What does it take to walk away from a business that is doubling every few months to chase something bigger? In this episode of The Big Bets, David Birch and Alessandro Hatami sit down with serial fintech entrepreneur Alex Mifsud, co-founder of Ixaris and Weavr, to unpack the defining bet of his career and the even bigger one he is making now.

Alex tells the story of building Ixaris into a pioneer of virtual cards for commercial payments, finding product-market fit in the global travel value chain, and then making a counterintuitive call. Instead of simply scaling a profitable business, he carved out the IP behind a new embedded finance stack (built with a four million euro Horizon 2020 grant on a project called the Open Payment Ecosystem), went against his own board, and spun it out into what became Weavr. Ixaris was later sold to Nium. It is a candid look at the innovator's dilemma in practice, choosing transformation over growth, and why solving hard problems beats sitting on a yacht in the South of France.

In the second half, the conversation turns to Alex's next big bet: what happens when AI meets digital money. As stablecoins go mainstream and AI agents become capable of managing money for ordinary consumers and small businesses, who is accountable when things go wrong? The three explore recourse and responsibility, the layered liability between the company that builds an agent, the company that deploys it and the customer who uses it, why banks and regulated entities remain the locus of trust, and how the banking stack might be reimagined for a world of agentic, embedded finance.

Timestamps:
00:10 Introduction
01:25 Alex's first Big Bet
09:26 The innovators dilemma
10:07 The second bet

Find us -
Dave Birch: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dgwbirch/
Alessandro Hatami: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aehatami/
Alex Mifsud: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alex-mifsud/

#fintech #embeddedfinance #ai #thebigbets