Thought Leaders in Financial Technology: Marwan Forzley, CEO of Veem (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: You have better rates on currency conversion? Double-click down on that for me.

Marwan Forzley: If you’re using the bank, you lose 2% to 4% in foreign exchange fees. That’s double our fee, which ranges from 0.5% to 2%. It’s cheaper than what you do today.

Sramana Mitra: What is your business model?

Marwan Forzley: We make the bulk of our revenue on foreign exchange transaction. Some of it is on fees. Like in domestic markets, we do charge a fixed fee for domestic transactions. There’s a fixed fee for payments that are kept in US dollars.

If you have a business here in California that’s sending money to a business in India, and the business in India keeps money in USD, we charge a fixed fee. That is generally about $20 per transaction. If there is foreign exchange, we don’t charge any fees. We make revenue on foreign exchange. 

Sramana Mitra: Out of the clients that are using your service, what is the breakdown? You said you have e-commerce companies and other kinds of online technology-enabled services companies. Can you talk about what kinds of transactions are happening in this client base?

Marwan Forzley: We tailor to customers that have a need to pay suppliers. Think of an e-commerce business that’s importing products from China. We have businesses that pay labor, typically developers and QA. We have a lot of businesses that use us to pay remote labor. A lot of that goes to places like Mexico, Brazil, India, and Philippines.

We have businesses that use us to collect money from their buyers. Generally, sometimes the business uses cards to collect money from their customers. When the transactions are larger, they don’t go on cards. They start going on bank wire. In our case, we eliminate that and help the business collect local currency.

Sramana Mitra: Very cool. I’m going to ask you to lift yourself to the 30,000 foot level and talk about the payments world in general. You’ve been an entrepreneur multiple times. You’ve also worked in other FinTech operations.

When you look at the payments world in general and if you were to start a company today, what open problem would you go after? What do you see as a problem that needs to be solved that nobody is solving it?

Marwan Forzley: I think there’s a lot of opportunity in cross-border payments whether it’s B2C or B2B. It’s a painful market. There has been more innovation in domestic markets and generally more innovation in consumer market.

There’s less innovation in cross-border and less innovation in business systems. There’s a lot of scope for FinTech companies going after the cross-border market and B2B. In general, FinTech as a category is an area that’s going to continue to see significant innovations for a long period of time. These are markets that have had very little innovation for decades.

Now we’re seeing a lot of activity in the space. It’s a hot sector. We’ve been operating for decades in these markets that have not seen an overhaul. The category itself is going to do very well for the future. Within that sector, I’d say that payments is a really good spot to be in. Anything B2B.

Sramana Mitra: Thank you for your time.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Thought Leaders in Financial Technology: Marwan Forzley, CEO of Veem
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