Talent is everywhere. Building a team that scales, stays compliant, and still feels like your own takes more than hiring. Here's how Esusu did it.
Esusu has never believed talent sits in one place. The New York fintech that helps renters build financial health saw early on that capable people could be anywhere, as long as the right support was in place around them. That thinking led the company to build a team in the Philippines around 2018.
What started as a small team has since grown into one of Esusu's most capable, spanning frontline support through specialized back-office functions, in-country leadership, and handling some of the company's most trusted work.
The hard part was never finding the talent. It was turning an early, informal team into a real, compliant operation at scale, without losing what made it good in the first place.
So how do you grow a team across an ocean without turning it into an outpost?
Whether it's the U.S. team and the Philippines team, it's like one team. They're part of our fabric.
-Billé Chitimbire, Chief Operating Officer, Esusu
Esusu began building in the Philippines years before it had the infrastructure, or a partner, that a larger operation would need. In the early days, the Philippines team was engaged through an independent-contractor model, starting with a small group focused on customer support and expanding from there.
For Chief Operating Officer Billé Chitimbire, the team had already become part of Esusu. Any new structure needed to preserve that.
“They felt part of the company, part of the culture, part of the experience, and we don't want to lose that,” he says. “The culture's important, because the people are what gets the engine moving….our Co-CEOs were adamant about that…”
The early setup had done its job. But it wasn't built to scale. As the business grew, HR administration, tax obligations, and labor-law exposure became harder to manage across a patchwork of arrangements.
“As we started to scale, the main focus was compliance and doing things the right way from a labor perspective,” Chitimbire says.
That was the bar for the transition Booth ran with Esusu beginning around 2022: bring the existing team into a compliant, fully managed structure without disrupting how the business operated.
Chitimbire describes the mix today as “a good split, 50/50, between support and then the rest that is like technical teams, finance, IT, risk, compliance.”
Booth handles HR, payroll, legal and compliance, and devices as a single partner, working within Esusu's existing systems and workflows.
The structure also changed what the team no longer has to chase down on its own.
“If they have questions around their compensation, questions around labor laws, benefits and stuff like that, that psychological safety I think helps them understand that those things are taken care of,” Chitimbire says.
Under the independent-contractor model, he says, those questions took up real time and often had no clear owner. Now the team knows there's a resource they can go to, ask questions, and get answers.
Customer support roles were straightforward to scope and fill. The back-office roles weren't, because there's no boilerplate for a risk reporting analyst at a fintech the way there is for frontline support. Booth sourced and placed the early hires and helped Esusu frame the compensation bands and how the roles were advertised.
“Some of the recruitment we use Booth in early stages, and now we kind of take the playbook, and then we can kind of curate,” Chitimbire says. “We lean on each other where we need to in terms of finding talent.”
For the full story of how Esusu built and grew its global team, read the Esusu case study.
There's an assumption that tends to follow global hiring: that whoever handles employment also, inevitably, shapes how it feels to work there. Esusu drew that line deliberately.
“The most important thing was that we still maintained a relationship with the employee. That was number one,” Chitimbire says. “They're not just an extension where we don't have to engage; we don't have influence. We can still have career ladders and paths of growth and promotion and allow dynamic growth for these folks.”
Booth took the operational foundation; Esusu kept everything that makes Esusu feel like Esusu.
“Booth was able to understand that,” he says, “and allowed us to say, ‘Yeah, look, we'll handle all the things that are logistical, the compliance stuff and so forth, but you guys can drive your culture.”
Bryan Tanduyan, Esusu's country manager in Manila, sees that same line from the other side.
Esusu is a village, and I've seen firsthand that the Philippines team isn't just part of that village, we help build it. What makes this real day-to-day is simple: we're on the same Slack channels, systems, and All Hands as everyone else. When my team and I were building out Loan Operations, we weren't just handed a playbook to execute, we had a seat at the table, and our feedback genuinely shaped how new workflows and processes came together.
-Bryan Tanduyan, Country Manager, Esusu
For a distributed team, office space can look like a line item you could cut, right up until people have somewhere to actually gather.
Booth's offices in Manila and Cebu give Esusu's team a place to work side by side, host visiting colleagues, and connect beyond a calendar full of video calls.
“Other models, it's like, okay, rubber stamp, you can tick a box, but your staff never have a platform, a place to go,” Chitimbire says. “Our staff at least have a place to go; they have a place to come to the office if they want to. And I think that in-person connection goes a long way for our team.
Esusu Chief Operating Officer and managers at Booth’s World Plaza, BGC Office
For the companies that get the most out of a global team, engagement isn't a line on a benefits page. A good culture isn't something you set and forget. Engagement is how you measure whether people are actually experiencing it. For Esusu, engagement is a meaningful part of the culture they've built and a driver of how it evolves.
“We're a U.S. company, so we work Eastern hours, and they have to work those hours to fulfill the objectives of the company,” Chitimbire says. “That relationship is important because it goes a long way for them to know that they're appreciated for the work they do.”
Last May, Esusu's leadership team spent a week in Manila, spending time with the team, volunteering with Rise Against Hunger Philippines, visiting Intramuros to learn more about the Philippines' history and culture, and attending a gala to recognize the year's work. For a global company, bringing leadership into the same room as the team creates a different kind of connection, one that's harder to build through meetings and messages alone.
“I've been here two times in the last three years, and it's good to know them as human beings as opposed to just additional bodies that are just here doing the work for us,” he says.
The Esusu team, on a walking tour of Intramuros, the Spanish-era walled city at the heart of old Manila.
As part of Esusu's community giving, the team packed meals with Rise Against Hunger Philippines, whose school feeding and nutrition programs reach more than 1.73 million people each year.
Esusu's Recognition Gala Night
Booth supports that engagement through the infrastructure around the team, from the offices in Manila and Cebu to the local team that coordinates work on the ground.
The best way to understand what that looks like is to see it. Watch how the week in Manila came together in the video below.
You can hear the result in how Chitimbire describes the company today.
“Whether it's with the U.S. team and the Philippines team, it's like one team,” he says. “It's not like, 'Oh, these people are just an extension of some other third party,' but they're part of our fabric, which I think is what has benefited us quite a bit.”
“Talent is agnostic. You can find talent anywhere,” Chitimbire says. “But we have to make sure that whatever we're doing is equitable and is fair. If you nurture the talent, you grow the talent, you build the talent, you can build your operation pretty well anywhere.”
What you can't find off the shelf is what Esusu built around it: the compliance, infrastructure, and presence that make a team on the other side of the world part of the company, not an outpost.
Thinking about building your own global team? If you're weighing how to grow internationally without losing your grip on compliance, operations, or culture, the answer is rarely hiring alone. The right partner doesn't replace your culture. It builds the foundation that lets it travel. Let's talk.