Marco Margiotta is a fintech lifer. He’s known since childhood that he wanted to work in the sector, and entered banking shortly after graduating from college to pull on that very thread, but it wasn’t until he did some work for Payfare—the company of which he is now Chief Executive Officer—that he found his forever home.
Joining the company, he said in a 2021 interview, was “like a lightbulb. I was able to take my extensive experience in niche, asset-based lending and develop a creative way to ‘lend’ money to gig workers while taking on minimal risk.” The synergy was fitting because, Margiotta said, “we developed Payfare in the back of rideshares, talking to drivers. We learned they would either get their earnings earlier through a third-party payment processor with fees, or they would use traditional bank accounts that had slow transfers.”
That was all he needed to hear to begin working on API integration for gig economy platforms, including Uber, Lyft, and DoorDash. While he eventually got there—obviously—it wasn’t easy. “Creating and running a successful startup was a lot of hard work,” he said, “as any entrepreneur can attest to, so there was limited time or resources to absorb any mistakes.”
While Margiotta was happy to upend the payments industry, he expressed concern for “disruption” for its own sake; he said he believes in the correct processes, even in the rough-and-tumble tech world. “When disruptors try to bend the rules or avoid collaborating right out of the gate, it creates an uneven playing field,” he said.
Put another way, it’s unfair—the same way he thought it was unfair that gig workers had to pay through the nose for their own earnings, and did something about it. Margiotta lives by three professional rules, all of which have helped him turn Payfare into a powerhouse. Rule 1? Listen to your employees. Rule 2? Think 10 times as big as you’re comfortable doing. Rule 3? Build everything with a purpose and a passion. Do those, he says, and you can achieve your goals, like he did…and his was nothing less than “financial inclusion for all.”
