How Silverflow reached 10–15% month-over-month transaction growth by targeting the one infrastructure layer every bank and acquirer uses but no modern vendor had rebuilt | Robert Kraal

Robert Kraal has spent nearly three decades at the core of global payments infrastructure — co-founding Bibit (acquired by RBS/Worldpay in 2004), serving as COO and founding Adyen's acquiring proposition from the ground up, and building the technology that let Adyen go direct to Visa and Mastercard by cutting out the acquiring banks entirely. When he evaluated the card network processing vendors back in 2009, he dismissed every one of them as legacy. Fifteen years later, those same vendors still dominate the market. That unchanged landscape became Silverflow. Seven years in, Silverflow processes over 1 billion transactions, is growing 10–15% month over month, and is making a focused push into the US — the world's largest credit card market.Topics Discussed:How a 2009 regulatory shift in Europe created the conditions that directly led to Silverflow's foundingThe three-option framework facing any new acquirer: buy legacy, build yourself, or buy modern — and why only one of those options didn't exist until SilverflowSilverflow's three customer segments — payment service providers, banks/acquirers, and large retailers — and why each demands an entirely different sales motionHow Silverflow uses Visa and Mastercard's public license application data as a real-time prospecting signalWhy selling to banks requires waiting for internal consensus to form before you can enter the conversationThe "me too" failure pattern Robert sees consistently when investing in payments companiesGTM Lessons For B2B Founders:Size the beachhead with math, not instinct. Before building Silverflow, Robert calculated that roughly 200 new acquirers come to market annually — companies reaching the maturity point where they want to go direct to Visa and Mastercard rather than route through acquiring banks. Targeting 10% of that cohort was enough to build a viable business case. That's the kind of TAM-within-the-TAM thinking that turns a broad market thesis into a fundable, focused go-to-market.Turn competitor stagnation into your positioning. Silverflow's core bet wasn't that the market was underserved — it was that the vendors serving it had stopped evolving. The same players Robert evaluated in 2009 are still there today, their core technology unchanged, their websites refreshed. Robert's framework for finding investable opportunities applies broadly: look for markets where the dominant players win on switching costs and inertia rather than product quality, then build what the market would choose if it had a modern alternative.Map your sales motion to each segment's decision-making architecture. Silverflow runs the same product across three customer types, but the GTM is structurally different for each. PSPs are smaller, move fast, and tolerate risk — they sign and go live relatively quickly. Banks involve legal, compliance, security audits, and multi-layer internal sign-off, making the sales cycle considerably longer. The flip side: once a bank migrates, they're not revisiting that decision for years, making it a fundamentally different unit economics conversation than PSP deals. Robert treats these as distinct motions — not just different speeds, but different trigger conditions and different value narratives.// Sponsors: Front Lines — We help B2B tech companies launch, manage, and grow podcasts that drive demand, awareness, and thought leadership. www.FrontLines.ioThe Global Talent Co. — We help tech startups find, vet, hire, pay, and retain amazing marketing talent that costs 50-70% less than the US & Europe. www.GlobalTalent.co//Don't Miss: New Podcast Series — How I Hire Senior GTM leaders share the tactical hiring frameworks they use to build winning revenue teams. Hosted by Andy Mowat, who scaled 4 unicorns from $10M to $100M+ ARR and launched Whispered to help executives find their next role. Subscribe here: https://open.spotify.com/show/53yCHlPfLSMFimtv0riPyM