Why every entrepreneur matters more than ever, by David Falzon, Head of Acquiring at wamo
Walk through any Maltese town at 8 o'clock in the morning and you'll witness something remarkable. A café serving its first coffee. A bakery pulling fresh bread from the oven. A family-owned shop unlocking its doors. A plumber loading the van for another day's work.
Individually, they may seem like ordinary businesses. Together, they are Malta's economy.
It's easy to celebrate unicorns and billion-dollar valuations, but in countries like Malta, prosperity isn't built by a handful of giants. It's built by thousands of entrepreneurs making hundreds of small decisions every day: every invoice sent, every employee hired, every customer served contributes to the resilience of an entire nation.
More than 99.8% of businesses in Malta are SMEs, employing 74.9% of the private workforce and generating 65.6% of the country's business value added, as mentioned in a previous post. Those aren't just statistics, they're a reminder that if small businesses stop growing, Malta stops growing.
That's why I don't think of payments as transactions. I think of them as confidence. Every time a customer taps their card and every time a merchant closes the day knowing everything worked exactly as expected, trust has been reinforced. Great payments are almost invisible: when they work, nobody notices. When they don't, they're all anyone remembers.
At wamo, our job was never simply to provide payment terminals. We exist to remove friction from entrepreneurship for every kind of business owner. The restaurant in the middle of dinner service, the hotel checking in a full lobby, the supermarket with queues at every till, the retailer, the architect, the tradesperson: each faces a different daily reality, but they share the same need, financial infrastructure that simply works, so they spend less time worrying about banking and more time building.
That belief became very real when we signed our first POS customer in Malta.
The first merchant who believed
Every company remembers its first customer. For us, it was Kebab Factory, one of Malta's best-known restaurant brands. Long before we had hundreds of merchants, Kebab Factory chose to trust a young company with an ambitious vision.
Trust is something you earn, especially in hospitality, where nothing can interrupt service. A payment terminal isn't just another piece of technology; it's the final touchpoint between a restaurant and its guests.
I recently sat down with Cihan Onerci, CEO of Kebab Factory, to talk about that decision and everything since.
Why did you choose to work with wamo from the very beginning?
"When you're serving hundreds of customers every day, payments simply have to disappear. Our teams should focus on hospitality, not on technology. What stood out about wamo wasn't just the product, it was the people. We felt we had a partner that genuinely wanted to understand our business and grow alongside us."
That word, "partner," matters. Technology can be copied. Pricing changes. Features evolve. Partnership doesn't.
What has actually changed in your day-to-day operations?
"The end of day used to be the hardest part: reconciling terminals, chasing discrepancies, waiting on settlements. Now the day closes itself. Settlements arrive when we expect them, reporting is clear across every location, and my managers spend that time on the floor with guests instead of in the back office with receipts.
And honestly, it goes well beyond the terminals. The business account itself is the easiest we've ever worked with: opening it took minutes, not weeks of paperwork. Whether I'm on the app between site visits or on the web at my desk, the experience is genuinely comfortable: paying suppliers, transferring between accounts, issuing cards for the team, checking cash flow across locations, every financial task is a few taps. Our banking used to be a chore we scheduled time for. Now it just happens in the background of running the restaurants."
You've expanded significantly since those early days. How has the partnership kept up?
"Every new location we open, payments are the one thing I don't think about. New terminals arrive configured and working. When we have an idea or hit a problem, we talk to people who know our business, not a ticket queue. As we've grown, wamo has grown with us. The team listens, reacts quickly and genuinely cares about our success. That's the kind of relationship every entrepreneur looks for."
What would you say to other Maltese business owners weighing the same decision?
"Choose the partner, not just the terminal. Rates and features look similar on paper, what's different is who picks up the phone when it matters. For us, that has made all the difference."
For us, that's perhaps the greatest compliment we could receive.
Partnership in action: this summer's cashback campaign
Words like "partnership" are easy to write. What matters is what they look like in practice, and this summer, we had the chance to show it.
At the start of the summer, wamo and Kebab Factory launched a special cashback campaign together: wamo customers earned 5% cashback on every payment at Kebab Factory locations across Malta, throughout June and July. A simple mechanic, but a meaningful one, because both sides put something in, and both sides gained.
For Kebab Factory, the campaign brought new guests through the door and gave loyal customers one more reason to return during the busiest season of the year. For wamo, it gave our cardholders a tangible, everyday reward at a brand they already know and love. Two different companies, a fintech and a restaurant group, each promoting the other to its own audience.
That is exactly the model we believe in. Supporting local businesses can't stop at providing terminals and accounts; it means actively driving customers to our merchants and putting our own marketing muscle behind their growth. When a payments company and a local brand campaign together, the money spent doesn't leave the community, it circulates within it: more covers for the restaurant, more activity for our cardholders, more life on Malta's high streets.
One campaign won't transform an economy. But it's a signal of how we intend to work: not as a vendor watching from the sidelines, but as a partner invested in whether our merchants grow. And it certainly won't be the last, we want every wamo merchant, from restaurants to hotels to the corner market, to benefit from campaigns like this.
Building Malta, one business at a time
People often ask what success looks like for wamo. Of course we celebrate every new merchant and every milestone, but I measure it differently.
It's one thing to win merchants in the easy-to-reach places; it's another to bring the same level of service to the furthest, most remote corners of the islands, and that's exactly what we do. We've now reached double-digit market share across Malta, and I'm proud of that number. But for me, the real success is something smaller and quieter: the little kiosk in the most distant village choosing wamo. When an entrepreneur at the very edge of the map gets the same modern financial infrastructure as a business in the capital, that's when you know you're building something that serves everyone, not just the easy-to-reach.
It's the restaurant owner who finishes reconciliation before going home to their family. The hotelier whose front desk never has to apologise for a payment issue. The market owner who knows exactly where the day's cash flow stands before the doors close. The retailer who spends more time with customers than with spreadsheets. The entrepreneur who finally feels their financial infrastructure is helping them grow instead of slowing them down.
Those moments rarely make headlines. Yet they're the moments that build economies. Every successful SME creates opportunities for employees, suppliers, families and communities. Every thriving entrepreneur makes Malta stronger.
Because behind every payment is a business. Behind every business is a dream. And behind every dream is someone willing to take the risk of building something that didn't exist yesterday.
Those are the people worth building for.
At wamo, we build the payments and banking infrastructure that lets Malta's entrepreneurs, from the capital to the smallest village, spend less time on admin and more time on their business.
