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League Data: The road to CEO

The intricate world of online security

[00:00:02] Hi there and thanks for joining us for another episode of Architects of Change, a podcast brought to you by Mambu the cloud banking platform to help you evolve your business. I'm your host, Emma Lindley, co-founder of Women in Identity. In this episode, we're going to be chatting about cybersecurity and we're going to discuss how organisations balance customer experience alongside security. We're going to be talking about education and initiatives that should be considered when using and innovating modern technology. I'm thrilled to say I'm going to be chatting to someone who can unpick this topic more than most. Bronwyn Boyle - Chief Information Security Officer at Mambu. Hi, Bronwen.


[00:00:47] Hi there, Emma. It's great to join you today.

[00:00:50] I'd be super interested to understand a bit about your career and what led you to become a Chief Information Security Officer at Mambu. Was this always a subject like a passion of yours and a subject area that you were, you know, you were always interested in?


[00:01:09] So it's a very interesting question because I'd say the answer is no. I was quite a late adopter compared to many more technical folks in my field. My background is I studied classics in university, which is possibly the exact opposite of kind of the future forward cyber world. But I did some computer science post-grad work and that got me into programming and I really, really enjoyed the coding and development side of it. So I started my career really kind of in the first wave of digital banking coding, online banking applications back in the, dot com era. And that really piqued my interest in security because obviously I was starting to see first hand how the security of applications was so intrinsic to supporting, you know, ever increasing use of digital application. So I pivoted then to security, took some time out to study, and I've been working in various different elements of cyber, cyber risk, information, risk, privacy and compliance ever since. So we've been delighted to be able to work with some really great organisations, including Big Four companies. I've worked with a couple of the UK's leading banks, a number of start-ups and reg techs, and it's also been delighted to support the open banking implementation entity over the last few years as we've been growing at the approach to open banking across the UK. And now I'm here at Mambu and I'm delighted to be helping support, make a difference to a huge range of customers across the world who are using our services for digital cloud adoption.


[00:02:36] Absolutely love that. That was from classics to deep cyber security in my less than 60 seconds, that was awesome. So huge amounts of experience of this subject matter of cyber security. So what are some of the biggest or the macro threats you see in the cyber security space today?


[00:02:58] So I think it's becoming ever more important and that is, you know, very well recognised as we see the effects proliferate quite broadly. I don't know if you are aware, but last year there was a fairly major internet security incident called Log for Shell. It was the biggest internet vulnerability in the history of the Internet. And, you know, many folks around the world and security researchers were working really hard to keep online services safe. And that, for me, was a really a really powerful moment of truth, kind of to show the pervasiveness of the Internet now to our daily lives and how important it is to maintain that security and maintain the safety of the services that we now rely on that are Internet based. And so from my perspective, I think looking at that interconnectivity and looking at how the threat landscape has changed, the elements of open source codes, the elements of software development and software security are now vital to make sure that we can withstand threats from an increasingly adversarial threat landscape, be that cyber criminals who are looking to drive financial gain or disruptors I mean, we've seen a lot of nation state activities that have been more focused around disruption. The Ukraine and Russia conflict, which is terrible to see ongoing, has also driven increased cyber threats that we've had to respond to. And obviously things like ransomware are ever present as a moneymaking scheme for those who are more nefariously inclined. But these sorts of impacts can really cripple a business. And again, I think harking back a few years to some of the ransomware threats that we saw, we saw the NHS very badly hit with an attack back in 2017 and a really stark example of how, you know, something that maybe was not intended to hit a national health service could still proliferate and bring a service to its knees. So I think supply chain threats and ransomware remain very much on our on our radars as kind of key threats. One of the other really important elements to think about from a threat perspective, which often goes a maybe less noticed is the idea of business email compromise. And that's where cybercriminals take over an individual's email account and they use that to scam or extort money out of individuals or companies so they can pose as legitimate suppliers. And indeed, big companies, big tech companies, sophisticated companies like Facebook when they were before they were Meta. And also Google saw so some of that that's kind of type of business e-mail compromise fraud where criminal actors posed as vendors and got millions of dollars of invoices before that was discovered. On the flip side, you've got individuals who are being contacted by scammers. They may lose their life savings. And I think it's a really important element. It falls slightly outside organisations perimeters. It's much more on end users and end customers and that's why it's often neglected. But it is a multibillion-dollar business for criminals and it's something that can be absolutely devastating for friends, the individuals who are victimised. So I think it's an area that I certainly feel very passionate about doing more to protect.

[00:06:06] And I think identity is right at the edge of the perimeter, isn't it? You know, that's an obviously that's the area digital identity that I come from. So I absolutely agree with you there. If you were to predict what you think is going to be happening in the future, what would you imagine the some of those areas that you think are going to, you know, are going to develop more of you know, you've talked about supply chain ransomware, you know, business compromise.


