TransferGuru

We are an International money transfer comparison service - promoting fair transfers by bringing transparency and clarity to the market.  www.transferguru.com

[transfergurublog-blog]

Always check TransferGuru.com to make sure you're getting the cheapest rates when sending your money home. Hit the link in our bio to find out how you can get involved in our crowdfunding campaign for less than a few coffees and cakes! ☕️🍰 #startup #fintech #invest #seedrs #crowdfunding #transferguru #send #money #home #africa #kenya #coffee #international #moneytransfer #dollar #company #remittance #charge #corridors #yum

[transfergurublog-blog]

Remittance Stories — Abdul from Somalia

At TransferGuru we’re always going on about the importance of remittances — but there’s only one way to do it properly. Hearing from the people that use them.

That’s why, following on from the success of our photo series, we’ve widened the net. We got in touch with people with interesting remittance stories and asked them to tell us what simple money transfers means to them. Now we can proudly present the first entry — Abdul, from Somalia.

My memories of Somalia are few. There are so many things I think I remember, but I’m not sure why. Walking through central Mogadishu, holding my mum’s hand as we made our way through the colorful crowds in Bakkara mall is one of them.

Earlier that day, my mum had received a call from Olympic, a local Somali transfer company. She was informed that someone had sent her money from the Netherlands. We were struggling to eat at that point, and I’m pretty sure that call made my mum’s week! She dressed up hurriedly, grabbed me by the hand, and within minutes we were out of the door, with me still in my school uniform.

At that point, Somalia was 10 years into its civil war. Unemployment was sky high and local tribal militia were constantly contesting territory, but the bulk of the fighting had actually ended. A large section of the society depended on money being sent from abroad. And given that the banking sector had collapsed a decade prior, this key service was being provided by small private transfer companies. Some of these companies had actually begun as individuals in the diaspora leveraging relationships they had with people back in Somalia. They took full advantage of the fact that there were businessmen in Somalia who were desperate to get their money out of the country, and that others abroad were desperate to get their money into the country (to feed their families).

My sister and my brother, both living in Europe, were amongst the desperate who needed to send money back home. A few years ago, I asked my sister about her monthly trips to “Wembley Square” where she’d send us money through a company called Dahabshil. This was routine for her. She did agency work through the month — sometimes working double shifts — she got paid, then she took a sizeable chunk of her money straight to the transfer company, and a fraction of that hard earned cash went to the transfer company as commission. My sister’s story is echoed in the stories of thousands of Somalis who had made it to Europe or North America in the 90s and were burdened with sending money back home, when they themselves didn’t have the skills or the cultural capital to financially succeed.

When we were refugees in the 90s, travelling from country to country in search of asylum, I feel that remittances genuinely made it easier for our family abroad to watch over us. Regardless of where we were, they had a way of getting money to us. It was safer too, we have never needed to carry around wads of cash, cash that would have certainly landed us dead in a ditch somewhere. In Yemen, in Saudi, in Syria, in all of these places, my family abroad made sure that my mother, my siblings and I had enough money to live.

Since the late 90s, Somalia’s economy and security have gradually improved but remittances still constitute a lifeline for millions of Somalis that have no other income other than what their families send them from abroad. According to a report by Oxfam, it is estimated that in 2015 the Somali diaspora sent $1.3 billion back home. Remittances are also aiding the effort to rebuild a country that has spent the better part of three decades embroiled in a civil conflict. It is estimated that remittances constitute 50% of the gross national income and 80% of all investment into the country.

I’ve interviewed family members for the purpose of this article and I have found that the majority of them have used a single transfer company for the past two decades to send money back home. The flat 6% commission seems to have been accepted by most of them, and they do not feel that they have much of a choice. The argument that I wanted to make to my family was that this was their earned cash and that they should have choices as consumers to find a better rate. I’m thinking of my sister doing unskilled temporary work for agencies through the entire month, and then being forced to give 6% because she felt that she had no choice. Well, she didn’t then. But she does now.

Written by Abdul-Rahman Jama

To find out how much you could save on your money transfers visitwww.transferguru.org

www.facebook.com/TGuru.FairTransfer

www.twitter.com/FairTransfer

www.transfergurublog.tumblr.com

www.medium.com/@TransferGuru

[transfergurublog-blog]

Anything you wish you knew about sending money home? Let us do the work.

Confused about corridors? Raging over remittance jargon? Or just sick of trawling the internet for hours to find a simple answer?

We’ve spent the early months of 2016 putting together a comprehensive guide to remittances. And we mean comprehensive. Our roving reporters have been researching far and wide to work out what remittance users want to know – and how we can find them the answer. But the work doesn’t stop there. (The work never stops).

