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How Travelex is turning a boring 40 year old company into a feisty fintech competitor
- International payments firm has made digital core
- New product, Supercard is attracting new customers

If the future is about digital payments, financial companies that deal in cash have an interesting decision to make. Do they stay the course, and just do what they do better? Or, do they have to upend everything and redefine the value they provide?
Travelex is embracing the latter approach. The 40 year old company is probably best known for its foreign currency exchange. The UK-based firm has stores in 34 countries around the world, supports 80 currencies for millions of customers, and processes 70 transactions/second. But senior management definitely saw the writing on the cash wall — that as people use cash less and less, Travelex would need to evolve to stay relevant.
The specs on Travelex's Supercard[/caption]
The digital team quickly got to work developing its first new product, Supercard. Designed for UK travelers, Supercard frees its users from what Travelex calls “bank card roaming fees”, foreign transaction fees and unfavorable forex rates. Because these fees are somewhat opaque and users don't generally see what they're being charged in real-time, creating a better international card is a tough proposition.
This new product was designed to reach people who aren't currently Travelex customers. “We look at our market through a lens of pre-trip and in-trip,” explained Veingard. “We sell most of our products to our customers before they embark on a trip. During a trip, though, we haven't had a great opportunity to interact with our customers. Launching Supercard was a means for us to capture new customers who travel and spend abroad and aren't necessarily Travelex customers.”
Supercard was formally launched in June after a pilot that included 2,000 users last year. The new card links up to an existing UK bank card and when a card holder uses Supercard abroad, Travelex does two back-to-back transactions: one via the merchant and one off the user's UK bank card. To the card companies, it looks like a UK transaction, so no foreign transaction fees are triggered and MasterCard's wholesale exchange rates apply. A user can check an accompanying Supercard app to see how much fees she is avoiding by using the Travelex product.
Redesigning the company of the future
Travelex knew it needed to change and to do so, it started a massive process of transformation that began at the top of the company and is making its way down to the trenches. In February 2014, the firm hired Sean Cornwell as its Chief Digital Officer. Cornwell, who's a senior marketing pro who comes out of tech firms like Google and eHarmony, began building a skunkworks team from scratch that functioned as a company-within-a-company, tackling the future of Travelex. It wasn't long before the company decided this structure wasn't sufficient for a full transformation, so the company reorganized digital and products under Cornwell. The team now numbers 80 members. “Senior executives said that digital is our strategy, not guys sitting in a corner,” said Simon Veingard, Travelex's global director of products and transformation. “It's core to our business.”New products, new company
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