creating financial harmony and opportunity with Swiss strength

Creating a product from nothing

A technology startup is a team that creates what did not exist before. Often you have to act contrary to your own experience and that of others.

At the very beginning of the project, in the very respected society of Swiss bankers, I was told that building a product like Aximetria, at the junction of two different universes, being the world of traditional finance and the world of cryptocurrencies — was simply impossible. Yet we overcame this challenge!

At the first stage, literally everything was difficult. I had to dig into the banking science: acquiring tools, payment processing, card products, currency exchange, licensing, and even sanctions. Many nuances were associated with the opening of a company in Switzerland, because it has its own regulatory base, corporate requirements, compliance and more. In addition to all of that, of course, the product itself was not easy. When you build something from scratch, at the first iteration you use improvised tools — a personal card, brokerage accounts, and so on — and literally “hack yourself.”

Finding people with the right chemistry

Experience in information security taught me that one of the most important things in a team is trust. Therefore, on the one hand, I found people I could trust, and on the other hand, I try to be a leader who can be relied on and trusted himself, and not only in working matters.

It is important for me that the team had people with the right chemistry. This way, you can communicate at a non-verbal level and eliminate many problems and clarifications in the working process, saving time. Of course, “chemistry” does not appear immediately, but it comes with time: some people grow with time, while others leave.

There are 17 full-time employees in the Aximetria team right now. There are also outsourcers in PR, accounting, HR, legal, which we take for individual tasks or areas that do not require constant involvement. Digital Horizon, an international investment company behind Aximetria, helps with some tasks as well. These include back office tasks, strategic consulting and, probably, the most important thing — the knowledge base and a wide network of invaluable contacts around the world.

Tracking processes

For two years, from scratch and in a vacuum, we created an innovation that is used by more than 100,000 people on four continents. Now we continue scaling the product while working on expanding our customer base. At this stage, when there is already a clear development strategy, it is necessary that the whole team and new specialists understand the processes involved in ensuring Aximetria operates with Swiss precision — like clockwork. To ensure sustainable growth, it is important to follow the processes, then the 70–80% of your resources and energy expended will maximize the results.

Weekly Stand-ups

We do weekly stand-ups in the company to guide the direction for the team. Every Monday we gather for one and a half to two hours and discuss all the tasks, current and future product features in great detail.

This does not mean that every day we just argue with each other. We search for the best direction, and the team in split in two equally important decision-making centers — those responsible for the technological part of the product, and those who are responsible for marketing and promotion. With this unified team, we gather for 15 minutes every day to understand how we are moving along the tasks that were identified during the stand-up. We analyze what product metrics were used “yesterday”, and what we want to use “tomorrow”.

Of course, in any company there will always be some chaotic instances, but it should not distract from the achievement of the goal.

Measuring absolutely everything

Unlike many other mobile services, Aximetria is a product that deals with the clients’ money. We do not simply transmit information on the status of payment through the blockchain registry. These are thousands of daily transactions, millions of dollars, and this enormously increases our responsibility. A simple mistake can lead to significant losses for our customers. We can’t just rely on the securest tools, processes and our intuition, we must also pay great attention to product quality and regular measurement.

We try to conduct the entire development so that any results, improvements or, if it occurs, deterioration of the product, is always measured, so the right actions can be taken for continuous improvement. This data-driven approach allows you to navigate in a “blue ocean”, when it is not very clear where to move.

Customer Journey

It starts with the very first communication with the client and the messages we address them with. Then, during the user’s onboarding process, when people just start working with the application and want to understand what it is about, they clearly see the benefits and start using it regularly. If this is only about crypto, there will be one customer journey; if it is mobile banking they desire — it is another usage scenario, with the trading application a third. For us, as for many other B2C services, competition occurs at the stage of attracting users. We make the job of discovering Aximetria and signing up as simple as possible, which drives the client to do their first transaction. Taking into account the completely different qualifications of our users, we had to redesign the whole process of onboarding several times, choose different suppliers for SMS delivery, document recognition, and providers for KYC/AML checks. We also finetuned the data entry order (from manual entry to automatic recognition), implemented a mechanism following user demand that tells you when to make purchases or sell crypto or when and where it is more profitable to deposit or withdraw funds and so on.

We also made the decision to change the tariff policy based on big data. Previously, there was a flat tariff, the same commission and a single limit on all operations for users. Then, as soon as we accumulated a sufficient amount of data on transactional activity, we analyzed it, and in September 2019, based on analytics, we selected a turning point to which absolutely all operations up to 500$ a month inside the Aximetria application are now free. For users exceeding 500$, a subscription appears, the tariff with extended functions is applied and a commission is charged. Without accumulated analytics, we would definitely not be able to correctly analyze the elasticity of our customers’ demand for the cost of the service, so as to not be at a loss, and to choose the right border in which other conditions should be offered to users.

Turning Support into Success

We not only measure the reaction of users that they convey to us by selecting options within the app or money transactions, but also actively communicate with people. To make Aximetria a better crypto service, we have turned our customer support into customer success.

The idea is to analyze the problems of users and discover how to help people successfully use the app and be as satisfied with our application as possible. For example, the Marketplace and the AxiCash service arose precisely from the difficulties reported by users, so we measured the frequency of the problem for specific situations, user groups, and launched solutions. As a result, users tell each other how cool Aximetria is and not only increase their usage of the app but become great brand advocates, helping others become users, too.

Based on this ideology of success, e-mail communication is also a fantastic tool. There is a separate mechanism that regularly triggers mailings, notifying users at the right time about the capabilities of Aximetria they could be using to their advantage, and conducting surveys. Our open rate is quite high — more than 30%, when the industry average is 1.5 times lower.

Of course, the success of an individual feature or application as a whole cannot be calculated with 100% accuracy. Even if you are a great specialist in big data, AI and machine learning, bringing to life any innovation requires doing what has not been done before, overcoming what was once thought impossible or unpredictable, but as Walt Disney famously said: “It’s kind of fun to do the impossible”. Success brings its rewards, but also new challenges, but we’re on this journey for the long haul, and are dedicated to positively disrupting the world of finance for everyone.