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Marco De Luca
I joined Mollie in 2017 when it was 80 people in a single office in Amsterdam. By the time I left in 2021, it was 750 people, valued at €6.5 billion, and I'd had four different job titles. My final role was product lead for the merchant risk and underwriting platform — the system that decides, in real time, whether a payment should go through or get flagged.
That role taught me something most fintech commentary gets wrong: payments is not a technology business. It's a risk business that uses technology. The companies that win are not the ones with the best API or the smoothest checkout flow. They're the ones that can underwrite risk most accurately — which means the ones with the best data, the best models, and the deepest regulatory relationships.
After Mollie, I spent two years at Adyen on the platform team. Adyen is the opposite of a startup in every way that matters: disciplined, profitable from day one, allergic to hype. Working there recalibrated my understanding of what "good fintech" looks like. Most fintechs subsidize growth with venture capital and call it product-market fit. Adyen charges a premium, grows slower, and actually makes money. The market eventually rewards the Adyen model, even if Twitter doesn't.
I started writing about payments in 2023 after watching one too many conference panels where people with LinkedIn titles like "Fintech Thought Leader" explained payments infrastructure without ever having processed a transaction. My first piece — a breakdown of interchange economics and why "free payments" is a lie — got picked up by Fintech Today and did about 90K views. Signal found me through that piece.
What I try to do is write about fintech the way a plumber writes about plumbing: specific, technical, and unimpressed by shiny fixtures when the pipes are leaking. Payments is a $2.5 trillion industry built on infrastructure that most people, including most people who work in fintech, don't understand.
I live in Amsterdam with my partner and our two cats, who are named Visa and Mastercard. (I wish I were joking. My partner named them before we met, and the coincidence was too perfect.)
Experience
- Product Lead, Adyen (Platform)
- Product Lead, Mollie (Risk & Underwriting)
- MSc, TU Delft