Dimitri Akhrin, BAMS: Building Trust in Payments

Dimitri Akhrin is president of BAMS and the founder of IRIS CRM, a customer relationship management platform built for the payments industry.

Two things from our conversation earned him this place in The Bright Ones: what human contact still does for trust in a business set on removing it, and a decision BAMS made in 2015 that only looked obvious five years later.

Why BAMS is a Bright solution

Every merchant knows the gap between a sale going through and the money reaching the bank. It exists, somewhere in transit between the card network, the processor and the account, and until it arrives it cannot buy stock, cover payroll or answer an emergency. Akhrin calls this cash drag, and for a high-volume business it grows quickly.

Two business models sit behind most card payments. Payment facilitators, the group that includes Stripe and PayPal, act as a master merchant, take custody of the money and hold a portion in reserve, which is what creates the lag a merchant feels. BAMS runs the other model, the independent sales organisation, and never touches the funds. That is the difference this branch of financial technology turns on.

The gap is really about who each model signs. Facilitators approve merchants fast, including businesses with almost no trading history, and the reserve is how they cover the risk that one of them fails to deliver. Chargebacks are the core exposure here: when a customer disputes a charge the processor must return the money to the cardholder, and if the business has vanished the processor absorbs the loss.

Because BAMS focuses on low-risk, high-volume merchants, it can work to a lower risk threshold and pay out the next day, with no need for merchants to change their existing bank.

Trust still travels by voice

The funding model is one kind of trust, the structural kind, and Akhrin treats it as the baseline rather than the achievement. What made the interview worth this section is the second kind, and a choice BAMS made about how a technology company should treat the people using it.

Every serious payment provider now runs on software, BAMS included. The question is not software or people, it is whether a person stays reachable inside the product. Much of the industry has answered that by routing merchants to a bot or making itself hard to reach at all, and for plenty of merchants who just want speed and self-service, that is fine. Akhrin's point is that this is not the whole market. Many owners still want a person on the other end, and BAMS built for them on purpose: named account managers, a phone that gets answered, a presence at trade shows, all treated as a competitive advantage rather than a cost to cut.

The reasoning goes deeper than good service. A merchant hands a payment processor control over the flow of their income, which is about as much trust as one business ever places in another, and for many owners that trust holds better when a named person answers than when a form does. The technology does the heavy lifting either way. What BAMS refuses to automate away is the point of contact, so the same portal that shows a merchant their transactions, deposits and disputes in real time sits alongside someone they can actually call about them. Transparency and a name to reach are two halves of the same promise, which is that a merchant always knows where their money is and who is accountable for it.

This is the choice worth admiring, because it serves a segment the rush to full automation tends to overlook. A payment industry that has to serve everyone needs both approaches, and the value of BAMS is that it picked its side of that split on purpose and built a technology company that still keeps a human within reach. It is the same instinct behind a digital bank opening a physical store, the argument that physical presence and trust move together for the customers who want them. Automation can run the whole relationship for the merchant who prefers it that way. For the one who does not, a reachable human is not nostalgia, it is part of what BAMS is selling.

The bet BAMS placed in 2015

The second reason this interview earned its place is a decision that predates the crisis that proved it right. BAMS moved its focus to e-commerce in 2015, when most of the attention in payments still sat with the physical card terminal. The value of the choice in building for where merchant demand was heading rather than where it happened to be, which is a discipline most companies talk about and few act on before circumstances force them.

The choice paid off in 2020, when physical retail closed and online sales became, for a great many businesses, the only sales. A processor already built for online payments could absorb that surge instead of rebuilding under pressure, and the merchants relying on BAMS were not left stranded while their provider caught up to a world that had already changed. That is the part worth appreciating, and it is easy to miss. The company that prepares early does not just protect itself, it protects everyone who depends on it, and a merchant who kept getting paid through 2020 was cushioned by a decision BAMS made five years before either of them knew it would matter.

How this fits into the wider payment industry

Akhrin is measured about the technologies people expect to settle payments faster or cheaper overnight. He sees a genuine use for blockchain payments, and also points out what they still lack, which is the consumer protection and dispute resolution the card brands spent years building. Visa, Mastercard and American Express give a shopper somewhere to go when a purchase goes wrong, and until an onchain payment offers the same recourse, he does not see it ready for mainstream retail. The lesson underneath it applies well beyond blockchain: a payment system earns adoption through the protections around the money, not the speed of moving it.

The frontier he watches more closely is software that spends on a user's behalf. When an AI agent starts a payment, the processor has to answer a question the card system was never designed for, which is whether this is the account holder acting or a machine acting without permission. Gateways are now building the checks to tell the two apart, the same problem The Bright Minded has followed in the work on authorising AI agent payments. Payment gateways are already developing the capability to support these agent-to-agent transactions, though Akhrin is clear the authentication question is not yet settled.

The thread through everything Akhrin described is one answer to the oldest question in money: why a stranger should trust you with theirs.