Interested in starting your own entrepreneurial journey but unsure what to expect? Then read up on our interview with Sanja Kon, CEO of Utrust, located in Milano, Italy.

What's your business, and who are your customers?

Comparisons are never perfect, but they can be useful. The simplest way I can describe it is that Utrust is "Stripe for cryptocurrency payments." We bridge the gap between bleeding-edge Web3 technology and Traditional Retail by allowing anyone, anywhere, to pay with cryptocurrencies. We accept payments from any and all wallets, and we go out of our way to make things easy for all parties involved. We settle in crypto, of course, but any merchant that doesn't feel comfortable handling these currencies yet can choose to get paid in fiat. Business as usual.

The way we see it, our mission is much more ambitious than simply providing this product (great at it may be). We want to fully change how people relate to money. Almost 2 Billion people around the world remain unbanked. Many more are underbanked. Lack of access to banking has overarching implications. If you are unbanked or underbanked, you will have limited access to every single step in the social mobility ladder, from credit to healthcare and education.

The technology we are building, when widely adopted, will allow everyone with access to the Internet to control their own finances. We are improving cryptocurrency adoption every single day. Over 300M people already use these currencies, and growth is in the double digits. Utrust is a big part of this. We are already working with thousands of merchants globally. Our solution allows businesses to tap into a new revenue stream by appealing to a new, global asset class of customers.

Last year, we were acquired by Elrond Network (now MultiversX), a company that is fully aligned with our vision. They have the technology to help us achieve our goals faster and from a position of strength. Their highly scalable, fast, and secure blockchain platform provides utility for dApp developers and enterprise solutions for the new economy we are all building together.

Utrust and Elrond agree on a number of key aspects:

(a) The new financial system must be high bandwidth, low latency, and transparent.

(b) Everyone everywhere must have easy access to it.

We strongly believe this may be the most important global GDP multiplier since the invention of the Internet. This has the highest potential to positively influence the highest number of people in both developing countries and the developed world.

Solving payments in an optimal way thus becomes a core derivative of the larger goal of redefining the global financial system and extending its access to everyone in the world.

Tell us about yourself

I was born in Sarajevo, Bosnia. If you know what the country used to be like before the war, you'll know how diverse it was. Multiple religions, and multiple peoples, coexisted peacefully. It was heartbreaking for my entire family to witness the war. It just so happened that we had moved to Italy the year before, so we were in a very particular position. We were physically safe and had to watch as our homes, our extended families, and our friends felt the full brunt of it. Everything people owned disappeared overnight. No one wants to talk about money or property in a time of war, but when your entire life's savings, your nest egg, what you put away over a lifetime of work for this exact kind of crisis just… vanishes… it's devastating. This backstory is a big part of why I do what I do and why I'm so driven to change the way we go about financial inclusion. These kinds of things leave a scar, and I will never stop working to allow people control over their money.

I was privileged enough to escape that situation and live in a number of places in my life. I've lived in Portugal, Italy, the US, the UK, Denmark, and Croatia, and I don't really have a single nationality. I don't like how the words "citizen of the world" or "digital nomad" have become these trendy terms that people associate with irresponsible lifestyles. They are meaningful parts of who I am, and they are anything but something I chose on a whim.

I completed my university degrees in Italy and Denmark, with a BA in Economics and Business Administration, as well as a master's degree in marketing management. I appreciate the experience I had at University. It gave me a good mindset and allowed me to meet interesting people. I am, however, very critical of the way universities guide students in their future lives. There's an intense focus on getting a job and working for someone else.

It's a very limiting mindset. There are other ways to find fulfilling work that doesn't involve being employed by others. When I finished college, I did exactly that because I didn't see many other opportunities. I had almost no entrepreneurs in my network; I knew nothing about starting or building businesses, and I saw it as the only viable path. How many twenty-somethings like me yearn for more freedom and independence out of university every year but have absolutely zero tools to make their own way? I'm guessing so many, and I fail to understand why.

I would go on to work in a number of different companies, seeking a good fit. Consulting, Telco, and several more until I became the head of the Italian Consumer strategy team at eBay Italy. Launching eBay in the Italian market was the closest I got to feeling entrepreneurial at the beginning of my career. I would then move to the UK to head the European Partnerships strategy at the company. I was already passionate about payments then, so when PayPal came along, I took the natural step of becoming head of Marketplaces and Large Enterprise Partnerships. This is what brought me to crypto.

I didn't stay at PayPal for too long. I had the opportunity to see the inefficiencies in the traditional payments space. We take payments for granted. We assume that, with maybe a little difficulty and maybe a little fee, payments will happen. That's not the case. Payments are one of the most important roadblocks to global business. The way we operate now can hinder, delay, and even make what should be normal, profitable businesses are impossible.

Today, as the CEO of Utrust, I've made increasing cryptocurrency adoption among businesses and individuals my mission. Not because crypto is a great investment or because the tech is incredibly cool, even though those things are true, but because fixing payments is the single most important thing we can do to improve people's lives.

