Ran Grushkowsky, CEO and Co-founder of MassPay – Interview Series

Ran Grushkowsky is the Co-founder and CEO of MassPay, bringing more than two decades of fintech, engineering, and entrepreneurial leadership to the company’s mission of delivering global, instant, compliant payouts at scale. A builder at heart, Ran specializes in transforming complex financial and regulatory systems into modern and intuitive user experiences. Ran is a renowned industry leader with deep expertise in cross-border payments, regulatory compliance (AML/KYC), embedded finance, remittances and fraud prevention.

Prior to MassPay he built several ventures from the ground up—including WireCash, ATMCash, and TrueMp3s—creating platforms that reached millions of users, negotiating enterprise partnerships, and leading M&A processes from both the product and deal table.At MassPay, he guides the company’s vision, culture, and global growth strategy, ensuring clients receive the fast, seamless, and secure payout experiences modern platforms demand.

MassPay is a fintech platform that enables businesses to send global payouts through a single API, supporting over 70 currencies across 200+ countries. It offers multiple payment methods including bank transfers, digital wallets, debit cards, cash pickup, and cryptocurrency, while handling compliance requirements like KYC and KYB. Designed for marketplaces, gig platforms, and enterprises, MassPay simplifies cross-border payments with intelligent routing and scalable infrastructure, allowing companies to operate globally without building their own payout systems.

You started experimenting with digital distribution in the MP3 era before Napster, then went on to build early remittance infrastructure, and eventually co-founded MassPay in 2019 with just $1,500. How did those early experiences shape your vision for building a modern global payout platform?

Those early chapters taught me two things: distribution always moves faster than money, and user experience beats theory every time. In the MP3 era, we watched content go global overnight while payments were still crawling through legacy rails. Then at USend, building remittance infrastructure put me face-to-face with every friction point in cross-border flows – KYC, correspondent banks, last-mile delivery. What struck me across both experiences was the same pattern: people had gotten so used to complexity that they stopped questioning it. Why should sending money across borders feel harder than sending a file? When I co-founded MassPay in 2019, that was the north star – build a payout layer that feels as instant and intuitive as sending a message, while staying deeply compliant under the hood. Simplicity on the surface requires the most sophistication underneath.

MassPay positions itself as a “payout orchestration layer” rather than just a payments provider. For investors and fintech professionals, how should we think about this distinction, and why does orchestration matter in today’s fragmented global payments ecosystem?

A traditional payments provider thinks in terms of “we move funds from A to B.” A payout orchestration layer asks a different question: for this specific transaction, corridor, and recipient, what is the optimal path? And optimal means best for both sides – the sender has cost and speed priorities, the recipient has their own preferences and restrictions.

Orchestration matters because global payments are inherently fragmented. Cards, bank rails, real-time networks, wallets, stablecoins, cash pickup – no single rail covers the world well.

MassPay sits above those rails, using AI and proprietary routing logic to dynamically select and re-route based on speed, cost, compliance, and recipient preference in real time. The result is higher success rates, fewer failed payouts, and the ability to add or swap rails without re-architecting your entire stack.

Our Q1 2026 results – over 3x volume growth year-over-year – are really just signals that this model is resonating at enterprise scale. When orchestration works, the numbers follow.

Cross-border payouts remain one of the most complex areas in financial infrastructure. What are the biggest technical and regulatory bottlenecks you’ve encountered when building global payment rails, and how has MassPay approached solving them?

The hardest problems are rarely just technical or just regulatory – they sit at the intersection of both. Technically, global payouts involve unreliable local rails, inconsistent data standards, and wildly different recipient preferences by market. Then regulators layer on KYC, KYB, AML, tax reporting, and capital controls that look completely different from country to country – and change constantly.

Our approach was to stop treating compliance as a checkpoint and start treating it as infrastructure. MassPay embeds compliance directly into the payout flow, so screening, verification, and reporting happen in the background without friction for the end user or the client’s brand experience. On the rails side, we built direct relationships with local banking and last-mile partners rather than routing through aggregators – that gives us better success rates, faster settlement, and real visibility when something goes wrong.

Your platform integrates with major financial networks like Visa and JPMorgan while also supporting crypto and alternative rails. How do you think about balancing traditional banking infrastructure with newer digital asset-based systems?

We don’t see traditional and crypto as competing camps – we see them as rails with different strengths. Visa, JPMorgan, and global banking partners provide trusted coverage, broad card reach, and access to domestic real-time networks. Crypto and stablecoin rails bring 24/7 settlement, fewer intermediaries, and real advantages in certain corridors and emerging markets where traditional infrastructure is thin.

MassPay’s job is to abstract that complexity away from the client. For every transaction, our orchestration layer is evaluating: is a card, bank transfer, local wallet, or stablecoin route the best fit for this user, geography, and compliance profile? The client doesn’t need to think about it – they just need the payout to land.

What this model also gives us is durability. New rails will emerge and existing ones will evolve, but the orchestration logic stays consistent. We’re not betting on any single rail winning. We’re building the layer that works regardless of which ones do.

