Fireside Chat With Emre Guzer
This article is written by Jeremiah Uke, a Contributor Author at Startup Istanbul.
Yunus Emre Guzer is the co-founder and CEO of PayU, he has a vast experience in entrepreneurship, fintech, and management information systems, he was present at Startup Turkey and was part of a fireside chat with Roger cowdrey, who is a motivational speaker and author of “Creating an entrepreneurial mindset”. Emre shared his vast expanse of knowledge and experience with the audience. Questions asked and answers given are below:
TAGS: Entrepreneurship, Startup Turkey, Fintech, Business, Technology.
Having studied in the Havard Business School, Emre possesses over 18 years in the technology space, of which he has 15 years in Fintech, he co-founded PayU in 2011, which is the first and the biggest payment service provider in Turkey. Emre also has experience working with a number of enterprises including TOBB, Garanti Payment Systems, and Teknoloji Holding.
Tell us how you got to where you are and a bit about your business
Thank you for having me, I started my career 16 years ago at a bank, I feel like I am still a banker practicing fintech. When I started in 2008 at Garanti Payment Systems, we had an opportunity to build the whole payment ecosystem for e-commerce players, the market is not so saturated, even the big players like eBay, Hepsiburada that come from the market but are so small, they need something to be covered by the banks, that is why we started building something to cover their needs. I had this opportunity to see how the market works, I spent almost 13 years by dealing with the virtual payments online, the next 5-6 years, the Nasper’s PayU found me, to penetrate PayU’s business to Turkey, which is a payment service, I then started at PayU because it was one of the first fintech companies in the country.
In the way, you developed the business in Turkey, what is your approach to PayU?
At Nasper, we believe in creating an ecosystem from scratch for those emerging markets we are running, we call these emerging markets “high growth markets”, so we actually do believe that if you leverage on the ecosystem from scratch, by building some e-e-commerce services to enable them to shop online from anywhere in the world. At PayU, we built the first PSP in the market, it was a harder time because we were teaching the customers what the PSP looks alike in the market, how the market will evolve, after building the first PSP, we got a whole lot of great followers. We are in 16 countries currently, focusing on local needs and fixing them, then, using the same API (Application Program Interface” we build everything, with a few increments and a different pricing scheme. Being global is the key, and acting local is also the sweet spot that we have. Currently, we have more than 250,000 online merchants from all around the world, India is growing very fast, we started investing in the fintech companies, we are a 15 years old company, we understand that the world is changing and we need to be involved as well.
https://youtu.be/ifNRsP60fA0