Matan Bar, CEO of Melio - Understanding Your Customer Pain Points is KEY

🎥 Nov 02, 2022 📺 Miguel Armaza ⏱ 1m 👁 153 views

Melio is now a $4 billion fintech company, but before they wrote a single line of code, the team took very deliberate steps to ...

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About Matan Bar

Matan Bar, co-founder and CEO of Melio, has discussed the company's approach to B2B payments and its growth in several recent podcast appearances. In a January 2025 episode of the Invested podcast, Bar recounted an interaction with former President George W. Bush, during which he described Melio's mission as "we keep small business in business." He also discussed the company's early days, noting that before building a product, Melio hired a person in Manhattan to manually perform bookkeeping and vendor payments for ten small businesses via WhatsApp, an approach he said helped the team understand customer workflows. Bar has emphasized the importance of focus, stating that the company uses the phrase "the main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing" in product roadmap meetings. He has also advised that "always do something" is the best career advice for young people, and has said that the worst thing for a team is "a bad player that thinks he's good." Bar has described Melio's growth, stating that the company processed about $20 million a month in early 2020 and around $1.7 billion a month by the end of 2021. He has characterized Melio as a B2B payments platform that acts "like Stripe but focused on B2B," and has noted that the company's objective includes creating "a workplace we all feel proud of." Bar has also discussed the role of banks in the payments ecosystem, stating that "banks are here to stay" and that they will continue to act as the routers for moving money, with fintechs providing infrastructure and applications on top.

Source: AI-verified profile updated from Matan Bar's recent appearances. Browse all interviews →

Transcript (1 segments)

Matan Bar0:00

When we started the company, we realized it would take us some time to build our first product, or our MVP, because we had to form some partnerships with U.S. banks and hire an engineering team. It would just take us some time to meet the first customer, and we tried to find shortcuts to better understand B2B payments and vendor payments specifically. So what we did is actually interesting: while we were developing the actual product, we hired a person in Manhattan, New York, who would manually do bookkeeping, accounting, and payables for 10 small businesses. So, without a single line of code, we had this person—today she's our VP of Customer Experience, but back then she was our bookkeeper as a service. That served 10 small businesses in New Jersey and Manhattan and did all the bookkeeping and vendor payments work for them manually. The way it worked was over WhatsApp: the business owner would send us their invoice, tell us when to pay and how to pay, and we would mail the paper check for the small business, update their accounting software, and send them reports. But it was all manual; she had to get access to the bank account and accounting software in advance. We found 10 businesses crazy enough to give us this access, but everything was done through WhatsApp. It was wonderful because we learned so much about the B2B workflow that we could have never discovered with a questionnaire.