After Selling His Company to SumUp, He Built a Compliance Business with Aurimas Bakas from Copla

Aurimas Bakas is a serial fintech entrepreneur, and each of his companies grew out of the last. Running a payments business, he kept hearing from customers that they didn't want the payment service; they wanted the core banking underneath it. That became Paysolut, which he co-founded and sold to SumUp in 2021. Building core banking for licensed financial institutions across Europe then sparked the next idea. As a critical vendor, he had to prove his own security and compliance to every customer, long before DORA existed. He could see where the regulation was heading. That became Copla. In this episode, I speak with Aurimas, CEO and co-founder of Copla, a compliance platform built specifically for the financial industry. Copla helps licensed financial institutions manage DORA end-to-end, and helps their vendors handle the ISO 27001 and other frameworks their customers demand. The platform acts as a register layer for vendors, assets, risks, and incidents, with AI agents doing the heavy lifting on reporting, documentation, and training. Copla already serves over one hundred regulated companies across Europe and raised a six-million-euro round in February. In this episode, we cover: 1. How each of his ventures seeded the next, from payments to core banking to compliance 2. What actually changes for a fintech once the regulator starts auditing 3. How Copla turns registers of vendors, assets, risks, and incidents into the reports regulators ask for 4. The role AI can play in compliance, and where the human still needs to decide 5. Why managing DORA and ISO 27001 on spreadsheets breaks as you scale 6. His advice for founders facing DORA for the first time, and why proportionality matters Connect with Aurimas on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aurimasbakas/ About Embedded Finance Review: Embedded Finance Review is a newsletter, podcast, and event series covering the European embedded finance ecosystem. I also offer Office Hours, free intro calls for companies navigating embedded finance, and host regular in-person events across Europe. Find all details at embeddedfinancereview.com. This episode was produced by https://orama.tv/ (00:00) Intro (01:54) ‌Start (02:10) Founder Night Worries (04:08) Why Build Core Banking (06:40) SumUp Partnership And Exit (08:18) Life After Acquisition (09:33) From Core Banking To DORA (11:52) Copla Platform Pitch (13:56) Who Uses It And When (16:59) DORA Outputs And Audits (19:19) AI Versus Compliance Tools (22:50) Selling Compliance To Fintechs (25:15) Funding Vision And Advice