The life of a (squeezed) Product Manager part 3 - New competitors

Wouldn't it be nice if things just stayed the way they were? No new competitors, just continuous, steady growth without challenges from new players? Who even play dirty?

This is the third part of my blog post series, where I share thoughts from my previous role as a Product manager at a bank. Squeezed from every direction, and this time it's serious: New competitors!

It all started with a colleague from another business unit, asking me: Why can't we open up accounts in the UK for small businesses? This new player just contacted me, they can white-label this really easily. 

This idea was quite quickly turned down. Not a priority, and the "we can do everything by ourselves, and we don't care about new competitors" mantra was really strong.

About a year go by. My manager is in London, and when she comes back she tells me:

- You know Magnus, when I was waiting for the subway, there was an ad from this company that wanted to white-label UK accounts for us. They were saying something like: "Your bank is ripping you off on cross border payment and FX fees". Is that true?

I of course got very interested, and decided to do a comparison. I recently bought a pair of hand built wheels for my bike and the wheel build guy wanted to get paid with this payment provider "because my UK bank charges me 10 quid and that's unaccaptable". So since I had an account, I decided to make five tests.

The result?

- In two cases, my own bank was less expensive end-to-end
- In two cases, it was a too close call to say
- In one case, the new competitor was less expensive

But, in all of these cases, my own bank didn't tell me my own fee, the FX rate or the fee that the beneficiary would pay. No information, no transparency.

So what to do when the new competitors are playing dirty with the ads in the subway, and you can't do anything to prove them wrong? (hint: Contact me and I'll tell you about our Predictability suite, that will also be mandatory according to FATF SR 16). 

And what to do if you want to have a more standardized, more predictable and reliable end-to-end cross border payment journey? Read more about Swift's "The Scheme"!

https://www.swift.com/payments/new-standard-cross-border-consumer-originated-payments

(Hint: Movitz Payments will help you get Scheme Ready, ping me and we'll talk about how!)