Where in the world was nanopay this week?
This past week nanopay’s Chief Revenue Officer, Nilesh Dusane, was in the innovation mecca, San Francisco, attending the Marketplace Conference. In this short blog, he shares his insights and learnings from this interesting event.
Q: How did this event compare to similar conferences you’ve attended?
Nilesh: This event was certainly geared towards education. In the past, I have attended events like this, and the organizers did a great job connecting startups and VC’s, to both create business opportunities, and learn about current and upcoming industry trends.
Q: What were your highlights from the event?
Nilesh: The event was both, organized and executed well, with a focus on education and sessions specifically for startups. Presenters like, Upwork and Apartment List shared their experiences on how they grew their marketplace companies, showcasing a maniacal focus on solving client problems and being in-sync with the customer journey as much as possible.
A particularly interesting presentation was delivered by one of the VC’s in attendance, discussing the rate of growth for marketplaces. The market is expected to grow to over $1 trillion dollars by 2025 and of course, the number of payments being made will grow by magnitudes. This will have an especially large impact on the gig economy, which is seeing millions of people join online marketplaces as part-time or temporary jobs.
Q: Any surprises at the event?
Nilesh: In Spite of being held in San Francisco, no one at the conference talked about technology! All of the presenters and attendees were focused on customer centricity and improving the customer experience. This was a welcome change from a typical conference held in San Fran.
I was slightly disappointed by the fact that there were no presenters from B2B marketplaces, which is a vertical growing at an exponential rate. Everybody seemed focused solely on P2P marketplace needs.
Q: What generated the most buzz around nanopay and its products?
Nilesh: Multiple startups have spoken to the growing pains that come with using credit cards for all of their payments. As a company grows, so do their payments, which means that a 2–3% charge becomes unsustainable. The current market is lacking a secure, cheap, digital alternative to cheques and credit based business payments, so attendees seemed most excited about being able to use our business payment product, Connect, as an alternative to Stripe.
Q: What were your top industry learnings or insights?
Nilesh: Customer centricity above all else. Marketplaces have to be as knowledgeable about the customer journey as possible so that they can understand consumers’ precise needs: one of these needs being payments. By making the payment process as painless as possible, marketplaces will be able to provide a frictionless experience when transacting.
