Making crossborders payments simpler with Rabea Bader (Episode 44)
In this episode, I sit down with Rabea Bader, co-founder and CTO of Quidkey.
Guests
Show notes
In this episode, I sit down with Rabea Bader, co-founder and CTO of Quidkey.
Rabea is a fintech entrepreneur and CTO with a strong focus on payments infrastructure and account-to-account solutions. He is the Co-Founder and CTO of Quidkey, where he is building a secure, bank-integrated checkout experience that enables seamless domestic and cross-border A2A transactions while helping merchants reduce costs and banks unlock new revenue streams.
Prior to Quidkey, he served as CTO at REQPay Inc., where he co-invented a patented payments technology. His career also includes leadership roles as General Manager of Le Wagon in Israel and founding CEO of IZMUS. He began his professional journey as a backend developer at UBS, building a strong technical foundation in financial systems.
Rabea holds a degree in Computer Science and Economics from Tel Aviv University and brings a global perspective, with experience across the US, Israel, and Europe, and fluency in Arabic, English, and Hebrew.
In this episode
Rabea Bader, co-founder and CTO of Quidkey, explains how cross-border card payments pile up fees, delays and failed transactions, and how Quidkey turns them into local pay-by-bank payments by opening accounts for merchants in each market and predicting each shopper's bank at checkout. He describes validating the idea with hundreds of interviews, adapting to US shoppers who love card points, raising from strategic investors, and why agentic payments for businesses are the next frontier.
Chapters
- 0:00Introduction and Quidkey
- 1:00Why cross-border payments are broken
- 4:34How Quidkey makes cross-border payments local
- 12:43Predicting the shopper's bank
- 16:35How long validation took
- 17:49How payment habits differ by market
- 22:39Raising capital
- 26:57Stablecoins: where they help
- 31:41Fintech trends and agentic payments
- 42:51Regulation as an enabler
- 48:29Advice for founders
Key facts
Rabea previously built a construction fintech that helped construction companies manage finances, where he met his Quidkey co-founder.
Quidkey lets businesses accept pay-by-bank payments from the EU, UK, US and Australia without local entities by opening bank accounts for them in each jurisdiction.
European merchants selling to the US with cards typically see acceptance rates of 80–85% and pay around 7% in combined fees, with payouts taking about ten business days.
Quidkey predicts and preselects the shopper's bank at checkout, cutting bank selection from about 50 seconds to three to five seconds.
Quidkey can calculate sales tax on each payment and set it aside in a dedicated tax account.
Quidkey takes about 20% of checkout wallet share in the UK and about 16% in Germany.
Quidkey's founders interviewed more than 500 businesses, including in Australia, plus hundreds of consumers before launching an MVP about six months later.
US shoppers prefer cards for their points, so Quidkey lets merchants offer rewards or discounts for paying by bank; one travel merchant offering $100–200 off saw near-universal uptake.
Quidkey raised a 2.1 million pre-seed round, including Plug and Play Ventures, and is raising a $10 million seed round.
Quidkey chose not to become regulated and instead relies on regulated partners such as Transfermate in each market.
Stablecoins make sense where moving money abroad is hard, such as Brazil or parts of the Middle East, but add friction in Europe, the US and Australia.
Agentic payments will grow first in business procurement and travel, where agents need autonomy within spending policies.
Open banking regulation in the UK created the pay-by-bank market, but open banking APIs in markets such as Italy and Spain remain unstable.
Questions and answers
How does Quidkey avoid cross-border fees?
The shopper pays their own bank into a local Quidkey account for the merchant, so the payment is domestic.
How did Quidkey validate bank prediction?
It sent interviewees a prototype with their bank preselected; almost all clicked it within seconds.
What is Rabea's advice to founders?
Don't hide your idea; talk to customers constantly and iterate on their feedback before coding.
People
Topics
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