A CEO’s Perspective on Globalizing a Corporate Payments Business

Meet Melissa Smith, President and CEO of WEX, a leading provider of corporate payment solutions around the world. Smith has been with WEX for nearly two decades, and has played a key role in its dramatic growth as a public company. In 2014, Smith was honored with the inaugural Women Driving Payments Innovation award by PYMNTS.com and W.net. To get a sense of her journey and the multitude of things she’s learned from her perch, PYMNTS sat down with Smith, who talked about the trends and challenges she sees in the space today, and how she plans to lead WEX in the further expansion of its global footprint.

Meet Melissa Smith, President and CEO of WEX, a leading provider of corporate payment solutions around the world. Smith has been with WEX for nearly two decades, and has played a key role in its dramatic growth as a public company. In 2014, Smith was honored with the inaugural Women Driving Payments Innovation award by PYMNTS.com and W.net. To get a sense of her journey and the multitude of things she’s learned from her perch, PYMNTS sat down with Smith, who talked about the trends and challenges she sees in the space today, and how she plans to lead WEX in the further expansion of its global footprint.



THE CEO’S JOURNEY

Throughout her career, there have been three principles that have ultimately led Smith to her role as head of WEX and as a front-runner for payments innovation. First, she said, is the idea that if you’re going to say something about a person, you need to be willing to say it to them.

“That’s really about building relationships and creating integrity around those relationships,” she said. Second is the concept that you have to be willing to do whatever you’re asking somebody else to do. That’s intentionally about making sure that what we’re asking to do is fair.

And third: Asking the question “Why?” It’s important to make sure that if you don’t understand something, you keep asking questions. Common sense, she said, is just undervalued as a principle, and “the more you ask, the more you learn.”

In more recent years, since she’s made her way to the CEO seat and seat on the WEX Board of Directors, Smith noted that communication is key.

“Just when you get to a point where you feel like you’ve communicated enough, you’ve only just begun,” Smith said with a laugh. “We’ve been creating a lot more venues around communication as we globalize the business to make sure we continue to have dialogues.”

For example, WEX’s first global leadership meeting created an interchange and diversity of thought amongst its employee base. And in December of last year, the company held its first Analyst Day, which made sure that there was ongoing dialogue between WEX’s investors and prospective investors.

“I always say that I’m OK if someone is debating what I’m doing, but I never want them to not understand the ‘why,’” said Smith. “Again, it comes back to that power in the question ‘Why?’”


TRENDS IN FLEET MANAGEMENT AND BEYOND

Since 1983, when it began as a fleet card management solution provider, WEX has expanded to earn site acceptance at over 90 percent of U.S. retail fuel locations. Now, the company’s growing fleet business is responsible for 69 percent of WEX’s revenue – largely due to globalization.

As globalization is now established as a solid trend, multinational companies leveraging WEX’s fleet offerings are starting to centralize and work more at a global level. This has driven WEX to focus more on its customer-centric model. “It’s important to us, as we’ve globalized our business, to make sure we can meet their needs,” Smith said.

At the highest level, from the trend perspective, there is a desire among WEX’s customers and partners to have the technology that helps make their lives easier. That means fundamentally allowing them to save time and money, said Smith, which has really been the backdrop of what WEX has done for a number of years. Nowadays, companies have to work with fewer resources, but are asked to do more.

“When we look back and ask what we’re really good at as an enterprise, it is our ability to simplify complex payment environments,” said Smith. The CEO added that while WEX has had a depth of knowledge in fleet, they were also able to utilize that same expertise and ability to develop tools in other areas like health and travel, to help their customers save time and make better decisions, and ultimately wrap that with “superior” service offerings.

WEX moved into the travel payments space, where the company facilitated online travel payments specifically for the fragmented hotel payments space, she said. More recently, with the 2014 purchase of Evolution1, a health care payments company, they significantly expanded into the health care space – another complicated environment.

“At the end of the day, what people are looking for are technology tools that enable them to simplify their business – and a really strong service platform to wrap around that.” And that as a whole, she said, is exactly what WEX provides.


KEY MARKETS IN GLOBAL EXPANSION

In 2005, only 2 percent of WEX’s revenue was coming from outside of the U.S. Now, as we start 2015, that percentage will rise to more than 15 percent with the completed purchase of Exxon Mobile’s fleet card portfolio in the broader European marketplace.

But as a backdrop, said Smith, WEX is interested in expanding into regions of the world where their products are applicable. “We’ve been focusing on Europe, we’ve been focusing on Asia, and on North and South America,” she said. “If you look across all of those regions, what we’ve been able to do is make sure that we’ve got a foundation in each of them before we set up actual physical locations.”

As an example, WEX is just setting up an office in Singapore, which Smith said will be their beachhead within the broader Asia region. The establishment of a Singapore office was based on defined needs of existing WEX customers within the Southeast Asia region. WEX currently has offices in Australia and New Zealand, and recently opened five more offices within the broader European marketplace.

And by purchasing ExxonMobil’s fleet card portfolio, said Smith, the company has entered into a market in Europe that’s larger than the U.S., and has provided a foundation to build upon.

“For us, expanding globally is something we’ve made significant headway on,” said Smith. “Our virtual card products were already being used in over 200 countries around the world, so this is just making sure that we have the infrastructure in place to service customers beyond virtual cards into some of our other product sets.”


HOW WEX WILL EXPAND ITS GLOBAL FOOTPRINT

2014 was the year of several significant technologies and developments – the cloud, mobile, social commerce and big data. And according to Smith, WEX is leveraging these technologies to scale, and to expand its global footprint, as they revolutionize the pace of innovation and the way that business is conducted.

“WEX has always thought of technology as one of our competitive advantages. We’ve used technology as the foundation of our product sets, and we try to make sure we’re actually putting things in the market that are unique,” she said.

An example of these unique offerings include, on the mobile front, the company’s WEX Connect app (formerly the Octane app) that’s available to anyone who goes online to download it. The app helps users determine the lowest cost of fuel in any geographic region. Some unusual applications of this app include first responders who use it to determine where there is fuel when they’re in the middle of a severe weather catastrophe.

And with the purchase of Evolution1, WEX has been able to leverage the health care payments company’s cloud-based mobile technology that uses a SaaS platform. The technology is foundational to their product set, said Smith.

“It is world class and is what allows the end consumer to make sure they’re clear about what’s happening with their medical costs.”

In addition, Smith said that big data is a concept that’s really been integral to all of WEX’s products for a number of years. What they’ve found is that there is even more of a desire from customers for tools that allow this big data to be more pinpointed.

“We can wrap a telematics offering with a fuel card offering and allow people to do things like know when someone is fueling at a specific location, which can help deter fraud,” noted Smith. Further, the WEX portfolio analyses capabilities enables customers to benchmark against others in their peer group.

So what’s next for WEX? Looking ahead, the company’s continuous investment in its technology is paying dividends in the marketplace, said Smith.

“We are not only committed to our strategic priorities, but we are also ready to capitalize on emerging trends in the global marketplace.”