Andrei Zubovits is Wallester’s Head of Implementation, the person responsible for turning White-Label partnerships into live, running card programmes.
He has been with Wallester for close to five years, joining in 2021 and moving through business partnerships, client project management, business development, and solutions consulting before taking over implementation in 2025. Before Wallester, he led sales at Premiumstore. He studied entrepreneurship at Estonian Business School.
In this interview, Andrei talks about what implementation means in embedded finance, how a card programme goes from a signed deal to a live product, and what he has learned moving across so many roles at a fast-growing fintech.
Interviewer: You’re Head of Implementation at Wallester. For someone outside the company, what does implementation mean, and what does your team do?
Andrei: Implementation is the bridge between signing a contract and launching a live White-Label card programme. It’s a dense pipeline of technical and legal milestones. On the tech side, we drive API integration, end-to-end testing, 3D Secure, and mobile wallet tokenisation. In parallel, we manage Visa partner approvals, card design, and physical cards manufacturing. The entire process takes about four to six weeks of highly concentrated work. We stay fully aligned with the partner throughout to ensure a rapid, seamless go-live.
Interviewer: Your work centres on Wallester White-Label. In plain terms, what does White-Label let a client do?
Andrei: White-Label is built for companies that want their own branded card programme but don’t want to deal with the huge investment and complexity of building it from scratch. Launching a card programme is really like putting together a massive puzzle. It’s not just about obtaining Visa Principal Membership – you have to connect all the different pieces required for the programme to actually work: the Visa membership, the card processing, the 3D Secure setup, tokenisation, and the regulatory framework.
Instead of the client having to source and connect all these different systems themselves, we provide the entire puzzle completely ready-made, straight out of the box. We handle all the heavy lifting and technical connections in the background. The partner simply focuses their resources on marketing. You act as the face of the card, put your brand on top, promote it, and earn from it.
Interviewer: Walk us through what happens after a client signs. How does a card programme go from an agreement to something real that people can use?
Andrei: A launch runs through several stages. Once the letter of intent is signed, the project first goes through due diligence and our AML and compliance review. Once we have the green light, it moves to the legal department to negotiate and finalise the contract. After the contract is signed, the project comes to the implementation team. Here, we complete all the necessary technical steps, secure the required Visa approvals, and configure the systems.
Then we move to pilot testing. This is a critical phase where we test the entire setup in a live production environment to ensure everything flows correctly. If the testing goes well and everything is stable, we officially launch to the public. On average, a white label launch takes around two months.
Interviewer: What’s the hardest part of getting a complex client live?
Andrei: The hardest part usually comes down to navigating the specific regulatory and compliance hurdles unique to a client’s business model. It helps to split our White-Label partners into three tiers to understand this complexity.
The easiest for us are the non-regulated partners. Because they don’t hold a financial licence, we provide the entire compliance framework ourselves – the KYC and KYB, transaction monitoring, IBANs, limits, setting the rules for the cards and so on. Their main job is marketing, and to minimise the technical involvement – they can even use our ready-made White-Label mobile app!
Next up are the regulated partners – EMIs, banks, credit and payment institutions. On the compliance side, things are very efficient. Because they already hold their own licences, we operate on a reliance model. Instead of duplicating the full KYC and KYB process for every single cardholder, we rely on the data the partner has already gathered, making the card available instantly. Plus, since they deal entirely in fiat, Visa approval is a relatively straightforward process. The usual main challenge with this group is actually the technical implementation. Many older banks and traditional financial institutions still operate on legacy systems and aren’t always equipped to integrate with modern APIs right out of the gate. Bridging that technical gap and getting their older infrastructure talking to our systems is usually what takes the most time.
The hardest part of getting a client live definitely lies with our third tier: crypto-related partners. Aligning strict regulatory frameworks with the technical build is highly complex, especially now with MiCA in Europe. A crypto launch takes at least four months, largely because the AML/Compliance review process may take time and requires highly specialised documentation. They are the most challenging to launch, but they are also some of the most interesting projects to work on.
Interviewer: You’ve held several roles at Wallester in under five years, from business partnerships to Head of Implementation. What has that journey taught you?
