Podcast · Episode 17
From Medicine to Fintech: Dr. Saheer's Journey
Dr Saheer Nelliparamban, CEO of Paywint, noticed that cross-border payment fragmentation was stifling SMEs. And that's why he decided to build his own payment rail.
Episode Description
Dr Saheer Nelliparamban, CEO of Paywint, didn't take the typical route into fintech. Having served as a medical doctor for the Government of Kerala, he made an entrepreneurial swerve during the COVID-19 pandemic, developing the CoviNET software that streamlined patient flow in overwhelmed hospitals.
Having got a taste for running a business, he then went on to co-found ZilMoney and OnlineCheckWriter with his brother Sabeer before venturing out on his own with Paywint.
In this episode, Dr Saheer dives into the cross-border payment challenges that his business has set out to resolve. He explains how his family's retail business in Texas served as inspiration, seeing firsthand how SMEs often face financial settlement issues, with money movement seeming fragmented and slow.
There are some fascinating points made in this conversation. Dr Saheer explains that compliance, not technology, is perhaps the biggest blocker in cross-border payments. Intriguingly, Paywint's answer to this problem is to build its own payment rail rather than wait for existing ones to interconnect.
We also cover stablecoin payments and how Paywint intends to smooth payments between parties that may have differing preferences for fiat or tokenised money. As is ever the case with instant payments, fraud is up for debate too, as Dr. Saheer tells us who's liable and why when end users fall victim to social engineering frauds such as APP, as well as how Paywint has built an in-house risk engine to score transactions on IP, geolocation, behaviour, and sanctions screening.
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Hello everyone, and welcome to Let Fintech Grow. I'm Ian Horne, and today I've got a podcast that covers everything from cross-border payments to mid-career pivots. I'm joined by Dr. Saheer Nelliparamban, CEO of Paywint, an American digital wallet built for businesses to collect, pay, store and settle funds in real time. He's a member of the Forbes Business Council and a former medical doctor. So when I say doctor, I mean he's someone you can actually turn to if someone asks whether there's a doctor on the plane. Now, there's a lot I want to discuss with Saheer, but first let's welcome him to the podcast. Saheer, thank you for joining LFG. How are you doing today?
Pretty good, and thank you so much for inviting me to this podcast.
My pleasure. Great to have you here. And there's a lot I want to talk about, cross-border payments being the main thing, seeing as that's what you do. But can we start by discussing you for a bit? Because you practised medicine for over a decade, and then you built Covinet, I think during the pandemic, if I'm pronouncing that correctly, before moving into fintech full time. There's a backstory there, right? Can you talk us through your journey?
Sure. Basically, sorry, is it Ian?
It's Ian, yes, my first name is Ian. No problem at all.
So, you know, I'm a medical doctor, a physician, I'm licensed, and I'm still licensed. But I had technology blood in my body. So once I completed my medical education, my blood was telling me to go back to my passion, because my passion was still with technology. That's the reason that, when COVID hit, I was practising as a physician at that time, I built an application to manage patient flow in the hospital. That was one of the biggest things I made, because I could do a lot with it at that time. Then I thought, let's do something in the financial technology space, and that's how I came into fintech.
Great stuff. And obviously the background, having a clinical background is quite interesting. What did that background give you going into the fintech world that you think other people don't have? Because people always have a backstory that makes their fintech journey just a little bit different. What did you learn building Covinet, and also as a doctor, would that be the correct term to use, or did you have a different title?
I mean, yeah, doctor, or just Saheer, that's my name.
Gotcha, gotcha. So as a doctor and as the founder of Covinet, what did that teach you that's become useful to you in the fintech world?
Actually, we also had a couple of retail businesses in Texas, it wasn't mine, it was our family business. And every time I went there, I'd see small and medium business people always facing financial settlement issues. The money movement was fragmented and slow. It was unable to trace, and the reporting was hard. That's the reason I jumped into the financial technology space. I wanted to make money movement faster, instant. That's what I'm still working on.
Got you. And before Paywint, am I right in saying you co-founded Zil Money and OnlineCheckWriter as well, with your brother Sabeer? And obviously Paywint you're doing independently of Sabeer, right? What is it that you saw that existing platforms couldn't do? And what's it like building with a sibling, especially someone who's got experience in the industry before you joined it?
