A relentless focus on customer experience and simplifying complexity are the defining characteristics of the most valuable companies in the world today. It’s a concept Rob Orgel, now the new president and chief operating officer at Flywire, told Karen Webster was foundational to his decade-long career at Apple — where he was part of the leadership team that developed, rolled out and grew the Apple Pay business. While there, Orgel was most recently involved in the launch of the new Apple Card.
Flywire announced his appointment Tuesday (Nov. 5) to the newly created position. As Boston-based Flywire’s President and COO, Orgel will oversee its global payment network, business operations, finance, legal, compliance, and corporate strategy and development. He will report to CEO Mike Massaro, who will now focus his efforts on the long-term growth plans, go-to-market expansion, and strategic partnerships, according to an announcement.
Orgel told Webster shortly before the news broke that some of the “magic” of Apple and Apple Pay was the work that went into mapping the customer journey end to end, then prioritizing and designing an experience that was intuitive, clear and transparent — and focused on what matters most to the customer. It’s what he sees as the “incredible opportunity ahead for Flywire.”
Flywire is tackling that challenge in an even more complex space because it is business-to-business (B2B), global and high-ticket — “it’s all the things that add complexity to payments,” he said. For Orgel and Flywire, that will mean a continued focus on verticalized solutions, and an intense focus on the significant markets that are “worth winning and worth getting right.”
Massaro said that Orgel’s appointment comes at a time in the company’s history where “demonstrated leadership is necessary to scale, develop and shape Flywire for the future.” He added, “Rob brings all of that and more with a customer-first mindset from Apple that fits perfectly with our culture here.”
Massaro told PYMNTS in an interview just last month, that the lesson Flywire has learned in a decade of building its global platform is that when moving money between parties, neither the person paying or the party being paid is really all that interested in the technology or the mechanics. What they want is to trust their transactions are secure, understand the process in front of them and be free to choose the methods they want to use.
“To get payers to want to pay, it is more about acceptance and being able to use what they know and trust then it is about who we are and what we are doing. In some ways, they care more about the payment methods on the screen and they are things they were familiar with. The customer is telling us loud and clear, ‘I already know what I want and need to do.’ ”
The value in offering up new payment methods and value-added services, Massaro told Webster, isn’t in trying to solve problems consumers and merchants don’t have and trying to sell them on it. It’s solving the problems that they do have and better meeting their needs.
Massaro and Orgel are longtime colleagues, who first worked together at the eBilling and payment solution firm edocs which was acquired by Oracle/Siebel. He also previously held a leadership role at m-Qube, which was acquired by Verisign.
“I’ve had the opportunity to work with him before and know that he’ll add tremendous value to the business and the organization as we write our next chapter,” Massaro said.
Looking at what the firm has done across education, healthcare and travel as three of its principal markets, Orgel said, “we’re already well into that journey of verticalized and specialized solutions.”
Digital payments are growing in Latin America as companies like Mercado Libre and TerraPay rapidly advance digital banking and digital wallets in the region.
Central bank instant payments mandates and modernized infrastructure in Brazil have also moved the needle to the point where the region is arguably moving faster toward digital transformation than anywhere else in the world.
PYMNTS Intelligence’s “How the World Does Digital” report surveyed 67,000 consumers across 11 different countries. It found that Brazil was far ahead of all of them — including the United States — in digital engagement. Drilling down into the results, in 2023, 66.8% of Brazilians used mobile banking apps on their phones at least once a month, and 46.8% used these apps at least weekly.
Consumers in Brazil are embracing digital payments as well. The report found that by 2023, two-thirds of consumers in Brazil had smartphones and 75% had debit cards. In the same year, 77% of consumers in Brazil were using Pix, the instant payments app for mobile phones launched by the country’s central bank.
“After many decades of the status quo in payments, Latin America is going through a major transformation,” Marcelo Moussalli, managing director and Latin America product head executive at Bank of America, told PYMNTS.
That transformation is being driven by the two largest economies in the region — Brazil and Mexico — representing roughly two-thirds of the total GDP of Latin America, he said. Regulators in those countries launched new payments initiatives aimed at modernizing their respective banking systems.
The top-down, mandate-driven approach has been focused on boosting competition while lowering transaction costs, increasing transaction security and fostering wider financial inclusion. Beyond the commonality of the goals, the governments in Brazil and Mexico took different approaches to get there.
Brazil, for its part, introduced the Pix real-time payments network. Mexico’s innovations have included a peer-to-peer (P2P) network and a digital collection capability underpinned by QR code technology.
“In both countries, these innovations are improving [payments] speed, visibility and the overall user experience,” Moussalli said.
Against that backdrop, the adoption of real-time rails and new payment modalities has, in some cases, exceeded expectations, but there is still a robust greenfield opportunity, he said.
By way of example, in 2020, Pix’s first year, the network captured 16% of Brazil’s electronic payments volumes; that tally has grown to 40% as recently as this year. Mexico’s real-time payments network has grown 6% year on year as measured in 2024, with 60 million individuals using the network, although the QR codes and P2P networks have notched less adoption than originally anticipated.
The trend is inexorable, however. Although some businesses have been hesitant to pivot more fully to these new payment modalities and may cling to traditional methods such as cash, as time goes on, “it’s going to be hard to do business in Mexico or Brazil” without connecting to these rails, Moussalli said.
“They’re going to miss out on opportunities if they don’t adopt new digital payment options,” he said.
That’s especially true in commercial payments, where suppliers will increasingly demand to be paid in real time.
Asked by PYMNTS about how traditional financial institutions can help enterprise clients embrace change, Moussalli said Bank of America launched support for QR codes, which clients can access through the CashPro banking platform. Clients scan codes from paper or electronic invoices, and within seconds the platform retrieves the invoice details from the beneficiary bank and displays those details for review and confirmation of payment.
“This dramatically speeds up the payments process” beyond the confines of paying suppliers and into the realm, for example, of mandatory transactions that companies make for employees’ retirement benefits, Moussalli said. That “helps eliminate bureaucracy in processing payments.”
The feature has been so well-received in Brazil that it is being explored for use in Europe, he said.
Although regulators initially drove innovation in financial services in Brazil and Mexico, the central banks are well connected to their respective markets and are working with banks and merchants to foster the shift to digital transactions, Moussalli said. Cash withdrawals from banks have plummeted in the double digits. There’s particular promise in pivoting to digital payments in Mexico where cash is still tied to 85% of all retail transactions, especially for transactions below the U.S. dollar equivalent of $50.
“The impact of these changes is ongoing,” said Moussalli, adding, “there’s no going back.”
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