ScreamingBox Technology & Business Rundown

SPEAKERS
Marwan Forzley, Dave Erickson & Botond Seres

Dave Erickson 00:32
Welcome to the ScreamingBox Technology and Business Rundown Podcast. Today we're talking with Marwan Forzley, CEO and co founder of the FinTech company Veem.com. A company focused on automating accounts payable and receivables for business. Starting with the intention of making business payments as simple as sending email, Veem levels the playing field by providing entry level payment tools for small businesses. Prior to Veem, Marwan founded and served as CEO of e-bill me, an online payment solution that extends online banking to the merchant checkout process. After selling e-bill me to Western Union, Marwan joined Western Union's digital team as general manager for e-commerce and strategic partnerships. With his extensive experience and expertise in e-commerce, infrastructure, mobile payments, content delivery, and alternative payment systems, Marwan co-founded Align Commerce in 2014, and changed the name to Veem in 2017. In the name of transparency, just to let you know, ScreamingBox has been using Veem since January of 2016. So we kind of have a user's understanding of the platform. So Marwan did I kind of miss anything in the intro, or is that good?

Marwan Forzley 01:47
That's great. Good. Thank you. And thanks for being a customer of Veem as well, for a long time. So thank you for that. Yeah.

Botond Seres 01:53
Marvin, let me start with the, well the basics. How did Veem start? I mean, we are aware that you've had experience from e-bill me and Western Union, but what was the catalyst for it?

Marwan Forzley 02:09
You know, one of the things that's interesting about payments that, that I have always been attracted to that, that payments are things you do and you don't think about them. So when you buy coffee in the morning, you don't think of how you pay, you just do it, your mind is somewhere else on everything else in life. The payment pile is habitual, you go to your wallet, wherever you have a, you know card, cash, if you have a mobile phone and you tap your phone, and you're done, you know your mind, it's very habitual, you can do it in your sleep. If you do business, payments are the opposite of simplicity. It's something that requires thinking, planning, you have got to think about what to do with how to do it. And because of that, I wanted to create Veem to simplify the entire experience, dumbed down, make it as simple as buying a cup of coffee. It turns out that it's actually a journey, because business payments are a lot more complex compared to consumer payments. And so to walk you through the difference between the two worlds, I'm going to digress here for a minute. If you're sending money to your sister, you don't think a lot about it, you just do it. If you're doing business payments, there's so many layers to that transaction. First of all, you know, the environment to do business payments are basically wires in checks. And these are payment methods that have seen zero innovation for decades. So that's like issue number one. Issue number two is when you start running a business, you have people and the processes and you got to figure out who's supposed to pay Is it is it the owner of the account and the controller, the CFO, depending on the size of the business, you start going into definitions of roles and processes and approvals. When you start doing cross border transactions, it takes it up a notch in complexity because you have to figure out foreign exchange and how to account for it and how to think of the cost of it. And then you got to integrate all this into your accounting systems. Because at the end of the day, somewhere in QuickBooks, or Xero, or NetSuite, or whatever you're using on the back end, things have got to add up, you know, the payments against invoices. So this ends up being a complex environment to simplify and that's why we created Veem. It's a journey. It's a journey of simplification of testing different things, giving different options to customers, to just keep simplifying and dumbing it down. That's the context of why we started Veem. By the way, Veem is V E E M, it's Very Easy Exchange of Money. That's the name.

Botond Seres 04:43
Oh, that's the best name. This is the best brand name we had on this podcast so far. Very Easy Exchange of Money. Love it. So as you said it really does sound like it was a journey. I am somewhat familiar with business payments already, since I do try to run my own business. It is a hassle. It's a big hassle, actually. It's a huge pain. So you already mentioned accounting, invoices, approvals, and so on and so forth. What was the the main or the central needs or business pain that you were trying to solve?

