Vision: specialists replacing banks for SMEs

What does it really take to build a fintech company that quietly fixes one of the most frustrating problems SMEs face every day?

In this episode of Tech Talks Daily, I'm joined by Pierre-Antoine Dusoulier, the Founder and CEO of iBanFirst, for a candid conversation about entrepreneurship, timing, and why cross-border payments have remained broken for so long.

Pierre-Antoine's story begins in London, where his early career as an FX trader felt like a compromise at the time, yet quietly gave him a front-row seat to inefficiencies most people accepted as normal. That experience would later shape two companies and a very clear point of view on how money should move across borders.

Pierre-Antoine walks through his first venture, Combeast.com, one of France's earliest FX brokerages for retail investors, and what he learned from selling it to Saxo Bank and staying on to run Western European operations. That chapter matters, because it exposed the gap between how sophisticated FX markets really are and how poorly SMEs are served when FX and payments are bundled together inside traditional banks. Out of that frustration, IbanFirst was born in 2016 with a simple idea: treat cross-border payments as a specialist discipline, not a side feature.

Today, IbanFirst serves more than 10,000 clients across Europe and processes over €2 billion in transactions every month. We dig into why growth has continued while many fintechs have slowed, from a product designed to be used daily, to proactive sales, to a new generation of CFOs and CEOs who expect the same clarity and speed at work that they get from consumer fintech tools.

Pierre-Antoine explains how real-time FX rates, payment tracking using SWIFT GPI, and multi-entity account management change the day-to-day reality for SMEs trading internationally.

We also talk about Brexit, and how being rooted in continental Europe created an unexpected opening. Pierre-Antoine shares why expanding into the UK, including the acquisition of Cornhill, made sense, and why London's payments ecosystem still stands apart in scale and depth. Along the way, he is refreshingly open about the heavy investment required in compliance, trust, and regulation, and why nearly a third of IbanFirst's team focuses on operations and oversight.

Looking ahead, Pierre-Antoine lays out a bold vision for the SME payments market, predicting a future where specialists replace banks in much the same way fintech reshaped consumer money transfers. As cross-border trade grows and currency volatility becomes a daily concern, his perspective raises an interesting question for anyone running an international business today:

if specialists already exist, why keep relying on systems that were never designed for how SMEs actually operate?

Useful Links:

• Connect with Pierre-Antoine Dusoulier
• Learn more about iBanFirst,

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