There’s always more to add, there’s always more to know, and there’s always more we can do to help. So before we publish it we want to hear from you about what you wish you knew about remittance. Big or small, simple or complex, a long-standing issue or you just feel like getting in touch – tweet at us, comment on our posts, write under our blog or simply hit us up at [email protected]. We’ll either ping you back or stick the best questions in the guide (soon to be “A guide by TransferGuru – and you!”)

Not everything can be answered with a simple calculator (at least remittance charges are now in that easy bracket) – but for (almost) everything else you’ve got the help of the TransferGuru research team.

There’s a lot to keep track of these days. Let us do the work.

[transfergurublog-blog]

Some of the team hard at work this morning putting the finishing touches on our new website which is launching soon! We're all so excited to show you the updated design, filled with new features to make it even easier to compare the cost and save on your international money transfers. #TransferGuru #save #send #money #home #internationalmoneytransfer #startup #remittance #fintech #abroad #money #business #office #london

[transfergurublog-blog]

Our next stop on our voyage around the world is to the beautiful, island covered, Philippines. We sent photographer MJ Velasco (@freshflippinoy) to document and find out what people living there would do with the money they could save by checking TransferGuru before sending money home. The Philippines receive 10% of their GDP every year through remittances. #Philippines #TransferGuru #Remittance #RemittanceCharges #FinTech #Startup #money #sendmoneyhome #simple #fair #free #holiday #thephilippines #beautiful #photography #series #insightful #research #islands #business #abroad

[transfergurublog-blog]

At TransferGuru we're interested not just in how we can save people money, but what potential people can unlock with a little extra each month. Today we're off to India to ask people - 'What would you do with an extra 1000 rupees you could save if you checked TransferGuru before transferring money home?' Over the coming week we will hear people's answers. All photos and interviews by Dhruv Karmokar. #SendMoneyHome #TransferGuru #money #transfers #international #savings #india #rupees #simple #fair #free #remittance #fintech #startup #1000 #illustration #map #world

[transfergurublog-blog]

This is a Polish snowman. On average he could save up to 70 Zloty just by checking TransferGuru before sending money home. We asked him what he'd spend his savings on - "70 zloty? It'd be enough money to refresh my carrot, maybe some more buttons? And a better hat! I want to rent a room in a cooler and be the first snowman who survived a summer in Poland" Hit the link in our bio to check how much you could save when sending money home. Photo/interview: @qbulrfc #TransferGuru #remittance #charge #send #money #home #save #Poland #warsaw #zloty #helpful #ideas #fair #simple #free #transfer

[transfergurublog-blog]

At TransferGuru we're interested not just in how we can save people money, but what potential people can unlock with a little extra each month. This week we set off for Poland and teamed up with photographer @qbulrfc to ask people: 'What would they do with the money (Zloty) they could save if they started using TransferGuru?' #TransferGuru #remittance #charges #poland #zloty #savings #interview #lifechanging #savemoney #helpful #ideas (at Warsaw, Poland)

[transfergurublog-blog]

Copywriter Alex is getting seriously in his zone idea generating this afternoon. #TransferGuru #creative #copywriting #vsco #aldgate #wework #ideas #transfer #remittance (at Aldgate Tower)

[transfergurublog-blog]

What would the people of Poland do with a typical TransferGuru saving?

Maja, the girl: "70 Zloty would be a good amount for two food mixers, so when one breaks down I could use the other one" And if you saved up? "Lego!"

--

Stanislaw, here with Flipper, Baja and Sophie. "Good food for my dogs! Every dog has a jacket with its own hood, so I would buy new jackets for them. I also have 13 cats but they stayed at home. Maybe a new trailer for them..."

--

At TransferGuru we're interested not just in how we can save people money, but what potential people can unlock with a little extra each month. So we used WorldBank data on remittance values to work out what you could save if you compared first. And then we set off for Poland to ask people - what would they do with the money they could save if people started using TransferGuru? Tweet at us ‪#‎transferguru‬ - what would you do with an extra 70 Zloty a month?

View the whole series at: http://bit.ly/1mXcM1q, and make sure you follow our Pinterest for more!

Photo/Interview by Jacob Zańczak

[transfergurublog-blog]

TransferGuru hit Pinterest!

