Without creativity, today’s leaders cannot create a culture of innovation. Traditional leadership models are all about leaders and followers. But, creative leadership is about building an environment where everyone is empowered to use their out-of-the-box thinking to enhance their organizations’ growth. One such creative leader is Pavel Matveev, the CEO of Wirex, who encourages his employees to be open and frank about their ideas. Together, with the team of Wirex, Pavel is transforming the digital payment industry with a global payments platform that bridges traditional finance and the new token (cryptocurrency) economy.
Changing the Digital Payment Landscape with Next-Generation Digital Payment Platform
Conventional cross-border payments can take up to five days to process and fees are often high. It’s clear that traditional payment rails are not efficient or scalable enough to accommodate the way people live their lives.
Decentralised digital currency, of which Bitcoin is the original and best-known, can address many of the issues present in legacy payment infrastructure. Pavel Matveev was one of the first in the space to realise the potential of cryptocurrency to provide a quicker and more cost-efficient way to send and receive money; Wirex was created to allow people to use this versatile, tokenised currency in day-to-day life and help facilitate its mainstream adoption.
Because the cryptocurrency market is subject to a high degree of volatility, it soon became clear that ‘traditional’ cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Litecoin were not best suited to international remittance. This fundamental problem heralded the creation of stablecoins – fiat-pegged digital tokens that were designed to eliminate the issue of volatility in cross-border crypto payments. Always ahead of the curve, Pavel Matveev and Wirex realised the potential of stablecoins to displace the conventional international payment infrastructure that is largely monopolised by Mastercard and Visa. They are due to release 26 fiat-backed stablecoins in partnership with the Stellar Network, offering not just instantaneous, low cost cross-border remittance, but unprecedented versatility for making payments in a variety of major global currencies.
Providing an Economical and Faster Payment Mode
Prior to establishing Wirex, Pavel worked in world-class investment banks such as Morgan Stanley, Barclays Capital, and Credit Suisse in London. The job was related to helping banks to create trading platforms and algo-trading strategies. This skilled leader has worked in the financial sector for more than 10 years and learned substantial financial/trading knowledge and experience in investment banking.
Years later in 2014, realising the extensive benefits of cryptocurrency, Pavel established Wirex together with his business partner, Dmitry Lazarichev. The idea behind the foundation of Wirex is to enable the customers to make payments either with cryptocurrencies or with traditional currency. Through Wirex, Pavel and his fellow team members are striving to achieve their mission of bridging traditional finance and cryptocurrency economy and making it available for everyone.
Wirex: A Borderless Payment Platform for Individuals and Businesses
Wirex is the first borderless payment platform to seamlessly integrate traditional and cryptocurrencies to support multi-currency B2B accounts, transfer and exchange services. Customers can move, exchange, and pay with their money in whatever way they want. This provides a trusted and cost-effective service for digital money transactions. The platform merges traditional banking infrastructure with blockchain technology and as a result, users have the choice of making payments with cryptocurrencies or with traditional currency. It allows customers to store, spend, and exchange all their currencies instantly. Since its inception, Wirex has enabled over 2 million customers in 130 countries to make over $2 billion worth of transactions between crypto and traditional currencies.
Leveraging Employees’ Feedbacks to Enhance Wirex’s Growth
At Wirex, Pavel and Dmitry have built a team of entrepreneurs, engineers, finance, and compliance professionals to curate the best-in-class offerings. The Co-founders and their team have kept customer security and safety as their top priority while developing the digital money platform. To make sure both customers’ data and funds are safe, they have integrated a number of industry-leading solutions. Additionally, to ensure reliability and productivity, the entire platform is checked and audited by independent auditors on a regular basis as part of PCI DSS cert level 1.
Moreover, Pavel has implemented an open policy environment in Wirex so that the employees can voice out their opinions, feedback, and share ideas. The best example of this open policy environment is when they have a product meeting. During this meeting, teams are requested to bring feedback on what they like in the personal finance space and the challenges they have faced. At the end of the meeting, feedbacks or opinions are gathered for their product development. Today, improved through numerous feedbacks, the Wirex platform now supports 10 cryptocurrencies and 11 traditional currencies.
Delivering Multicurrency Services with Rewards to Customers
As a leading fintech company, Wirex caters to both consumers and business across the globe. It offers traditional banking and cryptocurrency-oriented functionality to users and clients. For its global customers, it provides a platform to manage their crypto and fiat currencies to make cross border payments. Wirex’s European customers have already started using Wirex Visa card for transactions. The Wirex Visa card can be used to pay anywhere in the world in any currency as per the users’ choice. Users can also earn cryptocurrency rewards as they spend with the Cryptoback™ rewards program. With this remarkable and unique reward program, Wirex has become the first company to offer a loyalty scheme that gives users 0.5% back in bitcoin with every transaction.
Pavel’s Future Plans for Wirex
While successfully managing and operating the unique Wirex platform, Pavel is all set to make Wirex available worldwide so that the company can empower everyone to pay in whichever way they want. Taking a step towards achieving this goal, Pavel and his team have just released their own token named as WXT, which helps them to provide the cost-effectiveness people look for in their payments and is used by their customers to unlock benefits, discounts, and rewards on their platform.