[00:06:33] Well, it's really interesting that you brought up identity, Emma. And I think that idea of like an individual's identity being the new perimeter, I think is exactly where we're going as an industry and as a as kind of this technology evolves with so many organisations now choosing to host data in the cloud and use cloud based services, that idea and also with remote working indeed that idea of going to an office with a data centre and a perimeter that you can secure is very kind of archaic and we've really moved on from that. So the idea of having remote workers around the globe accessing servers, services that may be hosted anywhere across the globe has very much shifted that paradigm of security. So I think there's going to be increased focus on identity as the key hub of supporting access paradigms like Zero Trust, where you move to this continuous verification, it's no longer okay just to trust that somebody inside a perimeter is safe and and authorised to access services. Instead, we're switching to that paradigm of continuous verification using indicators like geo location, device metrics, biometrics to continuously authorise and authenticate identities. I think that's probably where we're going and where we need to continue to go. And it's also interesting, you know, there's a lot of debate about blockchain and obviously where we're in a new crypto winter. Arguably, there's a lot of volatility in the market there, but I think blockchain does offer some interesting opportunities to solve for some of the conversations and questions around things like software, integrity, supply chain kind of verification as well. Now that obviously comes with kind of high computational cost levels. And I think again, we're probably still only tapping into some of the opportunities that that technology can provide. But we need to look at how that can happen at scale and how that can happen within a reasonable a reasonable kind of operational cost envelope, I guess. And I would also say the other piece that's kind of looming on the horizon is the whole idea of quantum cryptography. So we've seen really exciting step changes in the application of quantum crypto and I think it's really being heavily invested in now. Obviously, it's kind of a bit of an arms race to see where that will go and who will choose to adopt it first. I mean, that will significantly change the landscape of the encryption that we all know and rely on right now. So it would be very interesting to see how we can use that to more accurately defend and protect assets that are safeguarded in any cryptographic form. And then finally, I would just say AI and machine learning, we continue to see great developments from the whole artificial intelligence applications. And again, that can be very helpful in helping to crunch through massive amounts of data that might be giving organisations insight into what's going on within their technology estates and kind of help that signal to noise ratio. What I would also say is the flip side is that the as in the bad guys and the attackers are also using AI machine learning. And you know, we touched on business email compromise earlier. I mean, that's a really interesting case where they're using AI and machine learning to kind of really synthesise and understand and emulate an individual's voice, tone of voice, tone of writing to more accurately kind of impersonate them and to craft very convincing to convincing attacks. So very it's always interesting to see kind of how any step change in technology can be used. Both. For good, but also on the on the cybercriminal side to kind of get a head start. And it would be very, very telling over the next few years as we see how that continues to evolve.


[00:10:09] Lots and lots of technological change, you know, and advancement. You know, absolutely. I agree with you. Tools and weapons, when we think about from a customer perspective, particularly from an identity perspective and, you know, identities being at the perimeter, we're also talking about humans, not just technology know absolutely humans and how they interact with that technology. So how in your really vast experience, how do we create secure experiences for customers but really optimising those customer experiences as well when we've got all of these new threats and threat factors that are emerging?

[00:10:52] It's a really great question. And, you know, I love your focus on individual's right, because at the end of the day, there's always somebody at the other side of a computer somewhere. And often as technology evolves very quickly, we can tend to forget that. And I'm a big advocate of making sure that we're not leaving customers behind. We're not we're not putting unnecessary barriers or kind of confusing obstacles in their way, particularly as the pace of digital change evolves so quickly. It's a steep learning curve, and that learning curve is getting steeper all the time. So what I would say is I think two things. One is making sure that that we are looking at how to streamline security controls into processes in a kind of as frictionless a way as possible and very much aligning those controls with the risk profile of the activities that are being carried out. A great example of that is in online banking and mobile banking, the idea of kind of step up controls, step up security, that increases the burden and the onus of authentication or authorisation, along with the risk of the activities that are being carried out. I don't necessarily need to provide my full banking pin or banking one-time passwords if I just want to of get read access to my balance. But if I want to create a new payee on my bank account, you know it's great to be able to be given prompts to say, okay, now you need to provide extra inputs, extra authentication, use your biometrics on your mobile phone, use your one time passwords that are, that are randomly generated, etc.. So I think that idea of kind of step up control is a great way of trying to ease controls into user journeys in a way that makes sense to them. It doesn't it doesn't seem counterintuitive, and it helps kind of think raise awareness of the risk profile to the end customer as well. I think on that as well. I think the other area that's worth thinking about is how we make increasing use of some of the biometric technologies that are already embedded in our mobile apps. So again, people are comfortable using that type of technology on their mobile phone. There's great progress being made with industry groups now who are looking to see how they can take those biometrics and seamlessly integrate them into user experiences. Again, as a take this as step of control, but one that hopefully would minimise any noise and interruption for users. And I think that's a that's a great paradigm, I think to kind of make sure that users are more comfortable moving forward. The third element, I'd say, as well as some of those in the moment messaging that you can provide for your customers. And again, obviously coming from a banking background, I'm probably more familiar with some of those types of controls, but a great step forward has been in confirmation of payee. I'm sure you've seen this yourself, if you if you've been online banking over the last while, there's a facility that will match the name of the person that you're looking to pay with the account number that you've given them. And if there's a disconnect there. So if you want to pay Bob and Bob's account number is X one, two, three, four, five, 5 that you're paying into doesn't match Bob's name. You'll now get that notification. And this is a really, really great step forward, particularly in helping against scams, because if somebody is pretending to be somebody they're not and the account number doesn't match, you will now see that and you have an opportunity to review those as you're making transactions. So yeah, I think those sort of in the moment controls increased use of kind of seamless and frictionless step-up controls I think will really help drive better user understanding, but also drive kind of faster throughput and better customer experience.


[00:14:21] And who would you say is from an information security kind of that customer experience? Who would you say is doing it really well right now?