Exciting news! We’ve expanded our social media presence and you can now find us on Pinterest! Featuring remittance fact-files, thoughts from the team and a few special surprises we’ve had up our sleeves for a while…

You can check out our first boards, and follow us to make sure you don’t miss out on any new ones, at https://uk.pinterest.com/transferguru/

Featuring:

A round-up of the latest remittance stories in the news

A curated selection of remittance infographics, fact-boards and explainers

What we’re up to at TransferGuru — staff blogs, office photos and all of our blog content

A special feature — what would the people of Poland do with an extra 70 Zlotys a month — a typical TransferGuru saving! Tweet us your answers atTransferGuru (@_transferguru)

Make sure you follow us for all the latest remittance and TransferGuru developments:

www.transferguru.org

www.facebook.com/TGuru.FairTransfer

www.youtube.com/channel/UCUutTM8W_TM1Vs2qU23rhsQ/feed

www.twitter.com/FairTransfer

www.transfergurublog.tumblr.com

www.medium.com/@TransferGuru

[transfergurublog-blog]

TransferGuru are proud supporters of Save the Children, we’re now sponsoring a Fundraising Event at Imperial College London. Find out more…

TransferGuru have teamed up with Imperial College London as a sponsor for their annual Imperial’s got Talent contest. Save the Children is a global Children’s charity that works in over 120 countries to save lives, secure rights and unlock the potential of children living in desperate circumstances. In 2014 they helped over 17.4 million children worldwide, and they’re gearing up to do even more great work in 2016.

And we want to help! A big part of our project at TransferGuru is focusing on why sites like ours need to help people find the best deals on remittance charges. We know that all over the world remittance is a vital lifeline for many needy people, children among them. It’s not just about helping regular customers save a bit of money, it’s about helping people who remit money home because their families rely on it. Every penny they lose to an expensive money transfer is a penny less to spend on necessities like food, bills and education.

That’s why we’ve set up a free online service, so you can compare in a couple of clicks. That’s why we’re proud to put our name to Imperial College’s Talent Competition, so we can spread the word. And that’s why we’re proud to contribute to the Save the Children cause, so we can give even more back.

We’d encourage everyone to open a new tab, donate to Save the Children (or find out how you can get involved) at www.savethechildren.org.uk, compare your money transfer so you can ensure you’re getting the best deal at www.transferguru.org or check out the evening lined up at Imperial at www.union.ic.ac.uk/scc/savethechildren/sponsor.

—

www.transferguru.org

www.facebook.com/TGuru.FairTransfer

www.youtube.com/channel/UCUutTM8W_TM1Vs2qU23rhsQ/feed

www.twitter.com/FairTransfer

www.transfergurublog.tumblr.com

www.medium.com/@TransferGuru

[transfergurublog-blog]

Make sure you’re getting the best deal at www.transferguru.org. 

[transfergurublog-blog]

Earlier this month we released a 3-part interview with founder Omid Pakseresht. It’s a great read - covering his time learning his trade on a market stall, his hopes for the future of fintech and what TransferGuru are trying to do for millions of people still being ripped off by exploitative remittance fees.

But don’t worry if you’ve missed it, you can still check out Omid’s thoughts at:

http://transferguru.org/blog/?p=164

http://transferguru.org/blog/?p=168

http://transferguru.org/blog/?p=173

[transfergurublog-blog]

Interview with TransferGuru Founder Omid Pakseresht – Part Three – The Team, The Project, The Future: TransferGuru

The final part of our three-part interview series with TransferGuru Founder Omid Pakseresht – stickiness, strategy and the story behind the start-up saving everyone from expensive money transfers.

“It upsets me that 45,000 people search online, but only 1,000 search for a newer company, even though they’re offering a much better deal.”

To TransferGuru. So why a comparison service, specifically? Why didn’t you set up another TransferWise?

Because there are TransferWises. There are 10, 20, 50 Transferwises, and there are more and more of them happening every day. But the key is that people don’t know about them. Even if they did know about them, they wouldn’t necessarily trust them, or go to them as their first choice.

So the opportunity is in assisting people and helping them use this industry, which is growing so fast. So that’s how you could explain it. Or you could say, ‘Hey, it upsets me that 45,000 people search for, say, Western Union online on a monthly basis, but only 1,000 search for a newer company, even though they’re offering a much better deal.’ That stickiness needs to change. It seems like it’s purely because people don’t actually know what options are available to them. It’s what they’ve been used to for 30, 40, 50 years. Sure, the old guard supported people. It was fantastic. They’ve got a great history, whatever they did.

Now, it’s a different story.

For the last 5 years, people haven’t had to do that any more, but they do.

So to pick up on the word ‘stickiness’, by stickiness you mean loyalty to the more expensive option, the option they’ve always used?

Yeah. Loyalty could be a very strong word, actually, but just ‘habit’.

So you want to ‘break a habit’?

