 a local-feeling user experience in a new market, you need to do the following. You need to translate into the local language. You need to adhere to the local regulations. You need to make sure your copy, your images, and video are shot locally. Adapt your copy for local slang and tone. Add local payment methods. Support the popular devices. Localize the user data fields. Establish the positioning relative to local competition. And build the brand in the new country. But if you want to scale to 140 countries, you don't have time to do all of that. So you're going to have to take some shortcuts. I'm going to tell you about the few of the shortcuts we used at WorldRemit when we went on our journey to 140 countries. But first, let me quickly tell you a bit about who we are. We're an international money transfer service, and we help our customers send money from 50 countries to over 140 different countries. Our customers are typically migrants, sending money back home to family and friends in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. We let them send the money as bank transfer, cash pickup, mobile money, and airtime. So everybody's recipient has some way to collect the money. I was the first product manager, and I built out the team so that today I'm the Chief Product Officer at WorldRemit. Let me show you our story going to 140 countries visually. We started off launching in the UK and sending money to just a few received countries. In the next year, we began to radically expand, opening up Canada as a send country in a lot of African received countries. Then into our third year, you can see that we've got Australia coming on there. We've really opened up Africa and Asia. In the fourth year, it's beginning to look like a truly global product, and in year five, we got to 140 countries. So what were those shortcuts? The first shortcut I'm gonna recommend is Be Opportunistic. A lot of product teams launched their product first in the country in which they built it, and this is a simple form of opportunism. WorldRemit was no different. We built the product out of London, and that's where we first launched it, sending to Zimbabwe and Somaliland, which happened to be the countries where our founders were from. Don't resist this kind of opportunism, picking markets that have some connections to your early team, meaning that you'll have an in-house cultural expert, and hopefully someone with useful relationships in those markets. The next shortcut I'd recommend is to find a learning foothold in a new market, and this might not necessarily mean selling your regular product. So for us at WorldRemit, that learning foothold was often selling airtime or phone minutes. You see, money transfers are highly regulated business. In order to be able to send money from a country, you need to apply for a license there. In fact, in the US, you need to get a license from every single different state. Applying for a license is time consuming, and that means you're burning time when you could be learning. Airtime is a different product than money transfer, but it has a lot of the same characteristics, and it doesn't require a license. When we were launching in a new market, we often began to launch with airtime first. This would help us learn what were the channels that we could acquire customers, what were the kind of messages we needed to use to speak to them, and where would they drop off during our conversion funnel? Now, clearly, the airtime example is very specific to my industry, but I'm sure that if you look at what your biggest constraints are to launching in a new market, you'll be able to come up with some creative way to get around them. Perhaps you're an e-commerce supplier without warehouses in a new country, and it's prohibitively expensive for you to send some of your larger goods abroad. Maybe you could launch just by selling your smaller goods and covering the costs of shipping yourself in order to learn about the customers there, or perhaps you're a content site with no local language content. Can you start syndicating it from a local site just to get that first foothold? The third shortcut I'd like to talk about is creating strategic partnerships with local brands. Now, one of the hardest things about gaining traction in a new market is achieving some kind of brand awareness and simply persuading customers to trust your product. An easy way to accelerate this is to partner with brands that they already trust. So we'd been launched in Ghana for a while and we weren't getting much traction, but as soon as we formed a partnership with MTN, a local telco, we really saw things start to speed up. Just seeing that familiar app, that familiar logo within our own app gave us huge credibility with Ghana in straight away. Now, the fourth shortcut is the ruthless prioritization of user experience improvements. To return to my laundry list from earlier, all of these things are important to create a truly local feeling product, but probably not all of them are gonna be deal breakers that will truly prevent users from getting started with your product. So you need to be rigorous with yourself and focusing on the ones that are actually going to move the needle. Now, what is that most important first step in order to customize your product for any new country? A lot of people's minds will jump to languages, but I found that languages can actually be pretty far down the list in terms of the things that are absolutely essential to enable your product. In my experience, the single most important thing you can do to make your product a success in a new market is to make sure you have the right payment methods. Or to put it another way, if you don't offer locally relevant payment methods, your product is sure to fail. Now, I'm talking about things like card payments. If you're not enabling card blur in France, then you're missing out on a big proportion of users, but I'm also talking about alternative payment methods in emerging markets. This is often mobile money. In Europe, it's often bank-enabled ways to pay. I'm thinking of things like Trusley, Polly, Mr. Cash in Belgium, and Ideal. We learned this to our cost when we tried to launch our app in the Netherlands without supporting