MassPay has remained fully bootstrapped while processing billions in volume. What advantages has this given you compared to venture-backed competitors, and where has it made scaling more difficult?

From the very beginning, our team was made up of highly capable individuals – and that set the tone for everything. It allowed us to be extremely intentional in every decision, move fast, and run in a very direct trajectory toward building a real, profitable business. That momentum is what allowed us to carry on without ever needing external funds.

It set the bar for how we operate – no vanity projects. For how hard we work. And for who we bring on, both professionally and culturally. We don’t lower that bar.

In this era, with the right tools and the right people, you can accomplish extraordinary things with smaller teams. When everyone is an A player, the level of execution is just different.

Many fintech startups prioritize growth over profitability. You took the opposite approach. What lessons have you learned from building a revenue-first company in a capital-heavy industry?

It’s less about prioritizing profitability over growth, and more about understanding which parts of the business generate the healthiest long-term roadmap. We chose to focus on the payout side because it’s genuinely hard – and that’s exactly why there are so few players who do it well at scale.

For a large company that needs to send money globally, efficiently, across hundreds of corridors, and potentially turn that into a profit center rather than a cost – those options are not easy to come by. The infrastructure, the compliance, the last-mile relationships – it takes years to build right.

We took the harder road deliberately. The complexity is the moat. And when you solve a hard problem that the market genuinely needs solved, impact and profitability tend to follow naturally.

One of the recurring themes in payouts is delayed or failed payments, especially for freelancers and global earners. From a systems perspective, why is this still such a persistent problem, and what needs to change at the infrastructure level?

Delayed and failed payouts persist because the system is still largely built on brittle, one-size-fits-all rails. Every country has its own data requirements, regulatory checks, preferred payment methods, and formatting quirks around something as simple as how a name or address must appear. If a single field is off – or a local rail goes down – the transaction fails or gets stuck in limbo with no clear resolution path.

The fix isn’t a single better rail. It’s intelligence above the rails. At MassPay, we treat payouts like routing logistics – our orchestration engine selects the optimal path for each transaction and automatically fails over when something breaks. We normalize data, localize formats, and build feedback loops so every failure makes the next attempt smarter.

What needs to change at the infrastructure level is the industry moving away from the assumption that one route can serve everyone. The world is too fragmented for that. The platforms that solve this are the ones building for that fragmentation rather than pretending it doesn’t exist.

Compliance is often viewed as a constraint, but your platform embeds KYC and KYB into the onboarding flow. How do you turn compliance into a competitive advantage rather than a bottleneck?

We decided early that compliance couldn’t be a separate, painful layer – it had to be embedded and invisible. Users stay inside the client’s environment while we handle verification, sanctions screening, and ongoing monitoring behind the scenes. White-labeled, seamless, and out of the way.

That does two things. First, it dramatically reduces onboarding friction and abandonment. Second, it lets clients scale globally without needing to become regulatory experts in every jurisdiction they operate in – that’s our job.

Where it becomes a true competitive advantage is when compliance is baked directly into the orchestration logic – informing which rails can be used, where, and under what conditions. At that point it stops being a gate and starts being an enabler. Clients can move faster and reach more markets precisely because the compliance infrastructure is already there, already working, and already trusted.

With the rise of the creator economy, gig platforms, and global marketplaces, how is payout infrastructure evolving to support these new economic models?

These new economic models share a core requirement: they’re global, real-time, and participant-centric. A creator in Tel-Aviv, a driver in Mexico, a marketplace seller in Poland – they all expect to access their earnings instantly, in a way that works for their local context. Payouts need to feel like streaming, not batch processing.

Infrastructure is evolving accordingly – from single-rail, domestic systems to multi-rail orchestration layers that can serve many markets and preferences simultaneously. That means instant card payouts where cards dominate, wallets or cash pickup where banking penetration is low, and stablecoins in high-inflation markets where currency stability matters.

What we’re seeing is that platforms treating payouts as a product – fast, flexible, transparent, and localized – are winning on retention and global expansion. When your earners get paid well, they stay. That’s a simple truth that the best platforms are now building their entire payout strategy around.

Looking ahead, do you see the future of global payments consolidating into a few dominant networks, or fragmenting further into specialized rails connected through orchestration layers like MassPay?

Fragmentation wins – and that’s not a problem, it’s the architecture. The idea that one or two dominant networks will absorb global payments ignores the fundamental reality that money movement is deeply local. Regulatory environments, banking infrastructure, consumer preferences, and currency dynamics vary too much market to market for any single network to serve them all optimally.

What we will see is continued proliferation of specialized rails – real-time domestic networks, stablecoins, card networks, wallets – each dominant in their own context. The connective tissue between them is where the real value gets built. Orchestration layers become the operating system of global payments – abstracting the complexity, routing intelligently, and giving platforms a single integration point into all of it.

MassPay was built on exactly that thesis. The winners in this space will be the platforms that make all the rails work together seamlessly. That’s the direction the industry is moving, and frankly it’s the only model that can keep up with how fast new payment methods and markets are emerging.

Thank you for the great interview, readers who wish to learn more should visit MassPay.