Meet SpectroCoin, a company developing bitcoin exchange, wallet, payment processor and a bitcoin debit card. Its CEO Vytautas Karalevičius suggests their main product in doing really well with 100K clients and 500 new registrations per day, and yet SpectroCoin is working on a pivot project – Pervesk.lt – that should make them a player in the traditional payments ecosystem.

Hi there, so what is SpectroCoin? What’s the idea behind it?

Vytautas: Our initial idea was to issue a bitcoin debit card. However, we ended up with developing bitcoin exchange, bitcoin wallet, bitcoin payment processor and only then launching a bitcoin debit card. Hence, SpectroCoin is an all in one solution for bitcoin (and now other cryptocurrencies such as DASH). We try to eliminate most risks involved in using digital currencies: know-how risk (regarding using bitcoin protocol, maintaining bitcoin nodes etc), technological risk (regarding security and stability issues) and financial risk (regarding price volatility). Our target users are people who are using bitcoin as a method of payment, as we are not selling digital currencies to everyone despite their needs, but we are selling services to people who already have a case to use digital currency. Currently, we only have 100,000 clients and 500 new registrations a day.

That sounds great. And how about Pervesk.lt, a new product you are working on? How was this idea born, how has it evolved and what’s on the menu?

Vytautas: We came with this idea couple of years ago while we were building SpectroCoin as we saw an opportunity in payment industry to offer more flexible solutions from the technical side for businesses as well as lower and quicker transactions for individuals. While services we are going to offer (payment account, money remittances, debit cards and payment acquiring) already exist in the market, we are aiming to offer more efficient and technology friendly solutions. The key reason for launching this product is to scale IT and human resources outside of our core product as one of our competitive edges would be an ability to offer low-cost services due to a scale of our operations.

So what market problems will Pervesk.lt try to solve?

Vytautas: We believe that payments industry is one of the best examples of perfect competition as in general services are identical and one can only compete on price and time aspects (as well as on user experience and fraud protection). Hence, we believe that in next year or two years the payment market will be different from today, because a number of FinTech companies are subsidizing their services with investor capital and once they run out of investments, they will have to charge all costs from their clients as well as a margin to cover initial investment, which should make their price no longer competitive. Hence, we are aiming to offer more competitive prices for the end users during this time and afterward. Another issue we are targeting is the speed of transactions settlement as we want our clients to be able to receive funds as quickly as possible, which is extremely important for business clients who are usually faced by rolling reserves and other limitations. We are planning to reduce settlement time by having a large scale of transactions in both ways (i.e. individuals depositing and business withdrawing through the same payment channels.

What are the main challenges in the payments industry? Could you elaborate further on that?

Vytautas: We believe that the key problems in the payment industry are the speed of receiving funds and fraudulent payments. Despite the advancement in technology and being able to confirm payments instantly, it still takes too long for merchants or any other receiver to receive funds, this is also due to that most FinTech solutions are building chains of different intermediaries rather than working on eliminating them. Our goal is to build infrastructure as independent as possible, in other words applying bitcoin philosophy for traditional payments.

And what are your main challenges for a company that develops solutions for this industry? How are you overcoming them?

Vytautas: The key problem for a company in today's market environment is to find really talented employees to hire. We still have not found a perfect solution for this problem. However we do have two offices, one in Vilnius and one in Kaunas to be able to find the best people in these cities by offering them various perks.

Speaking of staff, can you introduce the team?

Vytautas: Currently we have 20 people working on our projects, which are led by three co-founders: myself, Vytautas Karalevicius (CEO), Ph.D. researcher of cryptocurrencies, Cambridge University alumni, who has gained experience at Bloomberg LP and management consulting industry. Mantas Mockevičius (CCO) who has eight years of experience of managing several payments and electronic money related projects from an operational perspective. Justas Dobiliauskas (CTO) who has eight years of experience in developing IT solutions for medium and large financial institutions. All projects are solely owned by private Lithuanian nationals.

So what’s next then? 🙂

Vytautas:  While Pervesk.lt is more a pivot project for us to gain more experience and tailor our product in traditional payments ecosystem, our long-term goal is to build an ecosystem to facilitate payments without relaying on counterparties (to have more transactions inhouse) for Europe. To achieve this goal we are going to work hard to onboard individuals as well as businesses to use Pervesk.lt in Lithuanian market as well as analogous projects in the international market.

Thank you for your time, Vytautas!