Ask a CFO whether they want AI agents, stablecoins or open banking, and the honest answer is: none of the above. They want their finance team to spend less time on manual work, and their cross-border payments to settle faster. The technology behind that is, quite reasonably, somebody else’s problem. Payhawk measures itself on exactly that yardstick — whether it’s saving its clients time — and the rest is engineering. That tension, between the headline-grabbing innovation in payments and the quiet, unglamorous work that actually makes products frictionless, runs through this conversation. 

Ahead of FTT Payments in London on 12 May 2026, Martin Wallraff, Director at Payments Consulting Network, sat down with Pedro Batista, who leads the UK payments and licensing at Payhawk. They discussed Pedro’s path from Corporate & Investment Banking through Currency Cloud to Payhawk, what it took to internalise Payhawk’s payments stack and obtain its UK and Lithuanian licences, where AI agents are starting to add real value for finance teams, and how stablecoins and open banking are reshaping cross-border flows — almost entirely behind the scenes. Read the full interview below

MW: Pedro, can you start with a quick introduction to yourself? 

PB: I’ve been in fintech for 13 years. The first half of my career was in corporate investment banking at Bank of America Merrill Lynch, and the second half has been in payments. I was employee number 20 at Currency Cloud, where the team and I built the FX and cross-border products that underpinned the early infrastructure of companies like Stripe, Revolut, Monzo and Wise. Currency Cloud was eventually acquired by Visa for close to a billion dollars.

MW: What changed when Visa acquired Currency Cloud? You’ve been through a similar transition with Optal, which was acquired by Wex.

PB: The dynamics shift completely. You move from being a senior leader in a fast-moving company to being absorbed into a much larger group. The speed of innovation slows, roles get diluted, and the focus moves from “build, build, build” to scaling, margins and profitability. What’s interesting is that Visa is increasingly positioning itself as a financial network rather than just a card network — Currency Cloud, Tink and Earthport are part of that shift.

MW: Tell us about Payhawk and your remit when you joined in May 2023. 

PB: Payhawk has been around for seven years and was at one point one of the fastest companies in Europe to reach unicorn status. The mission is to be the dominant AI-powered spend platform in Europe. My remit was to internalise the payments side of the business: apply for and obtain our own licences in the UK and Lithuania, then build the financial infrastructure and compliance stack on top of them — SWIFT membership, banking partnerships, our own sort code, IBAN issuance, FX and global payments, plus the compliance operation. Three years on, the UK is fully on our own licence and Lithuania is on our licence with a legacy programme still running alongside. We have three core product and engineering teams — onboarding and compliance, corporate cards, and banking — which have done an extraordinary amount in a short time to operationalise the licenses and continue to build innovation on an ongoing basis.

MW: Is Payhawk still primarily an expense-management business, or is the proposition broadening? 

PB: We’re enhancing it, not moving away from it. Expense management — corporate cards, receipt capture, AI-powered reconciliation, real-time visibility for finance teams — is where the company came from. Over the last two years we’ve added more rails for domestic payments, intake-to-pay, FX and cross-border payments, and we’re one of the few players in Europe offering credit cards alongside that. The thesis is simple: CFOs are busy people, and we want to give them the best tools, the best data and the best workflows so they can spend their time on what’s strategic for them. We measure ourselves on whether we’re saving our client’s time. There’s more coming in Q3 and Q4 to deepen that proposition. 

MW: Your customers are typically mid-market and increasingly enterprise. They already run intricate landscapes of ERPs and supplier tools. How does Payhawk fit in? 

PB: Integration is everything. If you don’t integrate seamlessly with the systems a company already operates in, you simply add overhead to the finance team — the opposite of what we’re trying to achieve. We invest heavily in connecting to ERPs, with what I’d argue are best-in-class integrations into the major ones, NetSuite included. Information flows in real time, workflows are fully customisable on thresholds and role profiles, and the company decides how it all looks. Our multi-entity product is increasingly important as we move up into enterprise — that’s where a lot of our roadmap iteration is happening.

MW: You recently launched four AI agents. Can you walk through what they do? 

PB: We’ve launched four AI agents – Travel, Procurement, Payments and Financial Controller. The Financial Controller agent for example helps companies to no longer have to chase employees or dig through supplier websites for invoices or receipts. The agent can automatically retrieve them – speeding up expense processing and reducing time-consuming admin work. A lot of our spend goes through travel, so an employee can prompt the Travel agent — “book me flights to this city on these dates and a hotel within policy” — and within the rules and permissions the company has set, it returns options and books them. It’s effectively prompt-driven travel inside the spend platform, with policy enforced automatically.

