How Veem CEO Marwan Forzley grew Veem to $80.6M revenue and 300K customers in 2024.

hey folks my guest today is marwan forzle he's the co-founder and ceo of veeam a next generation global payment provider that enables businesses to quickly and securely send and receive payments in local currency marwan are you ready to take the top all right thank you thanks for having me you bet so did you have a local currency crisis a couple years ago and this is what made you get the business going or what oh you know i i have a lot of uh businesses in my family uh and and it's been quite painful watching smbs deal with payments all day because they're busy selling what they do best selling their products and they're looking for ways to simplify paying getting paid and i i'm amazed about the the number of things they do that are what i could call old-fashioned processes so like cutting checks sending wires uh creating paper invoices and we wanted to rip that whole thing up and provide something simpler to the user so that they can pay and get paid without having to think about it kind of becomes natural and second hand that's why we created veeam so that we help them do it in domestic markets as well as cross-border international it's one login that gets you to do payments payables receivables domestic and cross-border under the same service interesting and and so help me understand i mean i'm not quite sure what the right question is here but you'll guide me how many small businesses use you guys sent at least a dollar via veeam last month yeah we have uh about 300 000 accounts on the platform we're in 110 countries we have 70 plus currencies that we support we've been doing this since 2014 and customers use us to pay suppliers pay labor some customers use us to you know move money between their own bank accounts some customers use us to collect payments on invoices they either create on the system or they have a an invoice already created they send it out and collect payments on it and so i guess what was total you'd maybe call it like gmv through your platform in august yeah we generally don't disclose that data but i mean this is a scalable platform that is designed to simplify payments for smbs and we're not talking about we're like we're not powerpoint in early stage we're not a big company either like that's like very large company where i would call mid-market accounts in in the way that wall street describes companies yeah i won't push you hard here but i mean it would be helpful could you give a range you're comfortable with in terms of gm like are you over a billion individuals a month yeah we do billions annually okay billion have you passed have you had a billion dollar month yet i can't as well as that but i i like it's really billions a year that's where we can just got it my guess would be you're not billions a year like a month would be impressive so maybe you're not there yeah i mean but is it on the trajectory did you even get that like within the next 24 months a scalable system and we double the number of accounts pretty much every year uh you know we've been in existence and like every year the number of accounts on the platform at least doubles mm-hmm interesting tell me about how you're doing that so if you're 300 000 now you're 150 000 a year ago how are you signing up more smbs yeah so it comes in in three different buckets so um some of it comes through our own marketing programs we acquire customers directly uh some of it comes through partnerships we're plugged into quickbooks zero netsuite we're integrating with bank partners and most interesting the bulk of it like well you know over half of it comes from customers that are already on veeam so kind of like think of it like member get member and the reason why they do that they like the service they find it to be delightful it's a simple experience so they tell other customers that they have hey i'm going to use me to pay you or i'm going to use veeam to get paid from you and so that naturally brings other customers to the platform that actually is the the primary way of getting customers on the system existing customers bringing other customers do you measure that do you know what your power coefficient is oh yeah yeah yeah we're we're at every month that that passes by uh 65 of uh new accounts come in from uh customers are on the platform so that's true five percent of new signups come from referral links from current customers yes yeah interesting it's not the traditional refer friend model where you don't know if you've been referred or not this is in the transaction i send money to you you'll like it you say you know i'm going to use veeam to get somebody else to pay you or i'm going to use veeam to send money to somebody else so it's in the transaction flow yep yep so so one party might not use veeam yet but they get an invoice for me and they go what's this veeam thing maybe i should sign up and you get 65 of your growth comes from that it was amazing about that model is basically um in return for a delightful experience that you give to the customers customers become party to the growth they themselves introduce the concept to other customers that they have today this makes a ton of sense i want to try and like put a face i don't want to get lost in the 300 000 number i want to try and put a face to this smb so like can you name is there anyone you can cite we have so many of them uh we have a lot of startups retailers e-commerce can you name one though uh a specific one um i'm trying to there's so many to pick from there's so many to pick from like i i uh pick a startup a startup a smb startup um so um [Music] yeah he's searching through his hub spot his crm right now yeah like i have so many of them like this is one of the things about smbs unlike enterprise clients where you have you know big accounts that you know them by heart this is such a wide swath of businesses that use us not only businesses businesses accountants partners so uh you know it's it's just a large number of customers that well let me paint a picture and you tell me what's accurate i'm a new startup i need help invoicing i'm going to use veeam we're in a couple different countries i'm going to use veeam to do that i might put like what 10 000 through the platform each month something like that my first couple invoices yeah i mean that's a typical profile that's okay way of describing it um actually they start customers start either paying suppliers and they start with a couple of suppliers a month and then they like the system they start expanding on it and adding more suppliers to that platform and some customers start the other way around they start on the invoicing flow exactly what you said you have a couple of customers you want to collect on your invoice and so you send them the invoice or the request and you can like payment something that's a typical profile so let's stick to this exact story again i'm a new startup i did 10 000 through your system this month in september how do you guys make money on the 10 000 i use your system to collect yeah we make money on foreign exchange we make money of the payer paid with their credit card when we deposit funds real time to your debit card and we make money on capital programs a bunch of customers really like the idea of accessing capital lines from veeam so i have a bill i need to pay it but i'm kind of short on cash so what i do is i request the payment to be delayed essentially think of it like a pay later type program the npl right nbl that's exactly similar to that for businesses so these aren't the types of revenue we make what's interesting is there's no subscription fee there's no setup fee there's no transaction fees on hca's checks or debit cards they're all for free so we make money on what we call advanced features which is credit cards foreign exchange and capital program let me repeat these back to you quickly and just to make sure i got them so you just said three but so so deposit fund you said foreign exchange credit card fees deposit funds real time to the debit cards and then capital programs but really i can eliminate the deposit funds to real time to debt cards you really think foreign exchange credit card fees and capital programs yes okay and and and of those three is there like clearly a leader in terms of what your like core business model is or is it like 33 33 33 you know revenue split well historically foreign exchange is the leader because historically we come from cross-border payments market and over time we know there's just quite a lot of activity in domestic markets so we started adding other ways to monetize domestic so that's a newer revenue stream parts and capital but you know today there's more skew towards foreign exchange in the future it'll balance out i see okay so i mean is it fair to say that right now more than 70 percent of your revenue is foreign exchange but the other two ones are growing very quick because they're brand new it's not as high but yeah the growth rate on domestic is you know definitely high uh you know it's like high growth markets give us a prediction i mean a year and a half two years from now of these three lines which one do you think about thousands yeah they'll they'll divvy up like maybe if you're the third or third these are all different ways to monetize customers and these are all big trends in the market i mean credit card and b2b and card issuance and deposits these are all hot markets in the b2b...