You’re only going to be able to break it if you bring something better to someone’s attention, offer them new information, and offer them a safe alternative. If you do that, the stickiness will become irrelevant.

–

“I think the greatest asset that we have is that we rely on the community a lot”

TransferGuru essentially provides a quick and easy answer to the best price for remittance, and we’ve seen just how big the remittance market is. So there’s a need there, and there’s considerable activity there. All the elements are there for a really useful service. Are you happy with the traffic to the site – is there anything slowing it down?

I think it’s a trust issue, and I think it’s an awareness issue. And I think both of them are things that are moving in the right direction. And I think we are helping that process. There are other secondary parameters. The other parameters, like customer service and so on, which will come into play. But yeah, it’s really just an issue of trust and awareness.

So what are you doing to overcome that?

We’ll get there. We’re giving people what they need to know. And they’ll come. They’re coming already, and they’ll come more. I think the greatest asset that we have is that we rely on the community a lot. Whether it’s our followers on social media, whether it’s reviews that we generate on the website, there is a strong reliance on community building.

Everybody who makes a transfer has got to check first. That’s the target. If someone knows that they’re getting the best deal, fair enough, go and get it. But the target would be to raise awareness to the point where people know that there are other choices available to them.

How do you differentiate yourself from other people trying to do the same thing, or a similar thing?

I know that the service that we provide is more comprehensive and more efficient, compared to every other comparison service out there already. In terms of differentiating yourself from other people, it’s the user base that you build, that you build a relationship with, that you build trust with, and it’s a question of being able to service that user base so you retain those customers. And those are things that we’re doing very well.

Other sites – They look at brokers, and they look at people who need to send thousands of pounds abroad in one single transaction. They look at making a big cut out of that. We’re not doing any of those things. We’re not making a cut out of it, we’re just making referrals. We’re focussed on people who need this the most, who send money regularly and who get charged the highest rates already.

Also, we are getting live rates. We almost have live rates already. No one’s got that tech. We’ve got very, very talented people working on tech. But that’s something that will show in the coming months as well.

—

“I think we’re working towards increasing the financial capability of people, and that’s always been the ultimate goal”

When I read the taglines of each of the companies you link to, it’s often a competition between them to say they’re the best or they’re the cheapest. And they can’t always be the best or the cheapest, obviously. So this can be very frustrating, as a potential user. So it seems likeTransferGuru has an interesting solution, which is to say we’ll find and we’ll tell you the objectively cheapest, or the best, which it can do with data in a way that sports analysts or film critics or anything more contestable can’t.

Will that always be the case? Will you always be able to provide the guaranteed best rate?

Yeah, absolutely. There are two questions there. I think that needs to go hand in hand with that trust issue, again. Because you have a company like Xendpay, you have companies like Transferwise, Azimo, you have these companies out there who are honestly all cheap enough, as far as I’m concerned. They’re all below 1%. They’re not really competing on fees any more, right? If I cut the fee from 0.5%, and say it’s 0.4% compared to what that company charges, that doesn’t make the decision for people. The question will come to trust, customer service and customer satisfaction. That’s what the big focus is going to be on, over the coming months. I remember 5/6 years ago, I would go on trustpilot if I didn’t know a website, and be like ‘okay, has someone written something about this? Because it looks dead to me’. And that was much more the case back in the day. This is happening to finance now, to fintech now, to personal finance now, and these are companies that are opening literally day by day, and someone needs to be reviewing them in a way that’s specific to that industry, and this is exactly what we’re doing with international money transfer. We’re looking at companies, we’re looking at which corridors they operate in, we’re looking at people’s satisfaction with the way that they are operating, and I think that will be much more of a deciding factor in the way that people choose these companies in about six months to a year, than the actual price, because the competition on price between these companies is almost not there any more. They’re all very competitive.

So just to go back to the last question, so there’s this model of this e-assistant, if you like, who finds you the objectively cheaper rate, who reviews companies for you and finds the best one.

Yeah.

Is there a problem with that vision?

Not at all. I don’t think there is. I think the concern for us is being able to tackle subsections of personal finance that we understand, and being able to do that one by one, with enough research, with enough resources to be able to do that. I think we’re doing a very good job at international money transfer now, and I’m sure the expansion will be much more rapid than it will be over the next two or three months. But that requires us to build the expertise and the team that can tackle those issues. And I also believe that it’s not just a question of price and rates, so we need the community engagement that we’re looking for, that we’ve got to some extent already, for them to tell us what the next thing is.

Hey, I could choose seven things now if you asked me to, but I shouldn’t make that choice any more. It’s for the consumers to decide, and they will have decided within the next month or two. And that’s what I mean, that’s what we’re getting at.

