Matan Bar is the co-founder of Melio, which lets small businesses pay and get paid by bank transfer, card or check. He started it in 2018 with Ilan Atias and Ziv Paz, and he is now chief executive of Xero US, responsible for both Xero US and Melio.
The Gifts Project and eBay
In 2009 he co-founded The Gifts Project, a group gifting platform for online retailers. eBay bought it in 2011 for $20M, and he became a head of product there. In 2015 he joined PayPal as director of global peer-to-peer payments.
Paper Checks in a Venmo World
At PayPal he was struck by the contrast between consumer and business payments. Small US businesses used apps such as Venmo and Square to take money from customers, yet still wrote paper checks to their suppliers. He set out to bring peer-to-peer ease to the back office, and recruited Atias, then vice president of R&D at Windward, and Paz, from a private equity fund in Israel.
Ten Customers on WhatsApp
Melio started by doing the work by hand. For four months it ran bookkeeping and payables for ten small businesses over WhatsApp: a customer sent an invoice, and Melio mailed a paper check to the vendor. The team built the product from what it learned. Melio now lets businesses pay vendors by ACH, check or card even when the vendor does not use it, and integrates with accounting tools such as QuickBooks.
Joining Xero
After Xero acquired Melio, it introduced online bill payments built on it. "The US payments landscape is uniquely complex but vital for small businesses," he said.
He began Melio by mailing checks for ten customers. He now runs the US business of an accounting company that wants those checks gone.
