How P2P-payments startup Verse is launching their product in 27 countries in one year
It's not the norm to launch your startup in 27 European countries at the same time, but then again few things are normal about Verse.
The young Spanish company (registered in the US) have raised close to $29 million the last year from prominent investors such as Greycroft Partners, Spark Capital, boostvc and eVentures.
Co-founded by three friends, Dario Nieuwenhuis, Alex Lopera and Borja Rossell just after turning twenty is aiming at building the whatsapp of payments according to CMO Juan Carlos Expósito.
He used to work as director of marketing at Just Eat before he joined the quickly growing Verse team in Barcelona:
Although is not the same, I’ve been in these shoes before at a different scale. This company changes week over week, growing at a really fast pace. Now with more money in the bank we can unleash all our potential, acquiring more talent to speed up all development, commercial and marketing strategies.
By the end of the year Verse is supposed to be active in all European countries apart from Switzerland. Even though the main team will keep the HQ in Spain, each country will have a local marketing manager says Juan Carlos:
The first step is to laser focus on the most attractive markets to grow fast there. My team will grow with a local marketing manager in each market who has experience in performance campaigns in all marketing channels: on, off, below, above, inbound, PR, etc.
But on top of that, he/she’ll be a person that deeply understands the local culture in every aspect related to payments. It would be inefficient to hire and handle campaigns from Barcelona targeting a foreign market without a local team.
As of today their key markets in Europe apart from Spain is the UK, France, Italy and the Nordics.
UX key to crowded market
It's no secret that slow-moving banks has caused a rather crowded P2P-payments market.
In France they've got Lydia and in Germany N26 launched Mobilebeam. In the Nordics traditional banks are having success with P2P products, such as Vipps (Norway) and Mobilepay (Denmark). However nobody has gone after the whole market at once, as COO and co-founder Alex Lopera told Techcrunch earlier this year:
There’s not really a winner yet that is taking over Europe in terms of social payments for Millennials. And that’s really what we’re going after.
Juan Carlos thinks the market is far from consolidated:
We don’t view it as crowded. There are a lot of ways to see it, but what we experience is that today’s payments are a real pain in the ass. Not only because of the available options and their basic UX, but also because the category is still to be constructed.
Apple just recently announced they will start offering P2P-payments with Apple Pay in the US. In five years, handling cash or plastic cards will feel awkward and we are happy to push this category and fill the gap providing the UX users require today.
When I asked what's the biggest difference between Verse and the competitors, the answer is simple, according to Juan Carlos:
UX, of course. It’s faster than sending a Whatsapp message. Every two weeks we release a refined version on iOS and Android, based on the usage and feedback. That shows a big difference on how serious we take UX versus our competitors.
The CMO also points to the social aspects of Verse that years back made Venmo a huge success in the US.
It’s amazing how social we are as humans, but talking about payments is still a taboo in some countries. We share most experiences, eating, traveling, party's, work, reading, even what we buy, but not when we pay. Social is the way to go.
When your business is an app and you're launching in a whole continent at once there's one thing that's crucial as they can't keep a heavy presence everywhere, according to Juan Carlos:
In the key markets our ASO is optimised, making it easier to users to find us and discover what we can do for them. Thousands of organic users have discovered, used and shared [Verse] it, helping us with the initial push to enter the market.
Going B2B
As all of the competitors mentioned above are working towards tackling the P2P-payments vertical, Verse is also looking to businesses:
We aim to have our second commercial product ready in 2017, an advanced B2B payment gateway like nothing seen before.
He can't share too much about the project yet, but Verse wants to be in partnership with businesses:
In the next years we'll see more and more news about countries that decide to go cashless. What we are offering is a comprehensive and really advanced set of solutions for businesses that need reliable and smart payment processing.
Apart from aiming at making payments less painful in Europe, Verse have a big milestone to work on the next months — finding talent, according to Juan Carlos:
We're hiring!
And they're staying put in Barcelona:
It’s a great place to build the initial team, but we don’t discard having people in other countries when required. Fintech is a really complex business and we couldn’t pretend (although we do our best) to know every financial technical aspect of every country. Acquiring the best talent for each position has been a winning strategy for Verse and we’ll keep it going on.