Actually, that one too, because I had the technology blood, ninety per cent of the technology and business concept was mine. I built it. I spent all my blood and sweat, and that's how I built it. Then, at a certain point, I wanted to come out and build my own. I wanted to have something of my own. That's the reason I built Paywint. And Paywint is more like a digital wallet, something like Cash App or Venmo, but more business-oriented.
Got you. So let's get into the payment side of this. I think two of Paywint's main focus areas are cross-border payments and instant payments. You were talking about the problems businesses face today. What would you say are the biggest problems that you're tackling for those businesses?
The number one thing is speed, especially when it comes to cross-border international remittance. If you go through SWIFT, it's really slow. It's one of the slowest payment rails in the world when it comes to the international space. So that's what we want to solve. And the reason behind it is that most of the traditional banks are still going through the traditional compliance checks and policies. Today, in 2026, we have advanced tools, we have AI, artificial intelligence, we have a lot of algorithms and tools to monitor transactions. And that's what we do in Paywint. We have our own fraud algorithm, a fraud, or risk management, tool that we call Paywint Prism. So once a transaction gets initiated, it goes through the Prism. We have a lot of checks inside, which are completed within a few seconds. Then, once everything's okay, we can do the transaction instantly. We don't have to wait for any compliance step. That's what we're solving.
Yeah, absolutely. For a business listening to this that's currently losing money and time on international payouts, how do you diagnose what the problem is? How does a business figure out where it's losing money?
If you're a small or medium business, fund flow is very crucial for you. Everybody wants to get paid right away, and if you don't get the collection instantly but you need to make vendor payments right away, the money you have to collect, if it gets slow, you'll be in trouble. Especially if you're an SMB, you won't have too much of a buffer. So that's what we're solving. Any SMB can collect payment instantly, so you'll have backup funds in hand, and then you can make vendor payouts, or whatever payouts you want, instantly. Real-time money movement, that's our mission, that's what we're focused on.
Great stuff. And you do this in a number of ways, right? Your customers are SMEs, small and medium-sized enterprises, or SMBs, as some people call them. But you're offering things like multi-currency wallets, and even stablecoin settlement. Historically, that's the kind of tool that's been available only to larger enterprises, bigger corporate treasurers, right? So what does a twenty-person or ten-person business actually do with these tools? What's the right level of sophistication for them to have?
Multi-currency, we just recently launched it, and we're still in the market research and study phase. But there are a lot of businesses, especially multinational companies, that have multiple payment collection and settlement points globally, in multiple corridors. In that case, they need to hold funds in different currencies. That's the reason we have multi-currency wallets. But we're in the early stage, and we're still doing the market study on that. We're doing research on every aspect.
Yeah. And stablecoins as well, stablecoins are very much talked about right now in the market, but adoption is still low and we're in the early phases, right? I'm confident we'll go a long way with that. But are you seeing much take-up for stablecoin settlement, or is it more a case of being future-ready?
Stablecoins, you know, are easier to handle. There's no geo-restriction, mostly, because a lot of countries accept them and the fund flow is easier. But again, coming to the compliance side, we do all kinds of verification. We make sure the transaction is legitimate, that it doesn't violate our policy, because we have a clear-cut, strong strategy on money laundering and all of that. So we make sure it goes through our policy, it goes through the Paywint Prism, and once it gets approved by the strategy, we do the instant settlement using stablecoin, because stablecoin is easier to handle.
And you've mentioned fraud a few times, I'll get into that later. But back on the instant payment side of things: instant payments are now live in, I think, 70 or 80 different countries, and central banks have been trying to wire together these instant payment systems for quite a while now. You can look at UPI and PayNow in India and Singapore, but that took over three years to link the two countries, and it still doesn't cover every bank there. Is that pace of change kind of your competitive moat? And do you expect to still be smoothing things over for businesses for many years? Because as much as we have real-time systems, it seems like linking them together is going to take a long time.
