Serhii Zakharov: CEO and Founder Re-Inventing E-Money for the Future of Digital Commerce

The fintech sector has grown rapidly, forever changing how businesses and consumers move, manage and access money. The adoption of open banking accelerated around Europe, growing e-wallet use worldwide and businesses increasingly moving on to digital-first payment environments. Despite these advancements within fintech, many online merchants kept running into the same issue they had suffered for years: customers who abandoned payments before making the checkout. Redirected payment flows, fragmented bank authentication, delay in getting funds confirmed, or inconsistent customer flows continued to harm merchant conversion rates, all across e-commerce. Despite the rise of digital wallets, many payment systems still relied on infrastructure that created friction rather than improved the user experience.

These limitations pointed to a larger reality in the fintech industry itself, e-money infrastructure was developing at velocity but not fast enough to service the needs of modern digital commerce. Instead of addressing these issues as stand-alone UX issues, Serhii Zakharov, Founder and CEO of PayDo, sees them as infrastructure-related issues that need a fundamentally new technical fix. 

Solving the Checkout Abandonment Problem

Customer experience is now one of the most commercially important factors in e-commerce growth. Every additional step at checkout created another point of failure and increased the risk of the transaction failing. Instead of focusing on merchant environments, redirecting users to an external banking page or an opportunity for third-party authentication led to disrupted purchasing behaviour and reduced conversions. While redirection flows had become commonplace across the many payment system architectures that now served as back-channel for consumers, companies increasingly understood the commercial cost of these flows.

Zakharov’s solution became PayDo’s Non-Redirect E-Wallet architecture, a payment infrastructure designed to allow customers to complete transactions without leaving the merchant environment. This solution greatly simplified the checkout experience and increased customer engagement and merchant conversion rates. More importantly, the breakthrough was not in front-end optimisation alone. Zakharov organized the infrastructure across a range of functions, including: technology, compliance, finance, risk and operations, in order to scale the product effectively in a financial regulated environment. At a time when fintech companies were busy scaling up payment functionality for the masses, the Non-Redirect E-Wallet hit one of the industry’s most directly commercial areas of focus, cutting friction in digital transactions.

Confirmation of Receipt now in Open Banking

In parallel with the Non-Redirect E-Wallet, Zakharov had also set up his own Open Banking Confirmation of Receipt API system. As the European revolution for open banking progressed since the beginning of 2022, the speed and effectiveness of account-to-account payments attracted businesses. But there remained a significant barrier to merchants, when a transaction was initiated, funds were not guaranteed to be received. This gap created uncertainties for online businesses and left spaces in which they could have payment disputes and types of friendly fraud. Merchants could get confirmation that a payment process had begun, but no guarantee that the transaction had been settled. Zakharov targeted this weakness in the solution, designing the proprietary API infrastructure to not only inform merchants of when their payments are going live, but to confirm the guaranteed receipt of funds in real time. For the first time, merchants operating in open banking environments could receive confirmed receipt of funds before triggering order execution, eliminating the structural gap between payment initiation and actual receipt that had made open banking commercially unusable at scale.

The innovation also encouraged wider adoption of open banking protocols for online businesses looking to bypass traditional card payment infrastructure.

Re-imagining E-Money Infrastructure

The difference between those innovations was not just in the technical features, but in the theory driving them. A broad segment of  the fintech industry still concentrated on adding new services, integrations or pay-as-you-go options to the ecosystem. Zakharov's approach had been to simplify transaction procedures specifically. This was a manifestation of a change in digital finance. With the maturity of fintech, businesses are much more oriented towards operational efficiency, smooth infrastructure, and conversion optimization rather than novelty alone. Financial tech was evaluated less by time or reach than how well it sliced through online commercial friction. The Non-Redirect E-Wallet and Confirmation of Receipt infrastructure was a prominent example of this shift. Zakharov reframed the approach away from considering payments as isolated technical solutions for a technical event in silos and structured payments around merchant operation, customer behaviour and long-horizon scalability.

PayDo in the fast-evolving fintech industry

PayDo's infrastructure innovations have contributed to growing industry recognition and commercial momentum. Its Non-Redirect E-Wallet and proprietary open banking services place the company within a broader shift towards more connected financial services infrastructure. The success of these solutions also indicates what the fintech sector is increasingly looking for: robust infrastructure which enhances trust, minimises friction and is highly agile to ever changing clients’ needs.