Supporting families around the world. Exclusive interview with Ismail Ahmed CEO of WorldRemit

Edited by @SimonCocking, exclusive interview for Irish Tech News by Daryl Conway @DarylConway42

The Bigger the Problem the Bigger the Opportunity Ismail Ahmed is the CEO of WorldRemit @WorldRemit, a company that was only founded in 2010 and has already managed to triple its turnover to £15.2 million in 2014. With similar growth expected in 2015 it is fair to say that Ismail knows a thing or two about entrepreneurship and he took time out of his busy schedule at this year’s MoneyCONF in Belfast to share some of his experiences with Irish tech News.

What is the best piece of advice you have ever been given?

The best piece of advice I have ever received was to always critically look at what you are doing. Go out and talk to as many people as possible, talk to people who say your product won’t work. I actually benefited a lot from people who were not actually praising the work we were doing but from those who were very critical, those who told us that it won’t work and listing how our product would not work. Because that enabled us to look at and address the things that people said would not work and this helped us to improve and make it what it is today.

What advice would you give a Tech Start Up today?

Look at the problems, look at where there are pain points and think about something that puts the customer first. This is a money conference and in FinTech what the new companies are doing is putting the customers first, addressing pain points tell anybody who was interested in entrepreneurship is just look at the problem, look for something that is creating a pain point for consumers and address that problem. The bigger the problem the bigger the opportunity.

What is the biggest mistake that WorldRemit have made?

We launched in Canada, which was our second market after we launched in the UK, without doing a lot of research and without truly understanding how the different aspects of our product would work in that market. So when we launched it, for about 6 or 7 months we couldn’t get any customers and the reason for it was that in Canada only a few people had debit cards, and we thought that like the in UK a lot of customers would be able to use debit cards, but in Canada people use credit cards or banks will charge cash advance fees when they use a money transfer product and there were no debit cards. So after we were able to identify this problem we were able to then look at how we could enable customers to use the alternative payment methods in the country. I think that was the biggest mistake we made.