Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Flywire CEO Mike Massaro (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Where do you recommend entrepreneurs to focus on if they’re looking to work in this space? What kind of problems would you steer them towards?

Mike Massaro: In financial technology cross-border transactions, I think the traditional money remittance space is prime for disruption. It’s not a space we’re directly in, but a lot of the companies out there are looking towards shared ledger technologies. I think we’re going to see people focusing on segments of that vertical.

Our business model is a good example where education payments alone account for about $53 billion in cross-border transactions. A lot of people would look at that volume and would probably put it in the cross-border remittance bucket. You can build a very targeted solution like we have to solve the problem that exists in many cross-border transactions.

The overall market size is seen as massive, but the reality is that not all cross-border transactions are created equal. There are lots of different use cases between consumer to consumer, consumer to business, and small business to small business. All those types of use cases really exist and I think we’re going to see a lot of those targeted by companies and not just people going at this broad cross-border volume.

Sramana Mitra: It’s very interesting. I actually studied in the US a long time ago. India is still very regulated as you know. In 1989 when I was in college, it was very regulated. It was interesting to just listen to you explain what’s happening in the education space. Both India and China are sending immense numbers of international students to America these days.

Mike Massaro: India is the number two in population behind China. Between China, India, and Korea, that’s about 52% of student population. It’s massive and it’s growing quite significantly. I think it’s interesting because consumers really want a fair and reasonable foreign exchange rate and fast delivery of payment. It’s a difficult process.

When we started the company nearly five years ago, we were surprised that this hasn’t been solved yet. There just wasn’t enough innovation around this international wire. With the growth in international students, schools just couldn’t handle the increased volume of wires and there’s no real good solution out there.

Sramana Mitra: Very good. Thank you for your time. That was a very good conversation.

This segment is part 5 in the series : Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Flywire CEO Mike Massaro
1 2 3 4 5