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toMaS Likar Hyperwallet
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Top Payments Tech Gurus
Travel often serves as an anti- dote to routine and mindset. For Tomas Likar, vice presi- dent of strategy and business de- velopment at Hyperwallet, it also o ered a path to the wider world of payments.
Likar, who grew up in Prague, joined McKinsey & Company 10 years ago. He initially focused on advising mobile operators for the global management consulting company.
In particular, he spent time in the emerging markets of the Middle East and Africa where he helped launch new mobile products, in- cluding payments-focused solutions. At that time, the region’s relative lack of banking infrastructure and the large amount of unbanked consumers led to an explosion
of payment services—such as M-PESA—that enabled payments and transactions via mobile phones.
That experience later proved ad- vantageous when he moved to the U.S. to attend the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. While many of his peers were fo- cused on the East Coast business and payments ecosystems, his experience abroad had given him a wider scope of what worked, and what might work down the line.
That insight also has proved bene cial to him at Hyperwallet, which he joined about a year ago.
Headquartered in San Francisco, the company provides technology solutions that enable employers and enterprises to pay their glob- ally dispersed contractors, suppli- ers and sellers. More recently, Hyperwallet has started to serve digital marketplaces, “the Ubers and Airbnbs of the world, signing some of the biggest names out there,” Likar says.
“Everyone is freelancing, every- one has gigs instead of full-time jobs. It’s more and more a free- lance and gig economy, and the old way of making payments is not applicable anymore.”
Need for Speed
That’s not the only change hap- pening in payments, he adds.
It’s all about speed. “The push
to have faster and more trans- parent payment methods is one of the biggest trends,” he says, pointing to the Faster Payments program in the U.K. “Speed is key. Real-time payments are becoming the standard for consumers,
and they want to be paid the same way. It will be secure and very transparent.”
Currently, Hyperwallet o ers in- dependent workers access to their payments in as close to real-time as possible. Through product o erings such as corporate prepaid cards, payments to existing debit
What technologies Will change payments most?
“Speed is key. Real-time payments are becoming the standard for consumers, and they want to be paid the same way.”
cards or cash pickup, Hyperwallet is helping new economy companies pay their workers almost instantly.
But Likar is much less bullish on the prospects of bitcoin and other virtual currencies, despite all the attention paid to blockchain, the technology that underlies bitcoin transactions. “We’ve not yet seen high customer adoption for those things,” he says, largely because there are few incentives to spark mass use. “I think the underlying blockchain idea is really interest- ing, but I don’t think the world needs another currency in the form of bitcoin.”
Of course, Likar does not spend all his time thinking about payments. A huge sports fan, he can often be found running and biking in San Francisco or watching the San Jose Sharks ice hockey team. And he still likes to travel, at least a few weeks each year to di erent countries. “Having been an expat on four di erent continents, I know the pain of moving money from one country to another,” he says. “It’s part of what led me to this company.”