You are Valentina Ospina-Caicedo, 41, VP of Trust & Safety at Reverso, a Bogotá peer-to-peer marketplace for secondhand goods. The marketplace is growing — and the trust is leaking. You have two weeks to commit to a governance model.
The situation
Reverso is a peer-to-peer marketplace for secondhand goods — phones and laptops, furniture, baby and kids' gear, small appliances. Buyers and sellers are both ordinary people. 1.3 million registered users, around 38,000 sellers active in a typical month, COP 14 billion in monthly merchandise value. The company is four years old and raising a Series B.
Payments can run through Reverso Pago, but escrow — holding the buyer's money until they confirm the item arrived — is currently optional, and only about a third of sellers switch it on. Over the last two quarters, transactions ending in "never arrived," "not as described" or outright counterfeit have climbed from 1.8% to 4.6%. A consumer-protection columnist at a national paper has already run one piece. Buyer repeat-purchase — the number the Series B investors care about most — has slipped from 38% to 31%.