Marwan Forzley 05:27
Yeah, it's really centered around a simple way to move money, all you need is an email and the amount that you're done. So if I'm sending money from, let's say, California to Germany, or California to New York, it's the same methodology, login to the platform, enter the email address of the party, I'm sending money to the amount, you hit pay, and you're done. We pick up money from the payer, we move it to the receiver and so that simplicity is, is so much different than bank wire. If you're sending wires to Germany, steep cost of wires, the time of wires, the transparency of it, it's just like, you know, the form that you have to fill, when you send a wire, it's like, you know, takes, you gotta find the Swift code, and then to me, or bank account information, and then you got to figure out how to do it before cutoff times and just the entire experience is something that needs to be ripped up completely and changed with something that's more modern. That's why we created Veem.

Dave Erickson 06:22
Yeah, that was the main reason why we started using well, at the time online commerce and then Veem is that, you know, I was sending payments, most of our developers are in Eastern Europe, Europe and some in South America. And, you know, trying to send them money by PayPal is really expensive. And so Veem offered a way that we could send it. Two things, one by email, which made it easy, and that was much easier than trying to login and send a wire and it was more cost effective than wire. It required a little bit more paperwork on the developers end but nobody complained about it. And it seemed to just be much faster and easier.

Marwan Forzley 07:06
Yeah. And they experienced on the receiving end, what they was mentioned is, you know, generally in the wire world, the sender does all the work, the receiver is passive, you just receive money. In the Veem world, the sender's experience is very different and much simpler. In return, the receiver needs to be more active on the system. And in return, the receiver gets benefits for using a system to do their own payables or their own receivables. So that's a net benefit for the receiving end.

Botond Seres 07:37
You must know pretty much all the ins and outs of business transfers by now and we're wondering what were the mechanics of money transfer that you figured out that solved this central problem. And how did Veem’s process differ from others at the time, such as PayPal,

Marwan Forzley 07:59
Depending, it's in, Paypal is designed for a different environment. They're designed for e-commerce to depart. They're designed for some consumer remittance transactions, but it's a different fabric. Business transactions require a lot more payment options to work with. So in the Veem environment, you have the ability to pay with your bank account faster. So credit cards, debit cards, checks, whatever the payer wants, and equally important, whatever the receiver wants. So the receiver then has a bunch of options to work with, they want to receive it, you know, on their bank account, they will pick it up on a debit card. So we give them a multitude of options to work with. in that flexibility, it gives the choice to the, to the payer, and support for multiple use cases at the same time. So a lot of customers use us to pay suppliers, pay labor developers and sales agents and QA and in all kinds of freelancers around the world. Some customers use us to do intercompany transfers between their bank accounts. So we created quite a bit of flexibility on the platform to enable multiple use cases, and give you all the payment options that you prefer when you do your payments. The reason why payment options are important, because it's, it’s all about cash flow management. You know, you, with Veem you can pay later, you can pay now, you can pay slow, you can pay fast. All of this is designed to help you with your cash flow needs. So that's how we kind of think of the experience.

Botond Seres 09:38
So does it manage monthly payments as well, and subscriptions maybe?

Marwan Forzley 09:43
Yeah. So if you have stuff that you need support for monthly payments, we pick it up and essentially return the payments to you from customers around the world or domestic We do both domestic and cross border And we support uh, you can set up in the system as recurring schedule, the system would essentially get the payment, pick it up, send it to you every month

Botond Seres 10:08
You do mention many payment options and I know, this is not a surprise to anyone who has been listening to this podcast, but it may be a surprise to you. My favorite payment option, all time favorite, for the moment anyway, is Apple Pay.

Marwan Forzley 10:27
Apple Pay is more for point of sale interaction, is a great payment option. We're doing essentially online transactions and it's business transactions that tend to be bigger in size. So Apple Pay is consumer point of sale. It's very consumer-like, like transactions. So remember, our transaction sizes are much bigger than consumers because they're for business needs. So we don't support it at the moment because it's, you know, businesses are more into like, you know, payments from bank accounts, payments from cards, believe it or not, checks, checks is like, so another thing that people do in the US. Yeah, it's…

Botond Seres 11:09
They're still doing it.

