STARTUP STAGE: FinMont seeks to help airline and OTA revenues take off

FinMont

FinMont helps travel merchants optimize their payment strategy by reducing the overall payment cost and increasing the acceptance rate globally.

FinMont is built using the latest cloud technologies with in-built tokenization for advanced security of payments data.

What is your 30-second pitch to investors?

Finmont helps airlines and online travel agencies who want to improve their multi-acquirer payments strategy with quantitative benchmarks, test new payment service providers instantly without any technical application programming interface integration wait times and expand to new markets quickly.

FinMont does it by offering payment orchestration as a service, and it is already connected with 200-plus payment service providers, acquiring banks, fraud prevention tools and alternative payment methods that cover both B2C and B2B transactions globally. FinMont is built by travel payment experts by keeping travel-specific use cases at its heart and is backed by the founders of Hahn Air.

Describe both the business and technology aspects of your startup.

Business aspects: FinMont helps travel merchants optimize their payment strategy by reducing the overall payment cost and increasing the acceptance rate globally. The benefits will be demonstrated using key performance indicators within six months of using FinMont.

Technology aspects: FinMont is built using the latest cloud technologies with in-built tokenization for advanced security of payments data.

Give us your SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats) analysis of the company.

Strengths:

1) Hyper-focused on solving travel-specific use cases.

2) Experts in the travel industry created the product.

3) Agile product development with a strong tech team.

Weaknesses:

1) The travel industry is slow to adopt new technologies.

Opportunities:

1) Due to changed economic conditions, travel companies will be focused more on saving costs.

2) The payment landscape is getting complex, and there is a need for a FinMont solution to simplify it.

Threats:

1) Travel tech incumbents entering the payment orchestration sector.

What are the travel pain points you are trying to alleviate from both the customer and the industry perspective?

1. Simplification of the payment landscape for travel merchants.

2. Offering the most used payment methods for each customer segment and demography.

3. Providing payment solutions for evolving travel technologies like new distribution capability and One Order.

So you've got the product, now how will you get lots of customers?

1. Offering our product as a white-label solution for already established travel tech providers to expand their product offerings.

2. Leveraging the partnership with Hahn Air, as Hahn Air is connected with 350-plus airlines and 100,000 travel agencies.

3. Providing thought leadership for the travel payments using webinars, whitepapers, exhibiting at the events and conducting podcasts.

Tell us what process you've gone through to establish a genuine need for your company 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 input.

How and when will you make money?

We charge a fixed amount for each transaction that passes through our platform.

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 sector. Hahn Air has more than 350 airline partners, and over 100,000 travel agencies use Hahn Air’s services globally.

Our CEO, Suby Valluri, is a software engineer and economist with 15 years of working experience in the travel, payments and e-commerce sectors. Because he has a unique set of skills, he helps us come up with new and useful ways to meet the payment needs of the travel industry.

How have you addressed diversity and inclusion within your business?

We have employees from six nationalities, with 50% being female.

What's been the most difficult part of founding the business so far?

Determining exact product-market fit and eliminating the wrong use cases.

Generally, travel startups face a tough time making an impact - so why are you going to be one of lucky ones?

Being an insider in the industry allows me to experience the problems firsthand.

A year from now, what state do you think your startup will be in?

Will implement the first 10 B2B customers, which will help us enter the growth stage.

What is your endgame (going public, acquisition, growing and staying private, etc.)?

Going public.