Paysend CEO Ben Chisell on why the fintech industry needs to worry less about chasing stablecoin headlines and more about solving real problems for real customers.
Ben Chisell built his career in product at Amazon, eBay, Starling Bank and OakNorth before joining Paysend as Chief Product Officer and becoming CEO last year.
In this week’s Five Minutes With…, Fintechly speaks to Chisell about why solving real problems matters more than chasing stablecoin headlines, what people still get wrong about regulation in fintech, why he expects stablecoins to go mainstream regardless of the hype, and how Paysend is being deliberately selective about where it deploys AI.
Can you tell us about yourself and what brought you to this point in your career?
I’m from Liverpool, and I studied aeronautical engineering at Churchill College, University of Cambridge. Engineering proved to be a great starting point for my career in fintech, as it taught me how to break down and solve problems, which I think is the most valuable skill a person can have in any industry.
I worked at Big Tech for 10 years, leading product and technology teams at Amazon and eBay before I decided to work in fintech. This sector always stood out to me as ripe for innovation, coupled with my desire to build solutions in and for the UK.
I was invited to join the early team at Starling Bank, which allowed me to apply my product background and approach to a new industry and company. What followed was a VP Product role at the global credit intelligence platform OakNorth, before joining Paysend as Chief Product Officer en route to becoming CEO last year.
What I love most about our industry is that the opportunities at our disposal only grow as the fintech market matures, and my product background gives me the tools to capitalise on them. There are still many problems to solve in fintech, which is why I’m still here building solutions.
What problem or opportunity are you most focused on right now?
Cross-border payments. High costs, slow speed, limited access, and poor visibility are still hamstringing an essential part of how money flows around the world today. That’s a problem given the sizeable economic importance of cross-border payments, which the Bank of England expects to grow by more than $100 trillion between 2017 and 2027, reaching over $250 trillion.
What makes global money movement so difficult is accounting for different customer preferences and market rules. Sending money overseas is complicated by banks operating under disparate data standards across jurisdictions that apply regulations differently, as money travels through corridors powered by outdated legacy systems.
Our goal with money movement is to make things instant, easy, and cheap at a global scale. We started by tackling the heart of the problem, namely, the payment infrastructure. Doing so has allowed us to build the world’s biggest digital payment network with over 25 billion endpoints across more than 170 countries. That infrastructure has formed the foundation of our products, enabling customers to simplify everything from remittances to treasury operations, and allowing other financial service providers to use our network to power their own products.
What do you think deserves more attention than it is getting in your part of the industry?
What matters most is solving real problems for real customers, not the technology hype. Founders are sometimes at risk of falling in love with their technology at the expense of their customers. Financial innovation is exciting and necessary, but every application of technology must serve a defined purpose.
For example, the news agenda is awash with stablecoin launches with very little substance. Another press release for a USD-backed stablecoin from the same issuer as the other 1,000 isn’t inherently newsworthy. There are real use cases for settlement with stablecoins — for example, reducing the number of intermediaries a payment has to pass through on its way from one country to another — which can improve speed and reduce costs. But people can be too eager to jump on the bandwagon rather than identify real problems to solve and overcome the challenges to make it work.
What do you think people still misunderstand about your part of the industry?
That regulation is the greatest barrier to innovation, perhaps even insurmountable. Fintech founders and entrepreneurs can easily fall into the trap of focusing on the problems before them rather than the solutions available to them, which has never done anyone any good.
The industry we operate in has strict financial controls and frameworks for good reason. They’re designed to safeguard people’s and companies’ financial instruments and assets. The most productive thing an executive in our industry can do is approach regulation as a problem-solving exercise to build stronger, more resilient financial products and services. The best way to do so is to work backwards from the problem.
Plenty of homegrown success stories, including Revolut, Starling and OakNorth, demonstrate that it’s possible and should be seen as a source of inspiration. We must raise our level to build better solutions.
What do you expect to rise up the agenda over the next year?
Stablecoins are going mainstream. Despite early scepticism about the demand for them and their utility, banks around the world are warming to issuing their own stablecoins as regulation plays catch-up.
With 98% of stablecoins in circulation today being dollar-denominated, the US is leading the way. Nonbank companies like Visa, BlackRock, Google, and DoorDash have entered the market, as other major financial institutions, such as Bank of America and Wells Fargo, are working towards global stablecoin ventures.
If the UK wishes to participate, it needs the ambition to attract the global adoption of UK-based stablecoins. The Bank of England is moving quickly to provide the right framework to make this happen and is reportedly looking closely at a central bank digital currency, which it would call the digital pound.
The greatest opportunity for stablecoins is for cross-border, multi-currency settlement. The unresolved issue the whole industry is watching closely is whether stablecoins can be used for settlement in core wholesale markets. Stablecoins work best when they serve as a settlement layer for the real economy and cross-border flows, displacing legacy correspondent-banking friction, rather than as instruments for crypto trading.
Expect stablecoins to become ubiquitous for cross-border settlement.
What’s the one question about your company we should have asked, and what’s your answer?
“How do you use AI?”
A seemingly harmless question that usually precedes a founder pontificating about all the areas of the business that are AI-enabled. But you won’t hear that from me.
At Paysend, we’re highly selective when it comes to AI because we believe it can be a force for good or evil: in the right hands, it can drive outsized results; in the wrong ones, it can spell disaster. We manage that risk by restricting our AI tools to our best-performing employees and scaling only when the business impact is measurable.
The way this works is that we give a select cohort of our best engineers access to Claude for a set period, during which they have to build something valuable and come back to us with their results. As a leadership team, we then have three options to choose from: (1) stop the experiment, (2) continue iterating with the same cohort, or (3) expand access.
Our latest example, where we went with option three, was when we launched our first fully automated, end-to-end AI coding agent for internal use, covering everything from the expression of an idea to a production release. The way it works is that a task enters the system, and autonomous agents handle everything from scrutinising requirements, reviewing designs, code generation and testing to validation, security checks, and deployment.
What convinced us to roll this AI agent company-wide for everyone to use was that it changed the way we worked, turning our engineers from coders into problem solvers. Our agents now handle the repetitive workflow with greater consistency and accuracy than any human ever could, while our engineers now have the time and space to focus on applying their judgment to solving other problems that can’t be outsourced to AI. It represents a big step forward for us, and we’re finding ways to use it to develop capability right across the business.
