Remitly Global (RELY 1.80%), a newly public company, focuses on remittance services for immigrants who want to send money internationally.
In this interview clip from Motley Fool Live, recorded on March 11, Remitly CEO Matthew Oppenheimer explains why the remittance process has historically been so difficult, and what problems the company is aiming to solve.
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Matt Oppenheimer: Yes, people have talked about disrupting the legacy remittance providers, the largest one's been around for over 150 years. But I think there is a timing element that's super-important when it comes to building a disruptive business and the growth of this is 10 years ago, phones, smartphones with global interconnectivity was happening. But then the second is that I think that remittances are much more complex than meets the eye. A lot of companies have tried and a lot of companies have failed in disrupting remittances.
The reason that's the case is because, one, trust is paramount for our customers. Those folks you worked with in that restaurant, they're sending a big portion of their paycheck home and they're providing us with information we need for security and compliance reasons, personal sensitive information about themselves. There has to be a lot of trust for the company that they're using and that's paramount. Then the complexity to deliver that trust. You think about everything from payment acceptance, how we're collecting the funds to all of the risk systems, compliance, delineating between bad actors trying to use the platform and preventing them from doing it while not treating good customers like criminals. You think about the disbursement network -- we've done over 100 integrations, reinventing global payment rails to be able to disburse money within minutes to all of those locations that I talked about in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Doing that is crucial to build peace of mind, which is how you actually build trust and build the scalable business and with more scale, there's this flywheel effect that we've been able to achieve with $20 billion in send volume. But ultimately, I think that it was about timing and the shift to smartphones, and it was about executing in a way that they got all the legs of the stool solved such that we can build and maintain trust with customers.