Outside of Utrust, I am active as an investor and advisor in the Web3 space, helping others succeed in the space. As a woman in tech and a CEO in Web3, I also keenly feel and understand how hard it is for women to get to these positions. I'm involved and always interested in initiatives that promote gender diversity and education for women.

What's your biggest accomplishment as a business owner?

It's hard for me to pick just one. Accomplishments have different meanings, more than different sizes. Being able to grow a business from a simple idea to a team of almost 60 people today that works across countries to serve more than 20K merchants is a highlight, of course. And yet, being able to offer a truly revolutionary solution to our customers that solves a real problem is not smaller, even though it's more abstract.

I always believed that online commerce offers an amazing opportunity for small, medium, and large merchants to serve virtually an infinite number of customers. Merchants can easily sell in multiple locations by simply setting up a store on the Internet. On paper, this is an amazing opportunity. You can sell through marketplaces, increase your revenue, and fuel your growth at a fraction of the cost that it would take to do it physically.

The problem is that payments haven't kept up with this market innovation. They are expensive, slow, prone to fraud, and opaque to the point of merchants not being able to predict how much they will cut into their margins. Today a merchant will end up paying between 3 to 11% for each transaction, just in processing fees. How many businesses can truly afford to lose 11% of their margin? Furthermore, the higher the volume of international payments for a merchant, the higher that percentage gets. In the age of the Internet, where borders have absolutely no bearing on how we process payments, this is predatory and absurd.

Chargebacks alone represent a 45B dollar yearly loss for the payments industry. A chargeback is the return of the funds to the original buyer. This is done by intermediaries, such as banks and credit card companies, and there's nothing a merchant can do about them. A growing portion of chargebacks is fraudulent. Fraud cases with credit cards are also growing at a rate of 30% YOY.

Last but not least, the process is sickeningly slow in an age of advanced technology that quite simply replaces all the outdated processes intermediaries have to go through to justify their existence.
Payments take days or weeks to be settled, rendering especially cross-border trade transactions very inefficient.

Our solution exists because this needed fixing, and we knew we could build that technology.

● We allow merchants to cut their payment processing fees by up to 90% (a blockchain payment doesn't require any intermediaries, allowing us to drastically reduce the prices usually associated with payment intermediation).

● We completely eliminate the cost of chargebacks. Only the merchant can issue refunds.

● No more fraudulent payments either, as our payment ecosystem does not rely on any credit card infrastructure. No middlemen, no intermediaries. Buyers never have to share personal information online, so the problem of stolen credit cards and fraudulent unrecognized payments are gone, thanks to the blockchain.

● We offer a truly borderless solution. Anyone can pay and receive money from anywhere in the world in a cost-effective and quick way.
I may not be able to quantify this achievement as easily as the business side of things, but the fact that we have put this solution out there in the world and that it's growing and helping people get their businesses off the ground is about as dear an accomplishment as I can think of.

Last but not least, I'm proud that we are among the first companies operating in this space when no one else thought it was even possible. I left a secure position in a big and stable company to pursue a dream, to face off against some of the biggest competitors in any business, and we pulled it off. Of course, it's still very early, and there's a lot to come in the industry, but we will be here driving the way. And that's about as big an accomplishment as I can imagine.

What's one of the hardest things that comes with being a business owner?

Definitely finding a good work-life balance, especially in the initial phases of the business. Launching your own business requires a lot of time and effort, and you are always connected. That's why it's important to have a strong passion for what you do so that it doesn't feel like a job but an extension of your life.

What are the top tips you'd give to anyone looking to start, run and grow a business today?

  1. Find your passion and build a business around it: being an entrepreneur and launching and running your own business is hard. I'm not going to lie; it will put demands on your mind and your body that you may not have experienced before. It's essential that you launch your business in an area or topic you're very passionate about because if you can't find it in yourself to see it less as work and more like a fun activity, it can be crushing.
  2. Don't do it top-down but iterate continuously through consumer feedback: one common error that I see early-stage startups making is launching a very detailed MVP based only on the ideas and feedback of the founders without having tested it in the market or collecting proper consumer feedback. Collect consumer feedback as early as you possibly can and constantly iterate based on that feedback. If you cannot afford to do in-depth research, ask your friends, family, and people in your network to help you test! Don't be afraid to pivot if your original idea doesn't have a product market fit.
  3. Don't do it alone: the most efficient startups are launched by multiple founders and with a small but very structured initial team. Trying to do everything alone is counterproductive, especially in the long run. You will need a support system while you're starting a business. Find a cofounder that has complementary skills vs. yours so you can bounce ideas off each other and have different but complementary perspectives.

Where can people find you and your business?

Website: https://utrust.com/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/sanja_kon/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/SanjaKon
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sanjakon/

If you like what you've read here and have your own story as a solo or small business entrepreneur that you'd like to share, then please answer these interview questions. We'd love to feature your journey on these pages.

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