[00:14:31] There was a recent announcement by Meta that they're looking to now support inline payments on Instagram. And I think that's a real game changer. And it's it's a really interesting example of where, you know, a number of different innovations and kind of changes in security control have been stitched together to now support and allow that type of payment option within social media apps. You know, Meta will be leveraging customer's existing comfort factor and familiarity with their authorised. Asian mechanisms on their own phones and their understanding of how they interact with the Instagram app, and then allowing that to take to the next step further and making payments, which is a real a real game changer, I think, for the industry and a real game changer for the industry and also incumbent financial services providers, because it's demonstrating, again, that those payment opportunities are really kind of proliferating in new and varied forms. The flip side, I would say as well, so, I mean, security it's more than a hygiene factor now, right? It is an existential requirement for pretty much any business. Nearly all businesses are digital businesses. And I think again, it's been very interesting to see increased pressure in the US to make sure that there are board level and subject matter experts who can advise on cyber and who can help companies to kind of really ensure that that's very firmly on the leadership's horizon. Likewise, there's also kind of increased scrutiny around reporting of cyber incidents and events. And I think that just tells us as well, you know, nobody gets this 100% right. It's always a learning journey. And it's really important to kind of keep transparent and make sure that we're keeping the customer's best interests at heart.

[00:16:10] We've touched a little bit on some of the new methods that we're putting in front of customers. And if I think about in the UK, we've got open banking, we've got open banking Psd2 sca, you know, they all require new security methods like biometrics and one time passcodes. You've talked about some of the things and ways in which we can help people understand and, you know, put prompts in front of them having step up control in the moment messaging. What are some of the other ways that we can get customers to understand some of these new security methods and enable them to stay secure?


[00:16:49] I think you're at your point is super valid. I mean, think there are steep learning curve as we've touched on. And that view of the digital divide, I think, is something that we need to think of as a kind of society level. And I think some of the digital natives may not struggle with these new types of control, but people who may be less familiar with online technology, who may be less comfortable using online apps or mobile apps, there's a real risk that those folks get left behind or that we need to kind of cater for them from a security perspective in a different way that is more inclusive and is more aligned with kind of how they perceive and how they interact with online services. So I think that's something I feel needs a lot of focus and attention, particularly just as the risks of digital inequality are kind of manifesting more clearly. And I think the other piece as well is there's my time at Open Banking was a really, insightful opportunity to see where the industry was changing and where there were those maybe friction points or kind of maybe understanding gaps, shall we say, in the in the broader customer base. And we really had had some great initiatives to see how we could better support them, including just providing consistent customer messaging. So, I think with the panoply of different payments opportunities, now comes a vast variety and different types of security messaging. And if you look back many years ago with the first advent of online banking, there was a real push of an industry level to consolidate around messaging, around fraud, because it very quickly became clear that without that type of dedicated education and consistent messaging, fraud losses would really, really hurt the online banking proposition and customer trust would erode. I think that really drove great collaboration and great consistency of messaging. So people knew, don't give away your password, don't give away your pin details. You know, make sure that you keep those safe and secure. Again, with new payment channels coming in and new opportunities to interact online, there are new mechanisms and new requirements for customers to keep other types of data safe or to keep aware for the types of scam. And I think what we're missing right now maybe is that very harmonised and very consistent user messaging at an industry level.


[00:19:03] I agree with all of that. I think. And, you know, one of the other things is when we think about, you know, you and I, we think about a lot of the people that are working within the you know, within the digital space, within the security space, within the digital identity space. We're also not representative necessarily of the population. And I think having that empathy for the user, really, as you say, putting them at the heart of everything that we do, all users will really enable is to think about the challenges that they and the ways in which we can help educate them around some of these topics rather than just assuming perhaps the user is, you know, is like us.

[00:19:47] Yeah, that's a great point, Emma. And I think you've touched on again just something that's at the heart of what we need to think about from a technological perspective, which is how we make sure we've got the most diverse representative. Diverse elements in our if we're using training datasets, how do we make sure that we are constantly and consistently looking for ways to make sure we've got like the diversity of the populations of customers that we're serving end to end as we're developing products and services.

[00:20:14] What would you say are some of the best ways, best practice ways to roll new features out with all of that in mind?

[00:20:22] I think the idea of having a representative customer is at the heart of how you're developing your products is a great rubric to follow. With the rise of more kind of continuous development and kind of rolling out of new and agile services, the idea is having customers very much involved in your user experience and your design and your interface and collaborating and integrating into that I think is paramount. I also feel that the industry knows as we have more kind of rapid development practices, agile development and a kind of increasing mechanisms to kind of do things like  AB testing where you can kind of pilot two different mechanisms of, of getting a service to market and see which one resonates better. That gives you a great opportunity to get a broader set of user feedback. And I think also kind of having the customer at the heart of how you're also implementing those security controls and testing through that and getting that feedback directly from the voice of the customer is really helpful. It's been very good to see the industry now kind of coalescing around things like, you know, the voice of the customer end to end customer experience, customer advisory boards where you have kind of that representation from a broad population of your customer base. That's a great way for just making sure that you have that constant and continuous feedback loop that allows you to really keep that customer centricity and make sure that whatever you're putting in from a security perspective isn't inhibiting the effectiveness and the efficiency and the attractiveness of your customer proposition. But it's also kind of maintaining that inherent security and supporting them on their journey with your products and services.

[00:21:53] I mean, we're all customers as well. Practically, how should customers be adapting to new changes in their online life? You know, should they, you know, in terms of like sticking still methods that are working for them already? Or is there any way that people can help themselves with some of these new security methods or educating themselves?

