A Chat with Vroon Modgill, CEO & Founder at Sokin: The World’s First Subscription Based Money Transfer App

Founded in 2019, Sokin was created from the need to build better financial services for economic migrants with families to support across the world.

We are the first payments platform to take the subscription model – like Spotify and Netflix – and allow consumers to receive and send unlimited money transfers and access cost-effective currency exchange in 38 currencies to over 200 countries and territories for one fixed monthly fee, without any hidden charges.

Customers can access currencies such as Euros, Dollars, Dirhams, Paseos, to name only a few, and enjoy a larger international reach than currently available via alternative providers on the market. We are committed to providing a greater level of transparency and adopting a subscription-based model allows us to ensure the customer is aware of what they are paying from day one, without fear of unexpected fees being added at the end.

Following the launch of our Global Currency Account offering in August 2021, we have rapidly expanded into 32 territories (India, Brazil and Canada imminent), welcomed 120,000 Sokin customers with a further 175,000 currently on the global waiting list, transferred over $100m around the world, delivered a multilingual app with five accessible languages, doubled the size of Sokin’s global workforce, partnered with five top-class football clubs (Arsenal, Everton, Fulham, AS Monaco) including our first NFL team (the Miami Dolphins) and launched our exclusive sponsorship community, Sokin – Money Goals.
 
 

 

How did you come up with the idea for the company?

 
As a first-generation immigrant, I watched first-hand as my father struggled with sending money back to India through a well-known remittance platform. The whole experience was stressful, expensive, and time-consuming. Unfortunately, this was a process repeated religiously for many years. Evidently, the world of global payments needed to change.

So, I created a business which is truly global and accessible to millions of people around the world, while simultaneously simplifying and democratising an out-of-date process. Sokin has been built to help keep money in the pockets of those who really need it and to support those on the outside of the English-centric financial ecosystem. People like my father.

In short, there’s simply no reason why today’s customers should continue to accept opaque commissions, unexplained costs, or repeat charges. We no longer pay for every track we download thanks to the likes of Spotify, or each film we stream via platforms like Netflix, yet when people want to send money or make a payment to family back home, we are hit by unspecified and variable costs.
 

How has the company evolved during the pandemic?

 
I launched Sokin just before the pandemic hit so the abnormal was the norm for us.  Since then, the company has grown and scaled exponentially in a short timeframe. The pandemic forced us into a way of working which, even today, feels unnatural to many legacy businesses. It is a way of working which has been built into our culture from the very beginning and we quickly discovered the location of the job doesn’t define the quality of work produced.

After all, the Sokin team planned, built, and launched the product remotely throughout the pandemic, across borders and in different time zones. We were only able to do this at the pace and scale we have because we all share a belief and a vision to create something better that has real benefits for users.
 

What can we hope to see from Sokin in the future?

 
As a young start-up, growth is very important to us and we will continue our ambitious roll-out of the Sokin Global Currency Account in regions such as North America, Asia Pacific, South Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East in 2022.

We also want to build and nurture our partner portfolio and continue to work with world leading football and sporting brands. By doing so, we hope consumers continue seeing the Sokin name in stadiums, in the community and on their screens putting us at the forefront of their mind. Ultimately, we want to become the provider of choice for global transfers and currency exchange.