This is the final part of the story. You can find chapter two by clicking here.

Rapid expansion

During the first half of 2021, recruitment went into overdrive. In the first quarter of 2022, the team grew to more than 50 members — a stacked executive leadership group that cumulatively held more than 250 years of payments experience. Hiring the best, no matter what became a key recruitment strategy, bringing superstars from the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT), Mastercard, Ripple, General Electric Capital, Citicorp, Pundi X and Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation Group. 

Having one of the most expensive payrolls in the blockchain space is paying off, with the team opening doors worldwide.

Kelvin Lee, president of WadzPay Asia Pacific, recently joined, carrying over his experience from Ripple and Mastercard. Lee said, “I joined WadzPay because it offers a complete digital payment experience that covers business-to-business-to-consumer that no other company offers. Ripple focuses on cross-border business-to-business. Mastercard and Visa are predominately business-to-consumer, and with WadzPay’s blockchain ecosystem, it’s a perfect marriage of digital payment services built around a payment-agnostic distributed-ledger technology framework.”

The India-based development team also saw rapid expansion, with growing development capability as a key hiring focus for 2022. WadzPay aims to create 200 more jobs this year with significant revenue streams from multiple partnerships forged in the fourth quarter of 2021 and the first quarter of 2022.

The year 2022 saw the opening of offices in Singapore and Dubai. Efforts in hiring IT professionals and developers led to a second development center’s opening in India — one that is quadruple the size of the first, simply because the initial office ran out of space.

The 2022 outlook for WadzPay

WadzPay is currently involved in multiple live launches with partners and many proof-of-concepts, and is closing out final negotiations with other partners, including a potential cross-border central bank digital currency trial for the e-Yuan in collaboration with a local partner in the market. The team has successfully completed the tools for e-commerce integration with major platforms allowing store owners to accept digital currencies. A significant global partnership is also ready to be announced not long after this article is published that should be the talk of the town in the digital currency market.

To service these partnerships and vertical growth trajectory, WadzPay is planning to open offices in Johannesburg, South Africa and Zürich, Switzerland, and North America, and is looking to field a 200-members-strong team by the end of the year.

Stas Madorski, senior vice president of blockchain strategy and who started off by leading the marketing efforts to transition from Wadz to WadzPay, said, “Anish instantly sold me on his vision and what a difference a blockchain-based payment ecosystem could make to the lives of people around the world. The company we see now is completely different from the company before it. There were missteps along the way, and we have successfully turned it around into a company that I firmly believe will be the biggest driver of blockchain adoption worldwide.

“I’ve seen the company grow from a few people on a balcony to one where I can barely remember the names of all employees due to its size. We’ve come from a place where every potential partner we’ve met required months of education and extra legwork to a reputable company with innovative solutions such as our tokenization and loyalty programs. We have an incredibly strong team, and I am thrilled to go to work every day knowing that I will learn something new from them.”

Anish Jain, CEO and managing director of WadzPay, said, “Despite the toll that the failure of Wadz had on my financial and mental health, I am glad that I had the experience. Failure is only absolute when we don’t learn from our mistakes. The years of 2018-2020 were a learning masterclass for me. It made me stronger and more focused. It is important to never give up and rally the team around your vision.”

Everything’s coming up roses for WadzPay, anchored by the staunch support from the blockchain community that clearly understands the company’s vision and recognizes how transformative WadzPay will be for the world of payments.