Acctual Co-Founder Atikh // Web3 Accountant Radio Ep4 Transcript
Atikh Bana is the co-founder of Acctual, a AR/AP software for digital assets that allows companies to bill crypto invoices and pay crypto suppliers easily.
In this conversation, we dive into:
1. Issues with crypto-invoicing?
2. Payment of crypto bills using different crypto assets?
3. Where are the crypto fund flows happening?
4. Process and time required to onboard Acctual
5. Why did Atikh decide to enter the Web3 space？
6. What is the most important lesson learned in the Web3 space?
7. What is Atikh looking forward to in the Web3 space?
And more! __________________________________
Connect with Atikh & Acctual👇 Linkedin: / atikhbana
Website: https://www.acctual.com/
Twitter (X): https://x.com/acctualteam ‪@acctualteam‬
Email: [email protected]
So let’s begin. Hi, everyone. Welcome to the Web3 Accounting Radio, the podcast where we dive into the fascinating world of the Web3 finance and compliance.
I’m today’s host, Diana, and my partner is Wei Xiang. Let’s welcome Wei Xiang. Hi, Wei Xiang.
Hi, Diana. Today we are very lucky to have Atik on the show. I’ve tried the Acctual software myself, and I’m very happy with the user interface and how it works.
Thank you so much. Okay, as someone new to the Web3 space, I’m excited to learn with you and share insights with the industry experts. And today our special guest is called Atik.
Atik is a co-founder of Acctual, a Web3 payment and invoicing SaaS. From his days at Stripe, Datadog, and Storj, he has seen the good, the bad, and the ugly of designing in complex product space. But nothing quite like the chaos of managing digital assets is what compelled him and his co-founders to build Acctual.
He is excited about Web3’s fine ops and the up-to-date potential of digital assets to change B2B payment globally. It’s not just about replacing outdated systems. It’s about creating a new standard where near instant settlement and financial inclusion is the norm.
And we are all about making this transition easier for businesses around the world. Acctual has raised $3.85 million in seed funding from big names like IDEO, Third Prime, Soma Capital, and angels like Ryan Selkis, founder of Messari. Hi, nice to meet you, Atik.
Nice to meet you as well, Diana. Thanks so much for having me on the show. Yeah, so I think before we hand the mic over to Atik to bring us through invoicing in crypto and what are some of the issues that customers face.
In one sentence, if you are watching this and you have issues billing customers, you are sending them many emails or you have issues with many payments of invoice inside your email. Sometimes you overlook them. Sometimes you pay to the wrong one.
Just give a call to Atik itself from Acctual and I think they have a perfect solution for you. We would be glad to help. Awesome.
Well, yeah, I mean, so I guess the first question is kind of around just invoicing and some of the things that we’re kind of learning. Maybe we can start off with like, what are some of the problems that you are solving currently? What are the common issues that I think customers face when they talk about crypto invoicing? Certainly, certainly. So at the core, I think problems that we see a lot more are kind of the workflow and process of dealing with both invoicing and bill pay, particularly with digital assets and fiat.
So, you know, most finance teams are used to very particular kind of workflows when it comes to sort of paying a bill or being able to send an invoice. And so that looks everything like, you know, being able to have the bill that you pay be synced in with your accounting system. And so that gets recognized just as any other bill would if it was like a fiat bill and having the journal entries kind of laid out there correctly.
The second is then being able to sort of have all of the crypto context kind of be one to one with a lot of the information that’s in the ERP system. So every time you make a payment to someone, that’s a vendor and that vendor should be associated to a vendor in that accounting system. And that wallet address that you pay should also be attached to that vendor as well.
And so just making sure there’s a lot of kind of connectivity between what the main source of truth, which is the general ledger has and what your AP system has as well. Second to that is the workflow process itself. You know, invoices are how people, you know, request payment.
And so being able to sort of send someone an invoice using the process that you have, you know, you aren’t always going to have the luxury of people using the tools that you want for them to send you an invoice. And so sometimes they come through in the form of an email. Sometimes people will text them to you.
