The name Ginger Payments is a bit of a misnomer. “We’re not a PSP anymore,” offers Roderick de Koning, CEO of the company. “We’re more like Ginger Tech now,” he adds as COO Joachim de Boer nods in agreement. The company now helps businesses build financial applications in a number of areas including banking and finance, ecommerce, instant lending, online lending, insurance and risk management, on-demand services, as well as in payments.

Beginnings: a PSP that has its stuff together

De Koning, de Boer, and CTO Maarten Sander founded Ginger in 2014 because they saw ample room for improvement in the PSP industry. Before then, the three were working together at a PSP. “At that time what was missing were technically-focuses PSPs, a PSP that was focused on the programmer didn’t really exist in the Netherlands,” explains de Boer.

De Boer goes on to mention that most PSPs, from an integration perspective, failed to sufficiently carry out this task, which established a mandate for Ginger to remove complexity from integration in payments, ecommerce, and any other industry it works in. “I like to keep it clean and simple, integrating within a half a day” de Boer says.

Due to the gaps in the PSP industry, the trio began Ginger with a wealth of experience:

Sander had already built two payments platforms prior to stepping into Ginger while de Boer had extensive experience in ecommerce and a technical flair, which when combined with de Koning’s expertise in banking and payments, made for a new type of PSP. One that “had its stuff together,” according to de Koning.

A change in direction: helping businesses build tools for transaction processing

“While we were building our platform, six or seven months in, ING called,” explains de Koning, and that call set into motion events that changed the direction of their business. ING wanted to start their own PSP and “they came to us and saw we had a great platform and a ton of know-how, and just asked to use ours,” relays de Koning. “So, we white-labeled our own platform and sold it to ING, and they are still using it,” de Koning adds.

After they sold the platform to ING, they took stock of their business and the PSP landscape. The PSP landscape was, and remains, very competitive, with slim margins for all but the most successful businesses; hence, the deal with ING caused Ginger to re-focus its efforts to re-selling the platform, or parts of it, to corporates that lack the knowledge and or internal skills sets to do so.

“What we really focus on now is helping businesses build tools to help with transactions,” says de Koning. Here, transactions are meant in a broad sense, in terms of both those of the traditional financial sort as well as tokenization, air miles, and data.

Supreme Clientele

With the new focus, Ginger sells its platform to its clients, which are primarily financially-focused companies, connecting it to their systems and making adjustments as needed. “And this is actually what we like better [ed. than being a PSP],” says de Koning.

Due to ING’s enthusiasm over Ginger’s platform, they invited Ginger to take part in a partnership with US SME lending fintech Kabbageto work on ING Instant Lending. This service allows SMEs in Europe to get instant loans via Kabbage. De Boer explains Ginger’s role in the service:

“Kabbage, as a US company, didn’t know a lot about the SEPA [Single Euro Payments Area] landscape and they weren’t looking forward to integrating with the SEPA systems, which are extremely complex. They wanted to create the cool engine that can calculate how much you can lend and then disperse it and not have to focus on legacy systems, and that’s where we came in.”

Ginger had already integrated with these legacy systems, so all Kabbage had to do was connect to Ginger and let them handle the legacy systems, which meant faster and more efficient creation of ING Instant Lending. The integration with Kabbage took around six weeks.

Besides ING and Kabbage, Ginger has worked with Air Miles and Mastercard.

You can check out Ginger’s brand-new website here.

By Elliot Lyons, Research Analyst