Q&A: Paysafe’s impact in Jacksonville and across the world

Paysafe, a provider of payment processing and digital wallets, posted its best quarter in Q1 2024 since going public in 2021. This marks seven consecutive quarters of year-over-year revenue growth for Paysafe. 

A London-based fintech, the company is led by CEO Bruce Lowthers, who is based on the First Coast and was formerly president of FIS. Paysafe's North American headquarters is in Jacksonville.

Paysafe solutions are geared toward mobile-initiated transactions, real-time analytics and the convergence of brick-and-mortar and online payments. 

With over 20 years of online payment experience, an annualized transactional volume of over $80 billion and approximately 3,000 employees located in more than 12 global locations, Paysafe connects businesses and consumers across 200 payment types in over 40 currencies around the world.

After gross profits grew 8.1% year-over-year in 2023, beating analyst forecasts, Lowthers

Given its Q1 success, the Business Journal sat down with Lowthers to learn about Paysafe’s burgeoning North Florida office and what services will elevate and continue to expand its international impact.

This conversation has been edited for brevity and clarity.

How much has your Jacksonville office grown since opening in October?

We've grown to a little over 100 people just since we opened the office late summer/early fall, so it's been going really well. 

We'll continue to add people throughout the year. We've got an aggressive hiring plan as we’re trying to add 170 salespeople this year alone, not to mention other functions within the company. 

It's fun to see the office busy with people from all over the world coming in and visiting Jacksonville for the first time.

In what space are you focusing your growth efforts?

We really have two distinct businesses.

In our Merchant Services business, we are the fourth largest non-bank acquirer in the U.S. 

We also have our digital wallet segment. We're one of the largest digital wallets in Europe, and we have one of the largest eCash networks in Europe with close to a million endpoints — storefronts that you can go in and buy our Paysafe card to use on whatever you're going to use your Paysafe prepaid card for.

How has the hospitality sector been a focus for Paysafe?

We really like to talk about the verticals that we align on in the experiential economy. 

And I think you hear that more and more now. Those are things where it probably became very popular post Covid. People had been cooped up for a couple of years, they wanted to go back out, they wanted to go to the Jags games they wanted to go to Jumbo shrimp, games, or down to the Symphony, so we really focused on those verticals — whether it be hospitality, retail, online betting — and we've really taken a leadership there because of our lineage and doing it for decades in Europe. 

Anything that’s helping families create memories, create experiences, that's really what we're trying to focus on: create that excitement for the day or that memory around a particular event.

Paysafe offered a sort of ‘turnkey’ solution to U.S.-based online betting. How does Paysafe overcome regulatory aspects to offer those turnkey solutions? 

We do business in 100 countries. For the last 20 plus years, we've been dealing with every one of those individual, regulatory, licensing and compliance requirements. What the company did is build a great regulatory compliance framework, and that's really what made it portable. 

As the U.S. started to open up, it was the same process, working through each of the states as they came live. At the end of 2023, we had about 30 states that are live. 

Who are you targeting with the Paysafe Business Wallet?

The Business Wallet was created as a mechanism to help our merchant base. We've got about 300,000 merchants here in the U.S. What we were trying to do is take the digital wallet to help businesses manage their business. 

Whether this manages their incidental payments, if someone's taking the company truck out to get gas, they can move money to that individual so that they can use that to put gas in the truck. They can make payroll through the business wallet. 

We've also incorporated merchant wiring into the wallet, so that they get their money faster through our process and then they can move the funds however they want.

The idea of the wallet was about helping our merchants make life a little easier every day by managing their business a little easier.

How has Paysafe’s Consumer Wallet grown?

Consumer wallets have been around for 20-plus years. What we do is we allow people to move money very quickly in real time. 

We're one of the largest in that space in Europe. In the U.S., we have double digit growth on consumer acquisition. Over the last year, it's been really a great turnaround story for us. 

When you look at form factors, we probably all use a digital wallet, whether it's our Apple wallet, or you know, Google wallet, PayPal…

We play in that space, and that's been a wonderful vertical. We expect continued growth, and we’re very excited about where we sit in that vertical. 

Again, it's all about helping people make purchases safely and easily in that experiential economy. Whether my son's trying to buy his new skin for his game or something in Roblox or whatever the game of the day is, we're integrated to almost every major video game as a payment type.

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