Sometimes people will, you know, maybe not even include an invoice and say, hey, you owe me twenty thousand dollars. Here’s my wallet address. And so just having a process where you can kind of streamline the intake of all of that is another big part of that workflow, which we help teams with as well.
And I think the last part is then the process of paying the bills themselves. So there’s approval workflows. Right.
I mean, sometimes you get a bill and if it’s, you know, a certain threshold or if it’s a particular vendor or if it’s a particular like kind of category of spend, there should be like kind of workflows in place, you know, based on that type of activity. So if it’s over twenty thousand dollars, maybe it requires that the CFO look at the invoice or that, you know, if it’s a marketing invoice, that maybe the director of marketing looks at it. And so we build in a lot of those internal controls so that teams can have that sort of expected experience around sort of the bill pay workflow that they had once before with Fiat.
And I think that’s going to be really, really critical, especially if we’re ever going to have this type of money movement happen in the traditional kind of AP workflow for businesses, non crypto as well. Now, the flip side of that is the invoicing workflow. Again, a lot of the same things.
Customers being attached to the ones that you have in the ERP system, being able to sort of build out this experience where you can kind of just click a button. It sends them an email. They can pay via payment link.
And every time they make a payment, they get a receipt that shows that payment that has been completed. All of that being automated alongside the reminders, you know, over 60 percent of invoices that get sent require at least one reminder to get paid. And so just kind of building alongside these just traditional heuristics of how invoicing and receivables kind of work, but then being able to bring the digital assets into that workflow is really the biggest part of the work that we solve.
And that’s kind of more of the process and workflow. And what we’re also seeing now is more around sort of the flexibility and the preferences that people have as it relates to getting paid. Sometimes you get a vendor that says, hey, I want to be paid in my local currency.
Maybe it’s Turkish lira, maybe it’s Nigerian naira. So then being able to sort of say, well, if I’m a business that has primarily US treasury and sort of USDC or USDT, maybe just U.S. dollar, being able to sort of allow people to have that preference of paying how they want while their vendors can receive how they want. And on the flip side of the invoicing, you have the same exact problem where maybe you as a, you know, a business want to get paid maybe in stablecoins, but your clients might not be well versed in crypto.
So being able to give them the option to sort of pay in, you know, USD or euro or something like that. Whereas me as the business owner, maybe if I’m in a place where, you know, I prefer to receive stablecoins, which we’re starting to see globally quite a bit, being able to just provide that flexibility where either side of a transaction, the parties get and spend how they want. So I guess that’s kind of the long way.
I think that’s very, very cool to hear. And I think myself, I mean, the finance portion, I think there’s one portion that is a system like that would be very helpful to me that I didn’t hear you mention is, you see, the person who decides the payment might Acctually be a CEO or the founder itself. But as an accountant himself, after he pays and then the whole bill comes to me automatically and with the numbers inside, that might be a lot easier than, let’s say, if we don’t choose a software and it will be the CEO at the end of the month, maybe handing me, I mean, using a very traditional way, a whole stack of invoice and say, hey, I paid all this, can you please just put it into the system? So that is where I think in terms of accounting and recording, that is something that I think is part of the workflow that is very helpful to staff also for the people doing it.
So, I mean, just like you mentioned something about like paying in a certain currency or getting it out, just curious, like, do you have compliance issues? Do you need to apply for licenses or is it like, no, because you’re a software, it doesn’t affect you? That’s a good question. So we’re really the sort of software experience that sort of creates a lot of interoperability between both the sort of AP and AR process and the kind of fiat and crypto movement. And the way that we kind of work is that we don’t kind of sit in that money movement as much as we kind of work through that process.
We Acctually partner with a lot of different providers that have the licenses, the MTLs and a lot of the compliance in place to make sure that all of that can happen in a clean way. Second to that, I mean, we do take our safeguards, right? So any transaction that comes out of our system, any wallet that’s connected is screened against kind of chain analysis data to just ensure that money is being sent out or paid to wallets that are not on lists that we don’t want to send money to. I see.