Marwan Forzley 11:11
It's still going in the US market. There's a lot of checks that happen. So while I'd love to support more and more modern transactions, monitoring systems like Apple Pay, the reality is a lot of the businesses are still on the older fashion technologies, cash tends to play up more in consumer markets, in businesses or bank accounts and cards. That are, these are the sorts. I mean,

Dave Erickson 11:36
That's kind of, one of the benefits for us is I've always run ScreamingBox, we have never had a checking, we have a checking account, but we've never had checks. I have never written a ScreamingBox check to pay anyone, right? I've either used Veem or one of the other payment processing, but I've never written a check. And one person once asked me to send them a check. I said, I don't even have a check. Right.
Marwan Forzley 12:01
That's good. Dave, I wish more businesses are like, like you. But that's not how it works.

Dave Erickson 12:09
Yeah, I know, in the United States, for some reason they love their checks.

Marwan Forzley 12:13
Yeah. I mean, it's declining in size, and volume, but is still a big instrument in the US market.

Dave Erickson 12:23
Veem is pretty well, easy to integrate into, at least from our standpoint QuickBooks Online. And that's one of the benefits that we find with Veem that it's much easier to integrate in, you know? But you know, there's a lot of these platforms that small businesses are using. What's your integration journey like or how painful or how, what's your focus on integration?

Marwan Forzley 12:50
Yeah,we like us, whatever is simplest for the customer. We do. And so it's important to support accounting systems, QuickBooks is a key one in the US market. Xero is another one that has a flavor of both domestic and international accounts. NetSuite is for bigger customers. We also do Acumatica, and we have one of the VARs who has also a SAP plugin. Same thing on the Acumatica, Silas have been to the Acumatica plugin. So if you're on the larger end of the market, you would need one of the more packages designed for bigger operations, or small business, QuickBooks, Zero, that's all, you know, good to work with. We, it's a two way integration. So whatever you do in Veem and ends up in QuickBooks whatever happens in QuickBooks ends up in Veem. It’s a two way sync.

Botond Seres 13:44
So in addition to working on these integrations, while you were building web and mobile platforms, what were some of the challenges?

Marwan Forzley 13:55
Building one of the things that is challenging in products like Veem is actually the regulatory and compliance in figuring out all the rules required to move money. We're a licensed entity, so we're a money service business, which means that you have to be licensed in every state in the US. We have licenses in Canada and a whole bunch of sub-licenses in other parts of the world, UK, Eurozone, Australia. And so when you're moving money, you’ve got to be knowledgeable about the payment systems not only in the US, but also outside of the US. So it's a, it's a complex environment to operate in, which requires high knowledge of the various regulatory regimes and compliance regimes around the world. And that's like not a walk in the park for us. But this requires quite a bit of knowledge of of systems infrastructure, both payment and in regulation in different parts of the World.

Dave Erickson 14:57
Plus those regulations are changing all the time so, you probably have a whole team that's just dedicated to altering the software; you take into account all the different regulatory changes.

Marwan Forzley 15:08
Yeah, I mean, it's, it's part of being in the business, is being in tune with what's going on in the requirements of the banks and the regulators that we work with.

Botond Seres 15:20
And what has been the biggest change to the business model. Since you started in 2014.

Marwan Forzley 15:27
I'd say when we first started the business, it was more cross border oriented, there was a lot of cross border flows. And so that's how we built it. Over time, we allow customers to use us for domestic as well. So the system evolved to do both domestic and cross border at the same time. And so we support quite a bit of domestic transactions, like, you know, when I say domestic, this is US dollar inside the US or Canadian dollar and say Canada, so this is local in country transactions. So when, when we first started the business, we, we didn't think we would be like, a big participant of domestic transactions. But that's what customers wanted. So we go with the customer. And at the end of the day, we're here to support our customers. And it was important for them to do domestic as well. So we, we added quite a bit of functionality and features for domestic markets.

