If we were to look back in a year or two, we might find that the last week of May 2022 manifested the trend toward the entire tech sector’s crisis, especially in the FinTech sector, which saw a C19 Pandemic-boosted hype before that. FinTech unicorns like Klarna or Bolt announced massive layoffs. Online payment pioneer PayPal as well. In contrast, the high-risk payment segment still seems to be booming. Alex Leigh, the co-founder of Total Processing, has made a job offer to the terminated Klarna people via a LinkedIn post.
The C19 Pandemic has led to an exponential increase in e-commerce shopping globally. With e-commerce sales expected to reach $5.42 trillion by the end of 2022, the cross-border e-commerce market share has increased from 15% in 2016 to a projected 22% in 2022, estimated at US$156 trillion. The C19 Pandemic was a real booster for the FinTech sector and the high-risk segment in particular. Payment Processors like Total Processing have been benefiting from it. So far!
Total Processing Limited (www.totalprocessing.com) is a UK-based high-risk payment processor and merchant service provider founded in Manchester in 2015. Alex Leigh is the co-founder and beneficial owner. The company is a member of the KPMG Global Growth Program, according to Leigh’s LinkedIn page, and operates one of the fastest-growing payment gateways in Europe
The well-known FinTech Unicorns such as Revolut, Monzo, Bolt, or Klarna are in the public eye and live off their investors’ money. They are rarely profitable. High-risk FinTechs such as Total Processing, or MoneyNetInt, on the other hand, operate their business out of the public sight with much better conditions and typically finance themselves from revenues. In this segment, there are also many black sheep like the collapsed iPayTotal that disappeared with their merchants’ money. But we cannot explain the dark side of the high-risk payment processors segment here. That is a book of its own.
We will hardly hear if and how many Klarna employees actually end up at Total Processing. But in any case, it has been an excellent marketing action.