That’s the goal?

I want TransferGuru to be a little agent that makes products simpler for people to understand, but at the same time equips them with the tools that they need to understand those products. And this is a question of education, and this is a question of awareness, and it’s a question of making the products understandable and simple. And if we do that, I think we’re working towards increasing the financial capability of people, and that’s always been the ultimate goal, regardless of how we do it. So that’s what we’re moving towards.

Interesting. So how would a successful and widely used transferguru change the state of things? If Transferguru took off, everyone was using it, what does the world look like?

Simple and fair.

–

The Team

“People can be considerably more influential in the world and on the people around them if they are doing what they are good at”

So let’s talk about the Transferguru team more specifically. I’d like to go back to the beginning. Was there a phase when it was just you working on it in the evenings and weekends?

The early days, absolutely.

And do you miss that? I mean, do you miss when it was just you working on Transferguru and it was your personal project?

No. I feel like I needed to go through that, and I did. When you’re on your own, you constantly question everything, right? That is the reason you come out of it stronger, because – so someone asks you a question, you will have asked yourself that question in the six months that you were working by yourself. That was really tough, but it meant that I had to answer every question. I’m not saying I figured out everything I needed to figure out, but it gave me a very very critical way of looking at things that I am able to tap into if we need to.

If you have the courage to do that, do that. Do it, and you will come out of it a considerably better person, and more well rounded. But it’s just every bit as you might imagine, working by yourself on a project that you don’t necessarily know all the answers to for six months. That’s tough.

So you were always itching to get other people on board. You always wanted to have a team?

Oh yeah, absolutely. I don’t see myself as a person who works independently. I don’t see myself as a person who even manages independently, which might sound quite strange, but I quite like having people that are pretty much the same level as me and I can work towards the same goal with them, rather than anything else. And those people are incredibly talented, passionate, caring people, and that’s the type of people that I want to work with. So that’s the biggest success to me, and that secured our future as well.

So – the classic question – what advice do you have for people trying to set up their own startup?

Okay. If I have advice for people, it wouldn’t be go set up a start-up. It would be go find a job that you enjoy doing. If you can’t find that, if you don’t fit the characteristics of a consultant, of a doctor, of this, of that, and you haven’t wanted to do that all your life, then think about what your perfect job is and go and create it. And that’s what I did. People can be considerably more influential in the world and on the people around them if they are doing what they are good at, if they are doing something they enjoy, if they are doing something they’re committed to and believe in.

—

“I don’t look at people as if they’re above me, and I don’t look at people as if they’re below me either. We’re a team”

There’s a lot of concern, quite rightly, about the struggles that women face to reach parity with men in a number of industries. Fintech appears to be no different. Your co-founder is a woman and has been there from the start. So let’s talk about Shreya, where you met Shreya, and what Shreya brings to the team.

Everything. When we worked together before on different projects, it got to the stage where the skills that we had and the way that we looked at things complemented each other enough that everything was made considerably easier.

I think there is a problem in finance, and there is a problem in tech. So fintech is not separated from that, particularly when you look at tech, and programming, and that type of role. But if there is one person who can tackle that problem here, it’s Shreya. And I will give her all the support that I have to be able to tackle that problem. But that’s something – yeah, big on the radar.

And now you have two of your brothers working for you. And you are the youngest of the three. How do they feel about that? How does Amir feel about working for his younger brother?

Haha -okay. I think I should say that this all goes back to how I see things within our team, but I don’t look at people as if they’re above me, and I don’t look at people as if they’re below me either. We’re a team. I co-ordinate, sure, but we work together. And no one’s had the sense that they have a boss – I hope that’s the case. This is a team working together, and I will take every opportunity to point that out to everyone as I can.

Is there any better proof, that your older brothers work with you?

Well, they fell for it! Absolutely. I understand that they may have had a certain amount of trust and respect for me to come and join the team in the first place, but it was never a question of whether I’m a good manager or not. I hope that it was a case of, ‘Hey, he’s building a team and he wants to work with me’, not ‘he wants me to work for him’. So that’s been the key motto for me, for bringing people on board. And I hope that we can make sure that people feel that way as well.

I think they do.

[transfergurublog-blog]

Part Two of our Interview with TransferGuru Founder Omid Pakseresht is up today - why time is running out on the banks, and what start-ups can do to replace them!

http://transfergurublog.tumblr.com/post/137216762331/an-interview-with-transferguru-founder-omid

[transfergurublog-blog]

An Interview with TransferGuru Founder Omid Pakseresht - Part Two - The State of Fintech

Part Two

After covering a hectic move to the UK, learning English by watching Friends and learn his trade selling biker clothing, Omid turned to his thoughts on UK fintech and the power of financial networking. An always fascinating vision of the future: Part Two of our sit-down with TransferGuru Founder Omid Pakseresht.

