We interviewed Zacchary Wengrow, who is part of the product team at Meero. Zacchary manages the developments related to finance, payments and legal challenges/projects at Meero. We talk about his job, Meero’s payment challenges and much more!

Hi Zacchary, it’s great to have you here! Could you introduce yourself in a few words and tell us about your background?

Of course. I’m 25 and I graduated in 2016 with a Master in finance from a Business School in Montreal. I had then an experience in M&A that didn’t satisfy me so I decided to go work in a startup, thinking that I could go back to investing later.

I had the opportunity to join ManoMano by the time we were around 80 employees. The first big fundraising (€60M) was about to be announced. At this moment we were only 3 people for the finance, accounting, and payment departments. Then, a new CFO came and structured the finance team. At this time, we were doing our pay-ins with Mercanet and Adyen and our pay-outs manually. A few months later, we started to look at different marketplace payment solutions and chose Stripe Connect. At this moment I started to work more on the product side. We rebuilt the whole payment and fraud management process.

Later, I joined Meero as a Product Manager. I’m in charge of managing the developments related to finance, payments and legal challenges/projects. For payments, we work with Stripe for the pay-ins and Stripe plus Payoneer for the pay-outs.

Meero has become very famous in the past months for reaching the status of French unicorn. Before going further on your payment challenges and projects, could you tell us more about Meero?

Meero allows image creators to generate additional revenue by connecting them with companies that have recurring needs in visual content (Airbnb, Uber Eats…).

On the other side, we enable companies to order photo reports with specific requirements and in large quantities.
From here we gather a large number of requirements and handle the assignment of these photoshoots to several photographers. Finally, Meero internally develops AI technology to provide a photo-editing service, to streamline its photographers’ process.

Could you tell us about your role at Meero, and how you work with the different teams as a Product Manager?

At Meero, the product team is organized this way: each Product Manager (we are fourteen) handles tech squads, has dedicated subjects, and reports to a Product Lead or directly to our VP Product.

My mission is to manage finance, payment, and related legal developments. On the legal side, it’s mainly about ensuring our compliance with GDPR.
On the payment and finance side, there are lots of things to do, namely with our PSD2/SCA migration with Stripe at the moment. We are also reshaping our billing system and our tax management process. Originally, our processes and systems were created to operate in France. Today, we have billing entities in Bresil, Japan, India and in the US, which of course completely changes the way we are working. We are, for example, creating a tax engine that is able to generate automatic tax calculations depending on who bills who.

In my daily job, I mainly work with the finance team and all the customer-facing teams on pay-ins and pay-outs. This includes teams working directly with photographers, and the customer success teams.

Can you tell us what are your current goals for Meero’s payments?

We have 3 prior challenges on payment and finance when it comes to the product:

1. Going back to the basics: what is a payment, how it works and how we can build the most scalable payment infrastructure for Meero;
2. Redesigning our billing and tax management system: We have many more cross-border payments and we want to make our billing and tax management processes and systems way more scalable;
3. By the end of the year, we want to be able to cover 100% of the pay-ins use-cases of our customers. Today, it’s not the case in, for example, Brazil, where Stripe will not let us collect payments with our local entity.

Last but not least, what are the most important KPIs on payments for Meero and how do you monitor them?

Today we monitor our payment KPIs with ProcessOut’s monitoring tool, Telescope. We namely monitor:

• our payment method split;
• our acceptance rate;
• the fees we pay on transactions.

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Want to know more about how merchants deal with payment? Have a look at the other interviews we made with:

• Laurene Lecomte, Head of Risk, Payment, and Fraud at Back Market
• Nicolas Bosmans, Fraud & Payment Manager at Oui.sncf
• Paul Mondollot, FP&A Manager at Aircall