Ideal as a payment method. Time and again, we saw users get through what's really quite a complicated conversion funnel right to that final stage to become our customer. And then they'd drop off because we weren't offering them a payment method that they were comfortable with using. Once we started supporting Ideal, this problem disappeared. But even more interestingly, over the next month, 30% of our customers from the Netherlands were people who had already signed up with us but hadn't been able to make a transaction before. They were essentially telling us that we'd driven them away by not giving them a payment method that they want to use. And this problem isn't unique to WorldRemit. Speaking to a friend from Facebook a couple of years ago, they couldn't work out why their ad business wasn't thriving in Thailand, even though there were plenty of users in Thailand. They went out there to do some local user research, and they discovered that by only enabling debit and credit card payments in US dollars, they were shutting off a huge group of small businesses they'd like to reach who simply didn't have this payment instrument available. The next potential deal breaker I'd like to discuss is form design. So if you're anything from an e-commerce business to a fintech business, you probably have to collect quite some information about your customers. But the problem is the format of names and addresses varies wildly between different countries and locales. We started off by basing everything straight on a UK form. But what we found was this. By giving users the wrong fields to enter their data, not only did we send them a subtle signal that this wasn't really the right place for them and perhaps we weren't trustworthy, we actually started to get bad data in and that will interrupt the fulfillment of your service. So in the US, they collect form fields in a totally different order for the addresses. As soon as we changed this, we got much better conversion in the US and we were able to validate a lot more customers more easily. In fact, in one particularly extreme example, we found that we'd been hampering our business in Brazil because Brazilian names were so long, people were often hitting up against the maximum character threshold that we'd instilled in our names. This even goes through to things that we really didn't anticipate. Like in the Philippines, we eventually ended up adding a field for people to add a local landmark, since that's a much more common way to express an address in an informal type address system. The last potential deal breaker that people often overlook is data and devices. In different countries and across different demographics, there are very different device profiles and attitudes towards things like app size and data usage. Particularly in emerging markets, you'll find that users will simply delete an app that burns too quickly through their pay-as-you-go data. And likewise, don't bother try and launch in China or the US if you're iOS only, because these are Android heavy markets. So I've given you four shortcuts for how to launch quickly and effectively in multiple markets. The point of all this is that you want to launch early and learn. There's no more impactful way to work out what's really gonna influence users in a new market than to actually get some of them on your product and to be able to see what's performing and what isn't. Once you've started to get that data in, then you can really start optimizing your product and you can start iterating. Of course, you have to listen to what your users are telling you and apply your product skillset to that. But I'm just gonna give you a couple more examples of things that we've found to be helpful in taking it up to that next level enhancement in a different market. Now, a lot of people are familiar with the idea that a great way to bring in prospective customers is to show them happy reviews from your existing customers. We learned this pretty early on and we've been showing customers in our app and website for some time, our trust pilot ratings or our app reviews. What we didn't necessarily know is how much more impactful it would be to show them a rating from somebody who was actually trying to send to the same country as them. This is an example of sending to Tanzania. Here's another one of sending to Columbia. If you can collect these reviews, people are really going to buy into them. Or perhaps it's not reviews that are gonna be the right social proof point at all. In a recent A-B test, we found that making reviews really prominent was a very effective converter apart from in Nigeria and Kenya. Digging into this a bit, we realized that these are markets heavily affected by online fraud, often accompanied by fake reviews. So reviews like this had gone from being a trust signal to actually a negative point against a company. That gives us the knowledge to start trying out different things like telling them how many other people are using our product in those countries. Copy and images are the more subtle cues that tell a user if this product was really designed for them. We've spent a huge amount of time experimenting with different images and different messages tailored to the different kinds of users who come to our product, seeing what will influence them. Now, I'm not saying that this is the only way that we can begin to segment our users by country. In fact, of course, when you're doing that testing, you're gonna be wanting to look a lot of different things like what are the channels the users come from, what are the other kinds of behavior they're displaying, and simply what is that message that will prove persuasive to them? Or maybe it's no message at all. Maybe they wanna get straight to it and get down to business with your sign up. Eventually, you'll find that you haven't scaled one product to 140 countries at all. In fact, there are thousands of different variants of your product that are specifically targeted to meet the needs of users all around the world. So if you're ambitious and focused, you can scale your product to 140 countries in five years, but you'll need to dispense with the nice to haves and work out what's truly impactful for your users. Thanks very much.