Right. Our mission is to build a new rail on our side. We already have it, it's called PayTag. So if anybody wants to make a payment using PayTag, it will be settled instantly in their wallet. We want to make it more global, so that globally the money movement will be faster. It gets settled in your wallet instantly using PayTag. So our mission is to build our own payment rail globally for instant transactions.
Great stuff. So talk me through how that works, because I'm assuming that for the business using it, they get that settlement instantly, but what kind of mechanisms need to work beneath that to make it happen smoothly? This is a difficult thing to make happen, right?
Right. For example, let's say a person in Dallas, Texas wants to make a vendor payment to someone in Dubai, and the person in Dubai says he wants to get paid right now, because everybody wants to be paid instantly. Both parties can use PayTag. And most of the time, let's say the Dubai person says he wants to get paid into his crypto wallet, into a stablecoin, let's say USDT, and the sender says he doesn't have USDT, he doesn't even know crypto. In that case, Paywint can facilitate it. The sender can initiate payment from his bank account, and the receiving person in Dubai can get paid into his USDT, or into his crypto wallet, his stablecoin wallet.
And when you say crypto, are you doing just stablecoins for now, or does that include other assets like Bitcoin or Ether?
We support, I don't remember the exact number, but nearly a hundred-plus crypto assets. Almost all the major assets, on almost every major network.
Got you. And I know it's early days, and you may not be willing to disclose, but how many funds are flowing through this network right now, this instant settlement?
It's big numbers, right? It's moving globally, all over the world. But everything is backed by our banking partners and providers, and in every corridor we're working with different providers, so the fund flow goes through multiple providers and banking partners.
Got you. Okay. We talked about fraud earlier, because instant payment obviously means instant settlement, which shifts the fraud question along in terms of how you rectify a problem. Instant payment rails, as we know, can lead to irrevocable payments, once the money's gone, it's gone. So how does that change your fraud model? Because when you look at card fraud, card fraud was mostly stolen credentials, someone pretending to be someone else. But when it comes to instant payments, you have things like APP fraud, people socially engineering others into making a payment. So when that kind of thing happens, how do you prevent it, and where does the fraud offence actually live these days?
In fintech, that's one of the biggest challenges we face every day. People use stolen cards, I've seen in an article that, on a dark website, you can buy, I don't want to disclose it, but people buy lists of card numbers with all the details in an Excel sheet or something like that, and they keep trying different card numbers online. That's the reason Stripe, for instance, has its own fraud detection tool, called Radar. On our side, we've built our own tool, called Prism, Paywint Prism. So every transaction, even if it's a card payment or a bank transaction like ACH or RTP, any transaction, goes through the Prism. We have a certain internally built algorithm, and the transaction goes through it, including IP checks, geolocation, behavioural checks, sanctions screening, everything. After this, the system generates a risk score. And when it comes to card payments, we have 3DS, 3D Secure, verification, we do address validation, a lot of things behind the scenes. This is how we try to eliminate the chance of fraud.
Gotcha. And can I ask a trickier question now?
Please.
Fraud losses are huge. I've seen over a trillion dollars listed as the cost of fraud globally, I think for 2025. And when you look in particular at APP fraud, authorised push payment fraud, it's been estimated this could cost billions of dollars; I think Deloitte put it at fifteen billion dollars by 2028. So what happens, especially in the US, where banks don't really have an obligation to make customers whole on the losses they suffer? What happens when you push instant payments or payouts to SMBs, and one of them gets socially engineered and makes a huge loss? Who eats that loss when things go wrong?
When we onboard a business, we make an agreement with them, and we clearly inform them: if any dispute comes, it will be your responsibility. Because we have a solution, we try to eliminate fraud, we support you to decrease it, but it's your responsibility too. Because if anything happens, the bank will put the responsibility, the liability, on our head. So we have no other solution but to pass it over. But again, in payments, we see a lot of fraud attempts, but we don't see anything happen in the real scenario, because we block everything in the moment.
Got you. Okay. And let's look at product development, because you're operating a very forward-looking business and tool. You operate across US rails, if I'm not mistaken, card networks and blockchain settlement, all at once. Regulation is moving on all three of those, even globally. If you look at stablecoin regulation, you've got GENIUS and CLARITY in the US, you've got MiCA in Europe, all sorts of things going on. How do you make product decisions for the future when compliance and regulation keep changing? Is there anything you've deliberately chosen not to build because of uncertainty?