MW: Where do you see the limits of agent automation, particularly once they’re making real payments? 

PB: Trust is everything. CFOs rely on reputable, regulated partners, and that’s why we’ve invested so heavily in licences, certifications and partnerships with the likes of Visa and JP Morgan. It’s not just reputation — those partners also bring product depth and financial independence that complement what we build internally. As we move up-market into enterprise and multi-entity groups, the trust bar gets higher, and the roadmap follows the actual pain points of those clients. So, the boundaries of automation will keep expanding, but only as fast as we can prove reliability and stay aligned with the regulatory framework.

MW: What was the case for going through the licensing process yourselves, rather than continuing on a partner’s licence? 

PB: Three things: trust, resilience and speed of innovation. Trust because clients see a regulated business standing on its own. Resilience because you’re not exposed to a single partner’s continuity. And speed because you’re no longer hostage to someone else’s roadmap. On a partner licence you can request features, but if they don’t have them, they have to build them — and you become dependent on their execution. Once you have your own licence, you set the ambition level. We’ve shipped products much faster since.

MW: What did you underestimate going into it? 

PB: The sheer scope. Companies that do this for a living have been at it for ten years. We had to build the same — and in some areas better — in roughly two years, while not disrupting client flows for a moment. In a fast-growing company you don’t have all the answers; you must be intellectually curious, ask the right questions, and rely on the people around you. When the UK launched, clients saw zero disruption alongside materially better products, and the UK portfolio continues to grow and go from strength to strength. It’s the part of the work that’s least visible externally, but it’s the achievement I’m proudest of.

MW: Looking ahead — open banking, commercial VRPs, stablecoins. Which of these will have the biggest impact on your space? 

PB: The honest answer is that most of the meaningful innovation happens behind the scenes. Clients aren’t asking us for stablecoins; they’re asking for faster, cheaper, more seamless ways to move money. If a regulatory framework or rail enables that, we’ll build on it. We’re already operating on open banking rails for both data and money movement. In Stablecoins we see most clearly in cross-border treasury flows — volumes crossed $33 trillion last year, more than Visa and Mastercard combined, and the use case where they genuinely improve cost and speed is moving money between entities across borders. That’s increasingly true in developed markets too — the first wave was emerging-market corridors, the second is treasury movement in established economies, and eventually the G10 corridors. The killer use case is making cross-border real-time so it’s not constrained by SWIFT cut-offs and business days. This weekend is a good example: with bank holidays in Europe on Friday and the UK on Monday, you effectively have a four-day gap to move money cross-border, while domestic schemes in the UK and the eurozone run 24/7. Bridging the cross-border leg with stablecoins and connecting into local instant rails is where a lot of the innovation will go — faster, cheaper, and round the clock.

MW: What are you looking forward to at FTT? 

PB: The timing is good — Q1 is done and a bit of Q2, so it’s the right moment to take stock and shape the H2 roadmap. The real draw is the in-person advantage: in a single day you have the conversations that would otherwise take you several weeks of calls and travel to line up. FTT is the right size for that — you actually run into the people you came to see and can hear how they are thinking about innovation and customer pain points.

Payments Consulting Network is a media partner of FTT Embedded Finance & Super-Apps and FTT Payments, taking place on 12 May 2026 at Convene 22 Bishopsgate, London. Martin Wallraff is moderating “Frictionless at the core: Why the best payment ops are invisible” at 11:25am. Pedro Batista is speaking on “The B2B stablecoin revolution” at 2:15pm.

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Payments Consulting Network is a media partner of FTT Embedded Finance & Super-Apps and FTT Payments, taking place on 12 May 2026 at Convene 22 Bishopsgate, London. Martin Wallraff is moderating “Frictionless at the core: Why the best payment ops are invisible” at 11:25am. Pedro Batista is speaking on “The B2B stablecoin revolution” at 2:15pm. 

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Author: Martin Wallraff, Director, London, Payments Consulting Network. Martin brings over 20 years of experience in financial services strategy consulting. For the past decade he has specialised in payments, fintech, and transaction banking, advising clients on strategy, market entry, go-to-market, and product development.

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