Dave Erickson 16:18
The advantage of having a virtual or SAS based product, which is what Veem is, is that when you get feedback from customers, you're able to alter the software to take care of needs. So my question is, how much of that is occurring? You know the, the development of the platform? Sure, you guys have a roadmap and a development plan, but how much of that is affected by you know, large customers saying, Hey, we wish we could do this, or the platform doesn't work this way with that, but we'd like it a different way. How much of your platform development is orientated from customer feedback, versus your own roadmap?

Marwan Forzley 16:58
I'd say like, it's, a good chunk of it is influenced by customers and partners. It's the combination of the two, that, that influences what actually happens. And you're looking for feedback points from multiple customers, because remember, we have a large number of businesses that are on the platform. You're looking for patterns of feedback, because it's very hard to listen to one customer in this instance, because it's not like I have Microsoft as a customer and they're really big customers, whatever they want, we need to do. I don't, I don't have that setup, I have a long list of, of customers. And we look for patterns among the customers to see what's important to them. And so we're constantly aggregating that feedback, and trying to figure out, Okay, where do you make changes that affect larger groups of clients. And so that's one stream, data stream is input from partners, we plug into accounting systems, the banks, we've logged into vertical software, players, and so you get feedback from them as well, as they tend to represent needs of their communities. And so we, we need to listen to that, to that feedback as well. So the combination of the two.

Botond Seres 18:04
Yes, and having a long list of clients, that sounds like a relatively healthy arrangement.

Marwan Forzley 18:10
Yes, there's 700,000 in sales at the moment only, like maybe before, I think when we first started with they were like, I don't know, few 1000s. I mean, Dave was one of the early ones. And at the end, they evolved quite a bit. It's about 700,000. I think we crossed that like, a few weeks ago.

Dave Erickson 18:33
Wow. Yeah. Congratulations.

Botond Seres 18:35
Congratulations on the customer story. Yes, let's, let's get it to 1 million.

Marwan Forzley 18:40
Working on it.

Dave Erickson 18:44
What, what, what would you say is a typical example of a client of yours or a customer? What, how? How has that changed from the beginning? And what is it kind of like now?

Marwan Forzley 18:56
Yeah, I mean, the bulk of customers use us to pay suppliers, domestic and cross border. So vendors, some, some customers use us to pay labor and 1099 as freelancers, contractors, sales agents all around the world. Some customers use us to balance funds between, they usually have subsidiaries and multiple places and they want to be able to move money from their US office to their Mexico office or from the US office to their, you know, Germany office. So we, inter-company transfers is another use case. And then the fourth use case is collections. We have two forms of that. We have customers that use us to collect payments on invoices. They create the invoice on Veem, send it out and collect payments against it. Or sometimes they pick up the invoice from, they have it in QuickBooks, in other things with Veem they log in and they push it out. Then there's a pay link that they invoice when you click on the pay link, you choose the payment option. You get it done. The system reconciles payment against the invoice and the data feeds into your QuickBooks account. So collections is another form of off payments that we support. There's one more use case that's more recent that, sort of, think of it like an emerging use case. We have some customers that use us at the checkout for business purchases online. These are large transactions, where the buyer is a business buyer. Generally, they drop off and send the wire in. And the merchants don't like it because they have to go process the wires and figure out how to fulfill the orders. So what we do is we keep the payment, we close the payment, add that checkout, so the business buyer essentially pays from their bank account, we pick it up, we settle with the motion, and that way it stays in the shopping cart. So that's another thing that we've, we've been doing. But there's quite a bit of use cases on the platform, since there's a lot of flexibility on how. you how you could use it.

Dave Erickson 20:56
And you know, that example you just used about a buyer buying something on a website, a large corporate purchase, and then using Veem to pay for that. You know, that mechanism is pretty similar to what would be occurring on the consumer level for smaller purchases. Are you guys thinking maybe of going into that in the future and entering that market?

