Appcharge appoints Ronen Morecki as Chief Operating Officer

Appcharge has appointed Ronen Morecki as Chief Operating Officer. He joins from monday.com.

The hire comes as app developers and publishers seek more direct control over payments and customer relationships outside traditional app-store billing channels.

Morecki was previously Vice President of Payments at monday.com. Earlier in his career, he co-founded payments technology company ZooZ and later became Chief Technology Officer at PayU after it acquired the business.

At Appcharge, he will oversee payments strategy and operations as the company expands its Merchant of Record platform for app developers, starting with mobile gaming and moving into other parts of the app economy.

Game publishers were the first to adopt direct-to-consumer payment models at scale, according to Appcharge. The company says changes in court rulings and regulation in the US and EU have widened the opening for apps selling digital goods or subscriptions through Apple and Google to use alternative payment routes.

Appcharge expects subscription, fitness, education and AI apps to follow, as more app businesses weigh the trade-off between app-store distribution and direct customer ownership.

Morecki brings experience from both sides of the payments market. On the provider side, he helped build ZooZ before its sale to PayU. On the merchant side, he led work at monday.com spanning payments, pricing and packaging, billing and the subscription lifecycle.

Appcharge also highlighted the scale of the market it is targeting, citing Grand View Research forecasts that the global in-app purchase market across consumer apps will reach USD $450 billion by 2030. The company sees that as creating a direct-to-consumer opportunity worth tens of billions of dollars across the wider app economy.

Its Merchant of Record model is designed to handle functions beyond payment acceptance alone, including tax, fraud management, chargebacks, compliance obligations and the management of multiple acquirers across regions.

Payments shift

For mobile game publishers, those issues are especially complex because of high transaction volumes and the need to support a wide range of local payment methods in different markets. That has made gaming an early test case for companies trying to move more sales beyond app-store billing systems.

Morecki's remit will include strengthening the platform, broadening payment coverage and helping build the next phase of the company's operations as it targets a wider range of app categories.

Maor Sason, Chief Executive Officer and Co-Founder of Appcharge, set out the company's view of the market. "Games are the hardest payments problem in the app economy, with huge transaction volumes and dozens of local payment methods in every market," said Sason.

"Ronen has built and run complex global payment organisations, which is exactly what we need as we take DTC further and deliver value for publishers in the wider app economy," he added.

Morecki described Merchant of Record as the next stage after payment orchestration tools, which have focused mainly on routing transactions. His comments reflect a broader debate in digital commerce over which parts of the payment stack merchants should control directly and which they should outsource to specialist providers.

"Every business wants a payments partner that takes the complexity out without taking away control," said Ronen Morecki, Chief Operating Officer at Appcharge. "Orchestration platforms solved technical routing. Merchant of Record is the next step. It absorbs the financial complexity too, from tax, fraud and chargebacks to compliance and managing multiple acquirers across every region, while staying optimised for each merchant. Game publishers have already proved Appcharge's model at more than a billion dollars a year. My focus is on reinforcing Appcharge's payments infrastructure as the strongest in gaming, and ready for any app that follows."