Thought Leaders in Financial Technology: Currencycloud CEO Mike Laven (Part 2)

Mike Laven: We effectively provide our customers a one-stop connection to a global banking world. It’s very difficult to find a single bank that optimizes everything for you. Different banks and different payment providers have different strengths. Some are good in Asia. Some are good in Latin America.

Different currency providers have different strengths based on the volume of what they do. Effectively, you connect to us and we handle all of that for you. From the perspective of your business, you’re making your international payments at roughly the same level of difficulty as your domestic payments.

Sramana Mitra: With your customers, are they coming into your system and saying, “We work with these banks.” Are you telling them that they should be working with certain banks to get the best rates?

Mike Laven: The bulk of cross-border business payments are made through banks. That tends to be expensive and inefficient. It’s not that they come in and say, “Use this bank.” They come in to connect to us so that we can connect to multiple banks on a global basis and make the transaction for them. Usually, we’re selling to customers who have a growth issue. They’re trying to grow the global component of their business, but the constraints of doing that involve either paying suppliers or getting paid. Their business problem is always the global growth of their business.

Sramana Mitra: These 200 enterprise customers that you are working with, is there anything in common amongst them? Is there any segmentation? Is there any tendency that causes them to be the early adopters of your technology?

Mike Laven: We’ve been around five years, so we might be getting beyond early adopters. All the customers making international payments are frustrated because the banking system can’t provide for them in a way that they need. The cost is always a driver. Everybody wants to do it for less. We find that the greater driver is automation.

Someone who has a large number of payments to make, if they didn’t use us, they would probably STP a file to a bank who would then make the payments for them. That’s a manual process. The file has to be prepared. It has to be uploaded. It has to be sent. The key reason people come to us is the friction in the system of making payments. That prohibits them from scaling. Of course, cost is an issue. Cost is always an issue. The automation is really the driver.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Thought Leaders in Financial Technology: Currencycloud CEO Mike Laven
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