Nice, nice. So I think you have done the relevant safeguards and the license providers will be doing their relevant KYC checks. So the other one is within the invoicing space itself.
Where are you seeing a lot more activities recently? Like, is it the gaming centers? Is it the market makers? Or is it service providers? Or like, can you share some color? 100%. Yeah, it’s definitely the service providers. We’re seeing, you know, quite a range of the types of service providers.
I mean, everything from traditional kind of dev design agencies to content writers, marketing, advertising, you know, all the way through to some kind of like logistics businesses that are kind of using the product for different things, real estate companies. What’s really neat is that we’ve seen kind of invoices and users from across 128 countries, which really kind of talks to sort of the need of just being able to utilize the digital assets and kind of invoicing workflow. But I’d say that, yeah, the spectrum, it seems to kind of extend beyond kind of just paying crypto companies.
But now it’s actual companies that are just, when you look at kind of where money is coming from, and where it’s going, you can clearly see that it’s solving the cross-border problem more than it is, you know, I’m a crypto company and I only like pay in crypto, which is kind of what we’ve been used to at some level, I’d say. Yes, because I think the thing that you solve is, you know, maybe the recipient wants it in a certain token, in a certain chain, but, you know, as a person paying it, I might have a stablecoin in another chain. But by using such a system, we will have a flow through and not let such differences become the payment problem.
And, I mean, as service providers, we have done so much to get a service and getting the payment sought out is pretty quick. So, I mean, in terms of onboarding, you know, setting up the system, how is the process? How is the process like, you know, the first one might be, I think, maybe an onboarding call and after that set up maybe internal controls, like, you know, what kind of control flow? So, I mean, maybe can you walk us through this, like, how many, how the period that you will take or like, yeah. Yeah, for sure.
Well, getting set up on Acctual just takes a few minutes. Usually when we kind of are working with more of a, you know, native kind of Web3 protocol, you know, finance teams that we try to do a little bit more of a discovery to try to understand their pain points and just better make sure that we can optimize that onboarding. But generally, I mean, the way it works is that you sign in to the platform, connect your accounting system and you’re ready to kind of use the full fledged solution from, you know, sending out an invoice to making a bill payment and using kind of your, you know, multi-sig wallet or now soon custodian wallets like Fireblocks to make those payments in our system.
Oh, so I didn’t know that you guys are connected to custodians. I thought it was just a normal wallet. Thanks for sharing that.
Is there like a lot of new integrations coming along? Exactly. Yeah. So we’re starting to see more and more and more demand from different kind of companies where custodians are typically what’s now being used to sort of make those payments for better kind of safeguards in their internal controls.
And so we want to meet them where they’re at and be able to provide that experience to kind of unify the AP alongside the custodian and not just limited to self custody options. I see. Thanks.
So maybe just one last question from me. So I understand that you guys are inside the crypto space, but have you been seeing some interest from people who are doing fiat pay, fiat ARAP that is using you guys as payments and or is that currently not a kind of business segment that you are focusing on? For sure. Yeah.
So certainly, I mean, I’ll give you two examples, right? I mean, so one is you have these service providers who maybe are law firms or accounting firms or different types of service providers who maybe work with traditional companies, non Web3 and then also work with Web3 companies. But when they go out and collect revenue from their customers, they prefer to receive that money into their bank account. And so one of the ways that we help is that they might have clients because they’re working with Web3 that want to pay in stablecoins.
So we Acctual do is kind of set up these auto withdraw addresses. So we’re on their invoices. They put a wallet address that we’ve associated with their bank account.
And so their client gets that benefit of being able to pay in stablecoins. And so then as their customer being able to offer that flexibility to their customer. But on the other side, they’re going to receive that payment directly into their bank account through the partners that we work with to be able to automatically off ramp those funds.
