Competing With The Big Boys In X-Border

How quaint. No voicemail and guaranteeing calls get answered within three rings. Hear why Jonathan Quin, CEO of UK-based World First thinks that competing with the big boys in the B2B cross border market means taking a page out of a playbook that is decades old.

Consumers often find it necessary to transfer funds overseas, perhaps because they’re moving or they have students away at school whose tuitions need to be paid. And for the vast majority of these transactions, they will turn to banks as the facilitator of the payments.

But a 10-year-old British company seeks to do what many banks might not be able to accommodate, including hands-on customer service and actual people answering phones. And while many of World First’s 13,000 customers are in the business-to-business payments market, many consumers similarly are seeing advantages to using their company’s services.

(Jump to: 8:27) “The reality is our biggest competitors are the banks. In the UK, the banks still have 85 percent of all transactions going through them,” Alex Sullivan, managing director at World First, told PYMNTS.com in a podcast interview this week. “That is changing. More people are becoming aware of us as an industry and us as a business.”

Omnichannel expectations

Indeed, as the global marketplace is changing and becoming more mobile, how consumers and businesses transact is changing as well. As such, convenience is gaining increased importance as a competitive differentiator. And enabling payment for cross-border payments is becoming a service that many companies and individuals expect can be accomplished not just at the office, but in taxis and airports.

While banks do well in meeting the needs of their largest customers, they typically have difficulty offering similar levels of service to smaller players, Sullivan says. World First’s B2B customers tend to be small and midsize businesses from industries that can vary from travel and food companies to electronics firms selling goods online.

(jump to: 3:10) “Typically the companies that we would work with would be of a size where they want to get the best deal and it matters to them that that they want to save money and get good advice,” Sullivan said. “But equally they’re not of the size of having their own treasury department and having several banks look after it for them. That’s where we will operate for companies.”

To help differentiate itself from competitors, including banks but also such firms as Travelex or Moneycorp, World First puts a lot of emphasis on customers relations. It’s offices don’t use voicemail, and it guarantees phone calls get answered by the third ring. Moreover, it enables transactions by phone and online, offering 24/7/365 online payments. The company can pay in 109 different currencies across 274 different countries.

Mobile app

Most recently, World First launched a mobile app, which is a version of its website. The company came up with the app based on the idea that users could complete transactions quickly. Last year, it timed from log in, booking the payment and the money leaving the company and arriving in the bank account in 6 minutes and 49 seconds, Sullivan said.

(Jump to: 7:04) “Nothing exists like that for the international payment space, and we’re really existed to be able to launch this for our customers,” Sullivan said. “We always listen to the customers and tailor the services to them. We think that’s why we have such good levels of customers coming back.”

World First, which operates offices in the UK, the U.S., Hog Kong and Australia, each year we help tens of thousands of people and businesses transfer money around the world. With internal research showing that 99.6% of its clients saying they would use the company again and 99.1% saying they would recommend it to a friend, the forex specialist’s strategy on emphasizing customer relations appears to be working.

To hear more about World First’s efforts to compete with banks and Sullivan’s views on marketplace trends, click here.

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