Presenting cryptocurrency payment platform UTRUST
Recently, we helped cryptocurrency payment platform UTRUST rebuild their corporate business presentation from the ground up. I talked with Vice President of Global Partnerships Sanja Kon about UTRUST, communicating the evolving brand, and what brought her to the Zug, Switzerland-based startup.
“It was one of those nightmare experiences,” Sanja told me by phone. “I was on vacation in Canada when I discovered that I couldn’t access my money. I wanted to transfer money to a prepaid credit card but my bank blocked the transaction because they thought it was fraud.”
Looking for a payment alternative
This realization that she didn’t have control of her own money brought Sanja face to face with what she calls the “inefficiencies of traditional payment options”. As a former Head of Marketplaces and Large Enterprise Partnerships at PayPal UK, Sanja knew that past inefficiencies had opened the way for disruptive challengers. She wondered what the next step in the payments evolution would be – and how she could contribute to finding solutions.
According to Sanja, she started to learn more about blockchain on her own, discovered UTRUST, and reached out to them. “My personal experience made me question the traditional payment system, and led me to believe that UTRUST could bring needed innovation to the payments ecosystem,” she told me.
UTRUST is different
UTRUST is the world’s first cryptocurrency payment solution to offer instant transactions, buyer protection and crypto-to-cash settlements. But “it’s not a new blockchain,” Sanja explained. “It’s an end-to-end payment platform with settlements in fiat currency” (that is, in the dollars and euros you’re familiar with).
Buyer protection is an essential part what makes UTRUST’s offer unique – “no one else in the world offers that in this market at the moment,” Sanja told me – and the key to wider-spread adoption of cryptocurrency.
After all, buyer protection is what helped traditional online payments go from niche to no-brainer. The possibility of refunds and a platform for third-party dispute resolution means buyers around the world feel safer about purchasing from online merchants.
In fact, it’s this last group that Sanja sees as key to the future of UTRUST. And through a series of conference speeches, panel talks, and interviews, she’s working to drive merchant adoption of cryptocurrency alongside other payment options in their storefronts. Which is why she turned to us.
Telling the UTRUST story
We worked with Sanja and UTRUST to help create a streamlined pitch deck that could tell the UTRUST story and inspire more merchants to come on board.
First we developed the presentation story along classic problem-solution lines, emphasizing the platform’s main strength: UTRUST makes crypto payments safe and simple. We also worked to demystify crypto in a few slides – after all, the online payment operations we now take for granted are arguably no less complex and no more understood by the average user. And most importantly, we used human storytelling to illustrate a purchase and possible dispute resolution journey to show both merchants and buyers that buyer protection ultimately protects them both.
With the story in place, we built on UTRUST’s already strong brand identity and style to deliver a straightforward but versatile business presentation.
Premiering the presentation
Sanja premiered the business presentation at “The Future of Payments,” an event at the UTRUST London offices during the The Next Web’s last international blockchain and crypto conference, Hard Fork Decentralized.
“The presentation really worked,” she told me. “It was really simple and visually represented everything well.”
UTRUST, women and blockchain
Since her presentation during Hard Fork Decentralized, Sanja has continued to help promote UTRUST and bring new partners on board. “It’s our goal to keep signing new partnerships with the right players, marketplaces, tokens and payment processors,” she said.
She’s also proud to be one of the emergent women in the until-recently very male-dominated blockchain space. “It’s really important right now that women become more visible in blockchain,” she told me. “And thankfully there are some wonderfully supportive women out there making a name for themselves.”
Blockchain, the online payments landscape, and UTRUST. “We’re all in constant evolution,” said Sanja. Watch this space.
