch to investors?
Finmont helps airlines and online travel agencies who want to improve their multi-acquirer payment strategy with quantitative benchmarks, instantly test new payment service providers without any API integration wait time of technical application and develop rapidly in new markets.
FinMont does this by offering payment orchestration as a service, and it is already connected to over 200 payment service providers, acquiring banks, fraud prevention tools and alternative payment methods that cover both B2C and B2B transactions worldwide. FinMont is built by travel payment experts with travel-specific use cases at its heart and is backed by the founders of Hahn Air.
Location
Berlin and Hyderabad, India
Describe both the business and technology aspects of your startup.
Commercial aspects: FinMont helps travel merchants optimize their payment strategy by reducing the overall cost of payments and increasing acceptance rate globally. Benefits will be demonstrated using key performance indicators within six months of using FinMont.
Technological aspects: FinMont is built using the latest cloud technologies with built-in tokenization for advanced payment data security.
Give us your SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats) analysis of the company.
Strengths:
1) Hyper focused on solving travel specific use cases.
2) Travel industry experts created the product.
3) Agile product development with a strong technical team.
Weaknesses:
1) The travel industry is slow to adopt new technologies.
Opportunities:
1) Due to changing economic conditions, travel agencies will focus more on cost reduction.
2) The payments landscape is becoming complex and a FinMont solution is needed to simplify it.
Threats:
1) Travel technology incumbents entering the payment orchestration industry.
What travel pain points are you trying to alleviate, both from a customer and industry perspective?
1. Simplifying the payment landscape for travel merchants.
2. Offer the most used payment methods for each customer segment and demographic.
3. Provide payment solutions for evolving travel technologies, such as new distribution capacity and One Order.
So you have the product, now how are you going to attract lots of customers?
1. Offer our product as a white label solution for already established travel technology providers to expand their product offerings.
2. Leverage the partnership with Hahn Air, as Hahn Air is connected to over 350 airlines and 100,000 travel agencies.
3. Provide thought leadership for travel payments using webinars, white papers, event presentations and podcasts.
Tell us what process you followed to establish a true need for your business and the size of the addressable market.
During the ideation phase, we tested our hypothesis with 50 merchants across Europe and proceeded with product development based on their feedback.
How and when will you make money?
We charge a fixed amount for each transaction passing through our platform.
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What are the backgrounds and previous achievements of the founding team?
Our co-founders, Hans Nolte and Nikolaus Gormsen, are the owners of Hahn Air and have a track record of success and 80 years of combined experience in the travel industry. Hahn Air has more than 350 partner airlines and more than 100,000 travel agencies use Hahn Air services worldwide.
Our CEO, Suby Valluri, is a software engineer and economist with 15 years of professional experience in the travel, payments and e-commerce industries. With his unique skills, he helps us find new and useful ways to meet the payment needs of the travel industry.
How have you approached diversity and inclusion within your company?
We have employees of six nationalities, 50% of whom are women.
What has been the most difficult part of starting the business so far?
Determine exact product-market fit and eliminate bad use cases.
Typically, travel startups struggle to make an impact – so why are you going to be one of the lucky ones?
Being an insider in the industry allows me to experience the issues personally.
In a year, what state do you think your startup will be in?
Will implement the first 10 B2B clients, which will help us enter the growth phase.
What is your purpose (IPO, acquisition, growth and maintenance of the private sector, etc.)?
Go public.
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