PCM vol. 3 issue 5

startup spotlight
it leads to amazing things that other payments can’t achieve.
A good example of this is working capital reduction. Right
now, payment companies all over the world hold floats of
international currencies all around the place to ensure they’ve
got enough to pay out to their recipients in a timely manner.
They do this because transferring via bank transfers aren’t
efficient enough to get the payment there in a time frame that
will keep the customers happy, or the operations smooth
PCM: What were some of your biggest challenges for
launching this business?
Michael: It certainly has been compliance related aspects. This
is such a tricky piece that you must get right. In the payments
space, being compliant is like being the good looking girl at the
dance. It’s attractive for other businesses to want to work with
a fully compliant company, and have confidence that they’re
doing the right things in the right areas.
Blockchain tech is still finding its home in terms of regulatory
compliance, but we engage with the regulatory bodies to make
sure we’re keeping our Anti-Money Laundering & Know Your
Customer procedures in the right direction with things. As a
team of non-payments people, this was a big learning curve
over the past few years, and we’ve put a very heavy focus on
this component.
Another really tough piece is the focus. Blockchain technology
offers the ability to change the game with finance, record
keeping, money transfer, trade finance, escrow, etc. The list
goes on forever. In our company, we’ve got to focus on one
thing, and one thing only. There are shiny objects everywhere,
but this was a bit of a resistance internally. We only do money
transfer, and we only do it between USA and China - for now.
But that’s the main thing at the moment, we want to prove our
value and execute exceptionally. After that, we will provide
more markets the same great experience we have crafted in
our first market. It’s important to remember that we’re trying
to change money transfer, forever. So it’s not a problem, if we
have one market focus for a few years. In 10 years time, we
can look back and see we’ve got 90% of currency pairs covered
in our network. At that point, that’s an incredible growth of
efficiency across the globe.
PCM: Tell us about your expansion plans and how do you
go about choosing the next region you expand into?
We like to be focused. So for us right now, solving the problem
between USA and China is a big deal. The market is huge,
technologically prepared, and has more pain points to work
with than most other markets. Doing this, and doing it
extremely well is step 1 for us. We’re assessing new geographies
to expand too, but we’ve got certain milestones internally we’d
like to hit before we’d feel comfortable opening things up.
However, we do think that Mexico and Japan are exciting
markets in the future. We open up new markets through a
balance of different factors, such as:
• What our current clients asking for
• What are the technical hurdles of that are
• What regulatory hurdles
• What are new clients demanding
Bundling all these together and weighting different areas
differently usually helps understand to a certain confidence
level, where we should head next!
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