And then second to that, we are starting to see more of these kind of cross border use cases where you’ve got someone that maybe wants to pay out in one local currency. But maybe the recipient wants to receive like US dollar. And so we kind of work with a number of partners there to kind of enable in that bill payment, the ability to kind of go from fiat to fiat.
But being able to utilize crypto rails as opposed to sort of traditional fiat like Swift network, which obviously kind of has a lot of delays, liquidity issues, high costs that we’re able to sort of help save and optimize around. Yeah, I mean, just the last sentence alone, I think you bring inside all the wonders of blockchain. We are talking about faster payment, cheaper payments, how we can go from a certain currency through the network.
And then maybe stablecoins, maybe Uniswap, maybe changing of stablecoins and then go back into the currency of the other web to without the customers even knowing that, you know, oh, he has gone through the blockchain world. But well, compared to the previous method, I have done it quickly and I have done it in a way faster way because the whole chain where I have just mentioned it to you, we can do it in say two minutes maybe. But let’s say we use the Swift system and we do the exact same thing.
Maybe we wait for tomorrow before we can see it being reflected in the bank account. And then the whole bank charges and what not also cost a lot more. Yeah, it’s some kind of black box.
You don’t even know what it’s going to be by the time the money hits the account, like how much fees they’re going to take. Yeah, and I think, you know, just now when I mentioned to you about how we go from wallet to the Uniswap, maybe to change, I’m talking about something that is very manual process. But I think that is where Acctual takes care of everything, including the graphic user interface, where as from a user perspective, you just need to send out the invoice and the other party will pay and then you will receive it within the set amount of time.
And that is where you would help with a lot because I think for many, let’s say traditional banking, maybe the system is still very chunky and very, because internet banking might not be something that they focus a lot of investment money on. For sure, for sure. Yeah.
And so really, I mean, the key here is just to streamline a lot of that and be able to simplify and just being able to have more of that unified story where everything’s kind of just tied together from payment to invoice to customer experience all just being easier. I mean, just now you mentioned if I’m receiving a payment, like usually what kind of time frame do you tell your, because, you know, if I give the invoice, the other party will send me a message, I have paid. So usually how fast would that be reflected in the system? I mean, is it like, are we talking about 24 hours? Are we talking about two hours or like how? Yeah.
When invoices get sent out on our platform, the moment they’re paid, I mean, obviously they’re sent out instantly and then the users get notified instantly as well. And so the moment you kind of connect your wallet, make a payment, you get that email receipt right away. And then me as the business that was invoicing, we’ll get notified that the payment was made and we automatically sync that invoice and the invoice payments, the journal as well.
All the off-ramp, on-ramp activities that happen behind the back happens almost instantly. So we’re talking about within two hours. Yeah.
So I know it depends. I mean, it can take as long as one day, so 24 hours, but sometimes it can happen depending on the time. And also depends on how many rails I’m using.
Yeah, exactly. Thank you. Thank you, Atikh.
I think the way around the invoicing in the future and receiving payment in crypto is very magical. So may I know the inspiration that you have to do these things? Yeah, a hundred percent. So we like to think of ourselves as just like, how do we just build the kind of user experience that is not just helping people like, you know, use crypto, but kind of be paid how they want and be able to have their vendors sort of send or pay how they want as well.
And so ultimately, I think the goal is sort of the flexibility alongside the process that we build around. And so really, I think it stems from understanding, you know, take, you know, the Nigerian kind of content creator that we work with, right, who has clients in Canada and the US and in the UK. He runs a firm where he prefers to receive stablecoins because he then uses those stablecoins to pay out his contractors.
But right now his workflow is being paid on PayPal and having PayPal go to his friend’s account in the UK and then his friend converting that money into Nigerian Naira and then sending him Nigerian Naira and then him taking that Nigerian Naira and buying stablecoins. Whereas now we can create a virtual bank account that’s tied to a wallet address that he gives us. And now his clients can pay just like they normally would through fiat.
But now he gets a stablecoin because that’s what he wants. And then his vendor continues to pay how they want. But then he gets the flexibility of getting paid a lot faster because that other flow took almost two weeks.
