MassPay is a payouts orchestration platform that routes earnings to gig workers, creators and freelancers in more than 180 countries and 70 currencies, choosing between bank transfer, digital wallet, crypto and cash pickup for each transaction. The company, which counts Coinbase and Visa among its partners, says its transaction success rate now stands above 99.6 per cent.
Its chief executive, Ran Grushkowsky, has spent more than two decades building financial platforms and scaling global operations. His exits include the sale of USend, where he was chief operating officer and chief technology officer, to the Nasdaq-listed Inter & Co.
In this In Profile, Ran Grushkowsky, chief executive at MassPay, discusses the infrastructure behind that success rate, how watching payments fail drew him into fintech, and why the gap between the industry’s promises and the experience of freelancers in emerging markets still frustrates him.
Tell us more about your company and its purpose
Every worker, creator and freelancer should be able to receive what they have earned quickly, securely and in the form that works for them. That is what MassPay is built to do. Our platform uses AI-driven payment orchestration to identify the fastest, most secure and most cost-efficient route for each transaction. Workers can receive earnings through the payment method they prefer, whether that is a bank transfer, digital wallet, crypto or cash pickup, across more than 180 geographies and more than 70 currencies. Our purpose is to remove the payment barriers that prevent gig workers, creators and freelancers, particularly those in emerging markets, from participating fully in the global digital economy.
What are some of your recent achievements you’d like to highlight?
The number I am proudest of is our transaction success rate, which is now above 99.6 per cent across 180 countries and more than 70 currencies. That matters because every failed payout is a worker who does not get paid on time. That result is not the product of one launch. We built the infrastructure to support it from the start: direct banking relationships, redundancy across rails so a failure on one route never strands the recipient, pre-send payee verification through MassPay Validate that catches errors before money moves, and compliance built into the platform rather than bolted on. Partnerships like Coinbase and Visa strengthen all of that by adding more reliable ways to get earnings where they need to go. We have applied the same standard to support, where our average first response time is now seven minutes. Speed matters for the person waiting on their earnings, not just the client sending them.
How did you get into the fintech industry?
I came to fintech through the problem, not the industry. Once you have watched a payment fail for someone who genuinely needed it to arrive, it is hard to work on anything else. Everything since, USend, Inter & Co and now MassPay, has been about closing the distance between when money is earned and when it is actually usable.
What’s the best thing about working in the fintech industry?
The feedback is immediate and human. When we shorten a payout from 30 days to 30 minutes, that is a real person in Manila or Lagos or Bogotá who can pay rent within the week instead of a month later. Very few industries let you see the impact of infrastructure decisions that directly.
What frustrates you most about the fintech industry?
The gap between the demos and the reality. The industry talks about instant, global, seamless payments, but ask a freelancer in an emerging market how their last payout went and you will hear about failed transfers, surprise fees and days of waiting. We have largely solved this for consumers in wealthy markets. Solving it for everyone else is the actual job, and too much of the industry treats it as an edge case.
How have your previous roles influenced your career?
Over more than 20 years, I have built financial platforms, scaled global operations and led multiple successful exits. Those roles gave me experience across both technology and operations, and a practical understanding of cross-border payments, compliance, fraud prevention and embedded finance. Just as important, they let me learn how the system works from the inside. When you understand the hows and whys of how money actually moves, you can build something that is not cookie-cutter. You can build a platform that adapts to different needs, that knows what compliance requires, and that still delivers a solution the individual receiving the funds can actually use.
What’s the best mistake you’ve ever made?
Thinking I could convince a bad partner to change his ways. I spent far too long trying to make a relationship work that was not going to, because the logic was sound and I assumed the other side would eventually see it the same way. They did not. What I took from it is that you cannot build reliable infrastructure on top of an unreliable partner, no matter how good the terms look on paper. It is why we are so deliberate now about who we work with, and why we build redundancy into every rail. If one partner fails, the payee never feels it.
What has the future got in store for your company?
MassPay’s goal is to remove the artificial economic geography created by fragmented banking systems and slow cross-border payment infrastructure. Through intelligent routing and partnerships across traditional payments, digital wallets and blockchain-based networks, MassPay aims to reduce failed and delayed payments and make near-instant payouts accessible to more gig workers, creators and freelancers worldwide.
What are the next key talking points or challenges for your industry as a whole?
Two things: fragmentation, and a shrinking window for catching mistakes. The payments landscape is already a patchwork of banking systems, local rails, digital wallets and blockchain networks, and it is only going to get more fragmented as new networks and regional schemes come online. That is not solved by picking a winner. The real challenge is orchestration: seamlessly coordinating all of those moving parts to deliver the most suitable option for each individual and each use case, whether that is a creator in one market who wants a wallet or a contractor in another who needs a bank transfer by Friday. And as transactions move closer to real time, the margin for error disappears. Monitoring for fraud and verifying accuracy and validity before money moves become more important than ever, because you cannot claw back an instant payment that went to the wrong place.
The post In Profile: Ran Grushkowsky, CEO at MassPay appeared first on The Fintech Times.
