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I think it means the existing payment market is so massively profitable that you can undercut them and still make a killing.

I don't think Payhawk are a payment processor, they use MasterCard under the hood. They are more like aggregator and analytics for corporate payment accounts.

I was wondering the same thing! I always assumed that payment processing was one of the most "winner-takes-it-all" business models out there.

I guess one reason is that initial growth of online service providers (and especially payment processing) is often driven by sex-related use, e.g. sex work or art.

If the provider becomes "mainstream enough", these uses then get banned to satisfy investors, key customers and upstream services, driving the demand to the next startups.

PS: Or rather, were always banned from the start, but enforcement was lax until they were no longer an important part of the customer base.

It's not about marginal utility, it's about the revenue model.

Very easy to monetize a payments platform.