I recently announced on LinkedIn that, after three years, I’m leaving Wise.
All of a sudden, this post generated massive engagement—huge. More than 100,000 people saw that I left Wise, and Parminder was one of them. We connected and grabbed coffee near their office next to Old Street in London shortly after.
Parminder Mann is the VP of Product and Design at Flutterwave, Africa’s largest startup. He leads multiple product teams across Flutterwave’s portfolio of products. Prior to Flutterwave Parminder led product at M-Pesa, Africa’s biggest mobile money service.
Parminder is probably one of the best people to talk to about building payment products for African markets. And that's exactly what we discussed in the latest episode of the Product & Growth Show.
Main ideas and takeaways from our conversation with Parminder
On being a great PM
Being a great Product Manager is like running a 5-star hotel. It is really hard to excel at everything. You need to focus on what you need to be good at at this particular point in time.
Product management in fintech
Ain’t no easy ICE scores in fintech. When building a new fintech product, you need not only to understand customers' pain points but also to consider the regulatory environment and potential local partners you can work with.
Being a good PM in fintech means knowing regulatory requirements well and being able to build a world-class UX around them. Especially, in smaller companies where you have no privilege to have a PM assigned to every domain.
There are always two sides to every transaction. As an early-stage fintech PM, you need to think about both.
Building empathy whilst building fintech products
Always try to experience the problem you are solving. When I was leading USD payouts for businesses at Wise, it wasn’t easy to be empathetic until I started my own business and experienced firsthand how this product impacts my life.
Go outside of big cities to understand how payments really work.
Stablecoins
Markets with unstable currencies can benefit the most from stablecoins. In markets with 70% annual inflation, customers want a tool that allows them to store value more effectively.
Remittance markets are huge, and blockchain-based remittance products like Sling will definitely have their niche among customers for whom speed is the most important factor.
Fintechs compete with WhatsApp groups where individuals provide FX and remittance services to one another.
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