Finperks Thinks Prepaid Payments Need Plumbing, Not Another App

The Macro: Prepaid Is a $2 Trillion Market Running on Duct Tape

The global prepaid card market is projected to exceed $2 trillion in transaction volume by 2027, and almost none of the infrastructure behind it was built in the last decade. Gift cards alone account for roughly $400 billion in annual sales worldwide. Employee benefit cards, cashback programs, promotional incentives, crypto off-ramps — all of these are prepaid products, and all of them rely on a patchwork of supplier relationships that looks like it was designed by committee in 2009. Because it was.

If you’re a bank that wants to offer gift card cashback to your customers, the process today looks something like this: you negotiate contracts with individual gift card suppliers, one at a time. Amazon is one contract. Apple is another. Zalando, Netflix, Starbucks — each one requires its own integration, its own settlement process, its own compliance review. A bank that wants to offer 200 brands in a cashback program needs something close to 200 separate agreements. The economics work at scale, but the integration cost and operational overhead make it prohibitive for all but the largest players.

This is the classic infrastructure gap that creates API businesses. Stripe didn’t invent payments; it made them programmable. Plaid didn’t invent bank connections; it made them accessible through a single endpoint. The prepaid space has the same fragmentation problem, but it hasn’t had its aggregation moment yet. Part of the reason is that prepaid has always been treated as a feature, not a product category. Banks bolt it on. Fintechs treat it as a retention gimmick. HR platforms offer it as a tax-optimized perk. Nobody was building the connective tissue between the brands that issue prepaid products and the platforms that distribute them.

The timing matters. Neobanks and fintech apps are competing aggressively on rewards and cashback, which means they need access to more brands in more markets faster than they can negotiate individually. HR platforms are under pressure to offer tax-compliant digital benefits as remote and hybrid work makes physical perks obsolete. And the crypto industry — for all its volatility — has a persistent demand for off-ramp solutions that convert digital assets into something spendable. All three of these trends point toward the same architectural need: a single API that connects to the entire prepaid ecosystem.

The Micro: Second-Time Founders Who Already Built This Once

Finperks is a Berlin-based prepaid orchestration platform. The pitch is straightforward: one API, one contract, one settlement process, access to 700-plus brands across 30-plus countries. Banks, fintechs, HR platforms, and retailers integrate once with Finperks and get a white-label marketplace of gift cards, cashback products, and prepaid instruments. The company handles supplier negotiations, compliance, settlement, and reconciliation on the back end. Partners go live in under 30 days.

The founding team is the strongest signal here. Achim Boensch, Sebastian Seifert, and Andreas Veller previously co-founded viafintech, a Berlin-based prepaid payments company that was acquired by Paysafe in 2021 for a reported nine-figure sum. They built and exited a company in the exact same industry they’re now re-entering. That’s not a pivot or a second act — it’s a sequel with the same directors and a bigger budget. They know the supplier relationships, the compliance landscape, the technical debt that accumulates when you try to scale a prepaid network across European markets. Finperks is, in a very real sense, the product they wished they’d had while building viafintech.

The technical team reinforces the seriousness. Philipp Zelmer serves as VP of Technology. Tobias Schoknecht is the founding engineer. The total headcount is around 12, which is lean for an infrastructure play but not unusually so at this stage. The architecture is API-first, designed for developer integration rather than end-user interaction. Finperks doesn’t have an app that consumers download. It’s the layer that makes other companies’ apps more useful.

Early traction is promising. The company claims over 700 brands live on the platform across 30-plus European markets, with expansion into the U.S. underway. One published case study cites FLIZpay, a German fintech that used Finperks integration to drive 25 percent new user acquisition, with 50 percent of users becoming repeat gift card buyers. Those are strong engagement numbers for a feature that most fintech apps treat as an afterthought. It suggests that when prepaid is implemented well — fast, broad brand selection, seamless UX — it stops being a checkbox feature and starts driving actual user behavior.

The Money: $4 Million to Build the Rails

Finperks raised $4 million in a pre-seed round led by Motive Partners and seed+speed Ventures. For a pre-seed, $4 million is substantial. It reflects two things: the credibility of second-time founders with a nine-figure exit, and the capital requirements of an infrastructure business that needs supplier relationships and compliance frameworks before it can show hockey-stick growth.

Motive Partners is a notable lead. The firm specializes in financial technology and services, with a portfolio that includes payments, capital markets, and banking infrastructure companies. They’re not generalist VCs writing checks into the latest AI wrapper — they’re domain-specific investors who understand the prepaid value chain. seed+speed Ventures, based in Berlin, brings local market expertise and early-stage operating support. The investor composition suggests this round was about strategic alignment, not just capital.

The use of funds is likely weighted toward three things: expanding brand coverage beyond Europe into the U.S. and other markets, building out the developer experience to reduce integration friction, and hiring the engineering and business development teams needed to support enterprise-grade SLAs. Infrastructure businesses are expensive to build and slow to monetize, but they tend to be sticky once adopted. A bank that integrates a prepaid API into its cashback program is not switching providers lightly.

The Verdict: The Boring Company That Might Win

Finperks is not going to generate breathless headlines. Prepaid orchestration infrastructure is not the kind of thing that trends on social media or gets demo’d at flashy launch events. That’s probably a good sign. The most durable fintech companies tend to be the ones building the infrastructure that other companies build on — the Marqetas, the Galileos, the Plaids. Finperks is making that bet in a category that’s large, fragmented, and underserved by modern API tooling.

The risk profile is manageable. The founders have done this before, literally. They know the suppliers, the compliance requirements, the edge cases in cross-border prepaid settlement. The question is not whether they can build the product — they already have — but whether the market is ready to consolidate around a single orchestration layer, or whether large players will continue to build bespoke integrations internally. My read is that the economics favor aggregation. The number of brands, markets, and use cases is growing faster than any single company’s integration team can keep up with. Finperks is positioned at the exact point where that complexity becomes someone else’s problem, and in infrastructure, that’s where the money is.