[00:22:13] Can they stick to the old methods? I think the answer is no. You know, the things have moved on so quickly. And it's funny, you know, sometimes, like when I talk to my mom, you know, she'll say, oh, you got to have a password for this. And it's like, you know it's not enough to have one password anymore. Times have changed so much. And I think that idea of focusing on customers who may need that re-education and may need to be brought on the journey to say, why do we need these extra layers of security? Why do we need to change our behaviour? You know, the why is very important to get across and I think, you know, the idea there are some simple things that people can do absolutely. To maintain security. And I would always say, you know, switch on multi-factor authentication wherever you can. It makes things so much more difficult for attackers and something so simple and straightforward. A lot of people still kind of use a little bit as an inconvenience, but believe you me, it's far more convenient than the alternative if something was to happen and likewise, I think the idea of making sure that, you know, customers and all of us are using unique passwords. Using password managers, if passwords are still are still needed, you know, that is essential. Right? So the amount of people who reuse passwords is pretty shocking. And you'll probably have seen for that, you know, there's millions of accounts online, but actually when they do analysis, they find that there's time and time again, they find very simple passwords that are reused. And of course, that's a dream for an attacker for very little effort. They can cause a lot of damage. So, again, that idea of using strong, unique passwords for everything is really imperative. And that is a shift, right? Because I think people are used to kind of the old world of I have having one pin and I stick with them and that's enough. You know, that that messaging, I think, has really changed. And I think the other final piece, I think I would say that is a simple, a simple kind of practice to put in into our kind of everyday behaviour. But again, it has a lot of impact, it's just really to kind of be mindful about not trusting messaging coming in over different channels. We've seen increasingly sophisticated SMS types of phishing attack email types of phishing against using artificial intelligence. You know, I think the idea of anytime you're getting a request to send money or to kind of take action, the idea of kind of just pausing and saying, okay, I'm going to validate this through a different mechanism. If I got a text, I'm not going to text them back. I'm going to look at their phone number online and I'm going to call that number that's kind of registered to the company’s account. Or if you get an email and you say, actually, you know what? Again, I'm not replying by email, I'm going to phone them, or I'll use their online chat facility. Just breaking that pattern is very, very powerful way of making sure that customers can stay safe.


[00:24:47] Some absolutely brilliant practical advice there from Bronwyn. Thank you so much for joining me.

[00:24:53] Thanks a million for the discussion, Emma. I enjoyed it! Thanks again.


[00:24:56] Absolutely loved hearing Bronwyn’s journey from classics to cybersecurity. Listening to her talk about some of the really big threat vectors that we've got, you know, supply chain, ransomware, business email, compromise and the fact that, you know, something that's kind of at the heart of everything I do. An identity is the perimeter of security nowadays, things that organisations needs to be thinking about in terms of putting users at the heart of the design, thinking about making sure that we're developing security for diverse groups and really, you know, putting the voice of the customer, doing AB testing that was really critical, I think, from what Bronwyn was saying and what can we do individually to help ourselves and secure our own services? Multifactor authentication and then using a password manager, making sure that you've got strong, unique passwords. And that brings us to the end of this Architects of Change episode brought to you by Mambu. Thank you to my brilliant guests, Bronwyn Boyle, Chief Information Security Officer at Mambu. If you'd like to delve more into her work, please head to mambu.com/insights. For more Mambu podcasts head to wherever you get your podcasts and don't forget to subscribe to our channels, so you don't miss an episode. I've been your host, Emma Lindley. See you next time.

Rock & Roar: The link between music and fintech

[00:00:04] Hello. Thanks for joining us for another episode of Architects of Change, a podcast brought to you by Mambu, the cloud banking platform to help you evolve your business. I'm your host for this episode, Nina Mohanty, founder of Bloom Money. In this episode, I am thrilled to say that I'm joined by two tech heavyweights from Silicon Valley, where I'm actually originally from, to discuss the bare bones of technical product strategy and management with two of the very best in the industry. One of those people is Jay Haines, an award winning entrepreneur with over three decades of innovation and investing experience and some other experience that I'm very excited to touch on. The other is Kevin Trilli, Chief Product Officer at Mambu, who's been a product leader for over 25 years across domains, including fintech, security, identity, machine learning in B2B, SAS and enterprise companies. How he does it all, I have no idea. Trust me, though, if you're a CEO, founder, anyone frankly looking to hone your product strategy, this is the episode for you. Welcome, gentlemen. Thank you for joining.

[00:01:16] So let's kick off by telling us a little bit about your relationship and your experience working together.


[00:01:25] We actually met from school and our kids when we were both in San Francisco, and it was our kids were both very young. And for something, I remember the first time was a party that was housed to host parents at the school, and we met and started talking and I think we probably instantly figured out we both like music at that point and got into a long conversation about that and, and ended up staying in touch. And the funny part about this whole thing is I don't think I knew what you did for a long time and then realised both you and I did almost nearly identical areas of discipline around product management in many ways, and this was a by-product of a personal relationship that formed many years later. So I don't think we've been talk business much for many years and then realise we're both kind of doing the same thing. So very, very serendipitous.

[00:02:09] Yeah. And I think we hit it off because oddly there is a relationship between product management and parenting.


[00:02:17] You've got these little products that you want to be a success in the world.

[00:02:20] So, Jay, you're not just, you know, a finance man or a tech guy. Tell us about your music experience and why you have this fancy recording studio.

[00:02:33] Yeah, well, I've always been interested in music. You know, I went to high school in the 1980s and college in the 1980s when the digital revolution was just happening. And I was always fascinated. My dad bought this thing called an Apple 2 in 1979, and then I got a Mac. And of course, Apple, from its early days was always interested in music. How can you use a computer to make music? Which seems like at the time it was a crazy idea. And what's really happened and the reason I still have a studio is that everything in the music world basically has been taken over by computer chips. You can do everything that you can do with the exception of a stringed instrument. And but even then, you can accomplish a lot within the computer. So it's amazing what you can do with software and hardware for music. And that's true for anything, whether it's financial products, whether it's parenting. I mean, the reason we're all using computers so frequently is they help you solve a lot of problems. And that's true for music. So I was always fascinated by that early on in my career. Turns out my first part of my career was a terrible way to make money in music, but it was really fascinating for a technology standpoint.

