Wallester on Why B2B Fintech's 3 per cent Problem is Trust

Editorial Calendar World-Region-Country Wallester on Why B2B Fintech’s 3 per cent Problem is Trust Karine Martinez, head of strategic partnerships atWallester, a European card-issuing platform, works with fintechs, lenders and embedded finance platforms to launch and scale card programmes. She answered eight written questions from The Fintech Times on whether the 3 per cent figure really is a trust problem, what a business looks at before it switches, and where implementations go wrong. Martinez reads the figure as a trust deficit rather than a capability gap, and argues that is the more useful reading.

Most fintech platforms are technically capable, she said, so if adoption were purely a capability problem it would be closing faster. What happens in practice is different: businesses are not comparing feature lists, they are weighing the operational risk of replacing infrastructure they already depend on. A young company with simple, recent processes can afford to experiment.

A business running on workflows that have quietly held it together for years is making a different calculation, not whether the new option is better but what it costs if it fails and how hard it is to unwind. “Until a provider can answer that convincingly, the incumbent system wins by default, however imperfect it is.” That, in her words, is not a mundane adoption curve but a trust deficit with a very specific shape. Businesses decide a provider is safe, she said, by watching how the first real interaction with the infrastructure goes rather than what is promised in the sales process.

Her example isGF Money, a financial services provider operating across Scandinavia, which moved from a traditional credit-line offering into a card programme with Wallester that has grown to more than 27,000 cards issued across Finland, Sweden and Denmark.David Öhlund, its chief executive for Scandinavia, was quoted