A once great company ruined by inexperienced leaders who stepped into the shoes of C-level positions
Pros
- XE was founded in 1993 by two inspiring tech driven entrepreneurs who began an amazing company in Newmarket. Unfortunately, they exited years ago when XE was acquired by Euronet along with a swarm of talent. Since then the company culture and growth has been crashing as the keys were handed over to UK's leadership team from Hifx who merged with XE. - Web and mobile traffic of millions create learning opportunities.
Cons
- At the expense of talented employees, for a better part of several years, the company has been led by inexperienced leaders in the UK with a lack of competence, empathy or vision. One toxic leader leading to the hiring of more as it spirals throughout the company. - Primary goal of shamelessly trying to copy competitors (came from the mouth of the person at the top) and dreaming for profits rather than understanding their user/customer segments. - An entire year spent with employees across 3 regions being whipped on attempting to transform the company's primary app in a rushed, poorly planned and executed manner. In this process, it lead to a mass exit of talent. Evidence of this disaster is visible via Google Playstore by downgrading the user experience by at-least 10 years for millions of users for the the wish of increasing money transfer transactions. A rating of 4.5 stars driven down to sub 3s with mass uninstalls. XE achieved nothing but reputational damage as users continue to flock to other currency converter and money transfer apps. A lack of common sense, if you can't provide a functioning currency converter to your users, they will never trust you for the money transfer side! These are the consequences of having a death march towards a release and ignoring all cries from employees. You won't meet Euronet earnings expectations, if you don't have any users left to convert to money transfer! - Warning signs, tight deadlines, poor quality, estimates famously ignored as marching orders were given to meet the magical deadlines set and not the estimates given by teams despite every week an agile fisherman chart and product team constantly told them otherwise. Ultimately, destroyed the work life balance of most employees. - Downward financial performance despite every competitor in the market segment outperforming in the current covid climate. Changes needed to replace arrogant C-level executives with leaders who inspire a change for growth and actually take the time to know who their users/customers are and what they want. - People generally have a fear of speaking out, given the track record of C-level executives yelling in demo meetings containing 100+ people and previously going on firing sprees for those who disagree with them. - In the span of a year, XE execs added a CTO, fired the CTO, then decided to hire a contract CTO who replaced experienced technology VPs with contract VPs and then all of them got replaced with VPs from Euronet. - Leadership isn't for everyone - C-level leadership is for those who inspire others to do better, not bark marching orders at them and complain about how they have to explain to their parent company bosses that projects are late when they failed to listen to their people in the beginning. - There is no clear direction of what the company wants to achieve, they are willing to rush out changes without understanding, assessing and making meaningful positive impact to customers. It is clear the only thing they are good at is creating a sweat-shop environment for employees to rush out their meaningless changes to frustrate customers even more. - While there is pressure from parent company for XE to meet short-term quarterly earning targets rather than investing in the future and creating a better brand, it is abundantly clear that the executive team at XE does not have the temperament or the leadership skills to run a company, let alone a tech company!