I follow how PayPal came into existence, because PayPal said that if they followed all the regulations, nothing would happen. So PayPal's strategy was to teach the authorities to make the changes in the regulations. That's what we're building. We make sure we don't allow any fraud or any policy violation, but again, legitimate businesses and legitimate transactions should not get blocked. They should get instant money movement, fast payment solutions. So we have our own dedicated compliance team, and they keep up with the frequent regulatory updates from the government, or federal, or FinCEN. We work closely with them, because we're a licensed MSB, a money service business, so we have to follow their regulations.
Yeah, got you. And I guess a few more questions.
Please.
One is on promoting your own business. You've done some interesting things, I mentioned at the start that you're on the Forbes Business Council, and you've also done a TEDx talk. How has that been helpful in getting the word out there? And the TEDx talk, talk me through that, because I think a lot of people in the fintech world aspire to do their own TED or TEDx talk, and that must have been a really interesting experience.
Yeah, because that's another of my passions. I like to interact with students and young people. TEDx talks give me more of a chance to teach students, and it's good to share my knowledge. I enjoy that, because sharing knowledge and motivating them is good for me too, I get energy out of it. And with the Forbes Business Council, I get a lot of like-minded people. I don't want to be in a community that demotivates me. In the Forbes Business Council, I get energetic people, and being with them, I get the energy to build something new, to do something today, not tomorrow. So that's the energy I get out of all these memberships.
Great stuff. And I have one last question for you, and this one relates to Paywint: what problem do you think you're going to solve next, and what are your next big goals for the company?
I want to compete with Stripe and those people. That's my next mission. I want to be a global brand. I want to hit the Asian market, I want to hit the African market, I want APAC, I want to hit Europe. So that's my vision, not today, I know, but tomorrow, I will be.
That's a huge ambition, and I love the size of the ambition. What are the next steps to getting there? What do you think are the next milestones you need to hit on the way to achieving that kind of scale?
We're exploring each and every corridor. We have a dedicated market and research team, and they keep researching different markets, learning their pain points, what the people, the businesses, or the common man needs in payments or fintech solutions in each corridor, and we build solutions accordingly in every corridor. So we've already started in that space.
Great stuff. Well, look, Saheer, so good of you to join us. Really interesting to learn more about Paywint and the future of cross-border payments, and what you're building there, especially for businesses. I think business payments is something that occasionally gets overlooked in favour of retail payments, not too much in the fintech world, but certainly in the world outside of it. Really great to get your perspective, and a really global perspective too. Any final words for the audience before I wrap this one up?
I always say to people, they get motivated easily. When I talk, they think it's all easy. But I always say business is not something easy. You should be highly disciplined, you should have a high quality of resilience to face failures and realities. And in business, when you make a partnership, a contract or an agreement, make sure you write it down, make sure both parties sign it. Otherwise, tomorrow everybody's going to face what I faced in my life. It doesn't matter if it's family or friends or anybody, the words, or the verbal contracts, have no value in this world. So any contract should be on paper, signed by both parties. I always teach every business owner: if you make a contract, write it on paper. That's the last thing I have to share.
That sounds like a man speaking from experience.
That's true.
I won't probe. But look
But this all gives you resilience. When you face reality, when you face failure, when people cheat you, you get the power to face it.
Yeah, absolutely. And Saheer, thank you so much for joining us, really great to get your perspectives, and an interesting thing to finish on as well. Resilience is something that every fintech founder needs. I often speak to people trying to grow businesses, and there are realities, right? Everyone has a big dream and a big idea, but you can't execute, certainly not in this industry, without a lot of commitment, a lot of work, a lot of resilience, and going through a lot of rejections and failures to get to the other side. So it's good to hear it from someone who's building, who's been through several companies already, and who's made such an interesting career pivot as you have, having been in the medical profession for a long time. So Saheer, thank you so much for joining LFG. It's been a pleasure having you on the show. And to everyone who's joined, thank you for joining us. I'm Ian Horne, and I'll be back again soon.
Thank you so much, Ian. Bye-bye.
Thank you.