Marwan Forzley 21:20
You know, we'll see if the customer is needed. I mean, generally we go with whatever the customers want us to do. And if there's enough demand, we would do it. I think the area we're filling in at the moment in such situations where the transaction is big, it doesn't quite happen on cards. And so the customer drops off and sends a wire in. And the motion generally is like, I just don't want to deal with this offline and adding more manual processes, just want a way to automate it. And that's where we come in, to help with automation and integration of the payment method to their order management system. But you know, if there's demand for consumer transactions, we'll take a look, see if we can help.

Dave Erickson 22:06
I remember originally that a lot of your transactions were assisted by blockchain and Bitcoin. The Crypto markets obviously have been going through some significant changes. How has that affected your business? Do you still use a lot of blockchain and crypto or has that changed and what do you think ? Where is the direction of crypto going to be going in relation to it?

Marwan Forzley 22:31
The US crypto as a way to move money in some corridors, so we go Fiat crypto crypto Fiat, so think of a transaction from us to Mexico, for example, there'll be US dollar crypto crypto Pesos. Now, this is all behind the scenes, it doesn't like the customer doesn't see it. And generally, it's internal routing. And we only use it when it gives us an edge against some of the existing payment methods where the edge is sometimes overnight settlement. So like, let's say you want to pay somebody in Mexico and you want to make sure that when they wake up, they know the money's in the country. So one thing that's beautiful about that method about the blockchain is the transaction tracking is pretty high. And it's live 24/7. So you can do payments anytime you want. It's not like bank banks, where there's banking hours.There is no such thing in the crypto world. So we can route all night and say to the customer, the money is in the country. When the bank opens up, it'll be there, it'll be deposited. So that's how we use it with the amount of usage has gone up and down depending on, you know, cycles and time and the state of the market. But in general, like we don't, we don't hold crypto, we're not necessarily long or short on it. We don't care about the price, we go in and out. And we use it as a utility. So we're pretty immune from all the changes in the market because of FTX and in other meltdowns in that space. We we’re very utility like, we pick-up, we buy and sell at the same time, and therefore it protects from any big fluctuations in the market.

Dave Erickson 24:15
You're using it more as a mechanism for moving the currency versus a speculation tool.

Marwan Forzley 24:22
Yeah, we don't, we don't sell. I mean, we don't do that. It's, it's where we're payment processing. And so we use it for the purpose of moving money from one point to another and creates more efficiency than traditional rails.

Dave Erickson 24:35
It seems like that on your back end. You do a lot of analysis of the different money movement processes and mechanisms. And you're always having to look at the cost effectiveness of one or another which seems to be always changing all the time. How do you do that? Are you using a lot of AI to, to kind of figure that out or is it more financial analysts who are doing it and then plugging it into the system? That must be a pretty complex kind of process.

Marwan Forzley 25:11
It's all pattern driven. So we look for data to detect patterns to see what the trending history is on, on the flow of money. And see if, if it's, if we make changes to that pattern, if it becomes simpler, better, cheaper to the customer, then we do it. And uh the system is set up to detect, you know, if there's any large changes, and alerts to look at that data, to see if it makes sense to optimize it, you know, and make some of the changes, but it is heavy on technology. And then looking at large sets of data to work with and making recommendations based on what the system observes, as changes in patterns.

Dave Erickson 25:59
I would suspect that AI is going to have more of a role in, particularly, data analysis. Are you guys looking at certain AI technologies, machine learning things like that? Is there like a focus? Or are you guys pretty open to anything right now?

Marwan Forzley 26:15
Machine learning is definitely part of the data team to look at, you know, what's been the behavior and the patterns on the system to come up with, you know, recommendations on what to do next. big fans of that, and I think there's room in the, in the system in the industry, to use data to create insights to help you manage the business better. Big, big fan of that.

Botond Seres 26:44
Listening to all this talk about crypto being used as a method of transferring money, essentially, or Fiat, as he said, I was wondering, it sounds very difficult to integrate all of this, is it difficult? And are there any special last aspects that you need?

