An EU leader by the number of licensed e-money and payment institutions, No. 6 in the OECD by tax competitiveness, and No. 9 globally in terms of ML/TF risk, the country offers the perfect business and regulatory environment for aspiring fintechs.

With 265 (and counting) fintech companies, Lithuania is where many new ideas and practices are put to the test. For this article, we sat down with the leaders of several major fintechs that have a presence in Lithuania to discuss approaches to riding out the economic downturn that’s been on everyone’s mind these past months.

TIP #1: Get inspired and innovate

To stay afloat, you have to innovate and invest in product development. Juozas Kaminskas, VP for Banking and Issuing and Lithuania Managing Director at Canadian fintech Nuvei, says the drive to create comes from understanding client aspirations. “It‘s about supporting clients' needs, having a passion and focus to innovate and deliver, which ultimately helps businesses accelerate their growth.“ The drive to innovate has seen a quadrupling in Nuvei‘s global workforce over the past four years. “And we are still hiring,“ adds Kaminskas.
The managing Director of the leading secure payment processing company Shift4 agrees that agility is a must-have for any fintech: “the fintech sector is subject to all manners of risk that also affects other industries. And yet, it is not all doom and gloom. Our goal today is to continue generating optimism within the sector by relentlessly pursuing the development of innovations”. Optimism is reflected in the numbers as well: Shift4 grew by 65% in 2021.

TIP #2: Focus on customers and diversify

Co-founder and COO at the financial services venture TransferGo, Justinas Lasevičius, says that having customer satisfaction and diversification as one’s North Star helps to keep all other things in perspective:

“We know that as long as we listen to our customers, we’ll always find ways to improve, grow, and make our business stronger. On top of that, we always tend to go with the “diversification first” approach. In our case, this means adding new consumer segments to our network of 2,600+ remittance corridors across 34 send and 163 receive destinations”.

TIP #3: Help yourself by helping others
When it comes to weathering the storms, it is important to understand that the customers are going through similar difficulties. Chris Lybeer, CSO at Revel Systems - a cloud-based POS and business management company - emphasised the importance of helping one’s clients deal with their challenges:

“At Revel, we focus on bringing new features and solutions to market that help our clients mitigate both current and pending economic risks by making it easier for them to increase revenue and improve their bottom lines. Examples include loyalty programmes to secure repeat customers, mobile order systems to reduce line churn and self-service kiosks that free up time for employees to focus on more strategic and service-oriented tasks”.

TIP#4: Optimise your product and finances
Beyond looking for “M&A opportunities surfaced by the current markets” and waiting for them to recover, the co-founder and CEO of the leading embedded finance fintech Railsr, Nigel Verdon, advised other fintechs to trim as much fat as possible and optimise their cash flows:

“We must be patient and focus on our playbook for challenging markets by reducing cash burn, extending the cash runway, and enhancing our products by any means necessary - including the removal of vanity features”.

TIP#5: Reward and retain talent
Keeping talent happy during an economic downturn is a challenging task. That is where Revel Systems started implementing a creative programme - the Great Employee Moment (GEM) Awards - that features four tiers (Topaz, Sapphire, Ruby, and Emerald), each coming with its own special reward:

“Employee programmes are vital to our success, and our HR team is always looking for new ways to secure and retain top-level specialists. The GEM is quite unique. Typically, earning a spot on a company-sponsored annual trip is reserved for sales account execs that have met their quotas. With GEM, however, trips are made available to all employees who’ve received an Emerald nomination from a co-worker. This year, over 50 employees and their plus ones enjoyed a four-night trip to the Bahamas”.