Disrupting the way WePay !!!
All about the Way – WePay vs ApplePay & PayPal
from SJ Mercury News 15 Nov 14 enhanced by Peter/CXO Wiz4biz
WePay Co-Founder Bill Clerico came up with the idea for online payment processor WePay when he was a 21-year-old graduate from Boston College. The concept looked so promising that he & WePay co-founder Rich Aberman moved to Silicon Valley, raised some money & opened for business 6 years ago. Since then WePay has grown to 65 employees and processes $1 billion in payments. Wow !!! [Wiz4biz] Based in Palo Alto, the company serves online-marketplace and small-business software customers such as GoFundMe, Meetup & Freshbooks. Clerico, WePay’s chief executive officer, talked to this newspaper about the fast-moving online & mobile payments business.
Q: What’s it like to be in a business that’s changing the world? A: One of the things I get really excited about is the rise of online marketplaces & crowd-funding + the way they enable small businesses & entrepreneurs to do things they never could do previously. Think about someone getting an idea for a startup. Ten years ago, it might have been hard to get funded. Today, they can put a video on Kickstarter and raise money quickly. That’s the democratization of capital. Places like Uber & Airbnb make it easier to start a business. You download their apps and immediately become an entrepreneur. Over the last 10 to 20 years, technology has replaced a lot of jobs, but I think this is going to re-enfranchise people. That’s what gets me up in the morning.
Q: So how does WePay fit into all this? A: We basically serve as the back office for a lot of cutting edge e-commerce sites. We do credit card processing for a bunch of large & high-growth e-commerce platforms, crowd-funding sites, (online) marketplaces & small businesses.
Q: What gave you the idea to form WePay? A: We were helping friends collect money from friends for ski trips – and things like that – so we built a big online payment platform to do that. We then realized, there was a much larger opportunity to help other users move money around.
Q: You style yourself as the PayPal alternative. How do you survive in competition with this giant? A:. The pace of innovation has been at break-neck speed, and even a technology company like PayPal has not been able to keep up with what people are building (in fraud prevention for example). By being focused on certain types of companies we are able build a much better product. The numbers validate that. We process over $1 billion for our customers and we’re growing fast. As our customers grow, we grow.
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