The Organic Disruptor: Meet Aleex Sjarki, Founder & CEO of Ecommpay

At Ecommpay, we often say that we are not a financial company. Rather, we are a technology company that happens to hold a licence. This distinction isn’t just a marketing slogan; it is the fundamental philosophy of our Founder and CEO, Aleex Sjarki and dictates every strategic move we make as a company.

For Aleex, the journey didn’t begin with a desire to build a bank. It started with a developer's instinct to debug a broken system. "I saw imperfection in digital payments," Aleex explains. "I had a feeling that I could fix it."

That simple refusal to accept the status quo remains the primary driver of our technology, our culture, and our ambition to this day.

Every global technology leader has an origin story, and ours is one that Aleex describes as the "perfect start-up". We didn't launch from a glass tower; we started in an apartment because we lacked the budget for an office at that time.

What we lacked in real estate, we made up for with a small team of inspired and passionate people. While the business began by connecting clients to existing services, Aleex quickly realised that correcting industry flaws required total independence. We could not rely on third-party architecture. We built our own technological capabilities from the ground up, and the business scaled from that point.

Under Aleex’s leadership, Ecommpay has grown from that single apartment into a global force with offices worldwide. But if you ask Aleex about growth and expansion, he doesn’t boast or highlight victories - he focuses on the targets that he considers were missed.

To most people, 26 times growth is an incredible triumph. To Aleex, falling short of the specific goal was a perceived failure, and that perspective provided the necessary impetus for further growth. That gap between ambition and reality provided the passion and push to refine and grow yet more. It served as a stark reminder that in a dynamic industry, arguably the biggest risk is believing "I am fine, I am perfect". Because the moment you relax, you stop evolving.

Despite such aggressive commercial targets, Aleex’s approach to leading our teams is fluid.

He describes the Ecommpay culture as organic, rejecting rigid, somewhat stifling forms of micromanagement.

He compares leading Ecommpay to watching a child with a toy. "You don't say to a child, 'take this toy and do this and that,'" he says. "You create the environment... but the child still plays by themselves”.

This philosophy is central to how we operate. We provide an environment where our experts innovate with fun and interest, driven by internal values rather than top-down instruction or mandates. We believe that if you create the right culture, people will do the right thing, not because they were told to, but because they want to, and it comes naturally.

Running a high-growth fintech scale-up requires immense mental stamina. Aleex manages the pressure through specific psycho-mechanics designed to keep his vision clear.

He prioritises "offloading the memory buffer." When the cognitive load becomes too heavy, he spends hours with a pen and paper, recording every thought in a stream of consciousness. This ranges from the "destiny of the world" to a simple grocery list. This process clears the noise, which allows him to focus on the signals that matter for the business.

And if that doesn’t work, there is always the cold. To build resistance to stress, Aleex starts his mornings with a five-minute ice bath at three degrees Celsius.

Aleex Sjarki remains driven by the same conviction he held in that first apartment: the payments market is still imperfect. "It asks for disruption," he says. "We are on the edge of a breakthrough, and we intend to be the architects of that change."

Watch the full interview to explore Sjarki’s philosophy on leadership, resilience, and the future of payments.