Monito
Monito cofounder and CEO François Briod speaking at a conference.
- Founders often rely on intuition to guide the growth of their company, but many startups rely on a strategy of careful testing to refine their business model.
- For Monito, a Swiss fintech, the scientific method extends beyond simply developing their platform or marketing approach to include almost every dimension of the business.
- Cofounder and CEO François Briod told Business Insider how his team's analytical philosophy permeates everything the company does, from the service it provides to the team that provides it.
- This article is part of a series on growing a small business, called "From 1 to 100."
While it's fairly common for founders to trust intuition to guide the growth of their company, many startups rely on a strategy of careful testing to refine their business model.
For the cofounders of Monito, a Swiss fintech, the scientific method extends beyond simply developing their platform or marketing approach to include almost every dimension of the business - even its name.
Cofounder and CEO François Briod told Business Insider how his team's analytical philosophy permeates everything the company does, from the service it provides to the team that provides it.
"Testing is everything," Briod said. "It's often better to write a good hypothesis and a good test to see if your intuition is right or not. And then based on that, really trust the data to make decisions and then move from there."
Starting with the numbers
Monito began as a student project with Briod, his brother Pascal, and their friend Laurent Oberholzer back in 2013, and has since grown into a team of 13 that is expected to double in size this year.
The challenge they are tackling is the international money-transfer marketplace, which represents a $1 trillion industry that typically costs users $28 billion in fees per year.
Their goal is to become a widely known and used comparison website for sending funds across borders, sort of like a Kayak.com or Booking.com for remittances, with a mission to bring big savings to customers who send funds overseas.
"In a startup world, you raise funds, you get more resources, and then you need to show results very quickly," Briod said, adding that rigorous tests help his team do just that.
What's in a name?
Plenty of companies track key performance indicators in a variety of contexts from product development to marketing, but Monito's name itself is actually the result of a series of tests.
At its start, Monito was known as TawiPay, which was the result of a rapid-fire session entering fintech buzzwords into Google Translate. (Tawi is Swahili for branch, and the cofounders were envisioning a future with branchless banking.)
In a blog post, Pascal explained how they ultimately chose to call their startup Monito through a process that included testing several potential names with hundreds of users.
"I wouldn't recommend to any entrepreneur to change the name of your startup, unless you really have a compelling reason to do so," Pascal wrote. "Don't do it because you want a better name, but because you have a bad one."
The test results for Monito over TawiPay were decisive, and in 2016 the company officially announced its rebranding.
Using data to help customers make more informed choices
François says Monito facilitated over $200 million in transfers last year, saving its customers roughly $10 million in fees by providing detailed information about the costs associated with different modes of sending money overseas.
The platform even goes further, he said, by offering an algorithmic score for different providers to help customers look beyond cost savings and quantify things like convenience and customer experience.
"We aggregate that in a score that helps you have a holistic view," Briod said. "A company may be more expensive, but it's more established, has millions of users, has already transferred a billion a month, so I might go toward that."
Briod says the tools his team is building have the potential to save customers billions of dollars each year once they reach scale, and that the path there will be guided by numbers.
"It's a continuous learning process," he said. "But when you have the data you can make more informed decisions."