Lisa Shields’ next big bet
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Lisa Shields became an entrepreneur by accident. The woman who built a cross-border payments company that counted Amazon and VRBO as clients, then sold it to PayPal, and is now building what may become an even bigger fintech venture, says she never had any kind of grand plan to disrupt the finance sector.
“My work has been a random walk,” Shields explains, smiling, from her office in Vancouver, Canada. “I studied aeronautical engineering at university, simply because I was good at math and science and bad at writing.” As a student, she was part of the MIT card-counting team known for beating casinos at their blackjack tables, immortalized in books and by Hollywood. After that, she didn’t plan to head into business. “I just enjoyed tackling interesting problems.”
Her first interesting problem was one that was hiding in plain sight. In 1999, in the midst of the first dot-com frenzy, Shields was working for an online betting company. “I noticed there was a problem with the payments infrastructure,” she says. Sending money across borders, even small amounts, was seriously expensive. “The problem I wanted to solve was: How do you send $200 across a border, from a bank to a bank, in an affordable way?”
That led her to set up Hyperwallet, with the idea of interlinking domestic payment networks, creating a spiderweb of connections that avoided the need for expensive international wire transfers. This helped the business cut costs by up to 60 times and compete with SWIFT. But—true to the spirit of her career—she says there was never an initial vision for how big this network would become. “There was no aha moment. It was a series of connections. Let’s link Canada and the US. Now let’s add the UK, now let’s add Europe. Just to facilitate low-cost payouts for businesses, so people can get their money.”
The company soared as the 2008 financial crisis pushed people into side hustles. Hyperwallet’s first big customers were direct-selling organizations, such as Amway and Herbalife. “These companies needed to pay thousands—in some cases hundreds of thousands—of gig economy workers $200 or $300 a month. If you could send it to them for an end-to-end cost of $3 rather than $30, that was really meaningful.”
It was good timing. As gig economy operators went mainstream, the market for which Hyperwallet had built infrastructure suddenly ballooned. But Shields needed a break. She stepped down as CEO in 2015; three years later, PayPal came calling, buying Hyperwallet for $400 million.1,2
The hiatus was short-lived. “I enjoyed relaxing and cooking dinners for my friends for about six months,” she says. “Then I started going crazy.” Shields found her next interesting problem.
Traditionally, businesses had to switch between their accounting or Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software and their bank, resulting in error-prone, disconnected workflows. Her solution came in the form of FISPAN, which helps banks embed their products inside enterprise software. “FISPAN is mixing up banks’ existing ingredients into a new recipe,” says Shields. “If you can make it easier for a customer to pay suppliers, collect payments, reconcile cash, and manage risk, you win what the banking world calls the “primacy of operating account.”” In other words, the bank becomes that customer’s favored provider.
FISPAN’s business model is all about being invisible. Banks pay FISPAN to embed their services in the likes of accountancy or ERP software, and businesses can make payments more easily as a result. Shields’ biggest focus so far has been uniting banks and ERPs when their objectives diverge. “We’re a little mouse dancing between their legs,” says Shields.
The next payments frontier, she predicts, will be weaving finance into workflows controlled by humans, but increasingly executed by AI agents. “We believe that the next generation of automation will empower accounts payable and accounts receivable operators to become ‘working capital heroes’ at their organizations,” she says. “Not by replacing them with AI, but by allowing them to leverage AI.”
This is all a far cry from Shields’ card-counting days. “But I learned a big lesson from the blackjack team: the best tricks, techniques, and brains mean nothing if you can't make it work in the real world. Just being technically good at something doesn't really help. You have to be able to adapt to your environment.”
https://www.jpmorgan.com/payments/payments-unbound/sources
Photo courtesy of: Lisa Shields
