Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Flywire CEO Mike Massaro (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Where do you recommend entrepreneurs to focus on if they’re looking to work in this space? What kind of problems would you steer them towards?

Mike Massaro: In financial technology cross-border transactions, I think the traditional money remittance space is prime for disruption. It’s not a space we’re directly in, but a lot of the companies out there are looking towards shared ledger technologies. I think we’re going to see people focusing on segments of that vertical.

Our business model is a good example where education payments alone account for about $53 billion in cross-border transactions. A lot of people would look at that volume and would probably put it in the cross-border remittance bucket. You can build a very targeted solution like we have to solve the problem that exists in many cross-border transactions. >>>

Bootstrapping a Niche E-Commerce Venture: Elite Fixtures CEO Steven Annese (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Did you know anything about the lighting business?

Steven Annese: I didn’t but my sister was working at a lighting distributor. She told me that there were some companies that were trying to do business with them in the online world. That’s actually where my lead came from so I have to thank my sister.

Sramana Mitra: For educating you in this business.

Steven Annese: For both. Before I spoke to my sister, I was looking at several products. I was looking into importing my own products from China or another country. I looked at India. I looked at possibly bringing my own product line. I got into a conversation with her and she said, “There are a couple of people looking to do lighting. Did you look at lighting?” That was the time that I looked at lighting and I saw that the competition wasn’t so fierce. I started looking into that and I started asking her questions. She started educating me on the topics. >>>

Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Flywire CEO Mike Massaro (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: What are the segments besides education? You’ve taken the education use case and fleshed it out. What other big-ticket items are you catering to?

Mike Massaro: Back at Money 2020 Conference in Vegas, we announced medical tourisms reports. In a similar manner to what we do with educational institutions, a number of the largest academic hospitals in the United States came to us and said, “We have the same problem.” We kept hearing about inbound medical tourism patients coming into the United States for knee replacement or cancer treatments. They are these very large dollar amount payments. Sometimes, two to four times larger than what you’d see in education. They have the same problem. >>>

Bootstrapping a Niche E-Commerce Venture: Elite Fixtures CEO Steven Annese (Part 1)

I’ve always been bullish about niche e-commerce. Here’s yet another story of an entrepreneur who has successfully bootstrapped a company in high-end light fixtures.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your journey. Where are you from? Where were you born, raised, and in what kind of background?

Steven Annese: I’m a child of an Italian immigrant. I was born in New Jersey. It was in the 70s when most of the Italians migrated.

Sramana Mitra: What about college?

Steven Annese: University was interesting. I wanted to migrate somewhere out west or south. Unfortunately, since my parents were immigrant, they didn’t want me to leave the house. So I had to go to school locally. I attended St. Peters University in Jersey City. >>>

Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Flywire CEO Mike Massaro (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Can you walk me through the work flow? I live in India. I have a child in college at MIT. If I’m the consumer sending the wire, what is my work flow?

Mike Massaro: We work with the educational institution. Our model is that of an international payment processor for that receiver of funds. We sign an agreement with that institution and that institution integrates us into their e-billing process. As part of the notification going to the student, it will often have the amount due. They’ll be driven over to, what we call, a payment experience over at flywire.com. It will be branded for MIT. The consumer can select the country they’re paying fro, in your example, India. Then we share various payment methods supported in local currencies in INR, as well as credit cards and bank transfer.

In India, there’s a specific form that has to be filled out by the parents to send money abroad for education. Our platform will actually take that consumer through filling out the proper information about the student they’re paying for as well as who’s actually making the payment. We pre-populate that A2 form in >>>

Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Flywire CEO Mike Massaro (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Talk about the variety of different ways that people do make these kinds of payments. It sounds like education is one of your big segments. Is that your only segment?

Mike Massaro: It isn’t now. We started the company there. We’ve been around for about five years. We had focused on education exclusively. Very recently, we opened up another vertical for medical payments. Hospitals started having a similar challenge. There are these large dollar payments coming from consumers all over the world who are coming for medical care and there’s no easy convenient way to pay. That’s our second vertical that we’ve just opened up and found some great traction there. We opened up other segments as well like consumer large payments. We’ve got a number of other segments that will likely be interesting to us in years to come.

Sramana Mitra: As it pertains to the roots of your business, you are serving a segment of big ticket fund transfer. Is that part of your segmentation?

Mike Massaro: That’s right. It’s typically tens of thousands of dollars. >>>

Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Flywire CEO Mike Massaro (Part 1)

Have you ever been an international student in a US college or university that required your parents having to transfer money to your school?

Or perhaps have a child studying abroad for whom you have to do this? In either case, you may want to read this interview to learn about how cross-border payments are transforming the efficiency in the sector.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing our audience to yourself as well as to Flywire.

Mike Massaro: I’m the CEO of Flywire. We’re an international payments company. We help global consumers make large payments around the world.

Sramana Mitra: What are the key trends driving your space? >>>

Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Brian Rigney, CEO of Zmags (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: What does this do to the conversion rates? Do you have metrics on how it influences conversion?

Brian Rigney: Beautiful question. It has dramatically helped their conversion rates. It has helped engagement as well. I’ll give you a couple of examples where it helped bring engagement up. From handbags, they saw a 50% increase in page views in the first 10 seconds—the really critical 10 seconds. There was a 20% increase in page views in the next 20 seconds. In the last 30 seconds, they saw a 9% increase in page views. Page views go up every step in that first minute and their conversion rates went up by 111%. Boathouse stores, a small Canadian retailer with 30 locations, saw their page engagement time go up by over 500%. People stayed. Boathouse just won an award from Retail Touch Point for commerce innovation around customer engagement because of their result.

Sramana Mitra: It’s interesting. I don’t know if you’re familiar with the piece that I wrote a long time ago, which has been referred many times and many follow-on articles have been written including a book called From E-Commerce to Web 3.0. The original formula for Web 3.0 that I had published back in 2007 was that Web 3.0 = 4C + P + VS. The 4 C’s are content, commerce, and community in context. P is personalization and VS is vertical search. You’re basically turning up your commerce site into more of a content commerce integrated site. You’ve just added a much more of a magazine-like feel to your commerce catalog. >>>