How to successfully build a B2B Fintech product
Fintech is coming 💵
As we have all noticed, this is the era of fintech companies, with new companies trying to tap into the B2B fintech market more than ever. But only a handful of them manages to offer a product that stands out as Melio does. So how did we make it happen?
Before we start — What does Melio do?
At Melio, we provide small businesses across the U.S. with a platform to easily send and receive online business payments.
While at first glance it looks like no one would shout “Eurica” over this idea, what makes us unique is that we give businesses much more than just an accounts payable tool. We give them a scalable and unique service that helps them keep up with their payments, manage all aspects of their bill pay on one centralized, easy-to-use platform, and improve their cash flow.
How did we manage to create an exceptional product that does it all? Let’s dive into our product’s journey, from conception to launch, and find out.
The product managers behind the scenes
Product Managers play a key role in a company’s success, and when it comes to fintech companies, payments product managers need to have a combination of skills and qualities to make a successful product. That is why you need to make sure they:
Understand technicalities
Payments platform product managers need to have an exceptional technical sense. Melio’s payment platform team comprises product managers who are API experts and have an in-depth understanding of how the engine works behind the scenes. It’s crucial for our day-to-day work and impacts our feature designs, payment-operations relationships, and roadmap formation.
Comprehend the industry’s ecosystem and terminology
Processing fees, discounts rates, acquiring banks, card processors, authorization, card schemes, card levels, the anatomy of the swipe, lending rules, reconciliation — it’s clear that the e-commerce industry is very complicated. Payments product managers must deeply comprehend the ePayments ecosystem and keep up with the latest trends since it directly impacts our product initiatives.
Know the users
Knowing your users and their business needs is vital for any product manager, but it’s even more critical for Melio’s product team. The combination of knowing the market and keeping a finger on the pulse of our users’ needs makes it easier for us to build product features that are designed specifically to make our users’ lives much easier and provide them with added values.
The tango of product & engineering — a walk-through of the launch process of new features
It always takes two to tango, and the balanced dynamics between product and engineering are indeed a tango that should be well choreographed to succeed.
Excelling in our product-engineering dance is our primary goal. This is precisely what makes our product launch process so unique: our tech leaders maintain a comprehensive knowledge and understanding of the industry and market trends. They are the masters of our payment life-cycle.
That’s the starting point of any successful launch process. From there, we go through the following milestones:
Understanding our users’ needs
Melio’s finance team naturally has the best hands-on experience when it comes to identifying users’ needs and pain points in internal-financial products. That is why we work with them closely to understand their day-to-day work. We do that with:
- Weekly meetings
- Dedicated Slack channels
- Backlog boards
- Quarterly planning meetings
By working closely with the finance team every step of the way, we can ensure we have the most intimate acquaintance with their actual needs when they’re using financial tools.
Identifying the important financial tools and features to integrate with the core product
FaaS (Fintech as a Service) products are all over the place: reconciliation suites, budget monitoring & reporting products, revenue operations solutions, and many more.
But we at Melio aim at building these features in-house. Why is that?
Compatibility
Melio offers various payment methods, such as international payments, fast ACH & checks, virtual cards, push-to-debit & credit cards transactions. All of which require special reconciliation and reporting tools. We know that for the best user experience and product functionality, the “satellite” features should be built in-house.
Product and engineering brainstorming
Now that we understand our users’ needs and know what we want to build, we can move forward. Now it’s product and engineering teams’ time to shine. We start thinking about how we can take all our insights and turn them into a great product solution:
Tailor-made product solutions
Going through the milestones will get us to where we want to be in the best way possible. Now we can march on to the next and final milestone: the product kick-off.
I can share as a recent example that our new reconciliation version spec has been built this way, and we are now ready to go. Challenges and bugs are yet to come (for sure), but as long as you take the needed steps to make sure the product is tailored to your users’ needs — challenges and bugs will make your product even better with time.
