TL;DR: A tech-forward company making a difference for immigrants! “Remember the name” — We’re just getting started!
I’ve never been more excited in my professional career! For folks who know me, you know I don’t say that lightly. As I prepared to start at Remitly, there were four primary reasons that initially attracted me to the company that I wanted to keep an eye on — purpose, tech, culture and people. Now that I’ve completed my #First30Days, here’s my initial assessment of why this company feels special and the role these four reasons play in that feeling.
Purpose
This can be hard to explain but is indeed quite unique. At Remitly, we’re all bound by this common purpose of transforming the lives of immigrants and their families by providing them with the most trusted financial services on the planet. You might say you’ve heard that about many companies, but I’d encourage you to come visit us in one of our office locations, or talk to some of our employees (you pick!) — the passion for that purpose is quite palpable.
From Matt (our CEO) sharing specific customer stories at the end of every meeting, to every employee keeping that immigrant’s (or their family who they are helping) best interest in mind in everything we do, to our research teams engaging deeply with our customers for insights, to our support teams ensuring we provide world-class support, purpose is at the heart of everything we do at Remitly.
Did you know that when the United Nations set sustainable development goals to make the planet a better place, one of them (goal 10C — reduced inequalities) is around reducing transaction costs to less than 3% by 2030 for migrant remittances?
Remitly’s services are key to helping the world get to that goal! I’m happy to report that our average cost per transaction for our customers is already lower than 3 percent due to our scale and our innovative technology platform.
But we’re currently only about 1% of the overall remittance market, so we’re just getting started! Immigrants (as our primary customers) and remittances (our core business) have both been under-served and under-invested in the past, and Remitly aims to really transform both!
Remitly has also joined Pledge 1% and through our charitable giving programs, we invest in and support the organizations and coalitions that are committed to improving economic, financial, and social inclusion of immigrants and their families.
Technology
What impressed me most about Remitly was the distinct differentiator that our technology provides in delivering the most important human needs to immigrants and their families — Trust, peace of mind, ease, and flexibility.
Our technology platform helps eliminate the long wait times, complexities, and fees typical of traditional remittance processes and helps return millions of dollars in spending power to immigrants worldwide.
Since its founding ten years ago, Remitly’s vision is one of financial inclusion, providing immigrants access to financial services and making the process of sending money internationally faster, more accessible, more transparent, and cost-effective. As the company evolves, it has added more products to its offerings, further expanding its vision of financial inclusion for all.
Some interesting aspects of our technology that drives Remitly forward include:
- We’re a cloud-native tech stack, delivering high reliability with our services, and continuously improving with our growing scale
- Our data platform is a lifeline for us — enabling fraud prevention via risk models, dynamic pricing, and many other scenarios via machine learning and AI, while leveraging data as a platform for us to drive insights and better outcomes for our customers
- Our infosec function ensures we’re running our technology operations in a secure and compliant manner — given the highly regulated nature of remittances and financial services, this is imperative to our success
- Remitly app experience is highly rated (iOS — 4.9/5, Android — 4.8/5), and an area we constantly innovate in, to provide the best user experience to our customers
- Remitly’s platform includes our pay-in and pay-out (disbursement) networks, which we’ve also platformized to make available to partners.
- Our core platform differentiates itself both in payment acceptance (handling the complexities of money transfer across the globe with minimal wait times, and low fees) and payment disbursement (not only with digital methods but also building out a unique disbursement network for methods like cash pickup which is still popular in many developing countries we serve)
As of the end of 2021, we had served 2.8 million customers in Q4 alone, transacting over $20B annually, with our active customers, revenue, and send volume all growing at rates of 30–50%+ YoY! [Tune into our earnings call on May 5 to get updated information about the shape of Q1 and future outlook!]
Overall, we leverage our technology to enable our growth, and solve really hard problems that excite our engineering teams to help drive tremendous impact to our customers and their families!
Culture
Culture becomes real when you first define a set of values to live by, and then those values become the lived experience of employees.