--

“We’ve just got rid of that massive middleman, which was the bank. You don’t need that any more.”

So before TransferGuru you had this finance experience, you had this business experience, you had this higher education experience (Part One). Why did you choose fintech specifically as the thing to put your energy into?

I think for a country to actually develop, and this is particularly the case for developing countries at the moment, you need the financial infrastructure to be able to build other industries. Besides, you know, primary needs, like, health and water and whatever it may be, I think the next most important thing would be financial networks, because that would be the infrastructure that needs to get set up for everything else to follow. So in a way, if you don’t have the financial infrastructure to do something, it’s blocking the way for a lot of other industries to grow.

So finance is a skeleton you hang everything else on top of?

This is the beauty of fintech at the moment, because there is a very social-good driven side to it – look at peer to peer, look at the not for profit initiatives. Microfinance in parts of Africa has fundamentally changed things. You have farmers who are actually able to now get small loans. You have people who have access to banking before they get internet access, because they can do it on their phone. It's fantastic.

You couldn’t open a bank branch in every village on the continent. It'd take decades. By the time you build the same financial infrastructure that you’ve built in the UK over the decades, you would have lost a lot of potential in other ways. Agriculture, food, tech. Any sort of industry that requires some capital, or any other financial product, is much slower. A farmer couldn’t borrow £500 to go and buy a crop for their farm without the financial ability to be able to do that. Now, they’re connected to people in the UK who say, ‘Okay, yeah. I will give you that £500. You can go set up a farm.’ That’s absolutely beautiful.

And I’m not saying this is happening enough. But I’m saying the possibility of this is now there, and it wasn’t, and it came very very quickly. And it can go much, much further very quickly.

There's a phrase that's you see quite a lot at the moment, banking the 'unbanked'. Can you discuss that a little bit - the idea is to get people plugged into this giant financial network?

Absolutely. I mean, think about the population of Africa, and what it’s going to be in 20 years’ time. Think about how rapidly it’s growing in every industry, the amount of big investments in education in a lot of countries, big investment in production. This all relies on an infrastructure that supports it, and that’s a financial infrastructure.

It's going to become more and more crucial. And I think fintech offers exactly the kind of type of tool that you could use in these places, and very easily. It relies on trust, and it relies on the community working together to build something. It relies on a little agent in the middle, like peer to peer loans and so on, that just facilitates that happening between people, rather than taking a load of money and putting it at the bank and investing in whatever they want to invest in. Which is what the banks did. Whereas if you’re just an agent that connects two people together, you haven’t sat on people’s cash, and you haven't simultaneously leant it to other people who are paying you large interests.

So we’ve just got rid of that massive middleman, which was the bank. You don’t need that any more. And you manage to make banking available without needing the bank. I mean, international money transfer is a perfect example of it. It’s no wonder the older providers charge such fees, because for users: if you don’t have a choice, that’s what you gotta do. Pay up. But once you’ve set up mobile pay, things like that, they become irrelevant.

--

"It’s so far from being done, so so far."

Okay. So Transferwise are now a unicorn, which is...

It’s got to £1 billion valuation within 5 years.

And their ads are absolutely everywhere in London. WorldRemit, Worldfirst you see. Remittance companies are everywhere. Why do you think that is? Why has remittance all of a sudden become such a big deal? It’s always been happening, right?

This is the thing. It’s fintech! I mean, I’m not saying Transferwise is doing something absolutely revolutionary by doing peer to peer, it's not a new concept. It’s just balancing the books. So it's not a revolution in thought - It just wasn’t possible to do that before. It wasn’t possible to build a payment infrastructure, build the digital money transfer infrastructure.

So technology has caught up with our ideas?

Yeah, absolutely. Money transfer ultimately is essentially almost costless. If my pound is in digital pounds, and I want to move it to digital Euros, nothing should happen to my money. If someone’s doing that service for me, it’s absolutely minimal cost to them. And that’s why they can offer it so cheap to the consumer. Because for them, the biggest costs are marketing. The biggest costs are customer service. That’s why a few of them are saying, ‘Hey, pay us what you want. We’ll still do it for you’. It’s fine. They still make money. They’re still happy. Everyone’s happy, as long as there is enough trust in them to do their job.

So is there a future where everyone just does this automatically, and they don’t need to spend the money on marketing, and it will be costless, or cost of staff?

Well, I mean, we are decades away from that. And I think I’m quite optimistic with this kind of thing. Because if you think about it, only a maximum 6% of global flow happens digitally.

