Conduit 2023 Deep Dive: Payments Dashboard Launch

Just over three months ago, we launched the Conduit payments dashboard –?an out-of-the-box solution for sending money across borders, currencies and payment rails. This is a deep dive into how we got there, how it’s performed, and what’s next.

Since launch, monthly transaction volume through the dashboard has grown 10x. We view this growth as validation that we were right to shift direction this summer, when we decided to shift our focus to a product with an interface, rather than our API. While the signs are strong that the change was correct, it was a difficult choice to make at the time.

“We felt we had something special in our API –?a new way to move money quickly, cheaply and transparently,” said Andre Masse , our VP of Strategy and Operations. “But something was keeping our clients from experiencing that magic moment. The distance between needing to send money and finalizing an API integration was too large. Time to value was too long.”

Throughout the lifetime of our company, we have been listening to businesses in Latin America and beyond talk about the pain points of working with traditional cross-border rails. Slow settlement times, black boxes, high fees –?it seemed there was a consensus on what the problem was. However, despite being sure that we had a solution, clients were not able to use it to solve their problems in the way they expected, or hoped.

“After working in this industry for a while, you start to see that businesses are kind of cynical,” Andre continued. “They have seen so many broken promises, so many providers claiming they have a silver bullet to solve cross border payments, and always failing to deliver. We didn’t want to be another one of those. We needed a way for clients to click a couple of buttons and see money move, like they were promised.”

As a remote company, we have several all-company off-sites each year. These give us the chance to catch up, recharge our batteries and pack in a few months worth of water-cooler chat. Our leadership team gets together for a few additional off-sites, to align on strategy and progress. It was at one such leadership offsite, at the end of July,? early August, when we made the decision to bet on ourselves –?become our own client, in a sense, by building an easy-to use product, powered by the Conduit API.

“Once we made the decision to build our own payments dashboard, we moved very quickly,” said Gus Ba , Head of Product at Conduit. “I was literally designing the interface on the plane ride home from the leadership offsite. Our development team was building it within days, and clients were transacting just four weeks later.”

In some ways, the speed at which we were able to launch the dashboard made good on our promise of a simple API. It was proof that, with the right development resources and experience, a company could launch a product built on our API within weeks. Gus continued: “It became clear to us that the people benefiting the most from our product were the CFOs, the controllers, the accounts teams. Rallying development resources sometimes just wasn’t possible for them. Focusing on that helped us reach that all-in moment.”

Since its launch, back in September, the dashboard has been used by companies throughout Latin America –?especially Colombia, Brazil, Mexico and Argentina – for a number of exciting use cases. These use cases are related to a variety of accounts payable, accounts receivable and treasury management activities,? like settling international invoices, global payroll, and more.

What is most important to us, though, is how quickly clients can go from signup to transaction, and how easy it is for them to continue sending money. According to Andre, “Before the dashboard, clients would estimate a certain monthly volume but – once they finally started transacting –?they would always actually send less than expected. Since the launch of the dashboard, that has flipped. Clients are sending more volume than they estimated. That is as good of a vote of confidence as we could hope for. There’s nothing more fulfilling than seeing your clients feel confident that they will grow with you.”

As we wrap up the year, we’re excited to go forward into 2024 with many more plans for our payments dashboard –?bringing new currencies and features for our current clients and those to come.