Thought Leaders in Financial Technology: Mike Ward, Chief Revenue Officer at World First (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What are some of the use cases?

Mike Ward: Private clients today might be an expat living abroad for a few years. You might have a consumer who is studying abroad. We pay part of that tuition for them. They could be buying a vacation home. From a corporate perspective, they might have their own website. They might buy or sell products and services. That might be done on a cross-border basis. We would come in and facilitate that.

Sramana Mitra: Why do they use your service versus banks? What are the drivers?

Mike Ward: It’s three things. One is service through technology, and then you have service through people. Most of these clients would have an account manager. In some cases, you would still have to walk into a branch and talk to a teller. As good as tellers are at banks, they’re not an expert in any one thing. They’re supposed to cover the gamut of what you would need.

What we provide is an expert in foreign exchange that can give you insights into the market and give the best solution for you. A lot of banks don’t allow you to do this on apps or in portals when it comes to international payments. Pricing is the next major thing for us. We provide much better pricing. We try not to sell on pricing. That’s not our goal but our opportunity is that in a lot of major financial institutions, it doesn’t make sense. They have too much market share to worry about pricing. We can be a lot more competitive with the pricing.

The third is delivery. There have been regulation changes in certain countries. When we service clients in 40 different countries, it gives us the ability to make payment within minutes or hours. That’s timezone-sensitive. Some places might be closed during weekends.

Sramana Mitra: You have two other segments. You were talking about e-commerce marketplaces. Let’s talk about e-commerce marketplaces. What’s the specific use case and why do they need to use your service?

Mike Ward: It’s a rapidly growing space. A great number of companies are turning to marketplaces to grow. Whether that’s domestic or international, it’s a great platform for them to do that. In doing so, there are a few key things that they need to focus on. Some of the larger marketplaces help with that while some of the smaller ones don’t. You need to have the right partners there.

We have great partners that we bring to the table for our merchants to engage and deal with on those things. At the end of the day, cash is important for these clients. You need to have domestic accounts in local currency. We provide the solution. They might have a lot of obstacles to open currency accounts in different countries where they’re not physically located. We provide a simple program for them to go and open that up.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Thought Leaders in Financial Technology: Mike Ward, Chief Revenue Officer at World First
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