Leaders at the United Nations have some pretty ambitious sustainability goals that they want to hit by 2030. Among the organization’s published 17 sustainable development goals, financial inclusion for the planet is a key aspect of serving the underserved; transforming the lives of immigrants to be more financially included will help drive their prosperity.
Lowering the transaction costs for immigrant remittances — the money that immigrants send back to friends and family who are still in their country of origin — would make massive international economic waves. It would help immigrants keep more of the money they earn, while simultaneously supporting the global economy. The World Bank notes that remittances can be used to support deposits, loans and insurance for people with lower incomes, and remittances contribute to the financial development of the recipient economy.
“Remitly’s services are key to helping the world get to that goal,” said Remitly Chief Technology Officer Ankur Sinha. “I'm happy to report that our average cost per transaction for our customers is already lower than 3 percent for the 9 months that ended in September 30, 2023 due to our scale and innovative technology platform.”
Sinha explained that Remitly’s primary customers are immigrants who are sending money across international borders. He added that when it comes to international financial technology, remittances have been underaddressed in the past. Sinha and other leaders at Remitly are planning to change that.
Built In spoke with Sinha about Remitly’s goals and how helping employees embrace new learning opportunities will help the team get there.
WHAT DOES REMITLY DO?
Remitly is a digital financial services provider for immigrants and their families in over 170 countries around the world. Remitly helps immigrants send money home in a safe, reliable and transparent manner. Its digitally native, cross-border remittance app eliminates the long wait times, complexities and fees typical of traditional remittance processes.
What’s your leadership vision at Remitly?
“Explore, Evolve and Enjoy” is a philosophy I use for leading our teams — it is about exploring and learning new things, continuing to evolve and get better every day and enjoying the journey as you go through it. It inculcates a growth mindset and a joyful approach to how we learn and grow.
At Remitly in particular, we’re very inspired by our purpose and our customer-centric vision. Our purpose brings us all together to serve our customers.
My personal vision from a leadership standpoint revolves primarily around enablement and empowerment. Making a small positive difference in people’s lives every single day, whether they’re our customers or our employees — that's what drives me to do better every day.
Why is company culture important for the work that you do at Remitly?
Company culture to me is about how you experience the company; it’s the vibe, it’s the environment and it’s the people. How we build culture and what it looks like at Remitly is about purpose, action and relationships.
For us, our culture is rooted in our values — which we espouse to live by and get better at every day. Our values describe who we are and who we want to be. As an example, we want to aim for the stars and overcome fear; at the same time, we also sweat the details and we’re data-driven. Our values are naturally meant to create an atmosphere where it allows people to be their true self and experience our company in a way that works for them. That is the essence of our culture.
How do you help your team grow their careers?
An important way in which we help our team members grow is captured in our “be an owner” value. This enables our teams to go beyond their immediate expertise, assume a more holistic sense of ownership for our customers and allows for greater learning.
We encourage our team members to overcome fear — a key aspect which unlocks learning and risk taking — and aim for the stars. We want them to be thinking long term, solving for the customer’s holistic needs which leads to a sense of greater exploration and ability to think end-to-end to enable amazing experiences.
“We encourage our team members to overcome fear — a key aspect which unlocks learning and risk taking — and aim for the stars.”
What this means practically is broader ownership and enablement, going beyond functional areas. Employees often tell us that they are learning beyond their immediate expertise, exploring different roles over time. Many of our employees take on different roles over their tenure here. They can explore and learn on the job. We offer programs to learn from others via mentoring and sponsoring to stretch each other’s strengths and improve on growth areas. Lastly, we also offer a number of training opportunities with our onboarding program and development program.
What are you most excited about accomplishing over the next year at Remitly?
We’re excited about our ambitious goals to transform the lives of immigrants and their families, first and foremost. All of our teams are proud to deliver trusted and premium experiences for our customers.
Over the course of the next year, we hope to create scalability and grow our customer base, enable seamless remittances and build trust in our unique global payments and disbursements network. We believe our network has a sound structure with things like industry-standard fraud prevention and the ability to build innovative experiences for our customers.
I am also really excited about building complementary new services to drive higher long-term customer value. We’re investing in new and innovative ways to serve critical financial service needs for our customers. The way we’re enabling this is by building a scalable technology platform to drive additional product enablement at higher velocity and higher efficiency.
Both these areas — the innovation and depth of technology enablement in service of our customer needs — is what drives the most excitement for me.
Why should someone join the team at Remitly?
There are a few key aspects of our value proposition that are specifically enticing for prospective employees.
First, we build customer-centric services. We are working to provide trusted financial services for our customers and their recipients located in over 170 countries across the globe.
Second, our autonomous teams are working on a global scale. We work on small, high-velocity teams tackling challenging problems in areas like payments, compliance, fraud, treasury, mobile, security, customer experience and more. Our teams build systems and products focused on high availability, scale and resilience given our global reach and the critical impact of financial services on our customers’ lives.
“Our teams build systems and products focused on high availability, scale and resilience given our global reach and the critical impact of financial services on our customers’ lives.”
Lastly, prospective employees get to work with talented engineers in a collaborative, growth-oriented and inclusive culture. We celebrate open dialogue, continuous improvement and customer-centered outcomes here.
Folks working at Remitly “explore, evolve and enjoy” their journey, reinventing international payments and transforming the lives of our customers.
