The MoneyPot
00:16:03 · Pranav Sood
[00:16:03] S1: I think a couple of things. One is payments, even as they become more global, are becoming way more local. Increasingly people are moving away from SWIFT and equivalents as money movement architecture and moving increasingly to local payment rails both in and out. If you look at our volume of all the transaction that we're doing annually, about 93%, 94% of them are local rails. So local money in, local money out. A very decent percentage of those are same day, about 70%, and then about 50% are actually instant. And so for me, that's indicative of the fact that the world is moving much more towards that local fast and in some cases instant way of moving money. Increasingly, you're seeing people finding ways to harmonize across borders. So Singapore and India, for example, have been doing lots of work to try and make those two payment systems talk to one another. And I think really the the crux of it is maybe the last thing I'll say is that we're seeing more and more people looking to buy programmatic money movement in a modular way. And let me just unpack that a little bit. So I think it bears explanation. I'd say historically, a lot of payment businesses and infrastructure businesses have tried to sell a whole stack of products at the same time to their customers. So it's like inviting someone for dinner and saying, You can have any dish you want for main course so long as it's acquiring. Increasingly, are saying, Look, I need this particular problem solved. I need you to find a way to plug in alongside other people. And we're fine with that. Our view is we need to solve the problem for the customer that they're experiencing today and prove to them that we're good enough to solve the problems that they're going to have tomorrow. But I think that's probably a slight change in philosophy over the last few years and a movement away from locked in ecosystems to much more flexible and hopefully compatible ways of working.
00:17:57 · Rachel Morrissey, Pranav Sood
[00:17:57] S0: What do you think are ways that Airwallix's platform has evolved to accommodate this scale across borders? What are what are solutions that you are finding? [00:18:09] S1: I think the first one is we've scaled a lot. So increased coverage. We can do more markets in terms of payouts. We can issue cards in more places. We can do acquiring with more payment methods. We can do more currencies. So all of that packet of staff relates to just scaling the infrastructure footprint that we'd already started to build. The second is we're increasingly working on new products and services. So for example, we will be launching a yield product to help our customers benefit from the interest rate environment. We will work on credit solutions and things like that as well. And then the third thing is expansion into new sorts of use cases. So as I mentioned at the beginning, we're doing more and more embedded finance offerings. We're helping our customers to be able to not only do banking as a service, but also global money movement and also payments as well, so platform product. As a consequence of that, our product is expanding on multiple different vectors at the same time, which is extremely exciting to see because the speed that we're doing that is not something that I've seen before. It's great fun to be a part of because as someone who's responsible for a meaningful commercial team, I'm always able to tell my sellers that you've got new tools to be able to go and talk to your customers with.
00:18:09 · Pranav Sood, Medhy Souidi
[00:18:09] S1: I think the first one is we've scaled a lot. So increased coverage. We can do more markets in terms of payouts. We can issue cards in more places. We can do acquiring with more payment methods. We can do more currencies. So all of that packet of staff relates to just scaling the infrastructure footprint that we'd already started to build. The second is we're increasingly working on new products and services. So for example, we will be launching a yield product to help our customers benefit from the interest rate environment. We will work on credit solutions and things like that as well. And then the third thing is expansion into new sorts of use cases. So as I mentioned at the beginning, we're doing more and more embedded finance offerings. We're helping our customers to be able to not only do banking as a service, but also global money movement and also payments as well, so platform product. As a consequence of that, our product is expanding on multiple different vectors at the same time, which is extremely exciting to see because the speed that we're doing that is not something that I've seen before. It's great fun to be a part of because as someone who's responsible for a meaningful commercial team, I'm always able to tell my sellers that you've got new tools to be able to go and talk to your customers with. [00:19:21] S2: We have, I think, like ten minutes left. I would like to ask you a question. What kind of advice would you give to some companies who want to use programmatic money and cross border payments?
00:19:21 · Medhy Souidi, Pranav Sood
[00:19:21] S2: We have, I think, like ten minutes left. I would like to ask you a question. What kind of advice would you give to some companies who want to use programmatic money and cross border payments? [00:19:32] S1: I think you have to look for a partner who has both breadth but also depth. There are many companies in the market who are able to say at a surface level, we can serve all of your needs. But as soon as you start double clicking, you don't see the detail that gives you that comfort. To give you some concrete examples, in The US, for example, we have actually a panel of five partner banks that we're working with at any given time. And that means that we have a lot of redundancy and scalability in our ability to route transactions based on what we think the customer needs. For example, when you're looking at creating accounts, virtual and physical, do those accounts come with the ability to do direct debit in and out so that you can either do recurring payouts or actually do recurring pay ins? And so I think when you're evaluating those solutions, you have to go one step below the headline. And I think that's a mistake that many companies fall into, which is they get seduced by the, oh, we pay out to X countries and then don't go the level deeper that says, well, actually, does this do what we really need it to? [00:20:35] S2: Interesting. Interesting. And for your platforms, how do you iterate the UI UX of the platforms? Do you do panel with customers? Do you use UI UX? Do you do, like, interviews?
00:20:35 · Medhy Souidi, Pranav Sood, Rachel Morrissey
[00:20:35] S2: Interesting. Interesting. And for your platforms, how do you iterate the UI UX of the platforms? Do you do panel with customers? Do you use UI UX? Do you do, like, interviews? [00:20:46] S1: All of the above. Okay. So we are... We love working with our customers to design and build the solutions that we offer. I have... My boss, our CEO and founder, is an extremely product focused founder. So when we talk, the stuff that he's always most interested and excited to learn about is not what's going on in a general marketing sense, but tell me what the customers who are using this product are actually saying. And the level of granularity that he loves to go into is not just the level of, you know, what... You know, we're missing this payment method, but rather this reconciliation report that these customers are using for mass API, you know, issuing. What field are they missing? That means that their finance team is having to do one extra step in NetSuite in order to make the thing reconcile. And so that for me is just the kind of ethos that we have as a company and and that I try and have with my teams as well. [00:21:37] S0: So I'm gonna, we only have a few minutes left, and I'm just gonna ask a question kind of off the cuff. You don't know, just don't tell me. It's fine. But yesterday I'm [00:21:48] S1: scared now.
00:21:48 · Pranav Sood, Rachel Morrissey
[00:21:48] S1: scared now. [00:21:48] S0: You shouldn't be. But you mentioned about working with India and making those cross border payments, those those systems talk to each other. And in India, the UPI is pretty much the standard. That is what everybody is using. And it was a massive success domestically, but it does complicate cross border. And I'm curious because we had a... I actually heard somebody mention this on one of our stages, you know, that this was a massive complication. So I am curious how you guys approach solving that because just because you mentioned it, it's curious to me. [00:22:30] S1: Yeah, look, I'll qualify this by saying I'm not an expert on That's the totally fine. And my colleagues who spend more time in India and in APAC will probably be better placed to do it. I think the key is really to make sure that you pick the right financial partners to enable you to access the market. For a business like us, we're obviously in lots of places around the world. We're not yet deep specialists on the Indian market. And so the key is just find people who can help you to navigate that entry and then iterate and learn over time. [00:22:59] S0: Yeah. I think I'm just curious about it because like I said, this is... I know it's totally off the cuff and I know it's not your specialty, but we were talking about it and it's a market that's so growing that it feels like a golden opportunity.