Only 6%?

Yeah. And that’s growing, and growing for everyone. They'll probably invest everything that they have in customer experience and marketing, or that’s what I imagine they would do. Because it’s so far from being done, so so far. Look at the G8 targets. Look at the UN targets. They want to drop these costs. Transferwise is not the first one, and it’s not the last one. We’re still seeing new people popping up every month or two.

And one day are they all going to be on Transferguru? Is that the plan?

Within the next month we will have at least 25 options, UK companies, listed on our website. And that’s just the first step. We’ve started comparing rates from the UK to the US. When you do US to UK, we’re already comparing 5 of those companies, because some of them do the other way round as well. And that’s fantastic. And all of these companies want to work globally. Very few of them are specific to corridors from country to country. And I imagine, if I was those people, I would be using that as a test case for building something much, much bigger. So this is by no means the end of it.

What do you think Bitcoin, for example, would do to this?

I’m quite a big fan of bitcoin, but let’s just say that even if bitcoin doesn’t exist in 5 years’ time, there will be a digital currency that is as prominent as bitcoin is now. If that assumption is true, then I think money transfer will essentially become costless. There are people who are using bitcoin to set up money transfer corridors. I think there is one from Mexico to Argentina. There are a couple in Africa. It has solved problems in corridors that were almost impossible to tackle - The costs were too high, the logistics, and so on.

--

“Everywhere we are in Central London now, we are 500 metres away from tech startup's, and 500 metres away from some of the most influential banks in the world.”

There is a narrative at the moment that the banks’ days are numbered, and that fintech companies, bitcoin etc. are going to replace the banks. It was something that I think you could always sense in the Transferwise message, until they started teaming up with them. Is that a narrative you buy into, and is that something you think you’re a part of? Or are the banks going to stick around?

I think in some ways it’s just too late for banks already. They've been ignoring customer experience for a long time - whether that’s slow phone lines they set up, their internet banking experience, even the high street branches. There's the statistic that people would rather go to a dentist than go to their high street bank.

So it’s not going to take long for customers to switch banks. There are already I think 5 challenger banks who have got their licenses and are starting to operate, and that is going to fundamentally change banking for us, because they are going to open APIs and say, ‘Go build whatever app you want, and I’ll just be the backbone of it.’ And some of them are doing that. They haven’t managed to create the experience for people, so they only route that they have is to become the backbone and let other people create the experience. And that will happen, and that will make fintech grow rapidly. So it’s not necessarily banks being dropped, it’s just banks taking a passive backbone role and allowing other people to do that stuff for them. And that will be fintech.

Do you think you benefit from a backlash towards major financial institutions after the financial crash?

This is actually something that bothers me a lot, because – as a guy who worked in finance – I think we’ve massively failed in finance in terms of regulation, and I think we’re really, really behind. We allowed a lot of stuff to happen that we should never have. And I don’t think that’s an opinion that I hold by myself. But it’s too late with regulations and it’s too slow to change things with regulation. So yeah, absolutely, fintech benefited from that, in the sense that it saw the opportunity and it did what it needed to do.

But I wouldn’t say that was being opportunist. I think that it's exactly the other way around. The banks failed, the governments failed.

So there’s this unmet problem that someone needs to meet?

Yeah. This happens with any industry, right? This is what you get told at lesson 0.1 if you do anything entrepreneurship-related – that, ‘Hey, what is the need that you’re solving, or what is the problem that you’re solving?’ This is the problem. This was the problem that everyone’s trying to solve. And that stranglehold that banks had over the consumers is not there any more. They are losing grip, and they’re okay with that. Perhaps not just as much with b2b products in fintech, but from a b2c perspective, they have lost their grip and rightly so.

Interesting. So you mentioned earlier that the UK is the hub of fintech, and London specifically. Why do you think that is?

London is the perfect combination of tech knowledge and finance hubs. Everywhere we are in Central London now, we are 500 metres away from tech startup's, and 500 metres away from some of the most influential banks in the world. So that obviously creates the hub for it. That doesn’t happen in every country, and obviously there is government support for this. They are trying to do what they can with regulation, but they are also trying to do what they can by allowing new people to come in and fix some of the problems as well.

Will that last? Will London always be the hub, or is there already a new London ready to take over?

