Building trust in crypto payments with Google Maps Platform

Editor’s note: Today’s blog post comes from Pavel Matveev, CEO and Co-Founder, Wirex. Wirex is on a mission to take crypto mainstream while offering customers clear insights into every transaction with Google Maps Platform.

At Wirex, we’ve made it our mission to bring cryptocurrency into the mainstream. As the creator of the world’s first crypto-enabled payment card, we work directly with both Visa and MasterCard to allow our six million users to spend cryptocurrency with more than 50 million merchants around the world. And with our ‘cryptoback’ feature, users earn cryptocurrency every time they make a traditional currency payment, bridging the gap between traditional finance and digital currency.

Building trust with our customers is really important. As a fully licensed and regulated fintech company, with over 20 industry awards, we work hard to establish trust in our brand as a financial institution customers can depend on. We want to provide full transparency around the funds our customers invest with us. So when we realized back in 2019 that our customer service team was receiving a lot of calls from customers trying to understand where certain transactions had been made, we were quick to react.

Building trust with Enriched Transactions from Google Maps Platform

We worked with Google Maps Platform partner Snowdrop Solutions to implement its Merchant Reconciliation System (MRS), which uses Enriched Transactions from Google Maps Platform to augment a customer’s transaction with contextual location information.

Now, our customers can use our app to see clear, detailed transaction information, including merchant names, categories and logos, as well as the address and map location of where the transaction took place. Customers can instantly recognize their own transactions making it easy to identify any fraudulent transactions, so they can quickly freeze their card or claim a chargeback. This has led to a 50% reduction in the number of transaction-related inquiries to our customer service team leading to reduced customer services overhead, and it has helped us to build even greater trust and transparency with our customers.

Growing our business with global transaction data

MRS and Google Maps Platform have helped us to scale our business, too. Not only has the reduction in customer service workload helped us to refocus resources where they’re most needed, the global reach of Google Maps Platform has allowed us to expand geographically, offering customers the same level of transaction data wherever they are.

Since implementing Enriched Transactions, we have doubled our user base from three to six million, and expanded from our London base into both Asia-Pacific and the U.S.

Clearer data for smarter business decisions

Our customers aren’t the only ones benefiting from enriched transaction data. With unprecedented insights into the spending habits of our users, we are able to make data-driven decisions about our products and business. Understanding, for example, that the two main spending categories for customers in Singapore are traveling and restaurants could, for instance, allow us to provide more cashback for those categories, to boost spending volume.

All of which puts us in a strong position to achieve our goal of reaching 10 million customers within the next 18 months. We’re confident that MRS and Enriched Transactions from Google Maps Platform are helping us to scale our business and further build the trust of our customers, so we can keep building trust in digital currency.

For more information on Google Maps Platform, visit our website.