Merchants have moved beyond simply needing to accept digital payments. Many now want to grow across borders, offer more relevant payment methods, improve cash flow visibility and use transaction data to make better commercial decisions. That puts pressure on payment providers to offer infrastructure that is easier to connect, more transparent and better suited to modern commerce.
Azimkhon Askarov, co-CEO and partner at global payments technology company CONCRYT, believes the next phase of payments will be defined by how intelligently merchants can connect, protect and optimise transactions across channels and markets. The company gives merchants access to cards, alternative payment methods, payment gateways, banking partners and ecommerce platforms through a single connection.
In this week’s Five Minutes With…, Fintechly speaks to Askarov about cross-border merchant growth, why legacy payments infrastructure is falling short, how large language models could make payments data more useful and why liquidity, real-time settlement and stablecoin settlements are set to move up the agenda.
Can you tell us about yourself and what brought you to this point in your career?
My interest in business and fintech took shape during my time at Riga Technical University and the University of Latvia, where I built a grounding in finance, marketing, operations, and strategy. From there, my career moved into business development and product management – leading acquiring partnerships and payment network expansion across Asian and European markets, handling commercial and legal negotiations, API integrations, and the deployment of new payment channels.
As Co-CEO and Partner at global payments technology company, CONCRYT, I get to bring that technical and commercial background to bear on something I genuinely care about. The work is varied – payment processing, banking, alternative payment methods, payment gateways, and ecommerce platforms – and that variety is what keeps it interesting.
What problem or opportunity are you most focused on right now?
CONCRYT was founded over two years ago with a clear goal: to meaningfully change the way businesses handle digital payments. That hasn’t changed. What has changed is how urgent the problem feels.
The pandemic pushed merchants (and consumers) online en masse, and those habits stuck. But merchants have moved on from simply wanting a digital payments solution – now they want to grow revenues, go cross-border, and compete on a level that they couldn’t have imagined six years ago. The payments infrastructure that worked fine in 2019 often isn’t up to that job. That gap is what we’re built to close.
Our product allows merchants to operate and scale across borders through a single connection, giving them access to a wide range of payment methods – cards and alternative options alike – backed by a global network of banking and financial partners. It’s faster, more transparent, and built around how modern commerce actually works.
What do you think deserves more attention than it is getting in your part of the industry?
Large Language Model (LLM) technology in payments data, and the gap between how much people talk about AI and how little of it is actually being applied where it matters.
Payment ecosystems generate enormous volumes of structured and unstructured data, and most of it goes nowhere useful. It sits in dashboards that nobody had time to read or spreadsheets that require a specialist to extensively interpret. That’s a real problem, because buried in that data are the signals merchants need to make better decisions – unusual decline or fraud patterns, concentration risks, week-on-week shifts that warrant attention.
A well-configured LLM connected to internal payment data can surface those signals in plain language, in seconds, for anyone in the business and not just the payments team. It doesn’t replace analytics; it makes analytics accessible to the people who most need to act on them. That’s the direction we’re heading at CONCRYT. The technology is ready… the industry just hasn’t caught up yet.
What do you think people still misunderstand about your part of the industry?
That changing consumer expectations are the whole story – they’re not, they’re the half that’s easy to talk about.
The shift toward digital wallets, mobile-led commerce, and account-to-account payment rails is also a real pressure on merchant strategy (and on what they expert from their payment providers as a result). A merchant offering a new payment option doesn’t just mean easily adding on a new tool to their payment stack. It means rethinking how trust is built with a new age of customers who scrutinise transparency and security more closely than ever.
For smaller businesses, that raises the bar across the board: faster onboarding, simpler integration, stronger fraud protection, and omnichannel capabilities (that work smoothly across in-store, online, and mobile) without the overhead of running separate systems for each channel. The good news is that the technology gap has narrowed significantly – small merchants can now access tooling that would have been out of reach a few years ago, and only available for their larger competitors.
Larger merchants face a different challenge. For them, payments need to disappear into a broader digital operation – sitting alongside bigger inventory, logistics, analytics, and customer engagement systems rather than running as a separate workflow. Every transaction is a data point, and the merchants who treat it that way tend to pull ahead.
What do you expect to rise up the agenda over the next year?
Accepting multiple payment methods will soon be table stakes – necessary, but not enough. The real differentiator will be how intelligently merchants can connect, protect, and optimise every transaction across channels and borders. Payments are becoming a strategic lever in their own right, one that shapes customer trust, operational efficiency, and financial stability, and more merchants are starting to treat them that way.
At the same time, global economic uncertainty is going to keep squeezing margins for merchants and making consumers more selective. That kind of climate puts a premium on payment efficiency and liquidity management. Reliable cross-border payment flows, real-time settlement, and smarter cash flow visibility will be what keeps merchants resilient. Stablecoin settlements are also starting to rise up the agenda, particularly as businesses look for faster, more transparent and more cost-efficient ways to move value across borders.
What’s the one question about your company we should have asked: and what’s your answer?
Probably: what have you actually built in two years?
And the honest answer is: more than what most people expect from a company our age. We’ve established a real foothold in the market, grown the team to over 50 employees, opened a new European headquarters in Barcelona, completed 100 integrations – giving merchants access to both local and international markets through a single platform. New features like cash flow reporting and automated onboarding and offboarding have taken real friction out of the process and helped our clients get to market faster.