[00:03:46] And Kevin, you're very into music, too. Are you a musician yourself or how did you foster this love of music?

[00:03:54] So I too was in the um, at university in the late eighties, early nineties, and I worked at the University of Illinois as a lab administrator for when the floundering thing called the Internet was starting. And the first use case for me for the Internet on a personal level was trading live music tapes through the user net groups that were out there that were formed on these different communities. And I became a very power user and I think my first post still publicly or around 1990 that you can find, and this was one of the reasons why I ended up going into the Internet as a second part of my career was this experience. So music actually is connected to my career, and very much so how I think about the Internet in its earliest stages.

[00:04:36] Throughout this episode, we're going to draw on your experiences with music, but we're also going to talk about financial products and product strategy and how that can relate to the music industry. But before that, aside from your love of music, I mean, clearly your good friends, what makes you so compatible? Is it just like is it your children or what makes you such good friends?

[00:04:59] I would say it's a way of thinking. And this is where I think it crosses over from parenting to music to technology, is what Kevin just said about music is really great and that's useful advice for product teams no matter what company you're at, because essentially a way to think about that is customer empathy. You know, the reason music's so great is because you love a song, because it empathises with some emotion you're feeling. You know something. There's something about the song and the groove, and that's what product teams really should do, is focus on customer empathy. They're ironically called product teams when they really should be called customer empathy teams because customers don't care about your product. They really don't. They care about getting stuff done in their lives. And that's where obviously parenting, you empathise more with your children than anybody in the world. And in music you empathise whether you like, you know, John Coltrane or Miles Davis or, you know, the Grateful Dead. You you're feeling that you're you're simpatico. You really are in the moment together. And that's a way that product teams should think about their customers, no matter what the industry is. And I think that's why Kevin and I are such good friends, is we just share this way of thinking and, you know, and that's really what friendship's about is that sort of commonality.

[00:06:23] Yeah I'll just add to that that I think, you know, Jay and I were sort of product leaders before there were product management books and techniques and names for things that are just a way of thinking, as Jay mentioned. And so I think when you find people that have the privilege, like we do, to kind of shepherd our chapter of the product management evolution story, you know, it just it's a privilege to be able to find oh, that's what people call this now. I just always thought that way, I learned the hard way to think that way and he and I have talked a lot about that. We're like, now there's a name for that, and it's a great technique and many people can learn this in a standardised way because product management's a funny thing to get into. There's not like a degree that you take to get into it. It's an experiential function that brings many disciplines together. And I remember when I first started it, people used to call me marketing, believe it or not, and it wasn't even called product management back then. So you have different evolutions of this discipline. And I think, Jay and I were lucky enough to come from separate areas, but be able to be part of one of the earlier parts of the evolution of it.


[00:07:19] Well, I'm glad you brought that up, Kevin. So let's just get down to business. There's there's not many people who can talk about product strategy as well as both of you and so eloquently and, and also tying it over to music. But before we get into current methods, let's talk about, you know, you were saying that there, there are names now for things that you just kind of did. So what was kind of the traditional old way of approaching product strategy? And you mentioned Kevin marketing and people calling you marketing. How did product actually evolve? So maybe paint me a picture of where we started and what it was like back in the day. I just done air quotes around the back in the day.

[00:08:10] I think the early days were very much business strategy type of approaches, right? They thought about it with company focus and maybe strategy development was a research project and it was a big spike, and we, oh we figured it out. Let's go build it. [00:08:24]And what happened and this happened as it went to technology also is that there was drift. And what happened is that you had this approach that you had technically, that you were trying to make a product and you're trying to fit that into a product market. And there was some set of assumptions you make up front. But then the focus and this is almost like human product, you know, kind of evolution is that more emphasis would go on how to build the mousetrap than is it a mouse we're trying to catch and what's changed. [28.7s] And so the mindset was adding about more product definition and it lost, you know, the analysis of the market, those became disjointed teams, they became commercial focussed discovery teams. When you had product building technological products, you had product definition happening only in technology organisations and you had sales organisations or commercial organisations figuring out the problem. And this disjoint just gets more and more pronounced as the companies grow and change people and you lose that initial set of people that form those opinions. And, and I think this is what all of a sudden started to realise that you had to get those product and technology teams back into the commercial side. And so then you started to hear about Eric Reece and other folks, Steve Blanck talking about customer discovery, which were I think so timely because you had waterfall and product technologist building product that didn't know why they were building code. They didn't know the context of a feature, they didn't know the why. And I think that's what happened. It went from business strategy to technological development and this chasm formed and you missed the interface of keeping alignment because, as we'll talk about today, product markets change right there, their technology cycles change. And if you're just focussed on the technology side, you start to lose touch with what the purpose of the strategy is, which is making you fit effectively into a profitable market over time.

[00:10:13] Yeah, I like that mousetrap analogy that you used and it really feels like, from what I understand, it was product for the sake of furthering business goals usually. I saw you nodding along a little bit, but would you agree with with Kevin's assessment there?