Marwan Forzley 27:09
It is a difficult, it absolutely is difficult. I mean, we're moving. We're moving people's money. And that's a responsibility. That's better, this way, you can't wing it. It's not like something that you just take lightly. I mean, the legal compliance, security, payment processing infrastructure, I mean, it's heavy on that knowledge. And these types of systems are, take time to build and they are complex to build. But we, all of us have been in payments for a long period of time. And so we built it from knowledge from doing this in multiple other environments. You know, all of us come from backgrounds of people that have done payments, domestic and cross border. But it's definitely not a walk in the park. It does require investment in technology and processes and people and understanding the nuances of payments around the world. And it's a big world. So it does require knowledge.

Dave Erickson 28:17
One of the frustrating things is that everybody has a story about customer service. And if you've had a problem with something, even if it’s something like Facebook or whatever, it's almost impossible to get customer service. What has been Veems approach to customer service and how does it focus? What's your focus on providing?

Marwan Forzley 28:40
Yeah, we, we take the opposite approach actually. So we the chat box is available anywhere, like on the website, when you log in the chat boxes right there, you interact with customer success, there's one eternal number you can call and talk to somebody live. And so we are believers in that and if you look our, our Trustpilot reviews, like we were up there in positive reviews, because we, it's important to have a system where customers feel comfortable. And part of feeling comfortable is, you know, talking to somebody to understand, like is there you know, here's where my here's where my issue is, can you help me? I think that is important. You know, I think the model of hiding it and making it complex for you to contact support is not a model that was working in environments like this when you're moving money too for people that you need to be the other way around more, more, more facing when it comes to support.

Dave Erickson 29:42
Yeah, I wish TransferWise would have that attitude. If you have a problem with TransferWise Forget it. You're not getting helped.

Marwan Forzley 29:51
Yeah it's it's it's something that we get a lot of feedback on customers. We like it that, that there's somebody to talk to so chat as well. Popular.

Dave Erickson 30:00
A good testimony is the fact that I don't think we've called customer service in years. Because the platform just seems to work. But we're probably not the most complex customer, our transactions are very similar, each one. So, but yeah, we, you know, we haven't had to really call it but I think in the, in the next decade, customer service is going to become more and more important. I'm sensing, in a lot of people, a frustration in dealing with tech companies. And a lot of tech companies want to hide from their customers, and don't want to deal with the problem. So they put in, you know, chat boxes that go nowhere and send us an email, but you can't call us and that type of stuff. And I'm seeing that pendulum kind of start swinging towards us. We don't really like that. I'd rather deal with somebody I can talk to. And I think that your philosophy on, on making customer service accessible, and having a person that someone can talk to, I think in the long run, that's actually going to be a better way.

Marwan Forzley 31:08
Yeah, thank you for the feedback. I mean, we believe in it, it's there. It's available for customers to use. And like I said, it's part of building trust and making sure that customers are happy with the system.

Botond Seres 31:21
Have you ever looked into assisting customer support reps with AI? So there're systems that exist.

Marwan Forzley 31:31
Yeah, I mean,Yeah, yep. Yep. So we, we are looking at combinations that are, we call them interactive Chat where some of it is for basic things, you know, you can get support from the machine itself. Like, if you're looking at, for example, what's the status of my payment, that like that, like a machine can look it up and give you a status without tying up a person to do with? So I think we're looking to make sure that the things that can be automated, we do them with, with AI and bots, and in the things that are more complex, we deal with people. And that works for both parties, it works for the company, and it works for the customer. Because you know, why wait for somebody to look up status and get back to you or my payment is the machine should look it up and give you an answer in three seconds?

Botond Seres 32:27
Well, that's certainly one type of user. But then there's the other type of user, the tech savvy user who just hates dealing with machines in general. I mean, there has been this god awful trend lately of doing virtual voice assistants, even for big companies, like banks and mobile providers. It's crazy. It's absolutely useless.

