Catering to the needs of entirely new personas with yet-unexplored needs and behaviours. Going global, retesting your abilities. Onboarding citizens from different walks of life, staring at a colourful analytics geo map in awe. All of it, even the idea itself, makes many excited. Achieving that mission is the dream, though in my experience, some gracefully fail to grasp how products, especially financial apps, come alive in different markets. The excitement of “going global” masks the complex reality of how products actually cross borders.

Starting with an analogy, it is like a circus operation; the show begins long before the curtain rises. It starts with craftfully and lawfully building a stage first to perform on it afterwards. The craftfull-ness mainly comes from the careful construction of a trustworthy stage: assembling reliable builders, forming strategic partnerships, navigating regulations. You, after all, aim to build a sturdy structure that would not go down easily while you’re on it, performing. Designing and testing your stage, drafting contingency plans to keep the act going if anything unforeseen hits you. The show must go on though you drop the ball or they change fire regulations. Lawfulness, on the other hand, is twofold: how compatible the laws are for you to perform your slightly unconventional show, and also, how well or suspicious they look to the outsiders. You can engineer the strongest structure on your own, but even with perfect engineering, a location’s troubled history can keep audiences away.

For a slightly more grounded analogy, launching a financial product internationally resembles adding a sandwich to an airline menu, the menu you can find in front of you. What passengers see, a simple new item with a €4.95 price tag, masks months of orchestration. Imagine you work for an airline and you feel like it’s time to introduce a new sandwich. You do not make a sandwich on your own and follow some D2C model, handing it to passengers yourself. You first set out to understand what kind of an item would sell and could be added to the menu, right? Analysing your sales data, brainstorming with stakeholders, running competitor research and all: you start with a discovery phase. Once you put your finger on a roughly defined new sandwich idea, you go on to talk to your suppliers to get them this new item ready for you. They start experimenting, pitching alternatives, and bringing their bite-sized samples. You test it. You give your feedback. They revise it. You test it again, and eventually you approve a formula. Then they start producing it in bulk. I’m not going into the details of their supply chain here, just to stay arguably succinct. In the meantime, you start redesigning your print menu, running the same iterative cycle with your printing partner and you mass print the new menu. Next step, changing all the menus in all the planes in your fleet. One by one, old menus are collected and new ones inserted. God knows how long it takes and what kind of bugs you encounter while implementing new menus. While menus are being changed, you draft plans to start supplying your aircrafts accordingly, actually getting this new item to passengers. Also, simultaneously, you update your digital inventory too. You’ve already taken photos of this new item, attached a brief explanation with calorie calculations run at a lab. You did those already, yes. Now, you add the item to your menu for online visitors too, with additional adjustments on its availability. There are, of course, rules; it can not be served on each leg, each flight. You put all this into your code, conditions are written, you test it, and you give feedback. It gets revised and shipped. There are possibly some training aspects for your crews, too, but let’s call it an analogy for today. We’re just adding a new item to our menu for €4.95.

As you may feel the sentiment, some stuff needs much deeper engagement to come alive. Similar to adding sandwiches to airline menus or performing as a circus with an unorthodox act, financial products go through a multilayered process behind the scenes to provide services via their simple, easy-to-use mobile apps.

Though there seem to be many variables at play, we can say that products require two foundational elements. First, the apparatus offers a new delicacy. To plant your flag in a new market, you first focus on engineering the optimal environment, the means by which you bring your solution. A servicing entity, probably with all the legally required parts, partners, and business processes. This is to accomplish two things: to get a green light for your business readiness and to have a robust system that’ll hold up under pressure. Two, your would-be product should not only be localised, but also be a tailored solution. Your sandwich with a twist for locals to enjoy. Your Maharaja Mac, which is made with chicken instead of beef. I’ll delve into this part, I mean building a tailored solution, not Maharaja Mac, in another post.

Selecting the right market demands clarity about organisational vision. How do you choose a market, a point on a world map, or a niche? Defining a global target is a herculean task itself, especially if this is the first time you’re doing it as an organisation. Millions of ideas appear in circulation with no one making a decisive case. It starts with solving the puzzle, if you ask me, what’s disguised in your way of thinking and vision as a company? Mostly, your vision and mission by their nature do not point to where to plant a flag as your next move, but, if you have a grand and sound claim, you can unravel and backtrack to land on a meaningful target. If your mission doesn’t inherently point toward international expansion, question whether global ambitions align with your core purpose. Without this alignment, international expansion becomes a solution searching for a problem.

If you’re lucky and your vision aligns with going global and you can see yourself in different markets with your products, your challenge is to evaluate markets across four dimensions: commercial viability, regulatory environment, market opportunity, and cultural compatibility. Your chosen location serves dual purposes: operational headquarters and either direct service delivery or regional distribution hub.

So, here goes understanding commercial laws and regulations with respect to what you do, and how favourable all these bits are for you. However, it may sound boring or too legal-ish for some ears, but it’s got its merits, providing food for thought for your future plans. Reverse engineering incorporated entities to figure out what sort of structures are in place would not only reveal what sort of legal apparatus you need to establish but also hint at much about your future product strategy.

