We can forgive a company for choosing a dumb name when it's fixing a very real problem. Step up to the plate, Wayerz.
Wayerz is a company trying to tackle a very real, and very massive, problem. Wayerz provides an integrated banking platform that is aimed at optimizing international bank wiring. For anyone who doesn’t need to use international payments, the minutiae of getting money between point A and B may well be a complete mystery. But as someone who lives in one country but derives his revenue mainly from another, I can tell you it is difficult and complex.
Currently, there are three unpalatable choices for international payments. The first, reliable but expensive, is to use PayPal. PayPal knows how much pain international payment causes, and has rightly surmised that individuals and businesses will generally be prepared to pay a significant margin in order to relieve that pain. So PayPal makes payments easy, albeit sadly expensive.
The next best way is to try and wrangle international wires via banks. I’ve ended up having bank accounts in a number of different currencies just to try and make it easier to receive payments. And I still need to provide massive amounts of information to clients in order to make bank wires.
The third, and most traditional, option is to use paper checks. Hard to believe as it may be, I still receive a paper check every month or so and have to schlep it to the bank in order to actually deposit to my account. Even this is problematic, as banks often do not recognize checks from foreign locations.
Into this quagmire comes Wayerz. The Wayerz platform, available globally beginning today, provides banks real-time access to wiring options that are tailored to their particular needs. In really-speak, that means that there is a choice to be made in terms of balancing speed, cost, risk, restrictions, and locations. After those decisions are made, Wayerz provides the bank an analysis of available wiring routes and a recommended wiring method. By tracking global wiring schedules and statistics in real time, the technology enables banks and their corporate clients to choose the optimum route for every wire. Wayerz’s algorithm analyzes all the invoices banks receive and converts them into unified and easy-to-read formats.
“The Correspondent Banking machine circulates roughly $21 trillion annually in wire transfers. We founded Wayerz to help these banks streamline the wire processes, enabling them to save money and improve back-office efficiency,” said Menny Shalom, Founder and CEO of Wayerz. “Our platform operates as a GPS system for bank wiring and invoice translating, providing financial institutions with a real-time navigation tool that will reduce the cost of wire transfers and boost profitability for banks and their customers.”
In conjunction with the launch, Wayerz is partnering with Barclays to help integrate Wayerz’s platform into its existing financial offerings in all of its branches worldwide.
“Barclays manages many back-to-bank invoices each month, requiring an overabundance of organizational and translational staffing to accommodate,” said Derek White, Chief Digital Officer at Barclays. “Wayerz billing software will reduce the time and costs our team has been forced to allocate on these invoices.”
I can leave the name, but beyond that, what Wayerz is doing is both very cool, and very useful.
