Melissa Smith Talks Trends with Tearsheet

WEX President and CEO Melissa Smith recently sat down to talk with Tearsheet, a leading online media publication that tracks technology and trends in the business of finance. In the conversation, she talks about everything from how she’s defined her role as CEO to how the company determines which industries to enter. We’ve excerpted some of Smith’s remarks to share with our Inside WEX readers below.

Relationships and People Matter

As CEO, I’m responsible for the intersection between what my employees, customers, and investors need – and their needs are often in contradiction with each other. So I spend a lot of time with all those people. At end of day, people matter tremendously, and how you make them feel matters and makes a difference. One of our core values is based on the importance of relationships, and as a technology company, we have to figure out how to integrate this into everything we do.

Growth Based on Deep Expertise

As a company, we learned that we’re really good at taking complexity out of things. We’re also really good at listening to what people need– not just what they are asking for. We developed that capability in the fleet industry and built an expertise around how we can use controls intersecting with a payment to save time and money for businesses. From there, we learned that we could craft solutions that could work for other industries. We took that expertise to the online travel industry. Then, we moved it into healthcare – and you can’t get more complicated than U.S. healthcare payments.

The common denominator for it all – where there’s a payment, there’s data around that payment – and that’s where we excel. The ability to solve problems and add value to our customers through the use of technology has been key to our success and growth in all the verticals we play in.

New Market Criteria

We have a few criteria we consider before entering a new market. The market has to be big enough for us to spend our time and money. We also have to feel like we can offer unique and differentiated solutions from what’s currently in the market. We’re not afraid of competition, In fact, we’re competing with really large banks, as well as start ups, in a lot of our products. The concept of finding where you’re best is great, and it’s what we’ve done historically when entering new markets.

Trends to Watch

The role of being global is far more important than it used to be, and will be even more important going forward. We’ve gone into a number of countries because our partners want us there, which has been great because it gives us a bit of a soft landing. Partnership is another interesting trend, and at WEX, partnerships have helped us operate in 200 countries for our travel business. We also see more of a movement towards integration with cell phones and on-board computers for real-time access to information. A big part of what we provide is information, and increasingly, people want it simplified and easy to consume.

Interested in hearing more? Listen to the podcast of Smith’s entire conversation with Tearsheet.