How FinPay Talent helped Payage move beyond founder-led growth, place seven hires across four countries, and become their exclusive talent partner as the business accelerates into its next phase of scale.
Payage is a Malta-based payment orchestration platform, founded by a seasoned payments entrepreneur with a track record of building and exiting businesses in the sector. Fully self-funded, the business reached profitability within its first 11 months. Having built strong traction within the iGaming sector, Payage is now transitioning from startup into scale-up, with a clear strategy to expand into additional high-risk verticals.
As Payage entered its first phase of scale, growth had been driven primarily through founder-led sales. Effective as that was, it was not underpinned by a structured commercial function or outbound strategy. The organisation was lean, with limited internal hiring capability and processes that were still maturing across product and delivery.
Payage approached FinPay Talent to support scaling across technology, product and commercial functions. The brief was broad but the need was clear: inject the right capability at the right levels to take the business to the next stage without disrupting what was already working.
No dedicated people function and limited bandwidth across the leadership team meant hiring was slow and difficult to prioritise alongside day-to-day operations.
The team was weighted heavily towards senior leaders with limited mid-level and junior capability to support delivery and scale operations effectively.
Product and delivery processes were not yet built for scale. The business needed hires who could both build and execute, not just follow established structures.
Commercial activity was concentrated entirely within iGaming and driven by the founder. Diversifying into new verticals required bringing in external commercial expertise and network.
Before placing a single candidate, we conducted full market mapping across Serbia and wider European markets to define a clear hiring strategy. This included salary benchmarking across target locations, talent pool analysis and a structured comparison of hiring locations to ensure Payage was targeting the right markets for each role.
To break the over-reliance on founder-led sales and open up new verticals, Payage needed a senior commercial leader with deep payments expertise and an existing network in adjacent sectors. We advised on the international hiring strategy, made the case for hiring in Spain to access travel vertical expertise, and successfully placed a Commercial Director with the precise background and network required.
One of the more unusual briefs in this engagement was identifying a candidate with hands-on experience building an orchestration platform using AI tooling. This is an extremely niche profile. We identified and placed a candidate who is now leading AI initiatives within Payage, bringing capability the business had no existing internal resource to build.
With hires needed in Spain and Serbia alongside Malta and the UK, compliant cross-border employment was a practical challenge. We enabled this through our Employer of Record partner, ensuring all hires were structured correctly from day one while also securing a commercial discount for Payage on the arrangement.
We delivered multiple technical hires across both markets, including relocation support for a Turkish engineer returning to Malta. Managing cross-border logistics, candidate expectations and timing across different geographies required careful coordination throughout the process.
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