Remitly’s cultural values shine quite clearly when you talk to any of our employees — the sheer all-pervasiveness of our values embedded into daily experiences for our teammates brings so much joyfulness to the workplace and beyond.
Also, culture is never done :) We’re continuously improving in this area, and will continue to learn as we grow. I’ve loved our focus on customer centricity, making sure we deliver on promises, and it shows in the reciprocal engagement we have with our customers (customer service, research engagement, feedback surveys, CEO letters, CSAT & NPS among others).
We continue to aim for the stars as we transform remittances while growing trust with our customers with greater access to financial services. We strive to sweat the details, and be data-driven and biased for action as we grow in our journey for financial inclusion for all.
If you’re looking for a positive company culture that’s not only diverse in thought and representation, but also really inclusive to being heard, this is a really cool place to be!
People
What makes Remitlians special IMO, is the unrelenting belief in our purpose of serving our customers, aided by our passion to solve really complex problems working with each other and our technology platform, and supported by our positive and evolving culture.
For me, the people experience has been warm, welcoming, and supportive. I’ve loved the passion in my engagements with the teams as I’ve gotten to know them better — there’s a tremendous amount of curiosity to learn, a growth mindset to do more, a sense of empathy towards each other, and a sense of belonging towards being an owner for the company.
It’s no surprise that the company (and our people) continue to receive accolades. Recent honors include: BuiltIn’s 2022 Best Places to Work — Seattle, Best Paying Companies, Best Benefits, Deloitte’s 2021 Technology Fast 500 (winner for the 5th year in a row), Geekwire’s 2021 Workplace of the Year, Inc.’s Best Workplaces of 2021, Forbes’ 2021 Best Startup Employers) and counting.
As I’m ramping up, I’ve been amazed by the fantastic ideas, and well-articulated plans of what we could do more to drive this transformation further — I look forward to our growth and continued learning and evolution as an organization!
What’s different?
If I reflect on the concept of Ikigai (a really useful framework for thinking about your reason for being, and something I’ve found incredibly helpful to apply in my life) — there are very few places I can think of, that have such a great balance of what I love doing (helping people grow and building products), what the world needs (better financial inclusion particularly for immigrants), what I’m good at (I’d like to believe that is helping people grow and building products), and what I can get paid for (my profession and vocation).
For me, what’s been different can be categorized into the following:
- Learning — we’re a learning-focused, driven-by-curiosity organization. What that means in practice also is that people and teams jump to learn new things to help drive customer outcomes — it also leads to a “One Remitly, multiple careers” perspective, where folks get to experience multiple roles, areas, and experiences all within Remitly
- Passion — We’re very passionate about impacting our customers’ lives across continents, and it shows in our approach to building products and serving their needs. We’re also very passionate about solving the complexity of problems with the simplicity of our solutions
- Velocity — Having spent 15+ years in #BigTech before this, the change in pace has been refreshing :) We move fast, experiment aggressively, and leverage data-driven decisions to evolve forward. When you’re an incumbent in an industry with many established players, this can be a key differentiator
- Audacity — We’ve set very audacious goals for ourselves, and we have this belief instilled in us to get there, to serve our customers better, and be in a unique position to be best suited to drive towards our goals of financial inclusion for all!
Where we’re headed
This is an exciting time to have joined the company. Remitly recently celebrated its tenth anniversary and became a publicly-traded company last fall.
Did you know that we’re one of the largest startups originating from Seattle, also one of the largest IPOs from the area?
We served 2.8 million customers for remittances in Q4 ’21 alone! But the addressable market for remittance is 280 million immigrants sending over $1.6 trillion in transfers every year, so we’re just about 1% done! Our services have also expanded, with our banking offering (Passbook) and our Remitly for Developers program (offering remittance-as-a-service), and will continue to expand towards driving financial inclusion for all.
We’re growing rapidly, and are looking to hire across many roles (technical and non-technical, early-in-career to senior leadership) and locations. If any of this piques your interest, and you’d like to explore a discussion surrounding employment or just chat, please engage directly with me or with anyone on our teams!
Signing off with — Ankur@Remitly — We’re just getting started!