[00:10:32] Yeah, definitely. And I would say that the business goal is always important because businesses need to grow and become more profitable. But it really should be about the customer goal because the way that you achieve your business goals is creating customer value. So at the end of the day, that's everything. And you can look at historical examples and see how this plays out. People forget that BlackBerry was worth more than Apple when the iPhone launched. That's that's just, you know, hard to contemplate. So the key question to ask is your product roadmap the BlackBerry or the iPhone? [33.4s] There's other great historical examples of this. Microsoft, you know, thought there was a market for the iPod. And if you used the traditional MBA one on one, you know, business school textbook definition of the market, the size of the market is the number of products sold and the number of customers buy the product price. So if you're a Microsoft product manager, you're saying, wow, this iPod market is huge. It's $30 billion, you know, to bring it back to music because Apple sold 200 million iPods, $150 a piece. So you're Microsoft, you've got an OS, you've got, you know, a billion customers. You can build an iPod competitor and take, you know, 10% share of that market at a minimum. Right. So that's a $3 billion revenue opportunity. Turns out that market is now zero, literally $0. So what happened? Well, the customer problem you're solving is not use my iPod because no one uses an iPod anymore. They don't use MP3 players anymore, right? The problem is to create a mood with music and, back to the music example, that's a universal problem to solve. That is not going away any time soon since, you know, even chimps have been shown to have been drumming. So our ancestors were even into music, you know, so it's literally encoded into our DNA. So that's the problem to focus on, and that is the true market. The products are going to change. Kevin I are old enough. You know, I had record collections, cassettes and then I had CDs. I even own eight track tapes which, you know, listeners may not even know what those are. You know, and then I switched my entire collection to CDs and then of course, I had to rebuy it all in the iTunes store. And now everybody streams, you know, whatever song you want instantaneously. You know, my 15 year old self imagining a product where I just could wirelessly stream any song ever recorded to myself anywhere on the planet, that was inconceivable. But the problem is still exactly the same, the products and solutions have change, but what you're trying to do is of music consumers exactly the same.

[00:13:08] I'm the founder of a fence tech company. There are more founders than ever, a new start-ups everywhere. What would you impart in terms of advice on what they should be thinking about? The considerations they should have when thinking about product strategy? And I realise this is a kind of interesting question because especially in the tech world today, they kind of say like if you're hiring a product manager before you know your series A, you've done something wrong. But someone's got to think about the product strategy, right? So Kevin, I see you nodding along. What are the considerations that young companies or founders need to be thinking about?

[00:13:49] Your point about hiring a product manager and when someone is going to have to do that job, regardless of how it's called structure to where it reports to. And it could be the founder or an entrepreneur, you know, it could be a product development team. It could be a customer discovery team. Just we'll leave that aside for a moment. But you may be a, you know, providing a Pandora like service back in the day. You might be providing the iPod. There's different ways you can participate in the music market. So knowing the full supply chain, knowing all the compliments and the subsidies. I like to think about the porters model, going back to Jay's Al Mater, as a great structure of defining the overall market because then you figure out your participation strategy and this comes back down to now I know the need from the job, I know the segmentation, I know that the ecosystem and now I start to think about my competitive advantage and how I can participate in whatever part of market it is. And all these things are important to do. And almost to the point where you're in the back thinking of what is the technology you're going to introduce into that market as a capability? But again, as I go back, the tendency of many companies is to try to take that capability and change the market and force the market in a certain direction where the technology doesn't matter, as Jay mentioned. Right. They're trying to get a need fulfilled. So your approach might work. It might not work. And if you're too wed to that approach, you're going to miss where you're actually going to have to provide value and hold that value creation over time. So I think that's the important part, is really understand it and give yourself a set of options. You may realise your initial approach is not the right approach for the market and you have to be flexible and readjust. You want to do that as early as possible and that's what I mean. You've got to really understand these buying needs of what's going on in the market.

[00:15:31] It strikes me as kind of counter intuitive in today's world. I, you know, just went through the fundraising process and with VCs in particular, they're like, how big is your market? They're like tells us the TAM and you're you are incentivised to give them the biggest number you can possibly find. It's like, you know, you see some founders being like cars, every car in the world. That's our TAM. Or like, you know, some founders might be building a streaming platform for music and be like, well, there's nearly 8 billion of us. So that's our TAM. Literally every human on the earth is going to stream using our platform. And it's like, well, actually that is counterintuitive to actually building a good product for the right reason and for the right problem, right?


[00:16:19] In all seriousiousness, market sizing is the biggest problem because traditional definitions of the market as we show with the iPod are inherently flawed. If you think the market is for cars, you know, you've misunderstood what customers are trying to do. They're trying to get to a destination on time. And they used to use horses. You can use aeroplanes, right? And this is the famous Henry Ford quote, If I asked customers what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse, because what people want is to have you solve a problem that's independent of the solution. They don't want a horse. They want to get to a destination. So and this is, this is a huge problem. If you go to, you know, major consulting firms, if you go to equity analysts on Wall Street, they are using the textbook definition of a market which is inherently flawed. And that gets back to what Kevin was saying, that if you were going to segment your market, which is unbelievably critical to do, you can be in a big market. But the first people that are going to buy your product are those people that are pounding their head against the table to help you solve a problem. So let's use the music example again. Spotify even has a list called Mood. You can type in your mood and pull up, you don't even need to know the artist. You're like, I want a relaxing mood or I want an upbeat dance mood. And that is because the market really is not the product. That is the essential element of any product strategy. And back to your other question, Nina, if if people are at a company and every single person in product marketing, sales and the executive team can't articulate what the product strategy is, that's a huge red flag. You should stop and say we don't even have an agreed upon definition of what our product strategy is. And then you should go around to your team-mates and say, what is product strategy? Not even what is our product strategy, but just what is product strategy? And the good news is the answer is really simple. It's as it's what Kevin was saying. [00:18:19]Product strategy is simply what unmet customer needs. Are you satisfying better than your competitors? That's it. That is it. You're your job as a company, as a product marketing sales team is just to satisfy unmet needs better than your competitors. And that brings up the question is what is a customer need? Of course, but having that agreed upon definition of strategy, agreed upon segmentation of the market to identify those unmet needs for the customers you're going to serve is critical to success. [31.1s]


[00:18:51] There has to be and we've been talking about a lot of these analogies already, but, an analogy here between, you know, live music, a band on stage, the audience raring to go, you know, all of this excitement and actually building products. So I want to throw to you. Is there an analogy or is there a line to be drawn there?

