Paysera celebrates its 17th birthday! Read the interview with the team

Depends on how much you know about it :) Before joining Paysera, I thought it’s a small startup that offered financial services for foreigners in Lithuania. To my surprise, when I joined the company, it turned out that it has been around for 17 years, has more than 300 employees, and they are located in 15 countries! It was a big and very positive surprise.

Having this international atmosphere around gave me the feeling of belonging and since day one I felt welcomed and an integral part of the team, and for that, I believe joining Paysera is the best decision I have made since I came to Lithuania.

Paysera is attractive due to its people, who are both great individuals and professionals. Even though there is some rotation, in some magical way Paysera manages to attract diverse, creative, and interesting people, with whom it's great to work and socialise.

And although the workload may sometimes seem barely manageable (haha), knowing that there will always be someone to reach out to for assistance and support helps to move forward, and provides courage, confidence, and determination not to give up. So all in all this is what I like the most and what makes me happy to be a part of this busy anthill.

To keep a young professional interested in one company for many years the company needs to provide tools and opportunities for constant improvement. It can be something as simple as the possibility to attend training sessions, or the opportunity to easily change positions, get promoted and move up the career ladder within the company. What kept me personally interested was also the fact that Paysera was always expanding abroad and had many foreign clients as well as colleagues – this gave me a feeling of working in an international company, which is both challenging and rewarding.

And of course, various motivational measures, trips abroad, team building activities, great supervisors, and superb colleagues – everyone working in Paysera would say the same!

There were many different events that marked a new beginning for Paysera and opened many new doors and opportunities for expansion. However, to name a few, I would say that the main cornerstones in the history of Paysera were:

1. Launching the payment gateway service - Paysera Checkout. 
   We did not plan it at the beginning at all but eventually, we saw it as something useful for the clients and went for it. Today – it is one of our main services. 

2. Starting remote client identification.
   When we started doing it, it was not a common practice, and not even fully described in law also. Today – almost everyone does it. This brought Paysera many foreign clients, who don’t need to travel to any physical branches and can open accounts and use our services fully remotely, online. 

3. Expanding via local partners.
   Looking for local partners that would invest their time and money in bringing Paysera services to their local market was a much better decision than trying to come into unknown territories ourselves. Local CEOs are more motivated for the company to succeed, in comparison to people we could hire and who could leave any time. This expansion model brought Paysera to countries like Romania, Bulgaria, Kosovo, Albania, Latvia, etc.

The best thing about working with the IT team of an already established company is skilful people. We have quite a few developers that are with us for a few years now, and we can rely on them not only to deliver great results but also to help onboard newcomers and bring them to the right level in a short time. Also, some of the biggest advantages are a solid knowledge base and established best practices. By now we kind of know what works and what doesn’t, yet we always keep an open mind for new ideas.

This allows us to give more attention to creating new products and services and doing what we like the most.

As for the difficulties, I would say that maintaining the already created infrastructure and upgrading all the existing components is indeed a challenge. But I am glad the team managed to do it successfully so far and it does not hold us back.

The view of a 17-year-old company in the eyes of the employees is actually not that different from customers, I think. For the people working here Paysera first of all associates with stability during the time of a pandemic, where employees can be sure to keep their jobs and are given flexible working conditions as well as support from their teams.

 Paysera is also a place where innovative products are being created. This can be done in a dynamic environment with the help of highly skilled employees, who get plenty of space to take the initiative and bring their own ideas to life, as well as improve already existing products and processes. To support their constant growth, upskilling and re-skilling, our employees are included in various learning journeys through the participation in internal and external training programmes.

Last but not least, a 17-year-old stable company can afford to invest in employee value proposition improvement. That includes various team building events, workations and holidays together with your colleagues in places like Cape Verde, Bali and Mexico. All of these materialistic motivational measures are very important, however, everything mentioned above – stability and involvement in the interesting projects - are often the deciding factor that motivates people to stay working in Paysera for many years, making them loyal ambassadors of the company, priceless team members, and great mentors to the newcomers.

We are witnessing processes of natural controlled corporate evolution; it's reflected in many areas - technological, ways of working, and even people themselves. Today we have to work on broken areas and replace them with something better, more stable, potentially - with future benefits; we have to keep good things and embrace what we have; we have to improve areas we believe in and maintain Paysera as the best fintech in the market. The key thing I'm looking for is further acceptance and implementation of these changes, as they allow us to take steps forward and grow.