Meet Shane Lennox, Creating Products for the Future
What’s your role at WorldRemit?
Product Manager in the Business team.
What makes you proud to work at WorldRemit?
Speaking to our customers and understanding the role that we play in their lives makes me proud to work at WorldRemit. Our customers are people that make huge sacrifices to support their families, friends and communities. Until recently, their efforts to save and send as much money home as possible were often rewarded with extortionate fees and FX rates.
That has begun to change and I’m proud that we’ve played a role in that. Ultimately I look at our business as an enabler of global growth. Every Dollar, Cedi or Peso we save a customer is recycled back into local economies. In aggregate we are creating a huge amount of value for our customers and their communities.
How did you come to join the team?
I joined WorldRemit as an intern while I was studying for an MBA. I was fortunate that Alice Newton-Rex was willing to take a chance on someone who didn’t have a Product background. I worked on few different projects as an intern and when I finished my MBA I came on full-time to build our Remittance-as-a-Service platform.
It’s worth mentioning here that I’m not the only person who has been given an opportunity by WorldRemit to make a big change. There are several people in our team who have come from other internal departments, and plenty of people in the company who have made cross-departmental moves. There is a lot of talk these days about the importance of employees learning new skills, but much less talk about the responsibility of employers to provide high-potential people with an opportunity. That seems just as important to me.
Our Product team focuses on designing solutions to common pain points. Can you tell us a little bit about how the team approaches these tricky challenges?
When I was getting started in Product my colleague Lewis Mills told me that a good Product Manager constantly goes from narrow to broad to narrow and back again. To me that means you need to understand your business both in aggregate and at the level of the individual customer. Can the story you’re seeing in the aggregate data be confirmed by speaking to your customers? Are the stories you hear from customers playing out in the aggregate data?
As an example, one of the first things I worked on when I joined WorldRemit was our eKYC checks. An eKYC check attempts to meet our regulatory requirements by matching a customer’s name, address and date of birth to public databases. The check is done to verify that the person in question exists. It’s a crucial step in allowing a customer to be able to send money.
In one particular country our match rate on eKYC checks was poor, which meant that a Customer Service intervention was required before we could allow some customers to send money. The reasons for the poor match rate were non-obvious when looking at the aggregate data. When you looked at the check on an individual level, however, it was clear that there was a localisation issue with addresses that was causing checks to fail. Going back to the aggregate data, it was clear this was playing out at scale and resulting in a poor match rate. A relatively simple fix meant that we could help our customers send money more quickly while still meeting all of our local requirements.
Everyone has now been convinced of the primacy of data. But if you only understand your data in the aggregate and not at the customer level, you often end up optimising for the wrong thing.
Any advice to people hoping to break into fintech?
I will go technical here: teach yourself SQL. It’s not hard to learn, and you won’t find a better way to understand a business than asking your own questions and using the database to answer them.
To learn more about career opportunities at WorldRemit, visit our website.
