What makes a great founder? And how do they transform their first spark of an idea into a growing business? We're talking to our customers to find out.
Paysend began with a simple question: Why is it so difficult to send money to a friend in another country when it’s so easy to message them instantly? Ronnie Millar said that he and Abdul Abdulkerimov approached the question differently to other fintech co-founders, aiming to make peer-to-peer money transfers instantaneous and predictable by controlling the end-to-end journey for their customers. With that mission in mind, the duo founded payments platform Paysend in 2017.
Today, Paysend(opens in a new tab) enables instant, cross-border payments to 170 countries. It has expanded from the UK into new geographies and regulatory climates, including throughout Europe and North America. Paysend has nearly 7 million customers, employs a team of 300 across 30 countries, and has added B2B payment services.
Growing Paysend from a startup into a global company required the co-founders to stay in control amid fast growth, according to Millar.
“As we grew, the business got immensely more complicated,” he said. “We had to improve the systems for our products, technology, and finances. In particular, we needed a financial system that would allow us to run the business in real time, giving us the information we needed to make decisions that ensured we were properly governed and regulated.”
Finding a Single Business Management Solution
International expansion highlighted Paysend’s need to consolidate its financial management processes in a single system.
“For example, if we're launching in the United States based out of Miami or launching into the European market out of Dublin, we need to add a legal entity,” said Millar. “A whole range of changes flows from that, like how services are provided between various entities and how they're charged.”
Paysend’s search for a global business management solution led to NetSuite OneWorld.
“In NetSuite, we saw a system that allowed us to consolidate all the disparate systems which we had managed to create for ourselves, then deliver the efficiency we needed to drive our financial performance forward,” said Millar.
Insight Across Geographies
As Paysend continues growing internationally, the team uses NetSuite to glean granular financial insights.
“NetSuite OneWorld brings us the ability to see what’s happening in individual geographies and get down into detail versus just looking at high-level patterns,” Millar said. “That way, our team can make effective decisions at the ground level.”
This real-time view of various regions’ performance as a single data set, coupled with an easy-to-access system based in the cloud, allows the team to work continuously from around the world and prevent the lags that can come with communicating across time zones.
Plus, it’s an advantage when seeking investment.
“NetSuite gives a certain level of assurance to potential investors,” Millar said. “We found that when investors started doing due diligence, as soon as they found out that we were using NetSuite as our core financial system, they were assured that we run our business well.”
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Millar views NetSuite as integral to both the past and future growth of Paysend. The team aims to continue expanding geographically while expanding their product offering, a feat Millar is confident they will achieve given their strong financial control system.
“Without NetSuite, we wouldn’t have been able to take our business to the next level—from local to global, from thousands to millions of transactions a month, and from three currencies to 60,” he said. “NetSuite has delivered for us and will carry on delivering for us as we expand.”
See how businesses use NetSuite to achieve their growth ambitions.
