At Zooz, we built our business on one idea: no single payment provider is good at everything, so no merchant should depend on just one.
Years later, I'm at Appcharge as Chief Operating Officer, telling merchants they can work with one payments partner.
It sounds like I changed my mind. I didn't. It took three companies, and a few weeks here, for me to see that both statements describe the same strategy. The difference is who does the work.
Starting with a phone and a wallet
My co-founder and I started Zooz in 2010. The iPhone had just reached Israel. Android wasn't in the market yet, and most people still asked why they needed a smartphone just to make calls. We were sure phones would change how people pay, so we built a mobile wallet years before Apple Pay.
We ran straight into the chicken-and-egg problem. Consumers wouldn't download a wallet that few stores accepted. Stores wouldn't integrate a wallet that few consumers had. So we stopped trying to win both sides at once. We packaged our payments into an SDK that any app developer could add with one line of code. Within three months, 300 apps were using it, with zero marketing.
Then came Burberry. My co-founder met their team at a startup summit in London and called me that night: take a flight tomorrow. Burberry wanted what we'd built for mobile. They also sold on desktop, and they needed local payment methods in markets like China. Building that connectivity taught me the lesson that shaped the rest of my career. The checkout wasn't the product. The payment infrastructure behind it was.
That's how Zooz became one of the first payment orchestration platforms.
The hard part was never the technology
Orchestration lets a merchant route transactions across multiple providers instead of accepting whatever one provider delivers. Today that's common sense. Back then, the hardest sale wasn't the tool. It was convincing merchants that payment performance could be improved at all. Most assumed you picked a provider and lived with the results.
The market caught up. Competitors arrived, which was good for everyone, and merchants started building real payment stacks. Eight years in, with 70 people and ~$33M raised, we had won the argument for orchestration.
We were acquired by PayU, where I then served as CTO and saw the next layer down. Zooz had been pure technology. We routed money but never touched it. A PSP holds licenses, settles funds, and carries the financial operation behind every transaction. That's a different kind of responsibility, and a much heavier one.
Becoming the customer
Then I joined monday.com and became the customer of the kind of tool I'd built. I wanted to see orchestration from the merchant's side, with real volume and real targets.
The tools worked. The problem was everything around them: payments sat between finance, operations, and product, and my department invested heavily to push each optimization through. Nothing was ever finished. You don't build a payments stack and let it run. You tune it, expand it, and fix it, every week.
Take Brazil. We wanted to offer Pix. That meant contracts, banking setup, QA, and finding people in Brazil to test it in production. Then came the questions no integration guide answers: how settlement works, how chargebacks and refunds are handled, what happens with delayed payments, how multi-currency settles, and how taxes are calculated and paid. That was one payment method in one country. We wanted many markets.
I left feeling we never reached the level of optimization we were aiming for. Effort wasn't the problem. The work is slow and expensive, and it needs experts in every corner of the stack.
Why it isn't a contradiction
Everything I said at Zooz still holds. No single provider is the best everywhere. You need multiple acquirers, local payment methods, and fallback routes, if only for redundancy. No payments, no business.
What monday.com taught me is that knowing this and doing it are separate problems. Opening two PSP accounts is easy. Knowing which accounts, in which currencies, how they interact, and where each transaction should go takes deep expertise and constant attention.
A Merchant of Record that runs a multi-provider setup on your behalf is how the Zooz strategy actually gets carried out, but in a headache-free way. Use multiple providers. Optimize everything. Just don't do it yourself.
That also changes how you should judge cost. Compare processing fees alone and doing it yourself will always look cheaper. But the fee line leaves out the team, the finance overhead, the tax tools, the compliance work, and the markets you never launched because the backlog was too long. The real comparison is net revenue, not processing rates.
Why Appcharge
Before I joined, I asked around. Everyone I spoke with in payments knew Appcharge and spoke well of the company. I went looking for bad feedback and didn't find any. When I asked people inside, they told me the pace is intense. That didn't worry me; it reminded me of Zooz.
What stood out was how much has been built in so little time, in both volume and product. Mobile gaming is a demanding place to master payments: global players, high transaction volumes, and local payment methods that make or break conversion. The ambition is broad, too. The team comes from mobile gaming and knows it deeply, but nobody here thinks the story ends there.
What comes next
Running payments well takes more than a product. An orchestration platform is a product: you buy the license, and what you do with it is up to you. A service is something someone operates for you, every day. New payment methods, new regulations, chargeback disputes, issues with the card networks: none of it is ever finished.
That's why the service needs strong legal, finance, and operations teams built into it, not just engineers. It's also work an AI agent can't take over. And every new kind of business brings its own rules and risks on top, which is why we'll take them on deliberately, one at a time.
Payments still isn't solved. There are plenty of good solutions, and nobody has nailed it end to end. I've been chasing that since 2010. Orchestration was the product the industry needed then. What merchants need now is a service that runs it for them. Build that well, and the volume follows.