[00:19:17] Yeah, absolutely. So let's talk about music and money. So the same thing is happening in music and finance, music and money. And basically what it is, is the underlying customer problems are the same. You know, all everybody's financial problems are exactly the same. They've never changed. You're still trying to transact. You're still trying to plan for retirement. You're still trying to optimise your cash flow. These are all problems that are universal. You know, they've been around forever. Same thing with music. You're trying to create a mood with music. You're trying to enjoy a live experience, you know, etc.. And what's happened is technology has enabled companies to create solutions to solve those problems faster and more accurately and at lower cost. So I'll give you a good example in the music world. So first on the recording side, the reason I have a recording studio here is because the price of a recording studio has dropped thousands of times. You know, it used to cost $1,000,000 to have one of those huge consoles that you would see in a studio. And that doesn't include the electricity bill just to keep that thing powered up, right? And you need a team of engineers, you know, is ridiculous. Now, on any laptop, actually, even on your phone, you have a better recording studio than the Beatles, Hendrix, the Rolling Stones, you know, any huge band had ever. Right. So, so the technology has moved. It's advanced to help people solve the problem of creating and recording a song. And Clay Christensen put this very eloquently, he called it enabling non-consumption of the products because who could own a recording studio? Well, record companies and they could afford that's why the record companies held all the power, because if you wanted to record, you had to get a half million dollar record contract just to afford the rates to go into a recording studio, it's insanely expensive. Now, you know anybody on their laptop, I mean, you know, Billie Eilish and her brother sit in their, you know, bedroom and record, you know, massively successful album, right? And that's the same thing with the cloud, with finance and money. A good example is like financial planning. Financial planning is really hard and it's very expensive. And, you know, if you're wealthy, you can hire all sorts of people who are super educated and very expensive to help you, you know, financial plan. But as banks and financial institutions recognise, we should create a product that enables anybody to do better financial planning. And even true for businesses, if you can have a better system to help businesses understand, you know, their cash flow, so not just consumers but also businesses, you're lowering the cost of solving the problem and you're doing it faster and more accurately. And that's really the key to all innovation and that's where you're helping your customers solve their problem using the new technology, but not trying to force the technology on them. And remember, if you look at the venture world, everybody loves to look at the huge successes, you know, the Apples and Googles and etc.. But most of them fail. The vast majority of new ventures fail. So that actually is the key, is try to solve that failure rate. You don't want to fail. And this goes back to what Kevin said earlier about risk mitigation. And unfortunately, as a culture where we have this bad notion, everybody should be a risk taker. You want to be a swashbuckling entrepreneur taking a ton of risk. That's such an incredibly stupid idea. You want to be a risk mitigator. An entrepreneur, a great entrepreneur is a risk mitigators. You do not want to take risk like that is like jumping out of an aeroplane without a parachute. It's an incredibly dumb idea, like, you know, so you want to mitigate as much risk as possible.


[00:23:06] I was thinking about, you know, like I saw Billie Eilish performing at Glastonbury and the audience, I would almost liken them to being like super users almost, you know. Would you agree with that kind of comparison there?

[00:23:23] I hope the innovation in live music is that we all show up for the show wearing headphones because it's, it went from the Beatles when they first arrived in the United States. No one could hear them. There was it was there was no amplification. Back to Kevin's point about the Grateful Dead, the Dead pioneered live audio very famously. And they were also famous for very low volume concerts. And the reason was they had repeat customers, their fans, you know, you have Grateful Dead fans that have seen hundreds of shows. And if you go see a hundred Olivia Rodrigo shows at the concerts, that you will go deaf. My daughters will go deaf. I'm getting them earplugs because, you know, you have a little decibel metre on your Apple Watch. It's like glowing red. The entire concert is like 110 decibels. It's so loud, it's offensive. And it also doesn't sound as good. So the artists are all wearing headphones. Olivia Rodrigo is not listening to, like, giant loudspeakers. She's got a perfectly, you know, beautiful 85 decibel, like, mix in her headphones. And that's what the audience should experience. You can still hear the people singing and hear the background and you know, you can have the bass be felt because you've got that low frequency. But it'd be a much better experience to have lower volume, higher quality audio.


