Money20/20 · Amsterdam · Part 2
Bringing In-Store Payment Experiences to E-Commerce
The LFG! podcast continues its Amsterdam adventure. This time, Justin Pike provides the origin story and mission of Burbank, while sharing lessons from 25+ years as a serial founder and payments expert.
Episode Description
LFG!'s Amsterdam adventure continues, and this time around we interview Justin Pike, CEO of Burbank. Burbank is a platform that turns consumer mobile phones into payment terminals, meaning that shoppers only need to tap their physical card to their phone and enter their PIN when making an online purchase.
If you haven't heard of Burbank before, that's no surprise, as the company operates as a 'behind the scenes' white-label solution for acquirers and PSPs. In this conversation, Justin shares the origin story of the business, and how an everyday problem inspired its creation.
Justin shares lessons here that any founder can get value from. He talks through the endeavour required to scale the business, and the strict requirements that need to be met when creating a security framework that's designed, eventually, to work for two billion consumer devices.
We go beyond Burbank too. Justin is a serial founder, and his 25-year payments career includes the launches of Enet (airline payment processing), MyPinPad (the first softPOS), and MyHSM (cloud-based payments), and here he explains what these experiences have taught him.
We also discuss fraud, an ever-present topic in LFG! conversations these days. Justin explains that card-present transactions shift liability and reduce fraud, false positives and chargebacks considerably. Many of these costs are hidden, Justin claims that the admin and associated costs of false positives cost merchants hundreds of billions of pounds each year.
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This transcript was produced with transcription software and lightly edited for readability. It may contain errors and might not be a word-for-word record of the conversation. If anything looks off, the audio and video are the definitive version.
Hi everyone, and welcome to Let Fintech Grow. I'm Ian Horne, and I'm joining you live from Money20/20. I say live, I'm uploading this, so by the time it goes up, Money20/20 will be well and truly finished. But it's great to be back here, and today I'm joined by Justin Pike, CEO of Burbank Software. And a handshake, there we go. So, Justin, you've been to Money20/20 several times before, and you've just arrived, is my understanding. What are you expecting this time around?
We're engaged with a lot of PSPs and acquirers, so it's always a good place for us to connect, to have those conversations face to face that you can't get done otherwise. You can't read the body language over email, so it's always a really good place to get that done. The outside parties and dinners are probably more productive than the inside at times, to be fair.
The networking is everything, isn't it? So, you've just arrived, and I think you've got a few days in store for you, maybe the DJ party, maybe I'll see you with a few drinks later. But in the meantime, Burbank Software: for those who don't know who you are, tell me what you do.
So Burbank Software is a next-generation SoftPOS, in a way. My previous company, which I founded, MyPinPad, invented and built the technology for SoftPOS, or mPOS, as it's known today. We were the first company to release that. During lockdown, my mother-in-law would call me every Monday morning to put things in her basket, because she couldn't check out. She doesn't like typing in details and answering all the questions, "where is this stored?" She'd always say to me, "why can't I tap my card against my phone, like I do in the shops?" And it kind of resonated. Well, there are a million and one technical reasons, it's hard. So, with my technical team from MyPinPad, we founded Burbank, and we had to go right back to the drawing board and rewrite everything: to build a security framework that's safe in the hands of consumers, that doesn't contain any encryption keys or acquirer keys or anything else. It's built from the ground up, a technology that turns consumer devices into payment devices.
So rather than using something like Google Pay or Apple Pay, you use this. I think it's a really interesting solution, and I actually love the origin story, that it came from a conversation with your mother-in-law. Very cool. I wonder, though: is it designed specifically for that kind of use case, where someone is less confident typing their data or using an autofill solution? Or do you think it's a service for everyone?
A service for everyone. When you boil it down, you tap your card and you enter your PIN, you're categorically confirming that it's you. That's why liability is shifted when you shop at a terminal versus over the internet. Because if I know where to look, and I probably do, I could buy your credit card details online and make a purchase before you even know they've been compromised. Hence the reason the MSC rates are higher: it's higher risk, higher charges. When you're shopping face to face, you don't need all the fraud-management systems, because it categorically proves it's you, from the card. So, boiling it down, we can use this technology not just for payments, but for things like agentic AI and authorising bots. There are lots of areas where this technology will filter out over the coming years.
So if you're talking about agentic AI, you'd still have that human transaction layer, but it would be more a case of just tapping your card to your phone?
How do the bots, the agents, know that it's a person who's actually authorised it? At the end of the day, we've got agents now going off making purchases, and all that might happen is an increase in chargebacks, with people saying, "it wasn't me, I didn't authorise it." Potentially, it's a nightmare scenario. But if you've got a bot that's pre-authorised, that you've tapped and PINned, then you'd operate it on a decent trust level.
It's really interesting what you're doing here, because I keep saying to people that, for me, the biggest topic in fintech right now is fraud. People don't want to position it like that, because it's not as exciting as a conference headline or something to base your publication on, but I interview a lot of fraud professionals and people in that market. You're trying to create the right level of friction. Do you think having that physical layer is increasingly important now, especially as AI makes deepfakes harder to spot? Do you think physically tapping a card to a phone is going to become a necessity as AI improves?
