How an Apple veterinarian teaches an old fintech new tips

Moneygram, if you do not know, is a case of manual of the innovator dilemma. The company began in 1940 as Express travelers, specialized in mandates, was acquired by Greyhound to be part of the service of the bus company. In 1988, this company bought a small Silver Services Slonger on paper called Moneygram, and a few years later, adopted its name.

You can probably guess how Moneygram, with a distribution model that was based strongly on bus stations, behaved when the Veno and Blockchain era arrived. By 2023, he looked like the end of the road when the company was drowned in debt and was having a single figure course. That year, however, he obtained a rescue buoy when the company Pe Madison Dearborn Partners took the soldier of Moneygram and appointed Soohoo as CEO last fall.

Since his appointment, Soohoo has lost a short time to accelerate Moneygram’s transition to a competitive force. During lunch, the new CEO told me that digital transactions represented only 20% of total transactions in 2019, but had climbed to 50% when it took over. During his mandate, he has already increased this to 70% and, in another impressive feat, joined a Stablecoin tool in the application of Moneygram. The company deployed Stablecoin’s offer last week in Colombia, which, according to Soohoo, is an ideal test market since the country has a great payment economy and Moneygram has more than 6,000 retail locations. Moneygram does not share his finances, but a spokesperson described it as “always profitable” with available and increasing available cash flows.

I asked Soohoo how he had circumvented the intimidating task of rolling up a business inherited to participate in the fiercely competitive fintech sector. He says that work was a three -part challenge, the first of which transformed organizational culture by setting up the good teams and leaders. This included the hiring of a former vice-president of Klarna, Luke Tuttle, to serve as director of Moneygram technology.

The second challenge, says Soohoo, concerns the construction of products. On this front, he says, his stay in Apple – where he interned and worked for four years – served him well. Soohoo recalled that he worked on the famous CLAMSHELL’s laptops of the company and how he learned from the incessant concentration of Steve Jobs on the customer experience. “Looking at the way a user uses the product tells you what he needs. You compete where you can be different,” he said.

Finally, Soohoo said he had to introduce a growing culture in a company that had not experienced it for decades. On this forehead, he says, the task was a question of patience and to recognize that “no one reached 3.0”. More broadly, Soohoo says that communication is an essential tool for achieving all of this – from a state of mind of growth to the excellence of products – and that it considers its ability to use clear language as executive superpower.

But what about the name? I emphasize that Moneygram sounds like the telegram of old -fashioned words, and that it must be an obstacle to the modernization of the brand. Not at all, says Soohoo, who quickly emphasizes that the name of the company also looks like Instagram. “Having” Gram “in our name is a huge advantage … It suggests people who send love to family and community,” he smiles.

It is too early to say if Moneygram will be able to perform the intimidating task of competing both with the inheritance giant Western Union as well as new money transfer titans like Wise and Paypal. But I got out of our lunch thinking that these competitors better do not sleep on this Soohoo guy.

Jeff John Roberts
X: @jeffjohnroberts
E-mail: jeff.roberts@fortune.com

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