Page 22: of Maritime Reporter Magazine (January 2021)

Interview

ShipMoney &

Seafarer

Wages “101”

Stuart Ostrow developed ShipMoney as a means to make the process of paying crew more ef? cient and cost-effective. Little did he realize then that his company could be instrumental in helping seafarers during their greatest time of crisis.

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By Greg Trauthwein

Images: ShipMoney crew members working on cruise ships; they all come from

How did you come create ShipMoney?

I’m the de? nition of an accidental salesman. By profes- foreign countries and they’re all paid in cash.” It was the per- sional training, I’m a Big Six CPA. Many years ago, I read a fect opportunity to introduce a payroll card program. business plan that talked about prepaid. It was a poorly writ- As I began to research the industry, I realized the opportu- ten but an interesting idea that piqued my interest. I began to nity. Once a month a Brink’s truck with a million+ dollars research and realized that there was an emerging third Visa/ would back up to a port. Two guys would bring the cash on-

MasterCard scheme called prepaid. This was right at the very board and the crew purser and a couple other people would beginning of prepaid. So I wrote a business plan, raised some spend the entire night breaking it up into envelopes to pay friends and family funds, found a bank in Chicago that was their crew. The next day there’d be a line of individuals. They very early in prepaid; they loved my business plan and said, hand them their pay and away you go. That’s how the in- “Let’s do business together.” dustry worldwide paid its crew members. Mind boggling if you think about it. I asked the question, ‘what do those

Was it focused on maritime from the start?

crew members do with their cash?’ Well, a lot of them send

My ? rst program was not maritime; the ? rst program was money home. And how do they do that? Well, if they’re lucky for specialized insurance payments for senior citizens. Then enough to be able to get off of a ship in port, they would go a friend introduced me to a company called MTN, Maritime out to a bodega or a remittance place, take out the cash that

Telecommunications Network, which was a South Florida they just received, and send money home. So I made contact based satcom company. MTN managed Internet Café’s on with Travelex, and I ? gured out that if I could take that wire about 90 (cruise ships) and was having a tough time paying service and connect it to a to a payroll card and enable crew their onboard managers, who were all foreign nationals. Post members to get paid and send money home when they were 9/11, the banks made it very dif? cult for foreigners to open on board, we would have a real solution.

accounts in the U.S. MTN successfully used our payroll card

Travelex bought into the idea and we were the ? rst compa- program to administer pay for their onboard crew solving a ny in the world to take a wire service and integrate it directly fundamental problem (for the cruise companies). into a payroll card. Today payroll card programs are univer- sally utilized across the cruise industry worldwide. That sim-

Accidental is how some of the best ideas are formed!

ple idea that I had – connect a wire service to a payroll card

This giant light bulb went off in my head that said, “you for crew members, fundamentally changed the entire industry have this vertical market that represents more than 250,000 in terms of how crew member are paid.

22 Maritime Reporter & Engineering News • January 2021

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