Buckzy Payments: Payments through People with Purpose

With global economies becoming increasingly connected, there is growing demand for a fast, secure and efficient cross-border payments system. But this trillion-dollar market is being shaken to its foundations by a rush of new entrants that promise to solve long-standing pain points for businesses and consumers alike. This includes a lack of transparency, long settlement periods, high transaction costs, and limited accessibility.

In recent years, the digitization and automation of the B2B payment system have turbo-charged demand among businesses looking to connect with suppliers, wholesalers, and retailers globally.

Having been in the cross-border payments business for 15 years, Abdul Naushad was well-acquainted with the challenges financial institutions and corporate customers face in making faster settlements and tracking their international payments. He realized that while governments around the world are progressively pushing real-time cross-country settlements to increase the velocity of trade, there was no such initiative for cross-border settlements. The breakthrough moment was when Naushad came up with the idea to transpose real-time settlement capabilities on cross-border payments – an idea that has predictably generated tremendous interest with financial institutions looking to transition to a faster payment settlement model. He established Buckzy Payments in 2018 to address real-time payments on a global scale.

We recently interviewed Mr. Naushad to know more about the company. In this interview, he talked about the Buckzy Payments platform and the company's work culture. Read on for the excerpts from the interview.

Tell us about your services.

We offer three key products on our digital platform – a real-time cross border payment settlement network, a cross-border pay-in network and enablement of Banking-as-a-Service offering multi-currency virtual bank accounts and digital ledgers.

The Buckzy proposition offers traditional banks, neobanks, and other fintechs a highly customizable real-time cross-border payment settlement network.  Buckzy also offers its solutions as a white label for banks, eCommerce marketplaces and fintechs who wish to use the solutions themselves.

Q. How are you different from other payments platforms?

Buckzy's near real-time cross-border settlements with a turnaround time of less than two minutes are setting new heights in the world of international transactions. Not limited to just bank-to-bank transfers, Buckzy is also enabling bank-to-wallet transfers through digital mobile wallets like M-Pesa in Africa. As a plus, Buckzy brings absolute transparency to transactions by providing spot rates on forex that lowers transaction fees.

Buckzy's offers several embedded add-on services like forex services and treasury and cash management on its platform to SMEs – something that traditional banks offer only to large enterprises. Additionally, Buckzy's powerful platform and infrastructure is built to withstand the load of running multiple large scale ecosystems like different traditional banks, neobanks, and fintechs at the same time in a secure and scalable fashion. Finally, the key differentiator for Buckzy is its platform’s ability to offer compatible modules with à la carte services that clients can pick and choose to onboard as per their needs. Buckzy is a regulated and licensed payment institution in various jurisdictions that our customers can leverage to move funds in a compliant and safe manner.

Q. How do you provide real-time cross border payments consistently? Tell us about the technology that helps you deliver this quality.

It offers a real-time cross-border settlement solution with two products – the pay-out network in 37 countries and the pay-in network in 32 countries. The pay-out network allows Buckzy to push payments into bank accounts, digital wallets, debit or prepaid cards across the globe. The pay-in option enables Buckzy to collect payments in domestic currencies on behalf of clients in different countries in accordance with domestic payment rates and collection schemes and move them to customers’ accounts in the currency of their locations.

The recent addition to Buckzy’s product portfolio is enablement of Banking-as-a-Service*, which offers multi-currency bank accounts in six currencies like USD, CAD, GBP, Euro, Brazilian Real, Mexican Peso.

Q. How do you keep the workplace productive and cheerful for your employees?

Our people are our priority, and our leadership team understands that an engaged team is a more productive one. We know that our success is dependent on how we lead our teams. For this reason, our leaders are focused and dedicated on leading with empathy, empowering their teams and providing opportunities for continued growth development.

We host a variety of interactive events that provide an opportunity for employees to engage in open, collaborative discussion. This includes our Quarterly Global Town Halls where we take the opportunity to celebrate team successes and highlight important employee milestones.  In addition, we host monthly Happy Hours that solely focus on fun, interactive cross functional team building activities that provide an opportunity for personal connections and participants must abide by ONE RULE: Absolutely No work-related topics will be discussed!

We appreciate our employee’s commitment and ensure we recognize our top performers by rewarding them appropriately. We pay competitively, offer company paid benefits and provide stock options in recognition for stellar performance.

Q. How do you empower your employees to grow? Tell us about the company’s work culture.

Our culture at Buckzy is based on a set of uncompromising values that drive everything we do – How we make decisions, they guide our behavior – internally and externally while engaging our employees and creating a sense of unity and belonging. Every employee is measured on how they exemplify our values in their day-to-day behaviors.

We pride ourselves in being collaborative, supportive and respectful in all our interactions – across every level and regardless of our position within the organization. Our senior leadership team is approachable, appreciates and encourages employee feedback and will always welcome a transparent conversation.

We are committed to our employees’ growth and development and seize every opportunity to learn. This mindset is embedded in our core value, WE OWN IT: "We admit to our mistakes and learn from them."

We encourage and offer growth opportunities by first considering our internal talent to fill vacant roles. We value the importance of our employee’s professional development by supporting learning opportunities and reimbursing the cost of external training courses with the purpose of enhancing and evolving their knowledge and skills.

Additionally, we host company-wide, interactive monthly Knowledge Sharing Sessions that cover a variety of cross functional topics with the purpose of providing knowledge transfer and educational content for all levels of the organization. This is supported by our core value, ONE TEAM: “Together, we learn, grow and win!”

Q. How many countries are you available in? Any plans for expansion? What does the future hold for your company?

Buckzy’s world-class financial services infrastructure securely connects with domestic real-time payment schemes in various countries, third-party wallets and card schemes in 80+ countries to provide a comprehensive set of digital settlement channels globally. Buckzy is headquartered in Canada with its operations across 4 continents and is expanding into various jurisdictions.

We believe the future for Buckzy is very exciting and promising. As a young company, we are well positioned globally to become the leaders in the industry through transformation of cross-border payments into real-time. With our innovative approach to financial services and thought leadership in payments, our team works very hard to deliver value to customers and empower their success.

About the Leader

Abdul Naushad, Founder and CEO

Abdul Naushad is a highly accomplished and proven business leader with deep expertise in payments and enterprise financial software with a track record of growing growth stage companies into later stage companies. He has passion for building companies, leading with innovation, technology and competing for market leadership for creating compelling value for the stakeholder’s business. Mr. Naushad is a recognized entrepreneur and business leader with over 25 years in the FinTech industry with deep expertise in global payments.

Today, Mr. Naushad is the Founder and CEO of Buckzy Payments Inc, a Toronto-based global fintech innovating and shaping the real-time cross-border payments.  At Buckzy, he is responsible for setting the vision, shaping, and executing the global business strategy to take Buckzy to market. His exceptional ability to motivate and foster performance-oriented culture across the organization is delivering the growth performance at Buckzy.

"We appreciate our EMPLOYEES' commitment and ensure we recognize our top performers by rewarding them appropriately."