Ian Gilbert is Senior Vice President (SVP), Enterprise Sales Strategy at Airtm. He has a 30+ year career as a commercial leader in the technology industry, and has worked with companies across the maturity spectrum to help them expand their potential and achieve their growth objectives.
Airtm is a highly connected digital dollar account, offering over 500 methods to buy and sell digital dollars. Incorporated in the United States and registered with FinCEN as a Money Service Business (MSB), Airtm operates in over 190 countries.
With over 30 years of experience spanning from founding startups to leading public companies, how have you seen the role of revenue leadership evolve, and what key lessons have you carried from those early-stage challenges into your current role at Airtm?
Technology has changed and impacted revenue leadership in largely positive ways. However, the fundamentals are the fundamentals, and technology only helps if the revenue generation approach/process is sound.
Revenue leadership has always been mixed up with sales leadership and the assumption that revenue is ‘created’ during the sales cycle and then ‘protected’ by an account management approach. There’s now a growing appreciation of the value of orchestrating all parts of a company’s revenue-generating system and the fact that optimum performance comes from creating value throughout the lifetime of customer engagement.
As such, modern revenue leadership is increasingly focused on the consideration of multiple channels and methods across the spectrum of markets served by a company relative to the stage of the business and the maturity of the product/solution offering. It’s focused on maximizing the entire revenue-generating lifetime of all customer relationships – and it’s likely in some businesses that existing customers have far more revenue-generation potential than new prospects. It’s also focused on efficiency of growth, and on using tools/technologies at the right times and in the right ways to optimize the model.
From an early-stage perspective, it’s tough to get everything right at once! A lot of experimentation is necessary. Finding the learning in each experience and codifying it to make modest gains is the key to creating long-term, sustainable growth for companies at this stage.
That’s hard because we’re instinctively ‘hustling,’ and every deal feels good – but I’m a believer that learning to help improve the model can often be significantly more valuable than the revenue from a single deal, however big.
At Airtm, we’ve focused on digital entrepreneurship. We’re trying to optimize our role in bringing value to workers and entrepreneurs throughout the Global South and the companies that they work with. We have multiple ways to create value, and we’re constantly trying to learn about the best blend of approaches and capabilities to increase value and sustain it for longer.
How does Airtm ensure the security and stability of digital dollar accounts, particularly for users in developing economies?
Airtm is focused on ensuring that all of our users across the Global South can access their money easily and freely, send and receive money quickly and inexpensively, and do so with the knowledge that their money is safe and transactions are secure. For that reason, Airtm uses USDC as the digital currency for all transactions. USDC is a stablecoin backed by highly liquid cash, and cash-equivalent assets pegged 1:1 to the US dollar. In other words, it is secure and stable and allows our users in developing economies to manage their money with total confidence.
In what ways can companies leverage Airtm’s platform to navigate the challenges of the growing AI Data Labeling market?
Airtm has spent nearly a decade helping users across the Global South access and use their money as they choose. Many of these users undertake work, and an increasing amount of that work supports the AI industry.
Our mantra is that we help companies unleash the world’s digital entrepreneurs for their businesses. We principally help companies attract, pay, and engage workers around the world so that they can build and maintain their workforces in developing economies efficiently, consciously, and profitably.
Practically speaking, not only do we offer the best method to pay AI workers throughout the global south, but we also have solutions to enable companies to engage with our community to find new workers, undertake research, and to undertake education. Organizations like Scale AI – one of the biggest players in the sector – have been working with us for years to fulfill their needs around the world, and an increasing number of AI and BPO companies are choosing us as their preferred solution.
With over 500 payment methods available, how does Airtm manage transaction efficiency and ensure low-cost cross-border payments?
The heart of this is our peer-to-peer network, which facilitates secure transactions with low costs and minimal limitations across a wide range of geographies. Our network is particularly focused on the global south, an increasingly important group of countries in terms of the future of work—but with some challenges in terms of financial and banking systems. Our capabilities in these countries are unparalleled, which is why we’ve attracted so many users and companies that serve the Global South.
We also spend significant time and resources on ensuring we maintain extensive partner relationships across the regions we serve and on product innovation. We also have a world-class product development group that develops our offerings for consumers and businesses alike to increase value and extend capabilities.