And then now he also gets to control the effects on his money as well, because obviously when he has the USDT, he can determine what his rate to US dollars in Naira become. And then it becomes really easy for him to pay his vendors. So ultimately the inspiration was just hearing stories like his, where this is what I want, this is what my vendor wants.
How can we meet both each other where we want to be? And that’s ultimately kind of what we wanted to help them solve. Interesting, I think. Because I think this will help a lot of firms to transfer the fiat to the crypto.
And, I think this question may be belonging to our free talk session. So I think it’s convenient to go to the free talk segment and maybe in this segment and I will ask some questions about your experience before. Certainly.
So the first question is, why did you decide to enter the Web3 space? Because I think your firm creates a very interesting way to transfer the currency to the crypto. And so I would like to know what inspired you to enter the Web3 space at first. Certainly, yeah.
So my time in Web3 kind of started around circa 2017-18 at a company called Storage, which was one of the early kind of decentralized storage protocols. And I think honestly, what got me inspired then was just being able to sort of see the use case of crypto kind of go beyond money transfer. And so it was like, wow, like we can leverage blockchain and sort of a decentralized system to be able to sort of store data and not have to leverage kind of these really large, you know, Google type providers to be able to do different things like that.
But then while I was at Storj, I got to sort of learn about a lot of the different intricacies from being paid in tokens to paying out the different node operators and tokens and different things like that. And so that’s kind of where I got just a better understanding of some of the friction that kind of comes with crypto payments as it relates to sort of real world kind of business use case, kind of beyond, you know, trading, which is what I’d done previous to that. And then fast forward to working at Stripe, where I got the great pleasure of meeting Momo, my co-founder, who also introduced me to Isa, our third co-founder.
I started to kind of see like financial operations in the Web2 world. And one that I always imagined just being kind of already figured out, like teams. This was like not a problem that I thought for a while was hard for teams, right? Like, oh, there’s already so many solutions that help them figure these things out.
But come to find out, it’s not the case. You know, there’s still very much a lot of fragmentation, a lot of time kind of spent on reconciliation. And, you know, the financial operations as it relates to just fiat is difficult and it has a lot of friction.
And so I think that’s kind of when we had this aha moment of, you know, what’s been so great about seeing companies like Stripe and others is how they can take something that’s so complex and build great kind of delight and craftful experiences for teams that maybe didn’t seem like mattered at some level, but has a really big effect. And we just thought, you know, if we could bring that same mentality to building for financial operations in Web3, do we start to unlock an opportunity by helping, you know, build products for finance people to ultimately help them onboard into Web3? And so that’s kind of what was the ultimate inspiration. You know, what does it look like to be a greatly designed product that helps teams from the finance perspective, be able to adopt crypto and ultimately be able to influence the sort of hundred plus trillions of dollars that move B2B payments worldwide and eventually bringing more of that on chain? Well, you know, Atik, just to hear why did you enter the Web3 world and then to where we are today, which we spoke maybe 10 minutes ago.
You made your dream come true, I think. I appreciate it. There’s still a lot to do, but we’re really excited about kind of the adoption of stablecoins continuing to grow, the acceptance of it around the world, you know, regulatory bodies becoming more open to it.
I mean, we’re seeing it kind of affect the US election right now too. And then all the great work that teams around the world are doing. I mean, from our competitors to the partners that are helping to make these types of movements from fiat and to crypto easier to the issuers like Circle, who are helping to support teams like us and others make this process more possible too.
Yeah, but I mean, as all this is happening, it’s unique to see how the regulatory issues where initially nobody cares about it, but now there’s the interoperability issue where, you know, some people are quite concerned about how stablecoins in other areas are being used in their areas, etc. But I’m quite sure, maximum maybe five to 10 years, they will sort it out. Yeah.
For sure, for sure. And ultimately, I think what people want and businesses want more than anything is just confidence and clarity. I think the more we can get to that, I think the better.