Andrei: It’s been incredibly exciting. When I joined as a sales and business-development manager, the company had maybe thirty or forty people, with only a few in each department. We had a very tight-knit, collaborative culture where everyone fit on one floor. Over the past five years, we’ve grown enormously. We’re now over two hundred people in a large office, and there are colleagues I haven’t even met yet. What this journey has taught me is how a company can scale rapidly while still maintaining that core, collaborative spirit. We’ve evolved significantly as an organisation, and I’m very curious to see where this growth takes us next.
Interviewer: You started more on the sales and business-development side. How does that background help you in implementation now?
Andrei: It helps immensely because it bridges the gap between what a client envisions and how the technology is actually delivered. In sales, you learn to be deeply customer-focused and open-minded about achieving the client’s business goals. Often, technical teams can be very rigid about standard procedures or limitations. My background helps me approach implementation from the client’s perspective: if a partner has a specific vision and it represents a strong business opportunity, I use my technical knowledge to find a creative way to make it happen.
Interviewer: You also review every White-Label project the company takes on. How does that work, and why does it matter?
Andrei: Every White-Label project is submitted to me before the letter of intent is signed, so I can review its complexity, its requirements, and its technical feasibility. The point is to make sure that when a partner signs, they can be confident they’ll actually launch with us. There are competitors who promise a lot and then can’t deliver, because of compliance, legal, or technical limitations. My job here is to make sure that doesn’t happen, that signing the letter of intent means the project is genuinely doable, for us and for the client. Our business isn’t about earning from the sale, it’s about earning from cooperating over time.
Interviewer: Implementation sits between a lot of teams, sales, product, compliance, and the client. How do you keep all of that moving in the same direction?
Andrei: First, I’m lucky to have a strong team of professionals. They handle a lot themselves, going straight to IT, AML or compliance to resolve issues, and only bring me the ones they can’t solve.
On working with other departments, I’ve met a lot of people with different approaches, and for me it comes down to finding a way to communicate that works for both sides. The communication between my team and the rest of the company is genuinely good, if I reach out, people are friendly and ready to help. The worst thing in any organisation is reaching out and getting silence, or a flat “no.” We’re all here to make the same business work. I’m from implementation, you’re from compliance, we do different jobs, but it’s the same business, just from different directions. That’s what I try to get across to everyone.
Interviewer: You’ve represented Wallester at events like Money20/20 for several years running. What’s changed most in embedded finance over that time?
Andrei: A few big things. One is crypto. There used to be far too many crypto-related companies, and MiCA has sorted that out. In Estonia we once had around two thousand crypto-related companies; now only a few are licensed. That’s a huge change.
The second is compliance. I’ve watched our company, and others, invest more and more into AML, compliance and legal, because if you want to operate in finance, you have to be compliant.
And the third is AI. It’s new to the industry, and everyone is trying to put it into their apps, their platforms, their daily operations. I understand why: it saves time and money. If something would take a person twenty hours and AI can help do it in a fraction of that, of course people reach for it. Crypto, compliance and AI are what have changed the most over my five years.
Interviewer: What’s the most satisfying part of the job?
Andrei: When a project goes live, there’s real relief, though it usually lasts a month or two before the same partner comes back wanting new currencies or a second programme.
But the part I enjoy most is resolving complicated situations, the ones involved colleagues can’t crack on their own. Digging into a problem myself, pulling in the right people, and coming back with a solution, that’s the most satisfying part of the job. Every day you’re digging into something different, and that keeps it interesting.
Interviewer: What’s your advice for someone starting out in fintech implementation or partnerships?
Andrei: My best advice is to embrace every opportunity to learn the core mechanics of the business, regardless of where you start. Fintech is a highly complex industry, so entry-level customer-facing roles are actually fantastic stepping stones. They give you a front-row seat to how the product functions on a day-to-day basis and how customers interact with it. Once you are inside the company, you build a foundation of practical knowledge that is incredibly valuable. From there, it becomes much easier to transition into different roles because you truly understand what you are building. The most important thing is to simply get your foot in the door and start absorbing everything around you.
Interviewer: Outside of work, what do you spend your time on?
Andrei: I try to stay active and spend quality time with the people close to me. I’m quite passionate about padel – I’ve been playing for about two and a half years now and have logged over four hundred games. Aside from that, you’ll usually find me at the gym or just enjoying time with my girlfriend, family, and friends to recharge.
