Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Flywire CEO Mike Massaro (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: What are the segments besides education? You’ve taken the education use case and fleshed it out. What other big-ticket items are you catering to?

Mike Massaro: Back at Money 2020 Conference in Vegas, we announced medical tourisms reports. In a similar manner to what we do with educational institutions, a number of the largest academic hospitals in the United States came to us and said, “We have the same problem.” We kept hearing about inbound medical tourism patients coming into the United States for knee replacement or cancer treatments. They are these very large dollar amount payments. Sometimes, two to four times larger than what you’d see in education. They have the same problem.

Very few of the global consumers have a credit card that can support such a massive transaction and yet, there’s a lot of out-of-pocket expense for that consumer. We now offer our solution to medical hospitals—the same product and capabilities we offer in education. We’re looking at other markets too. Right now, we’re going to stay in education and medical. Anywhere there’s large dollar payments such as travel industries or when purchasing a house, those are all areas that are underserved.

Sramana Mitra: Help me get an industry-level perspective on this. Where do you see your space going? I’m talking about not just your company. I’m talking about the industry in general. Where do you think it’s going? What are some of the open problems that you’ve observed in this space?

Mike Massaro: There’s a lot of opportunities for continued innovation. If I look across borders in financial technology, I think the world of mobile is just going to increase. There’s been a lot of talk around mobile payments from a point-of-sale perspective. I also think that you’ll see growing usage from mobile e-commerce or in-app purchasing.

Even in our business, we’re seeing an increased number of users going to mobile just to make large dollar payments where traditionally, consumers just do that from a browser. I think that’s a growing trend. Mobile, as we know it today, is going to broaden out. You’re going to start seeing numbers for people transacting traditional e-commerce, more and more, from mobile devices. Being willing to do a type of transaction from a mobile that, maybe, three or four years ago seemed unlikely.

I think traditional banking is going to go through a lot of disruptions. In many markets around the world, the physical bank branch is still relatively prominent. Consumers will often go there to interact with the banker on a regular basis. India is another great example for this where consumers will go in and know their banker and engage the bank branch more so than a lot of other countries. I think that’s going to continue to change over time.

Bank retail footprint is going to shrink. That’s going to open up lots of different challenges and opportunities for new companies to come into banking or to have a different relationship with that consumer. I think cyber security is also at the beginning of having to evolve to keep up with the changes in the space.

This segment is part 4 in the series : Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Flywire CEO Mike Massaro
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