Don't be big to start, start to get big - Tony Markov from FastSpring

[Music] We are now joined by Tony Marov from Fast Spring. How are you doing, sir? I'm doing really good. Barcelona is treating me well with the sun and the food is much better than Dutch food. So, I'm I'm a happy guy. Wow. You're starting off. He's firing shots right out of the gate. My word. Well, this is our first show in Barcelona. We're lucky that people are here and you know the sun is welcome. I'm not going to lie. We come from the UK. Seeing the sun, it's a novelty. So, we're happy to be here. But as far as Fast Spring is concerned, I have spoken to you folks in the past, but if anyone hasn't seen those videos, what is it that you folks do? In a very simple way, and I can go on for hours typically, and don't let me go on for hours. We are a merchant of record that assists companies with the rigomearroll of payments, right? They can get very confusing. Dealing with taxes all over the world can get very confusing. um more money, more problems. So, as you scale and make a lot, a lot of

complexity comes with it too. What we're trying to do is release some of that pressure, which is very relevant now for mobile gaming companies and gaming companies in general with many of them trying to do this for the first time and trying to just figure out doing payments by themselves for the first time. So, in a nutshell, we just help. I mean, we did kind we covered the basics in previous interviews, but for those watching the group behind away in the background over there, if you can see behind, that's all the indies. That's all the new people that we're talking about that maybe haven't factored in, you know, they're focused on making the game that they want to make, but they maybe haven't thought about the subscription processes or how am I going to monetize this or advertise this properly. And that's when new folks kind of step in. When do people need to start introducing these sorts of plans? Because often we've talked to developers before and it becomes as a bit of an afterthought sometimes where they've got we'll just do inapp purchases. We'll do a couple of things. It'll be fine. Yep. What do people really need to do to lay the groundwork? It's a great question. You don't you don't need to be big to start, but you

need to start to get big, right? So, I'm going to divide it into two different things. One is when you start thinking about it. One is when you start doing something about it. If I was an indie studio right now, I would start thinking about it already. Doesn't matter whether your game is casual or not. With the Apple ruling, which I'm sure we're going to be talking about at some point, you can steer directly from iOS in the US to a checkout, even not even to a web shop. So that's your direct straight line to some D2C strategies. Now, if you do a web shop, it's a little bit different, but you should be they should be thinking about it right now. In many ways, I feel like Apple has taken power away from mobile gaming companies and they're kind of 10, 15 years behind any e-commerce company which can sell anywhere, right? In many cases, Spotify can have an application on the web and charge there and also have an application on mobile and then they have multiple revenue streams whereas mobile gaming companies have not had that opportunity. So, I'd say start thinking about it from day one because it's going to be a reality in the coming years. when you implement something

completely depends on the game whether there's a creator infrastructure built around it or they will be built around it. I'd say if you have creators making content for your games, jump on it instantly. If not, wait and see how it goes. But if you have the development resources, you can spin something up. Definitely do. Well, we've had that Apple ruling recently which means that the ward garden is kind of coming down a little bit. people are allowed to link out to web stores and web shops and and third party payment systems. As a company that you know deals with transactions and subscriptions and all that kind of thing, does that mean that you you've been interested in building web shops, you've been helping doing that stuff. Is there going to be a huge surge, do you think? And how difficult is it to draw people to your web shop if you don't already have fairly large fan base and foot? The diff it's not easy for sure. If you have a web shop and you spin it up, there's many occasions where you just put it out there, nothing happens. It costs you more money than it actually makes you. So, there's a lot of strategies that are involved with

getting people to the web shop. In terms of what it means for us, we don't have our own web shop built in yet. We rely on a third party to work with them. They're great at doing what they do. We're great at doing what we do. Um, so we do have something that can, you know, spin up a website in a couple of weeks and something very quickly for probably those indie companies that don't have the development resources to go build it out themselves. What it's allowed us is to go out there and assist any size gaming studio to try this or to migrate from another provider to Fastpring as well and enrich their infrastructure because many of them actually I don't think there's any large one Thank you. that um that works with a single provider. I think all of them orchestrate multiple payments and multiple providers and multiple types of payment companies. Um, so that's the direction they want to be going towards. So from our standpoint, it's it's been all great and uh we're trying to cover as much ground as possible. Gotcha. Well, this doesn't affect you sort of directly, but maybe indirectly. We've had all the the threats of global

tariffs are being thrown around all over the place at the moment. And even though it's not impacting things like inapp purchases or web stores at the minute, it does affect hardware that all of these things run on. So there's a threat of iPhones becoming more expensive in the US. We've got, you know, switch to pre-orders being stalled and cancelled. So there's this weird knock- on effect where it's kind of coming into our territory. Is that something that in any way like impacts yourselves in what you do? And even when they start talking about we're going to put tariffs on movies. So the idea of putting tariffs on digital products, then it really does become our problem. Does this instability cause any worries or do you think it's a noise? I don't know if it's noise. Uh but I also don't think it's a worry. So as of right now it doesn't impact us in any way right during co there was a huge hit on shipping and hardware and manufacturing our business boomed right because everything is digital and people started buying a lot more they were locked up at home so this doesn't impact us right now I can definitely see a world where something unpredictable happens and that changes down the line I