[00:24:44] I wanted to hit your point about the super users, and I want to make sure that this is mapping as we're trying to map it to software and everything. Like I think going back to the Grateful Dead, I think the important thing, they transformed the music product in a very specific way. I think it's important to call it from a business perspective, which is they allowed their fans to record their concerts for free and then trade these. And they were the first band really to do this in mass. Other bands like The Allman Brothers and a few others did this to follow. But that's a such an important concept when you think of the primary product was a certain direction that we talk about radio albums, eight tracks, and they're like, no, we're about the live experience because of our fan connection, our customers, and therefore we're going to take a risk because the fans wanted to do this to save this very special experience and record it. So not only were they the fans, the superfans, to your point, they actually had developers, they were called tapers. I was one of them for a while. They bought DAT machines, really expensive microphones. They had a very, very high level of quality they searched for. And this became massive viral marketing for their product. Which what did it do? Sold more tickets because that was their business model in this big job to be done market of creating mood. They were live mood and their connection was fuelled by not only their superfans, as we've talked about, the listeners and the singers, but they actually had this developer community that they embraced. And my goodness, how does that analogy play toward any software product now? Is that key to having developers who use your product and integrate with it with special rights and privileges and you know, you're speaking directly to them as a persona. And what happened? They sold out 2,300 concerts over 35 years, and that was the way that they fuelled their business model and their product strategy, which to the nature of what they were, is an improvisation band, they improvised their product strategy over time with their fans, which is an amazing concept to think about.


[00:26:35] That really speaks to where we are today. And you know what you said about having individual headphones. I mean, I have been to one of those what do they call them, like silent discos. But it does allow for a certain amount of personalisation now to, right? Creating products for specific personas, whether that is leveraging an existing API and taking what you need from that and using that to build something specific for someone else, or for a different client or whatever that might be. Am I going too far with that analogy there, or would you say that that's a pretty fair comparison to make?

[00:27:15] No, I think it's great. And to stick with music, the reason that it's important is everybody is different. My hearing's different than yours, Nina. Different from Kevin's. Unfortunately, I have some hearing loss at 4K after too many concerts, and I really don't want my daughters to have that. And I actually have tinnitus which is, you know, a problem. And already you can see this, Apple is doing some of this. I think they have a new feature where you can literally take a picture of your ear and, you know, you can sample someone's hearing and say, okay, you have a different EQ curve. Essentially no bass and treble, for people don't know music tech. And you can because Nina, if you're at a concert, you're going to want to hear it differently and you might have like a little bit more bass, you know, where someone else wants someone wants more vocals and you can't do that at the Olivia Rodrigo concert. And I think it's amazing to me also that they haven't learnt the lesson the Grateful Dead, that Kevin was talking about about this openness because every single person also at the Olivia Rodrigo concert held their phone up the entire time to videotape the entire concert. And when you get back home, that's going to sound terrible. It just is going to it's going to sound awful. And, you know, video call quality is probably pretty good. But why doesn't she just record that concert, you know, in San Francisco and make it available to fans at super high quality? They'll eventually get there, I think, and charge for it. Yeah, sure.

[00:28:43] So I want to land finally on jobs to be done, which is personally one of my favourite frameworks for product development. Jay, I'm going to go back to you because it's literally what you're currently doing at your day job. Can you explain to us what jobs to be done is?


[00:29:02] It's a very, very simple idea that has big implications, and Clay Christianson really helped popularise the term and it's a way of articulating customer problems. So the core idea is that customers don't want products. They want to get a job done. So it's become known as jobs to be done, but it's really customer problems. And the big insight was that the customer problems are independent of any product solution or technology, and they're stable over time. So what does that mean for product teams? It means that you can actually know what customers want. And that's really, that's an important insight because jobs are very, very complex. So if you're trying to create a mood with music, that job has 15, 20 different steps and hundreds of needs. That's true. If you're trying to get to a destination on time. In financial markets, if you're trying to plan for retirement or optimise cash flow. All of those things are now known as jobs to be done, and they're essentially customer problems. [00:30:08]They're really goals that someone is trying to achieve. So you've got a goal you're trying to achieve, you know, frame it as a problem or a job done. And the reason it's important is you can do all sorts of things with the customer's job. You can segment the market, you can understand what they're willing to pay to get the job done. You can understand how much effort it takes to get the job done. And all of those are critical inputs into product development and product strategy independent of any product ideas you have. And this is, this is one of the issues and the reason that product management is so hard and product development often fails is people start with ideas and they think, I got a great idea. And as Kevin's mentioned multiple times here, well, why is that idea good. That's the question you have to ask. And ultimately, that will bring you back to a customer problem, a job to be done. 

[00:31:05] When I think about product roadmaps and the ones that I've personally helped define or work on, you kind of see some businesses fall into this trap of defining the roadmap based on, hey, that'd be cool, wouldn't it be nice if... this would be a cool feature. So Kevin, I mean, when you're thinking about setting your product strategy or looking at your team's product roadmap, would you say that you're actually using jobs to be done to build that out and the direction that you want to take the product org? [29.8s]


[00:31:35] The comment I made earlier about the tendency and drift of teams, I've been, the last couple of companies I've worked in, I've either been at the very early stage of it or walked into a relatively early stage. And what typically happens is you need to shock the product org back to thinking about jobs to be done. And this is again the nature of an operational, you know, all these businesses are high pressure and customers are demanding and there's escalations - and we're recording this on a Friday here - take a pause on a Friday and think about, what have I thought about to advance my understanding of the customer job this week as a product person? And I bet there's an immediate feeling of panic that you haven't done enough. I can almost guarantee it. Now you play it forward a month, now you play it forward a quarter. And what happens to a company? It's the end of the year, it's the holidays. And we are all stacking assumptions continually. But man, have we built a lot of stuff. So what is the deal with all that stuff? How does it fit back to the fundamental need, the why, in which your strategy should be developed out of? There's always drift that happens and it's just something you have to keep bringing back. And so I personally try to force myself to say to a customer, 'can I just come and listen to what you're doing? Can I see your situation, what you're doing? Can I see the people you're talking to?' I guarantee you're going to learn something by doing it. [79.9s] