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Welcome to the twenty-sixth edition of “Startup of the Week” which features many great startups and interviews with successful business heads. This week, I interviewed Guste Sadaunykaite, a brand and communications manager for TransferGo, an international money transfer service that provides a quick and cheap solution to send your money abroad.
I’ve asked Guste a series of questions about TransferGo and tips for budding entrepreneurs. Have a read at what she had to say.
How did the idea of TransferGo come about?
TransferGo business was born out of frustration while dealing with a bank and trying to make international money transfers via them. Two of the co-founders had their previous business, which made them face unfair and stagnated money transfer sector themselves, with unreliable destination amount, huge charges and transaction lime stretching up to 7 working days. Once they saw the problem, they realized that solution such as TransferGo could help many people, like them.
Simply, what does your business do?
TransferGo uses a digital account-to-account business model. Funds are paid in locally and then paid out locally. This innovative system means that company does not have to send money across borders. The sender makes a local payment to TransferGo, which then makes a local payment to the recipient, from any account to any account.
We work with banks rather than against them, giving it a significant advantage over competitors. TransferGo has already built up more than 30 partnerships around the world with mainstream banks.
What were the challenges you faced when creating TransferGo?
Regulations, licensing, bank accounts… it was all difficult at the beginning. Obtaining permission from the regulator at that point already seemed like a trivial exercise, considering that we also had to obtain permission from a bank to enter their competitive market.
What is the difference between you and your competitors?
Firstly, our settlement models are very different. Other companies apply the P2P model when they have to wait for the opposite currency pair transaction to take place in order to match the transactions. We, on the other hand, apply the local-in-local-out model, which allows us to pay out the money to the recipient as soon as we receive the funds on the sender side.
Secondly, we manage currency fluctuations via our clever backend system, meaning that our clients aren’t exposed to currency fluctuation risk, whereas others ask the client to deposit an extra deposit to cover for any possible currency fluctuations. As currencies fluctuate daily this FX deposit can be quite a steep fee if you are unlucky. Therefore, we are not only consistently faster but if you take the total cost of the transaction we are also cheaper and more predictable.
We have fully localized product experience including the web & mobile products and customer care making it accessible to more clientele out there who prefer to be services in their local language.
What advice would you give to budding entrepreneurs?
Most importantly, while creating a business, you should make it clear to yourself what kind of problem your business is solving for the consumers. Then you should offer the most frictionless solution to solve that problem. It’s very important to have a good team around you and do not micro manage them, but inspire them to exercise their abilities and experience to the fullest, while seeing every obstacle like an opportunity to improve.
In one word, describe your job?
Purposeful.
Website: transfergo.com
Twitter: @TransferGo
Headquarters: London, UK
People: 37 team members
