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Marwan  joins us to discuss global payments for small businesses. He has been in payments for many years and was first a founder in 2002 so speaks from long experience of both. Veem is a global payments network used by small businesses around the world which allows them to pay their vendors, suppliers and contractors anytime, anywhere.They do payments to 110 countries in 50 plus currencies, and have about 200,000 B2B customers.

Forzley.jpg">Forzley-150x150.jpg" alt="" width="150" height="150">One important way that Veem manage such a long list of countries is to use a unique “multi-rail” technology – basically having wired up a bunch of different conduits from bank to bank transfers at one end through the likes of card payments to via crypto currencies at the other. This enables them to have a broader range of options for any particular transfer and for the end-users enables them to have a much richer range of payments destinations.

Topics discussed include:

• Marc Marquez’ instantaneous G-force in a MotoGP crash being over 25G :-O
• soccer in the US is one of the fastest growing sports
• Marwan’s career journey inc in telecoms/VOIP
• comparison/relevance of telecoms and payments – many similarities from a tech and regulatory perspective
• payments is very complex to engineer
• why “FX” Fintechs appeared to fade and “payments” Fintechs rise
• “FX is the smaller piece of the puzzle [compared to payment]”
• the workflow of payments end to end
• comparison of paying for your coffee in the morning with international payments – simplification long overdue
• waves of industry around payments:
  1. Banks
  2. Foreign exchange companies and remittance industry – slightly better value and sender-focused
  3. Paypal – P2P payments – payer and payee on the same platform – Venmo, Alipay etc etc
• Wave 3 was engineered around easy user experience rather than value
• Veem is an example of the third wave, P2P, but applied to B2B
• Multi-rail required to cover wide range of countries/values/pairs:
  1. transferring money over Veem’s own bank-accounts
  2. third-party payment providers where Veem et al aren’t allowed to operate freely – eg China
  3. Blockchain – crypto for an instant cross (not taking any risk on the value of the crypto)
  4. Real-time on credit cards – Visa/Mastercard rails
  5. SWIFT – long tail, large value payments
• the benefit of having the multi-rails available for any given transaction
• for most Veem customers they don’t care which rail just that the payment gets done efficiently so multi-rail is hidden
• how to judge value in FX rates given the challenge of what the FX rate “is”
• a case study of having a bunch of bank/app bank cards in one’s pocket in Thailand and the opacity around rates
• the nature of the FX industry and its design
• Veem’s approach
• clients are most focused on simplicity, transparency, reliability and not getting ripped off
• future:
  1. expect more simplification (back to coffee example), businesses more time to focus on their business and less on tracking payments
  2. transparency – right now you know where your ordered pizza is but not your $100k transfer!
• Veem’s shoutout globally for partners, integrations et al
• how they are growing their business

And much much more

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