This week’s Align Commerce customer profiles features Xpogo, the official governing body behind the sport of extreme pogo.
Extreme pogo does not easily come to mind as a competitive sport, having only started within the past decade. Although young in its age, extreme pogo continues to grow with its global network of athletes and widely attended international tour, Pogopalooza: The Xpogo World Championship Series.
As the main organization responsible for managing the sport, Xpogo needed an efficient way to pay its athletes from all over the world.
Initially, Xpogo co-founder Josh Phan-Gruber used inefficient methods such as bank checks and Western Union to pay athletes. Despite being established payment methods, these were not optimal for Xpogo. Checks took more than a month to clear, in addition to the expensive bank fees. Western Union also imposed high fees and Josh had to figure out where the athlete was when payday arrived. Since Xpogo athletes are often travelling to perform at various events, this proved to be difficult. Josh eventually tried PayPal, only to experience the same frustrations – high fees and long wait times of 3-4 days for the money to arrive.
Unhappy with the inefficient, expensive and time-consuming process of the methods above, Josh looked to Google for a solution. A quick Google search for companies that can do efficient, cross-border payments led him to Align Commerce.
“I got pretty excited about Align, when I saw the site,” said Josh. What drew him to Align was its centralized way to pay all of Xpogo’s international athletes. All of Xpogo’s payments could be tracked and organized through Align’s simple and easy-to-use dashboard.
Having to send out payments weekly/bi-weekly used to be costly, but it costs $0 to send or receive payments with Align Commerce, saving Xpogo thousands of dollars a year.
More importantly, Josh was impressed by Align’s customer service. Our Customer Success Specialist went above and beyond his expectations by being hands on and thorough with using the system. Align Commerce was the seamless solution Xpogo was looking for, and now the small, but growing, sport can focus on building a stronger presence in the world of extreme sports.
The case study can be found here: Xpogo Case Study
Veem is a global payments network built for businesses. We began in 2014 with the intention of making international money transfers as simple as purchasing a cup of coffee. Since then, we’ve revolutionized the way businesses pay and get paid around the world by empowering owners, accountants, and financial professionals to take control over their payment processes. We level the playing field by providing enterprise-level financial tools and negotiating power to the small businesses who need it most.