From Cash to Code: How Barzahlen became finperks

Note: The following contributions are personal impulses from Max Eckel. They represent individual reflections and are intended to stimulate discussion and further thought.

In 2013, a dm drugstore cashier held 800€ in cash in her hand: “What is this for?” she asked. “A Piano.” She blinked. Twice. The payment went through. This scene was actually possible thanks to three WHU founders.

Back then, cash was everywhere in Germany. But the internet was already taking over commerce. So you had a gap: You could buy online. But you often couldn’t pay online if you wanted to use cash.

Their idea was almost stupidly simple:

• Generate a barcode
• Walk into a retail store (like dm)
• Pay cash at the checkout
• The payment gets confirmed digitally

That product became Barzahlen. Then something even bigger happened: Once you can do “cash → digital” at the checkout, you can also do the reverse. You can enable cash withdrawals and deposits via retail stores for banks and wallets.

Barzahlen evolved into viafintech - A Paysafe Company: infrastructure that connects everyday retail checkouts with the digital payments world. They scaled that model across Europe and eventually viafintech was acquired by Paysafe.

But the story is not this exit. It’s the team. Florian Swoboda, Achim Bönsch. Sebastian Seifert. Andreas Veller. All BSc 2011.

They found their A-team early, built through the hard years, and now the latter three are doing it again: finperks.

finperks builds the “one integration” layer for prepaid: gift cards, rewards, employee benefits… all the stuff that looks simple (“I get a code, I buy something”) but becomes chaos behind the scenes.

Here’s the visual version: Your company wants to reward 10,000 people (employees, gig workers, customers, crypto users, whatever). You want the reward to feel generous, so you want choice: “IKEA or Roblox or Amazon or something local.”

So you start calling vendors. One can do lots of brands… but only Germany. One is global… but only gaming. And for every brand, every country, every payout format, the fees are different. Suddenly you’re not building “a reward”. You’re building a mini payments operation.

And then the edge cases hit: Someone buys something, returns it, and tries to turn your reward into cash. Who eats that cost? The merchant? The issuer? The vendor? You? And who even sees the fraud pattern early enough to stop it?

From the outside, prepaid looks like “just gift cards”. From the inside, it’s a jungle: intermediaries, fee structures, compliance, settlement logic, liability. Prepaid is not a niche product. It’s a distribution format for value.

And finperks wants to make it boring again: one setup, clear economics, clear responsibility, scalable across markets. The "Stripe of Prepaid"

I love stories about industries I’ve never thought about.

But my biggest takeaway for every student and young founder: If you find people you trust under pressure, treat that like gold. Ideas change. Markets change. Trust compounds.

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