PNS|HYDERABAD
Smrithi Ravi’s career path is quite inspirational, you know! As Wise’s APAC Head of Engineering, she is doing a fantastic job of propelling the business’s expansion throughout Asia. She works closely with central banks and partners to make it all happen, combining technical expertise with business know-how. This is what we enjoy most about her approach. The fact is, however, that her influence extends much beyond the tech sector. As a working mother in the computer industry, she is dismantling obstacles and dispelling myths, demonstrating to women that STEM careers are completely viable. Smrithi is reinventing what leadership in fintech looks like with her Columbia University computer science degree and experience developing reliable tech solutions. Her focus on empowerment, inclusivity and innovation is truly having an impact!
EXCERPTS FROM THE INTERVIEW:
Your relocation to Hyderabad is a significant turning point in both your personal and Wise’s journeys. In what ways does this decision, in your opinion, represent the larger decentralisation of global tech leadership away from established centers such as Singapore or London?
From a Wise perspective, I don’t necessarily view this as decentralisation. Since we are a global business with similar full-stack hubs already in London, Budapest, Tallinn, Austin and Singapore, we view the Hyderabad hub as a strategic addition that will help us achieve our dual goals of expanding our presence in a significant market and creating a second global hub to accelerate our progress toward our objective of becoming the global financial network. Our worldwide organisation and structure will incorporate our local leaders in the Hyderabad hub.
How do you intend to maintain both product relevance and technical excellence as someone constructing a full-stack hub here?
It is true that India has a strong IT ecosystem and other remarkable features. We have access to a wide range of expertise in engineering, operations and customer service and Hyderabad is becoming known for offering the proper infrastructure required for multinational corporations like ours. What sets Wise apart from the majority of other tech companies is that we are a mission-driven organisation, which means that every employee can truly see how they are contributing to our customers’ cost savings through our open pricing and ongoing efficiency improvements. It’s important to note that many of it’s employees, including myself, used the product long before they joined the organisation. They are greatly inspired to continue working on this after witnessing firsthand how the product has benefited them personally. Because we want our employees to hold a stake in it, we provide a competitive benefits package that includes basic pay, stock options and other perks. At Wise, it’s not enough to be an engineer; you also need to have a thorough understanding of the company’s internal workings. Our hubs, including Hyderabad, will be set up to help with this. For instance, on one side of the room will be the operations team, which is in charge of liquidity management, or how the money actually moves. The operations team is the backbone of it, handling the majority of the company’s most important processes and the engineering team sits right next to them. The, engineering isn’t just about fixing bugs; it’s about creating features and understanding the specifics of, say, how money travels from India to the US.
How do you strike a balance between developing for hyper-local use cases and building for scale?
Working in the payments industry is rather different since, while some aspects are really local, there are also many global parallels, particularly with regard to the fundamental underlying infrastructure. Therefore, even though we require teams that are closest to our clients in order to truly understand their demands, there are instances when it doesn’t really matter where our teams are located when shipping items throughout the world. This “global local” strategy is actually it’s greatest strength; our global network of interconnected teams can exchange knowledge, which speeds up product delivery. Regardless of whether we are launching our cards in Brazil, Australia, or Europe, for instance, our entire Wise card product is built out of Singapore. However, things weren’t always this way in Singapore, where the first team on the ground about six years ago was solely focused on local and regional products. This is precisely how we will be considering our expansion in Hyderabad. Prior to considering how we might support more of our ambitious global product plan, we will prioritise local and regional product development.
What firsthand observations influenced the ultimate design of the product?
Our product launches are constantly influenced by the issues that our clients are facing and how it can help them resolve them. We were hearing from Indian businesses and freelancers about how frustrating payments were for them and how it might assist. We investigated further and in collaboration with the research firm Benori Knowledge, discovered that the biggest issues faced by Indian companies that accept payments from outside were excessive transaction costs (40%), unclear and opaque pricing (37%) and convoluted procedures (31%).
How do you think the future of cross-border finance will be shaped by freelancers & digital entrepreneurs’ changing needs?
Indeed, 10% of all incoming international remittances to India are already processed by it and there is still much more we can do to assist other use cases, such as receiving payments from outside. This is precisely what led us to introduce a new feature for businesses and freelancers that is completely different from how the product appears in other markets. It is designed to meet the needs of Indian businesses and freelancers who require a quick and affordable method of collecting payments in multiple currencies.
Lastly, how does this new hub reframe India’s narrative about its place in the global finance ecosystem?
If this hub is truly successful, it will become a hub for innovation that influences the flow of money not only locally but also globally, with the products the team creates and ships from Hyderabad being used by its global network, which serves millions of clients worldwide. The Hyderabad team will create solutions that are important to its global strategy rather than merely implementing concepts that were conceived elsewhere.