Marwan Forzley 32:50
Yeah, you know, like, you gotta I mean, so like one thing about this business, you deal with users from all walks of life, and all backgrounds and all kinds of desires. And so in general, you will be able to tailor to the different settings. And so some people want to be able to chat or some people want, just want quick answers. And so you’ve got to be able to support both.

Botond Seres 33:16
Right, as long as there's the option to press zero to talk to an operator, then I think you're golden. That's the most important thing. What I meant about assisting customer service reps, is there's this fun trend of training API's, on datasets that are comprised of messages that they receive and send. And so if they have a certain style of dealing with issues, or people or whatever, the AI can provide a template for them. So they can just click and send that.

Marwan Forzley 33:55
Yep. Yeah. And that's what I meant by what I was saying interactive support. That's, that's what I meant by that is a combination of live person and automated machines to help you with, you know, collecting your data, collecting your issues, and helping you come up with answers relatively quickly. And if, if the answer doesn't make sense, you can always press zero and talk to somebody.

Botond Seres 34:23
That's great. And…

Dave Erickson 34:25
Since you're dealing with so many different types of transactions, and technically you're a FinTech company, I guess one of the questions is, in the coming 5 - 10 years what do you see is kind of the FinTech trends are the financial transaction trends that are developing that you think are going to become more popular in global financial transactions?

Marwan Forzley 34:54
Yeah, I'd say there's definitely more and more interest in real time payments. If it's for a variety of reasons, you know, some of the labor payments help customers when the payment is done fast, and especially if it's last minute. So that the trend to move into real time is something that I think is going to shape up become bigger, longer term wallets, a lot of popularity to wallet transactions. So we like that. And we would like supporting, we have the Veem wallet, and we're looking to support other wallets as well. Generally, integrations so that you access payments from the systems that you work on day to day. So, like whether it's accounting systems or, or if you're in a bank, for example. And you want to have access to Veem, like functionality, you'll see it from the environment you're in, we're believers in that model that take what we built and plug it in, embedded into somebody else's fabric to create an experience to the user, where you don't have to move around between platforms, you can do it from the environment you're in. So I think these are macro-perspective, you know, important trends. The other trend that we see is this meshing of domestic and cross border transactions. So like, for example, we have a customer that sells coffee, and you would think of this customer to be a domestic retail operation, I sell coffee to my walking customers. But, But the really interesting thing about this customer is their website is run out of a service provider that's in the Philippines and their bookkeeping is running out of, out of Mexico, and the customer is local. And so you see like this, you know, because of COVID, and everybody's online, you find service providers that would, that are, you know, accessible at a different cost structure that help you with your business. And this creates an environment where there's, you know, this intermingling between domestic and cross border transactions, because the world is getting flatter and flatter. And and so this is an interesting behavior we're seeing,

Dave Erickson 37:17
Are you seeing different regions of the world becoming more active or less active, via the financial transactions in your system, probably?

Marwan Forzley 37:27
What changed in COVID is the rise of payments to labor markets. So we see a lot of transactions to places where a lot of startups and businesses in the US get access to pockets of labor to help them with their business. So we see you know, transactions flowing to India, Philippines, Brazil, Mexico, Poland, Ukraine, I mean, Russia, like all kinds of places where you have access to, to labor markets, in the world, again, is getting flatter and flatter. And because we're all on Zoom, you know, in the past, pre-COVID, if I need something done, I look for someone around me to help me out to do it. When COVID happens, we're all on Zoom. So people started looking for, getting help anywhere they can get help. And so that changed the makeup of the transactions to see more cross border transactions to markets where, where businesses and customers get help.

Dave Erickson 38:31
Yeah, I'm curious to see how Africa will play in the future. Their, their, their banking system was not so up to date, I think it’s becoming better. And I think people are looking at Africa as a labor market as well. And startups are happening in Africa. I'm curious to see how that will develop in the future.

