Embedded Finance Review Podcast, episode 50. Published 3 September 2026. Guest: Aurimas Bakas, founder of Copla. Host: Lars Markull.
Welcome
Lars Markull: Hi Aurimas. How are you today, and in what part of the world are you located right now?
Aurimas Bakas: Hi Lars, nice to meet you. I am in Barcelona, in the sunny city, even though it's pretty cloudy today. But yeah, a lovely place here.
Lars Markull: Yeah, definitely a nice place to pick and also to record a podcast episode from.
Aurimas, we're going to talk about a lot of different things today. Obviously your core topic today is compliance, and the first thing in preparation for this podcast I was thinking about is, I have a lot of fintech founder friends in my circle, and I know a lot of them say they stay awake at night because of compliance. What keeps you awake at night? Is it also compliance, or something completely different?
Aurimas Bakas: Well, you know, I'm building another business, another story. This is another journey, and even though this is journey number eleven for me as a founder or early stage employee, every journey is different. And as a founder you certainly have this feeling that there are many things that you need to do on top. There are a number of things that you have not thought about, and a number of things that still need to be addressed, and especially at nighttime, right? Then it's when all the noise goes down and your mind just starts playing with you.
But I think that's every founder's life, and this is not the first journey, so as a result you know what is coming, and as a result of that, mentally of course, you try to get some time to relax as well. But it's an intense journey, and there are many, many thoughts and many challenges. So they of course keep me awake at night.
From payments to core banking to a SumUp exit
Lars Markull: Understood. And obviously we're going to talk quite a bit about compliance today, as you said, with Copla. That's exactly the space that you chose and are building in right now. But I think for people even who don't know you, it's probably not surprising that this is not your first venture, and maybe not something that many people would choose as a first venture.
However, even before building Copla, you founded a company called Paysolut, a core banking provider that you eventually, after many successful years, sold to SumUp. So you had that exit as well. Both core banking and compliance tend to be, by the judgement of most people, the harder kind of problem. Maybe you can tell us a little bit what led you to build a core banking provider in the first place, and then after that I would love to understand what was the decision for the compliance pivot.
Aurimas Bakas: Yeah, absolutely. So the Paysolut story was quite a journey and quite a ride, and a very successful one. What people don't usually see is what was before that ride, and a number of failures, a number of mistakes, a number of stories that did not end in such a sound result.
So I have been building in the fintech area since 2012, and I was a founder of the second licensed payment institution in the history of Lithuania. So I was building a payments business which did not really scale. And in that process I realised that there are hundreds if not thousands of new fintechs which are emerging, which are looking for light solutions, which are looking to start their business, which are looking for a way to do that in an efficient way. And a number of incumbent old style core banking systems are not really suitable for that.
And there was a moment in my life where some of my potential customers used to come back to me and say, hey, well, I don't need your payment service that you are selling to me, but I need this core banking which is behind that service. Is this something that you can provide to me? So that was the initial idea, and it led to Paysolut, which we co-founded back in 2016.
And of course, as every startup, it had a number of different challenges. But it grew like a rocket, because the fintech ecosystem grew like a rocket. And I think that we managed to touch an area which was extremely sensitive, important, and we managed to connect our previous experiences with a product which was very much needed in the market. And very much focused at that stage on small and medium companies, but as soon as we started addressing the needs of much bigger companies, SumUp was one of them, which long story short, ended up in an exit event back in 2021.
Lars Markull: I think it was Steve Jobs who famously said you can only connect the dots when you look back. And from what I'm hearing, first building a payment business, then going to the core banking, and then we will talk about the decision to go for compliance after that, it seems like all the points are very well connected.
But just to focus again on the Paysolut story, that meant you built core banking for the fintech ecosystem, not for the big banks I assume, more for the upcoming challengers, companies like SumUp. You had many different customers including SumUp, and then eventually SumUp decided to buy your company. What was the reasoning for SumUp to do that, and how has the acquisition been for you?
Aurimas Bakas: It was quite a story, because the ecosystem was developing very rapidly and companies were building their own services, their own banks as they thought about it, their own solutions. And in the early stages it was really complex to understand what it's going to turn into.
