I’ll be honest, returning to run Reloadly after three years away is a unique and strange experience. Stepping back into a leadership role after time away brings a mix of familiarity and change. At first, it feels slightly unfamiliar, like reconnecting with an old high school friend you haven’t seen in years and before long, it feels as if no time has passed. That sense of reconnection is powerful – and a reminder that sometimes, change can lead you right back to where you’re meant to be.
During those three years as an advisor and board member, I was close enough to stay informed but removed enough to actually have time to think – something founders rarely get the luxury of when they’re buried in day-to-day operations. That distance gave me perspective. Ideas started forming, some of them bold enough that I knew they couldn’t be executed from the sidelines. That’s ultimately what brought me back, not just to observe the next chapter of Reloadly, but to lead it aka ‘founder mode‘.
Where We Started
When we launched Reloadly in 2019, the mission was simple and sharp: be the API platform for mobile top-ups. Full stop.
We looked around at the incumbents – the big, legacy players who’d been doing this for decades – and the gap was almost embarrassing. These were companies running on old infrastructure, clunky UIs, and outdated SOAP APIs along with archaic business models. Meanwhile, the developer ecosystem had completely changed, Stripe had shown the world what a great API experience could look like. Twilio had done the same for communications. We asked ourselves: why doesn’t this exist for the airtime/top up industry?
So we built it. Developer-first. Self-serve. Clean documentation. A product that a solo developer could integrate on a weekend and a large enterprise could scale without calling a sales rep. That was the DNA, and it worked!
The Gift Card Move
By 2021, we were seeing something interesting. The same problem we’d solved for mobile top-ups existed in digital gift cards. The market was fragmented, the APIs were painful, and nobody had come at it with a proper developer-first mindset. This ultimately led us to launch our Gift Card API with the same approach – and it took off. It was the first signal of something bigger that I don’t think any of us fully understood at the time. We weren’t just an airtime company. We were becoming a platform for digital value payouts. The rails. The infrastructure. The thing underneath the thing…
What Seven Years Teaches You
Seven years in, patterns start to emerge that you can’t ignore. And what we’ve been watching closely is the organic growth in prepaid cards, both closed loop and open loop. But here’s the thing: these new customers buying these products are fundamentally different from our original mobile top-up users. Different industries, different use cases, different buying patterns. A totally different customer profile that are coming organically to Reloadly which caught us by surprise.
When your customer changes, everything has to change with them. Your marketing. Your branding. Your positioning. Your website. Your go-to-market. All of it.
That’s exactly what we’ve been preparing for…
Reloadly 3.0 — and What It Represents
This week, we launched our new website. We’re calling it Reloadly 3.0 internally, and it’s not just a redesign. It’s a statement about who we are now and where we’re headed, more focused and positioned for prepaid card customers.
We spent most of 2025 building and shipping our payout links product – a feature that lets companies create campaigns where end users receive a redemption link and choose how they want to receive their value. Gift card, prepaid card, whatever works for them. The flexibility is the point. Companies from HR teams to gaming platforms to fintech startups are already using this to power their rewards and incentive programs.
On top of that, we built and launched Swype – our own open loop, virtual prepaid card issuing program. Swype works globally on Apple Pay and Google Pay, and it’s already embedded inside some of the biggest reward and incentive companies in the industry. Swype is an obvious product pivot from our traditional airtime/top up business. That took real conviction, heads down building with belief that this was the right direction and product for us. We listened to our customers, and delivered the best prepaid card in the market.
The New Mission
Billions of people participate in the global economy without fitting into traditional payroll or business payment flows. Organizations want to reward and pay these participants, yet face friction across borders, currencies, payout methods, and compliance.
Reloadly is evolving beyond airtime top-ups into a global payouts and rewards platform built for developers.
Reloadly provides the infrastructure that enables companies to programmatically move value to individuals anywhere in the world – through the payout methods people actually use. Payout links allow organizations send embedded value that recipients can redeem however they choose for their available value, whether that’s gift cards, money cards, or monetary payouts coming soon.
This is not a simple problem. Recipients expect choice, speed, and trust. Organizations need scalability, compliance, reporting, and control. Developers need APIs that are clean, reliable, and actually can deploy with with speed and simplicity.
That’s the gap we’ve always lived in. We’re just now building something much bigger inside it.
Change is sometimes a good thing. For us, that’s the whole point.
Michel
