Parminder Mann is VP of Product & Design at Flutterwave, a global payments infrastructure company. He began his career in a rotational program at Sainsbury’s, the UK’s second-biggest retailer, and eventually joined the team as the first ever product manager. From there, Parminder transitioned to Barclays and, later, Metro Bank (UK). Before his current role at Flutterwave, he served as Head of Product at M-Pesa and Dojo.
In our conversation, Parminder talks about how Flutterwave is building technology to connect Africa to the global economy and the importance of creating localized experiences across the continent. He shares how his team designs seamless journeys for each persona, such as consumers and both enterprise and SMB organizations. Parminder also shares the key role that partners play in launching products in new markets.
I think about a few things, including people, processes, and priorities. First is people — you need a great team to help support you in terms of localization, whether it’s regulatory coverage and insights, or when you’re thinking about go-to-market. It’s crucial to have people on your team who understand the market and represent folks on the ground.
A lot of my experience has been in expanding across countries. Truly, no two countries are the same, whether that’s in language, culture, geography, and so on. You might say, “We’ve got a really successful product in this country, why don’t we just take it on the other side?” That’s much harder than it looks, especially in Africa, where no country is the same. This is where partnerships are key.
When you’re launching new markets, you don’t need to do anything by yourself, particularly in the payment and fintech space. Having partners and guardrails in place helps you do business in each country and operate with the right infrastructure.
It goes back to our mission and vision. We always say that our goal is to connect Africa to the global economy. Also, even though Africa’s not just one country, we want to make it feel like one when it comes to payments and doing business. For me, that overarching mission enables us to explicitly say what we’re doing as a business. And ultimately you’re serving global enterprises. We’re also serving customers who live elsewhere but want to send money back home. We want to keep the mission and ethos in mind all the time.
In general, we need localization to serve the bigger picture. For example, there’s a big global enterprise that wants access to multiple African countries. We can do that by having one integration, as well as local rails and customizations — whether it’s mobile money, local banks, or other alternative payments. We think about tying these expected MVPs for each country or market to each merchant that wants to do business there.
The most important component is having a formal dialogue and relationship with the regulator to make sure that you’re being transparent. You need to be proactive with your engagement with regulators, approach every country as unique, and try to abide by the rules and fulfill the requirements.
Next, having the right people here is key. They need to understand the regulations and regulatory environment first and foremost. This is like an internal muscle, and we have people in-house for legal, risk compliance, and regulatory environments. They have a specific view of what we need to do and accomplish in each market.
An extension of that is having people in the market itself. I think it’s important to have a dedicated country manager or risk or compliance person representing you on the ground. They also work with you and help you partner with the right people. For example, you might be going to a new market with no footprint at all. A good place to start with that is by having a balance of internal and external counsel, particularly from a legal risk compliance perspective.
They’ll say, “OK, what’s the minimum requirement there? What are the kinds of things that we need to adhere to?” Every country will be quite different in terms of its onboarding — there are different types of documentation and required inputs. That hybrid in-house and external assurance, as well as people in that country, is key.
We have a principle of being customer-centric. Many of us are our own customers and use the platform ourselves. That’s really important to us because not only are we developing the product, but we use it as part of our lives. That’s been a great help. For example, one of our PMs got married recently. He used our product as a way for people to send gifts or money for his wedding.
Another element is our cycle of design, discovery, user testing, and alpha/beta testing. In fintech, we don’t just need to engage customers and end users, but partners, regulators, and risk compliance departments as well. We’re constantly doing demos, not just to give an additional level of policy control, but to get feedback on what the market needs and what user experience should look like.
In fintech, stress testing products is huge. People do regression testing, but there also needs to be testing for volume. How do we prove that the end-to-end flow, from collecting the person’s money to then paying it out in a country like Nigeria or Egypt, works? It’s never 100 percent smooth sailing. There will always be things to tweak around performance infrastructure as well.
Further, we’re very API led, which is another element. Break down your segments and think about what to build for whom. We have a developer portal, so we need to engage with the developer community often and bring those people in. We also have our enterprise clients, and having a healthy relationship with them helps us improve our product.
That’s something I really like about this type of work. As you go to integration, developers can become a different type of customer, as well as a partner. There are different segments, spheres, and verticals that we also look to solve when we think about product discovery and the user journey.
Enterprise customers, for example, go through a certain type of onboarding that differs from a regular consumer. For example, we can’t tell a global S&P company, “Hey, yeah, we’ve agreed! fill out this form and we’ll magically sync.” For enterprise global merchants, and even local major merchants as well, we take a more face-to-face and interactive approach. It’s like account management. In terms of the product itself, it’s still about the API, how to handle volumes, and components from treasure, etc. We’re responding to what the enterprises want.
For the small medium businesses, they have less time and capital. These are often mom-and-pop shops. We want things to be more self-service for them because that’s what they’ve told us they prefer. They want to be able to open an account and move quickly. Of course, we still offer personal on-hand support, but our goal is to be local, as well as global. We call it “glocal!”
For consumers, it’s similar to SMBs. They want self-guided onboarding, but there’s always someone available on the phone for support or escalation. The consumer approach is a bit more straightforward because they do peer-to-peer transactions. At that moment, it’s mostly about designing seamless journeys so they can easily achieve what they want with our product.
With partnerships, it’s about identifying where there are synergies and opportunities for supply and demand. In most cases, we’ll be the partner for someone providing services and infrastructure. And on the other side, we’re the entity with the demand and we need to partner to keep up with supply.
My advice is to start with where your users and their needs are. Identify partners who are in the location space or provide those types of alternative payment methods, for example. There are lots of different opportunities here. The partnership needs to start with a need, but then expand to learn from each other and tweak as you go.
Beyond that, it’s also about understanding. There will be partnerships at multiple levels of the organization, from tech integration to operations. Over the longer term, it’s important to have a structured environment to review performance, see if you can expand on the partnership, and look into what other products you can bring to the market. How can you synergize on that? What are your plans as a partnership team?
Lastly, partnerships can help each other by introducing new businesses into the mix. For us, because we play on the enterprise and the SMB side, we sometimes have partners who connect us to other merchants trying to solve similar problems.
There are so many great technologies coming in, such as AI-powered customer service and operational elements. I think this is a great opportunity, particularly when you think about routing payments. This type of added customer support has a real impact, both outside of our sphere and within it.
Also, in Africa, there are a lot of currency fluctuations. We’ve seen the importance of stable coins. That’s a big trend in Africa and is probably the highest in the world in terms of volume processed across the continent. Having the ability to do some elements of cross-border seamlessly is really beneficial through that. These trends are what I see the future going toward.
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