think we live in very uncertain times right now with everything that's going on in the US and uh I can see it I've seen crazier things happen so who knows In more positive news, yes, we've had uh news from app figures. They recently released a report that said that though overall install numbers are down, those who are installing are spending more. The number the payment are up by about 11% despite the install figures being down by about 7%. In your opinion, what do you feel might be driving this growth? And as someone who works for a company which is all about driving online growth and and ensuring that people spend more in a game and it's frictionless, how do you go about encouraging those people to spend more when they're in there? Yeah. So I I I'd be very curious to understand where those players are coming from and where the purchases are coming from. My gut tells me that it's all western primarily. Another hint that I have and again I'd love to see the geography split. Latin America and Apac and even the Mina region have been becoming bigger buying powers specifically for

digital goods. There's a possibility that a proportion of the sales in this 11% uptick is coming from those regions as well. We've been noticing that you know our revenues from those markets have been growing. When we speak to incoming specifically gaming companies, Latin America is a huge focus for them. APAC is a huge focus and now the Middle East and Africa region is also becoming a huge focus. So my gut tells me that it's the west doing its thing but at the same time the regions that used to not have a huge buying power and be very volatile before have better economic status and with that when uh economy grows and gets healthy digital goods also rise and then you can spend some money on a video game and so on. I don't know why the installs are not, you know, maybe it's just lack of great games. So, you know, we all need to get to work, but that's why I think the the sales might be going up. Well, where Fast Spring yourselves are concerned when people approach you and they're like, "Look, we need your assistance. We need your help." What's kind of the number one thing that folks ask for? What's kind of your, I guess,

main good, if you like, that you ship out? If you're a grocery store, what's the number one seller? So, it differs per company. Obviously, we've been serving just regular software companies and software as a service companies for the last 20 years or so. In the last couple years, it's opened up to gaming companies. The topic that I love the most beyond what's your pricing and like, you know, how many payment methods that you have, there's been a huge ask of infrastructure, right? Some of the companies that we're working with are very large and they do have very active creator communities. They do have lots of sales. that do have successful web shops or that the web shops are becoming successful through Fastpring itself as well as other partners that they work with and it's been can you handle the load can you handle the the spikiness of traffic you know um can you handle the demand of our buyers can you handle the fraud that comes with some of the markets that we're selling to right we'd be speaking to a midsize or even a small studio that wants to do a PC within Latin America which is a very volatile market from a payments perspective and

from a coverage perspective their mind is not necessarily around pricing. It's about how to serve that customer the best by offering payment methods and approval rates that are really really sorry really healthy. So that's kind of where the conversation goes once you go through the surface level things and that's where fasting shines because of our maturity as a merchant of record for over 20 years. We mentioned the mayor region which you know we were out to Dubai we're out in Akoba this year we've been in Jordan before and that's a totally different payment system where for example a lot of people don't have credit cards for example so and and that's something that you guys have to mitigate as well how does dealing with those things in different regions do you have a centralized kind of I know you guys are based in the US at the minute right yeah so is it all working out of there or do you set up sort of specialtity offices around the world to deal with this kind of thing yeah so since we're the merchant we We do all of that, right? In some places where we're required to have local presence, we do. And some places where we're not, we don't. But we still set up infrastructure, right? So, whatever that region requires for us to process successfully within it, we'll just do

that. And we do have an entire department of people, taxes, and you know, compliance that do all of that and figure that out for our customers so they don't have to do it. What about this year? I always ask everyone, is there something that you guys are planning on rolling out? something you've been working on that you're sort of excited to launch in the next 6 to 12 months or so. Is this something FSR is cooking up at the minute? Yeah, I think the biggest thing that we're trying to do now is improve our payment coverage and payment method coverage as well. We're noticing that there's a bigger and bigger demand for like you said, many people don't have credit cards. So, there's going to be local payment methods that need to be provided. So, a lot of our focus has been on that and a lot of underlining things within the platform. But the biggest thing that I can see from my side from on the go to market team has been let's get more payment methods out there. Let's get, you know, local acquiring capabilities in as many places as possible. Let's get those approval rates really high, which is kind of the the main point where fastpring is needed. In a lot of our cases, our customers tend to build their own web shops and build their own experiences because they want to control the design and the look and feel and then they attach a Fastpring typically at the back

of it or another provider, they want to keep it kind of headless and free, which is totally fine. And for that, we need to have the best kind of payment infrastructure possible. So then when a customer does get on that checkout page, maybe through the app store themselves, through through the US or on a web shop that they built, we can capture their payment as much as possible and they have all the payment methods that they need. So we don't introduce any unnecessary friction in what may already be a friction process. Gotcha. Yes. And we've all experienced the uh payment declined or unauthorized whatever, but uh anything you can do to resolve that and in my personal life as well, anything you can do to fix that, that'd be great. Much appreciated. I tend to agree. I don't want when I'm playing Clash or something, I really don't want anything to to block cuz then it can sober you up. It can make you go like, "Wait a minute, I probably shouldn't spend $99.99 on on this thing. I can probably, you know, buy some food with it maybe, but uh click." So, that's right. We're we're keeping reality at bay. That's our job. Say that's right. Just escapism above all. Excellent on that. Tony, thank you so

much for talking to me. Thank you so much as well. [Music] [Applause] [Music]