How Fidesmo and Tapster Built a Scalable Partnership

When Fidesmo joined Lighthouse in 2018, the company had already spent two years building a technical platform for secure, contactless payments. Founded in 2013 by Mattias Eld (CEO) and Miguel Cardo (CTO), the company pivoted in 2016 to focus exclusively on wearable payments.

Fidesmo faced significant technical complexity when building the platform, becoming one of the first companies to integrate issuer, card scheme, OEM, and chip certification. Yet, as the platform came together, Fidesmo recognized a fundamental limitation.

“We needed to get access to more banks and issuers. They are not our customers, but they are our partners in this,” Mattias explains.

Three years later, Tapster entered Lighthouse facing entirely different challenges. Founded by Tobias Ericsson and Ludvig Scheja, Tapster had strong hardware expertise and a clear vision: make contactless payments seamlessly integrated into people’s lives through stylish, battery-free wearables.

But vision wasn’t enough.

“To be honest, before we joined the Lighthouse program in 2021, I didn’t get a single meeting with a bank. It was a hard no,” Tobias recalls. “Nobody thought this was anything of interest.”

Coming from traditional hardware manufacturing, they needed to understand payments infrastructure, tokenization, and how banks evaluate solutions. Before joining Lighthouse, a credible path into the financial ecosystem was out of reach.

“For Tapster, Lighthouse represented an opportunity to build on our relationship with Mastercard, meeting potential partners in the form of banks, and learning about fintech essentially,” Tobias explains.

For Fidesmo, in the midst of pre-launch technical challenges, Mastercard Lighthouse provided essential validation and kept all parties aligned.

“The main benefit we had was that Lighthouse worked like the glue to keep everyone together. It kept us and our partners working together and focused on solving problems,” Mattias notes. “When you are working together for almost three years before you launch something, there are lots of ups and downs. It was very important to have this sort of stamp of trust from Mastercard.”

Both companies experienced Lighthouse’s most tangible benefit: access to decision-makers that would have been near impossible to reach independently.

For Fidesmo, the program delivered critical issuer introductions. “There were multiple meetings organized by Mastercard during workshops,” Mattias recalls. “Usually, they have two or three representatives coming from these organizations that are responsible for innovation and know how to help you navigate the organization.”

While some relationships took years to materialize—at times shaped by factors such as technical infrastructure limitations in certain markets—the foundations proved invaluable. ”It was important to have relationships that still form the foundation for our current discussions.”

For Tapster, the contrast was even more dramatic. The program transformed complete market rejection into active partnerships across Sweden, Norway, Finland, Denmark, Poland, Czech Republic, Hungary, and Italy.

Beyond introductions, Lighthouse participation served as powerful validation to banks, investors, and partners. “For me, the Lighthouse program was about relationships with the ecosystem, to Mastercard, to issuers. It’s about building and adding trust to your startup,” Mattias explains.

This validation proved particularly valuable in fundraising. “We absolutely included in all pitches that we were Lighthouse participants,” Tobias adds.

Perhaps less tangible but equally important, both companies gained strategic insight into how to position their solutions effectively. “We started to understand better how we should formulate our offering towards banks,” Tobias explains. This insight reshaped Tapster’s entire value proposition. Rather than just selling convenient payment wearables, they positioned themselves as banks’ strategic partners in maintaining customer payment primacy, offering an alternative to other platforms.

When Fidesmo’s platform launched in March 2019, the scope was narrow: a single issuer, market, card scheme, and OEM partner. It was a proof of concept more than a finished ecosystem.

Today, Fidesmo supports more than 850 issuers across Europe, Africa, the Middle East, South America, and the United States. “We are the biggest player in our niche worldwide,” Mattias explains.

For Tapster, growth accelerated dramatically after Lighthouse. Since 2022, the company has delivered more than 100 percent year-over-year revenue growth, scaling from approximately €1.3–1.4 million in 2024 to €2.7–2.8 million in 2025, while maintaining profitability. The next phase targets €5–5.6 million.