How our marketplace works
Miguel Valencia
May, 31, 2023
1 min. reading
One of the main pillars of Airtm is our P2P marketplace. This post is part of a series of publications that we will be doing in the coming weeks, where we will try to explain in the best possible way how our marketplace works and why it is a crucial piece in the growth of Airtm.
To Airtm, the Marketplace is the compound of all those internal processes that help us build, maintain and grow our cashier network.
Our mission is to give digital entrepreneurs the best way to move their dollars between disconnected economies through a P2P network where the escrow allows them to do it quickly and securely.
For us, maintaining a reliable network ensures that our clients will be able to request and complete a transaction whenever they need to and with the best available conditions. That’s why we focus our attention on the performance metrics that will allow us to:
- Ensure that transactions are accepted by a cashier (Acceptance Rate)
- Give our users the best exchange rate possible
- Maintain a low acceptance time
- Maintain a balanced market where we have enough cashiers available to complete transactions without being oversupplied
Multiple factors interact to offer a reliable network to our users. At Airtm, we divide them into 4 categories and we’ve created specialized processes and monitoring metrics for each so that we can run the marketplace efficiently:
Cashier Ops
It is our first process. It is responsible for designing, implementing, and iterating on strategies to keep our cashier network up and running. This vertical sees everything related to acquiring, converting, and activating new cashiers on the platform. Likewise, this process tracks everything related to preserving engaged cashiers and coordinating strategies to reduce churn.
Rates Management
We have a team in charge of maintaining our exchange rates and pricing algorithm, which will be explained in detail in a future post. We use the data obtained from our transactions to determine the best price for all the participants in the transaction flow. Our cashiers, our clients, and Airtm.
Payment Method Management
We also have a team that focuses on identifying and prioritizing new payments to be added to the Marketplace. This team is taking user feedback constantly to prioritize the changes and adds of new payment methods. Additionally this team is in charge of working with the Product team to ensure we collect all necessary details to provide a seamless experience for our users and Cashiers.
Research / Development
We have a team in charge of designing and iterating on the algorithms we use in the marketplace to calculate our fees and to distribute transactions throughout our cashier network
Matching algorithm
This algorithm was created to make the distribution of transactions evenly among cashiers based on probability and without preferencing any specific cashier group or person. The objective is to make sure that any active cashier has the same probability of seeing transactions without taking into account the speed of its internet, or if the user is using any kind of bot to accept transactions.
Pricing algorithm
This algorithm was created to make sure that the rates we offer to the customers are adequate and according to the current market conditions. As Airtm marketplace varies vs other marketplaces where the “cashiers” define their own rates, we need to be constantly calculating what is the best rate that a customer should see to make sure that it is accepted by a corresponding cashier.
We are continually improving and investing in each of these areas to create the most efficient peer-to-peer Marketplace for our users and cashiers. We have learned a ton over the years and will continue to take our learnings and move them into action.
