How Utoppia is Solving the Banking Needs of the Modern Global Workforce
After successfully growing a FinTech company in Argentina focused on the underbanked, Stefano Angeli saw an emerging need among the global workforce working with US companies. These freelancers, contractors, and remote workers from all over the world needed a way to easily and cost effectively get paid by their employer, manage their finances, and spend in their home country without friction.
Stefano realized that when people are able to work from anywhere, they need a banking solution that is as borderless as their lifestyle. And with that realization, Stefano set out to build Utoppia, a banking and payments product that would allow the global workforce to get paid in USD and manage their money from anywhere.
“Our first question was how can we make it compliant for a non-US resident to open an account and manage their money safely,” says Stefano. “It was a huge challenge for us to find vendors that could not only help us do this the right way, but also in a way that was sustainable and would allow us to grow.”
When he first began looking for partners to help him build and scale Utoppia, Stefano says he often heard things from vendors that raised immediate compliance concerns.
“I wanted to see and hear with proven facts that they had a compliant approach,” he says. “Too many vendors offered up ‘plug-and-play’ solutions – but nothing is plug-and-play in this industry. They set us up for something they could never deliver.”
After initially launching Utoppia with partners who were not able to offer the solutions the company needed to scale confidently and effectively, Stefano began looking for new options.
As Stefano began to evaluate new vendors who would be able to offer Utoppia a scalable and compliant platform, he said the initial conversations with Synctera were “music to his ears.”
“Synctera was upfront about the work and investment it would take to compliantly and effectively integrate Utoppia with the right banking partner,” says Stefano. “Synctera’s honesty was different from all the other vendors, and it gave me confidence this was the right partnership.”
Building Trust in the Click
Once Utoppia began working with Synctera, they were able to re-launch their product to their customers in less than three months. Focusing first on the freelancer and contractor community in Latin America, Utoppia provides their customers with access to accounts to receive and manage money in the US, and a virtual card to spend anywhere.
Utoppia will soon be launching additional financial products to their customers this month, including physical cards, investments, and bill pay.
As Utoppia continues to scale, the entire team has a relentless focus on building trust among their customer base. Traditionally, banks built trust among their customers by ensuring their branch locations conveyed a sense of security through marble pillars and high priced adornments.
With the rise of digital banking experiences, trust must be built in a different way. For Stefano, this means “building trust in the click”.
“If you give a user a digital product, and tell them that if they click here money will go in, or if they click there money will go out, and then all of that happens as it should, you build trust in the click,” says Stefano. “If you can deliver that, you can build trust without the need for physical banks or assets. You just have to deliver on your promise.”
When looking to the future, Stefano envisions a world where Utoppia meets the need for an everyday banking solution for people who live in a different country but would like their money in the United States.
“I’ve built Utoppia on the thesis that the world is going borderless, and that soon it will be mainstream for people around the world to work for companies in countries they don’t live in,” says Stefano. “When that becomes mainstream, then Utoppia will be mainstream.”
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