And it’s starting to see that that pattern emerge a bit more, getting more comfortable. Yeah, I think it will be very proud to create such a very useful and very meaningful software. And I think that as I said before, I think this achievement is very meaningful in the life.
So can you share one key experience or lesson that you have learned in the Web3 journey that you think would be very valuable? A hundred percent. For us, one thing that I feel like has been a good lesson is, what’s your superpower? What’s the thing that you feel like you can uniquely bring to building in the space and leaning in on that? One of the things that we quickly realized was that sales is not something that we are particularly strong at. So obviously we had to build up that muscle and how we can get really good there.
But we also really learned that we were strong product people, strong designers, engineers, and trying to lean in on just building really high quality product experiences, as opposed to trying to be the best of everything else, helped us optimize at some level of building a company and it being something that we can use as our strength to build something that is great. Yes, that’s a good lesson, I think. And I think this lesson will have a good help to our listeners.
So maybe as a co-founder of Acctual, and I think Acctual is a very useful company in the Web3 area. And so what are you looking forward to in this Web3 finance or compliance area? Yeah, it’s an area that we continue to try to just be kind of up to date on, try to understand what sort of implications exist. One of the things that I think we are excited about, though, is the fact that from day one, the product that we have is usable by the world.
And so as much as we care about what the US or Europe think about stablecoin regulation, at the end of the day, it’s being used. And so it’s as much as just kind of understanding how that can continue to affect us, but also just continuing to focus on the areas where we aren’t seeing any friction and helping to serve those people as well. Yeah, I think the story that, I mean, I was silent for a little bit, but the one where you shared, like, for people to find out what they are, they are strongest, because let’s say for a three-man founding team, especially when you have friends in the same area, you know, like you mentioned your product people and then the sales portion.
So, I mean, similarly for a Web3 accountant, we are a very young brand and we do have to look into, you know, and I mean, for every other listeners out there, I have met with many founders themselves, you know, where is your strength and, you know, to work on the areas where you need to work on. And I think that is very thankful for Atikh for sharing this part of it, yes. And I think for the other issues with stablecoins, we are very thankful for USDC, at least.
I mean, USDT has not been so compliant, but at least we have Circle itself, you know, always, I know in Singapore, in MECA and even in the US itself, they have licenses and Hong Kong itself. So I think even Dubai. So I think at least we have an option available outside for us to use as a one payment area.
A hundred percent. A hundred percent. Yeah.
And that’s going to be the great thing moving forward, too, is just all the great work that, you know, a lot of these companies that once were kind of in their infancy are now like really grown up in a lot of ways. I mean, you’ve got public companies like Coinbase and, you know, MicroStrategy and obviously Circles are basically there as well. And they’re doing great work on just kind of the policy side and getting the licenses globally.
The MICA announcement a couple of weeks ago was really great to hear and seeing that the products expand into sort of euro stablecoins as well. And so I think there’s going to just be a natural tailwind when you have the issuers and, you know, the bigger companies helping to propel that work forward. OK.
So I think today you share a lot of things that are very useful and I think that will help our listeners to enter the Web3. And so thank you so much again. And to our listeners, thank you for tuning in to the Web3 content radio.
And if you enjoyed this radio, please subscribe and leave a review. And at the last, I would like to know that whether you have some words or some idea to share at our podcast. Yeah, Wei Xiang and Atikh.
For me, it’s just, Atikh, don’t drop off after the thing. I just want to speak to you for a while. Yeah.
Sounds good. Sorry, any last words from you? Oh, yeah. Well, no, thanks so much if you’ve gotten this far to listening about Acctual.
And I thank you both again for having me on. And if anyone wants to chat about bill payments or invoicing in crypto or just have ideas or, you know, like to give feedback on these types of things, please reach out. I’m just A-T-I-K-H at Acctual with two C’s dot com.
I’m also on LinkedIn and Twitter. You find us on there as well. And yeah.
Thanks again. Okay. Thank you, Atikh.