CPoI isn't a brand-new way to pay. We've found a way to scale the existing safest way to pay in the world, chip and PIN, so that everybody can use it. Everybody has a card, everybody has a PIN. You only have to look at card-on-file: it's dropping off continuously, because people are getting fed up with storing cards somewhere in the cloud and then having them compromised and hacked. Every month you see a hack, be it Marks & Spencer, be it Harrods, be it Target, there's always something going on, and people are starting to get a bit wise. That trust level, because of the inconvenience, is going down. But they know how to pay. My 75-year-old mother knows how to tap her card and enter a PIN, and she's now doing that on her mobile phone. Ironically, the older generation probably don't use the internet as much as they could, it's an issue of trust. My mother-in-law, my father, would never type their card details online; they're not brought up that way. But she uses her card to buy a pint of milk every day. So, all of a sudden, we can open up an entirely different target audience for merchants, one that's the richest segment.
Yeah, absolutely. It's an e-commerce thing, isn't it, ultimately, bringing the real-world, in-store experience to that. Are you getting any research or data on how customers typically use your service? Is it for everyday items, or more big-ticket items?
It can be all of it. We've just done a big YouGov survey, and consumers are willing to do this. At the end of the day, a wallet is a subset of a subset of a subset of people, it's only a certain phone, and people have to be comfortable using it. What came out clearly in the report is that people want to be in control of making a payment. They don't want to look at their phone and see £500 suddenly gone out of their account. When you're in charge, and you're taking a positive action of tapping your card or entering your PIN, people feel more comfortable. So we haven't had any negative feedback from that experience.
Let's look at your business from a growth perspective. You've come to Money20/20, you're clearly looking to network and meet the right people. Who are you trying to connect with here? Are you trying to grow internationally, or raise funds? What's the next step?
We're very well funded. We launched the first live transaction about 18 months ago in the US, where I live. Burbank will be the company that nobody ever hears of, we entirely white-label. So we deal with the likes of all the large acquirers and PSPs, and they can host the system, run the system, and produce their own payment solution. So we remain invisible.
Great stuff. And looking at the fraud market generally, there have been some eye-watering sums coming out of it. I think in 2025 there was a trillion dollars lost globally to fraud. Where do you see that market heading, and how is your solution safeguarding people against the evolution of fraud?
The interesting thing with CPoI is that it's a market-by-market approach. If you look at the airline industry, you've got very high-value tickets, and purchasing is cost- and time-dependent, we've all had airline tickets or concert tickets where you go to pay and the wonderful AI system says, "no, I don't think it's you." Airlines lose a lot of money, not just through fraud but also through false positives. In fact, last year the schemes' figures were $44 billion lost to fraud, and false positives were $450 billion. It's ten times the problem. And largely, that's a problem the merchants don't know they have. They're paying a fraud company that tells them, "we've saved you, Ian, from ten fraud attacks this week", but some of those might have been genuine. You don't know. So again, it's about simplicity and just replicating what works. Chip and PIN works. Sometimes, to move forwards, you have to look backwards, you can't always innovate for the sake of it. The hardest challenge we had was building something that scales. With chip and PIN there are probably 150 million terminals in the world today; we're targeting 2 billion consumer devices. If you plugged in 2 billion POS devices in the world today, the banking system would melt. So we've had to re-architect everything, a completely different approach, from the ground up, to make it safe to transact from consumer devices.
Great stuff. A few things to finish. I want to look at your founder journey. Obviously the last few years have been interesting. How long have you been running Burbank now?
So Burbank is three years old now. Right back at the start, I founded a company called eNett, which was the world's largest payment processor in the airline and hospitality space. Then I founded MyPinPad, which was the first company to do SoftPOS. Then MyHSM, the first company to put payment HSMs in the cloud. So it's been a long journey, a 25-year journey, but one where every company has achieved something different. MyPinPad was all about convincing the schemes and PCI that you actually can put a PIN into a phone securely. And then, for retailers, the logical end to this is consumers, because everybody already has what they need to transact securely, they just don't use it.
Yeah, absolutely. And this most recent venture, three years in, what has it taught you as a founder that you perhaps hadn't learned in previous ventures?
Patience.
Yes.
In the payments industry, you think it takes three years, it takes six. You think you need two million, you need four. That's the biggest thing. There are so many moving parts: acquirers, PSPs, scheme bodies, the schemes. It's a nightmare.
I'm going to finish on this. We're at Money20/20, where you hear people talking about all sorts of big themes and mega-trends. In two or three words only: what do you think is the most exciting topic in the industry right now?
Okay, so CPoI would be my logical answer. Agentic AI is obviously something that is
You never do two or three words! No one manages it, honestly, it's rude of me to even ask, and it is very difficult. Agentic AI, yeah?
It's difficult, yeah. Probably that.
And the same question, what's overhyped? What are you hearing about that makes you think, "no, I've had enough of this"?
I have to be very careful, because there are a lot of people behind me here that I might
Okay, well, that's good.
It's difficult. I think there's a huge hype around AI, and AI is a wonderful technology in some areas. But if you look at some areas of payments, such as fraud prevention, and you look at the cold, hard facts and stats, it costs money, and it's not good enough yet. It guesses whether it's you.
Absolutely. It's funny, it's a variation of the last answer I got, which was that the most exciting thing is AI, and the most overhyped thing is also AI.
Correct.
Anyway, Justin, such a pleasure talking to you. Let's do another handshake. Thank you for joining us on Let Fintech Grow, and thank you, everyone, for watching.