To expedite the process of finding a habitat for yourself, you may rely on partners who’ve been there and done that. But how much first-hand struggle you’ll end up having would correlate with how focused you are on globalisation. If it’s a tiny project or an afterthought for your org, then it’ll get abysmal resources, and you need to scrap a lot. Otherwise, with good partners and determination, you can move at a neck-breaking speed.

This brings us to finding reliable, like-minded partners. Choosing the ones who understand you and your business and, if possible, are experienced in doing what you’re asking them to do. Partners are partners; good ones have many clients. If you want a good and trustworthy service, then pump up the budget. If you’re going small, then you may have to dilute your expectations of trust or double-check the work provided often. Since you’re not single-handedly moving a lever on budget, this part also entails a bit of politics internally. The more you turn this into a top priority within your company, you wind up having more resources at your disposal. With fewer resources, on the contrary, you and your team spend more on analysing your would-be partners and their agency.

With your HQ anchored in a selected location, no matter the partner you choose, digging deeper into these three areas would benefit you greatly: taxation, AML/CTF rules, and data protection laws. There are some reasons for this. First off, your business, like any other, is unique. Not for you, maybe, but for your partners, whose default view is being sceptical about your plans. So their expertise will turn into educated guesses at some point. Secondly, the clearer the picture you can present on these fronts internally, you’ll muster more stakeholder power. Failing to answer questions coming from your sister departments will diminish your chances of going forward or delay internal decisions, especially at the earlier stages. And thirdly, you’ll hear “this works here, but I do not know how it’s in your country” a couple of times at least. A bilateral perspective on data sharing, travel rules, or bookkeeping is what stays under the hood and needs expertise from different partners. So, it’s a good exercise to think hard about the realities of your business along the way, though, perhaps, it’s not your speciality. But, thinking about how and when we’ll pay taxes? Who will make up our books? How can we process user data? And more will fall upon you if you’re steering the initiative. In line with everything so far, as you may have had the hint already, going global means there’ll be many hats to be worn by only a few heads.

Let’s say, as of now, you’ve got your priorities straight, have done your research and got lucky forging partnerships. Now comes the inevitable drag effect of the jurisdiction of your choosing. Unescapable vortex of establishing things officially. Incorporation presents classic chicken-and-egg challenges: banks require company registration; registration requires business addresses. So, here your risk appetite and timeline chime in.

With a higher risk appetite, you could find workarounds easily, but with a caveat: you can also lose the most valuable resource, time, if you bet on the wrong horse. So, it’s also a good idea to come to a consensus about how bold you’ll be in your actions. Have this conversation in the first place, as there’ll be times you have to take action on a whim.

As you progress, you might need to do extra-curricular activities internally to make sure regulators understand you better. This bit may prove as a test for your teams and ambitions, in fact, as it demands constant reassurances and optimism to hold the spirits high. The trick is not losing situational awareness at this stage. This is not the only thing going on at your organisation. Tons of stuff is getting done, thrown out, reassessed, or reconsidered daily. Without clear prioritisation and organisational commitment, momentum dissipates quickly.

Let’s take another step further. You put everything together for the gala and beyond. You’ve established an entity, obtained regulatory approvals. Congrats, now you’ve got the stage to put on a show! The easy part is done—pun is unfortunately intended. Next, you have to keep alive everything until you grow mature enough to convince yourself it’ll walk on its legs. Who has control over bank accounts? Who is gonna report financial audits? What happens if our company address changes? Now, add to this mix ever-changing regulations. Imagine what you’ve done following regulations that have changed overnight, and you’re expected to keep up with these new rules in a sweetly defined grace period.

Before talking about the “fun” part, users and products and localisation and Maharaja Mac, there are more action items to be mentioned: things about internal politics. You and your teams are into this globalisation thing, but this is one of those things that everyone may offer opinions on. You may overhear alternative market suggestions mid-process, infrastructure changes planned without your input, or back-channel discussions that bypass your plans. Though seems minimal in effect, you should be wary of these sorts of ideas gaining ground without you being involved in discussions.

One last thing to add, initiating early dialogues to ruffle the feathers on the design and development fronts should also be an item on your agenda. During the earlier stages, someone has to start thinking about what kind of changes would be addressed to provide services when the day arrives. From your DB architecture to 3rd party integrations, there is a myriad of actions waiting to be tackled, again, long before the launch. Similarly, starting with marketing and customer success functions, you should be feeding teams about ever-materialising plans, gradually increasing urgency. The last thing you want is to have set up the stage and not be able to sell tickets as there is no show.

All in all, adding a new item to your menu requires many things: dedication, ambition, tenacity, resources, and shared consciousness. It’s an act or an art to bring all these bits together to ship your product somewhere else. So the next time someone says ‘let’s launch in Brazil,’ ask them how many menus they’re ready to redesign, and who’s going to serve the sandwiches.