There are new ones popping up. I’ve heard things about Barcelona. I’ve heard things about Amsterdam, and heard things about Portugal. We’ll see what happens. They’re all trying, and they won’t be far from London. But I think one thing that there is in London is these little fintech movements and the circles have been formed, and people working together. And a lot of these companies, a lot of these startups, want to work together, because they realise they can solve a lot of bigger problems if they did stuff together. It’s reached a critical mass of companies being able to look around and say, ‘There are 10 UK companies that I could go and see to work with’. So if you wanted a payment solution, the best new company is actually two doors down. So that kind of thing creates more of an opportunity, sort of like a little bit of a critical mass, so that the more there is, the easier it gets for it to survive as a scene. There is an ecosystem in London, and they benefit from each other’s existence. And that’s fantastic. We want to work with Transferwise, Azimo, Xendpay. They’re all in London.

--

“Look up what a mortgage looks like 30 years ago, and you can compare it to now...It is orders of magnitude more complicated.”

A broader fintech question. As a financial layman and outsider to this stuff, there’s a feeling, I think, that finance is unnecessarily complicated, or it’s this big complicated behemoth by design. And we're told that only a certain well trained group of people can interpret it for us, and we need to leave it to them. At the same time computers are now running more and more of the stock exchange – so I want to talk about financial literacy – Is tech making it easier or harder to really understand finance? Is it bringing it to the people or putting out of everyone's reach?

I buy into the idea that a lot of stuff could be semi automated, and it's not. So essentially we need banking agents, rather than banks who do a lot of stuff now. I think that’s – you know, when you talk about financial markets, and how computers do a better job than us, there’s fund managers who’ve been studying economics for 30, 40 years, there’s a team of 20 of them who do research into the stock, and try to invest, and the computer still beats them, based on an automated algorithm.

So how about: Do you think people are under-trained in financial management? Do you think, say, that more financial training would be useful at a younger age?

Well you have, on one side, a lot of people paying less attention to financial decisions. Maybe they're more impulsive. Less worried about what happens in the future. Often it's because it’s just got so complicated that people got fed up. I did - I never looked at my rates for my credit card. It was a stress worrying about why I’m getting charged for what I’m getting charged for, and why my money has gone into whatever place. It's a big problem, and people get fed up.

There is also a big education gap, I think, that can go further back into the early years. And I think there is a certain level of financial education and financial capability that we don’t have because of that education.

But you can look up what a mortgage looks like 30 years ago, and you can compare it to the options there are now. Tell me it’s the same level of complication. It's not. It is orders of magnitude more complicated. So there is a huge gap that has just been opening up more and more. There is a need to simplify this stuff, and help people answer these questions. And if that happens, and if that meets somewhere in the middle, then you’ve solved a lot of problems. And that’s ultimately what we try to do at heart, exactly that.

Present complex financial data simply and clearly?

Exactly. I worked in currency, and I did money transfer, and I saw that there is a margin, and a fee, and I thought, “Hey, wait a second. I mean, they’re trades. We have to think about this properly”, and so on. People who actually do fx trades think about these things. You can’t expect a consumer to know enough about currency, or where these costings come from, to be able to break this down. Particularly if you actually hide the fact that you're charging a margin from them!

Why has it become more complicated?

I mean, you’ve got 5 banks who have massively sticky consumers, so very low switching rates. They’re not competing on customer service. They’re not competing on retention, because their customers don't really go anywhere. There is no other real alternative. And you come to the stage where they have to compete on something, and that’s making more money out of each consumer. And that means they just produce hundreds and hundreds of nonsensical products that make sense to no one. But they think that’s creating products that means something to the consumer. If they created a nice app so I could check my balance, I would appreciate that. But they‘ve just been producing more products. They’ve been making it more complicated. Consciously or unconsciously, that’s what happens if you have an oligopoly. They will try to make more money out of each consumer. But that’s not the case any more. There is no 5 banks anymore. There are a lot of new banks.

Who are the challengers? Who are these new banks?

This is really exciting, actually. I keep checking every month or two to see how many of them have been awarded a banking licence. Fidor is quite a nice one. Mondo is the API first one that I told you about. They want to start as a backbone service and let people build the ecosystem around it. That’s quite exciting. I mean, to me, that’s as exciting as it can get, because it’s a big shift in something that’s been going very, very sluggishly for a good 30 or 40 years.

But is that not going to be more confusing? Whereas before you chose between, as you say, three or four banks, now there’s 10, 20?

No - they’re not competing on the products any more. This is not just a question of products. It’s not a question of how much money you can get out of a consumer for these businesses any more, because they have a risk of losing the consumer. If you have a risk of losing the consumer, then you care about retention. You care about customer service. You care about marketing. You care about making that experience as nice as possible for your consumer, because you don’t want to lose them. You make things complicated, they will go somewhere else.

Thankyou

Part Three tomorrow – Life as a start-up founder, challenges for the future and what TransferGuru are doing to help.