When we started our partnership with SumUp we started from one angle, which was more focused on the payment side. It has eventually turned into a proposition and solution which is today managing the whole global SumUp bank. And as a result we grew like a rocket. SumUp developed very, very quickly, and then at some point it made a lot of sense for them to acquire our business, for a number of different internal reasons. And on our side it made a lot of sense because we saw a big possibility to keep developing Paysolut under the SumUp brand and wing.
Some things have turned into reality, some things have not. Well, that's the nature of every acquisition, right? But I think that there are many things which we were able to turn into something very substantial, and I'm really happy that we chose that way.
Lars Markull: Interesting. And from my research it's fair to say the exit had quite some waves in your home country, Lithuania. It was quite a success story, of course for you as a founder, but I think also overall for the ecosystem. How was it then for you personally after that exit? We're going to talk a little bit about how you decided to go into compliance and build Copla. But generally, what was your thinking when you did the exit? Was there a time you stayed with SumUp? You wanted to stay with SumUp? You already knew what you wanted to do next? How was that personally for you?
Aurimas Bakas: So on the one side it was a life-changing experience, from a number of different perspectives. Of course the financial freedom, of course a lot of publicity and attention, but even more importantly the experience of being part of a big organisation and going through the acquisition and trying to find the synergies and trying to turn those synergies into reality.
Having said that, when I look back at all of these experiences, as a founder you always, or you usually probably have this feeling that you want to build, you want to succeed, you want to do it fast. And we stayed at SumUp for a few years. We did our best, but eventually we realised that our passion is to build something from scratch. Our passion is to build something much faster than we were able to in a much bigger organisation. And that's exactly what led us to the Copla journey.
Why compliance
Lars Markull: Interesting. And if I remember correctly, the transition from the payment company to Paysolut, the core banking one, you had customers reaching out to the payment company just asking about the core banking. What was then the trigger, after leaving SumUp, after the acquisition was done, from your end personally, to go into the area of compliance?
Aurimas Bakas: It is actually very much related. All of those Paysolut experiences, they helped us to understand that the Copla idea and Copla proposition should be successful. Because, as you can imagine, once you're building a critical core banking infrastructure, and then you are selling that infrastructure to the financial industry, and all our customers at Paysolut were licensed financial institutions across Europe, a number of those topics related to cyber compliance, vendor management, security, were deep in every discussion with every customer.
At that stage DORA, the Digital Operational Resilience Act, did not really exist. However, we saw that coming. FCA resilience requirements in the UK did not really exist, but we saw that coming. And we felt that cyber compliance is going to be a topic on the table of the management boards, and something that the regulators are going to push for. And that's exactly what is happening today, for a number of reasons. Because those cyber risks are only getting more exposed. The possibility of getting hacked is higher and higher. Regulators are demanding and are asking for a number of cyber compliance-related documentation, evidence, audits, et cetera. And as a result this whole area today is very much one of the focus areas in every licensed financial institution.
And we had a lot of practice in it. As a vendor to the financial industry, we had to go through those processes. We had to prove that our technology is safe and scalable and secure and compliant, and we had to answer all of these questions. And we were a critical vendor, and we realised what the financial industry is going after. And that's exactly what helped us to come up with the Copla idea.
What Copla does
Lars Markull: Makes sense. And for the following question I think it would be really helpful if you can give us just a short pitch about what Copla exactly does. I think we understood that you're helping the listeners, the fintech founders, maybe the people at non-financial brands that are building financial services. You're helping them with compliance. And compliance, you mentioned DORA already, but compliance itself is a very broad term, it can be a lot of things. So maybe you can give us a short pitch, and then we can dive a little bit more into the compliance details.
Aurimas Bakas: Absolutely. So what we did at Copla is we tried to break down the compliance process into a number of different steps. Management of your registries, management of your vendors, management of reporting, testing, employee training, documentation management, et cetera, et cetera. And what we have built is specialised fintech-focused solutions for each of those steps.
So you can think about Copla as a compliance platform which is helping the financial industry to manage DORA end-to-end. You can think about it as a platform which is helping vendors to the financial industry, such as core banking systems or payment gateways or KYC systems, AML systems, to manage their own DORA or ISO or GDPR or SOC 2 requirements, et cetera.