As Jacksonville’s newest fintech opens North American HQ, here’s what’s on the horizon (Courtesy of First Coast INNO) — London-based Paysafe’s North American headquarters is now officially open on the Jacksonville Southside.
The international online payment processing company celebrated the opening of its offices located in the Town Center II building on Gate Parkway Wednesday with much fanfare from the business community as the event was well-attended by the city’s business and tech class.
Paysafe handles about $120 billion of payments each year and operates in more than 40 currencies across a dozen offices worldwide.
The move to Jacksonville was announced last November when CEO and Executive Director Bruce Lowthers was one of two local employees. A year later, the company has more than 65 employees locally and are in the process of relocating a large portion of their staff with the aim to have around 600 employees.
The Business-Journal sat down with Lowthers at the grand opening to talk about his company’s growth and what lays on the horizon:
It’s a very interesting time to be in your industry in Jacksonville. There’s FIS, Black Knight (now a subsidiary of Intercontinental Exchange), Dun & Bradstreet and many others on the First Coast now. What do you think is driving this sector on the First Coast?
Lowthers: Well I’m biased but Jacksonville is just a beautiful place to be and live and it’s a great place for families. This past weekend we had the Blue Angels and this weekend we have Florida-Georgia football. So there is always something for our staff and their families to engage in. But there’s also a lot of talent here and it’s a great place for women in technology. There’s a lot more technology here in Jacksonville than probably most people think of, including a lot of back-office financial services. It’s really becoming kind of an emerging FinTech hub. Obviously anchored with FNF and then FIS and Black Knight, among others.
Jacksonville’s business history is pretty unique and interesting in that we used to specialize in back-office financial services in the 1980s and early 1990s before the rise of cities like Charlotte’s financial hub. But it’s interesting to see that type of industry, but leaning heavily into modern technologies, make a strong comeback in Jacksonville.
I think at least a little bit has to do with the Bill Foley’s management tree, right. So, Anthony Jabbour was at FIS, I was at FIS, obviously so was Gary Norcross. So a lot of those organizations that are here, really started under FNF and Bill’s leadership over the years. He’s obviously been a big part of the city for a long time. I’m personally grateful for him. Bill was very passionate about Jacksonville and and wanted to be a big part of the community and you can see it has spread from there.
Can you talk a little bit about your relocation progress and your plans for Jacksonville as your HQ?
I think it’s very important for us to be together from a cultural perspective. I think one of the things that I think hurt a lot of companies during Covid was everybody kind of separating out. You don’t get the same sense of collaboration that you do when you’re together. But even more than that, you don’t build that strong network. So we do a lot of different things whether its merchant acquisition or digital wallets in Europe. And when you have separation of people that aren’t in the same office, even just a few days a week, you lose a lot of that opportunity to talk and learn about other things that are going on in your organization. So for me it was really important to bring people together to really foster that collaboration, create that spirit and fabric. It is really exciting to see that happen here with this group of people. We’ve also been extending offers to people who are interested in moving to Jacksonville. And that’s gone very well. We’ve got a number of people that are in process of moving. When I announced our move to Jacksonville, there was really only two of us here at the time.
How rapidly do you see Paysafe growing here?
The company is growing again and doing well. We anticipate that we will continue to build out a presence in North America, as it is one of our areas of geographic expansion. We started in Europe and now we’re bringing a lot of what we do there to America. We’re very excited about that. But there’s most likely in a few years until we’ll reach our target range of 500 to 600 employees.
What are some of your European services that you are expanding into North America with and what growth opportunities excite you the most?
One of the things that we do is we provide card processing for iGaming and that is rapidly in North America. Everybody’s read something about the online gambling recently.
Even Disney is getting into it.
As each state has gone live, we’ve participated in that marketplace. More states are going to be allowing iGaming in the near future and that is definitely a segment we see really strong growth potential. We see a long trajectory of good growth with that sector. The other place that we do play is in the traditional gaming space. Video gaming, another great vertical, really has a lot of opportunities for growth and that space is going to continue growing for a long time. that that’s going to grow for long time. So just a lot of opportunities in North America, both with our acquiring business, our card processing business and our digital wallet business.