Marwan Forzley 38:53
Yeah, I mean, it's everywhere. I mean, we see that term is a good market, a lot, lot, a lot of transactions to that area. You know, I'd say like, Southeast Asia is another one, like a lot of transactions to, you know, Philippines, in Vietnam and Cambodia, and like all that whole area. But so like, I mean, I think it's a big world. And there's movement around the world for supporting, you know, businesses in the US that have international needs.

Botond Seres 39:28
So talking about international leads, as we know, and as we discussed, we miss targeted uh all sizes of businesses, well, except maybe the tiniest retail customers at the moment. And many businesses are now using many different SaaS platforms to run and manage their business. How big of a challenge is it to keep Veem up to date with all of those API's, all of those end user license agreements, all those partnerships?

Marwan Forzley 40:01
Yeah, but we have a whole team that, that's what they do is partnerships. So partnerships and partner implementations and keeping you up to speed with the partner, looking for what they need and supporting them. So that's a, that's a whole team there, just just maintaining these relationships. And we liked that model, we liked the partnership model. So we're going to continue to invest in embedding into more partner ecosystems.

Dave Erickson 40:28
Where do you think Veem is going in the next couple of years? What's your vision for where, how would you like to evolve Veem in this financial tech space?

Marwan Forzley 40:40
Continuing where we started, keep it, keep simplifying, keep streamlining, keep, keep innovating, keep adding features, keep embedding into other platforms, more partnerships, more countries, more payment methods. So it's, it's just the journey of simplification and streamlining and supporting customers, we're on it, we're gonna continue to be to be honest, it's, it's, I will get to a point where like, business payments is something you just do it, you don't think about it, it's just become so intuitive. Like I said at the beginning, that's why we started Veem.

Botond Seres 41:15
So as you may be aware, Revolute recently started the bank. Do you see Veem bank in the future, when you think about how you're planning to develop this wonderful company?

Marwan Forzley 41:29
You know, one of the things we are looking into, we've had customers ask for virtual bank accounts to be embedded in their wallet, we have a VM wallet that enables you to hold funds with Veem. And so we've had requests to open it up to include actual bank accounts where you can deposit money into as well as multi-currency setups. So you can have multiple sets of sub accounts under the same, under the parent account. So we're looking into that as a way to support the customers for what they're looking for.

Dave Erickson 42:05
Well, Marwan, thank you so much for being part of our podcast. We will have your LinkedIn profile in our description for if anybody wishes to contact you or ask you questions. We will have our next podcast in a month. And so we invite our listeners to join us then.

Marwan Forzley 42:22
Thank you, and thanks for having me on your, on your podcast.

Dave Erickson 42:27
Great, we enjoyed having you.

Dave Erickson Closing
Thank you very much for taking this journey with us. Join us for our next exciting exploration of technology and business in the first week of every month. Please help us by subscribing, liking and following us on whichever platform you're listening to or watching us on. We hope you enjoyed this podcast and please let us know any subjects or topics you'd like us to discuss in our next podcast by leaving a message for us in the comment sections or sending us a Twitter DM till next month. Please stay happy and healthy.

1:00 - What is Veem?
1:50 - What was the catalyst for creating Veem?
4:30 - How did you come up with the name Veem?
6:20 - Why are payment options so important?
7:37 - What are the mechanics of money transfer with Veem?
10:32 - What was the integration journey like for these platforms?
15:15 - What has been the biggest change to the business model since it started in 2014?
16:18 - How much of Veem’s development is influenced by customer feedback vs. Veem’s own roadmap?
18:40 - What is a typical example of a client?
20:50 - What are some of the current use cases for the platform?
22:06 - How does Crypto currency fit into money transfers?
24:30 - How do you use AI and machine learning to detect patterns in payments?
28:10 - How does Veem approach Customer service?
34:20 - What does the future of Fintech look like?
36:15 - Meshing of domestic and cross-border transactions.
39:28 - Keeping a SaaS up to date wih the latest API’s.
41:15 - Do you see a Veem bank in the future?