The recent launch of our US Virtual Account is an excellent example of this innovation. This solution opens up near limitless options for our users and provides tremendous flexibility for our business customers – the perfect complement to our other capabilities.
How does Airtm’s use of USDC protect users’ funds from local currency devaluation, and what role does this play in developing markets?
Because it’s backed by highly liquid cash and cash-equivalent assets and pegged 1:1 to the US dollar, one key benefit of USDC is the protection it provides against the devaluation of local currencies around the world.
Airtm has spent nearly a decade supporting earners across the Global South, and we have a very clear understanding of the need – the right – that these earners have to be able to access their money quickly, securely and with as little erosion of value as possible. We believe that our use of USDC contributes to our goal of enabling earners in the right way – we are able to provide Global access, always-on 24/7/365, near-instant settlement, and near zero fees.
What specific benefits does Airtm offer companies looking to streamline payroll and cross-border payments, especially in emerging markets?
We understand emerging markets better than anyone, and we’ve spent nearly a decade serving customers in those regions. Specifically, for companies looking to streamline payroll and cross-border payments to those markets, we provide solutions that help them attract, pay, and engage contributors in more efficient, conscious, and profitable ways.
We help facilitate faster and less costly payout processes. Our enterprise app offers a very simple experience for creating payments, visualizing activity, and managing roles. Our API enables the integration of Airtm capabilities into our customers’ standard processes and systems.
How does Airtm’s peer-to-peer network differentiate it from other e-wallets, and what advantages does this provide to both individual users and businesses?
It should be said that Airtm has built the most active and extensive community of earners in the global south. Our community members are highly engaged and proactive, and we believe this is highly beneficial to the businesses we work with.
Our peer-to-peer capabilities leverage the size and engagement of our community, enabling users to match up with cashiers within the community to conduct transactions securely with minimal restrictions or limits. Peer-to-peer transactions are one of the easiest and most reliable ways to transfer funds and offer substantial optionality for users in terms of payment methods. Those users who qualify to become cashiers can create an earning stream from this activity.
What opportunities does Airtm provide for companies in industries like market research, content creation, and trading platforms to grow their reach?
We have a community of more than 1.6m users across the Global South, and community members are hungry for more opportunities to work and earn as they pursue their digital entrepreneurship journeys.
Our business customers get excited about the ability to communicate and engage with this audience, and we have several offerings that facilitate this with our various community touchpoints. We have great success stories showcasing the value created for all participants when this happens.
Our community team has a suite of offerings and capabilities designed to help companies access our community. Having understood what’s needed—examples include contributors with specific skills for a data annotation project, a particular demographic group for a piece of market research, or creators and influencers to help build reputation and reach—our team recommends an approach to engaging the community through multiple channels and then assists with program execution and measurement.
How can Airtm help businesses better understand the payment preferences of digital workers and optimize their payroll systems to increase engagement?
We expend significant time and effort tracking trends, assessing the community pulse, and interviewing digital workers to understand their needs and priorities and find ways to help them. We encourage all of our business customers to do the same. We can help them by facilitating interaction with our community through methods like surveys and social outreach, and we guide our customers on the best approaches to understanding more.
Ultimately, user behaviors are the best teacher. If workers who secure contracts through a particular digital marketplace like Upwork, for example, are choosing Airtm as their means of managing their money when they receive payment, and if they then demonstrate that they want to use their money in a particular way – we think the digital marketplace in question should act to make it easier to access Airtm and to better facilitate the actions that users are already taking. We can see those preferences in the use of products like our US Virtual Account, and we try very hard to ensure we alert our business customers to the opportunities available to them to capitalize.
How does Airtm’s bulk payments feature simplify mass payouts for businesses managing remote employees or freelancers across different regions?
Our business customers range from small – paying a few people in a single region – to massively complex – making hundreds of thousands of real-time payouts per month, some as low as $0.01, across a myriad of countries in the Global South and beyond. Our bulk payments functionality helps all of these companies to achieve incredible simplicity and consistency through a straightforward UI, intuitive controls and tools, common-sense role management, and elegant reporting. Our larger customers are able to manage complex mass payout programs accurately and efficiently with modest resources.
Thank you for the great interview, readers who wish to learn more should visit Airtm.
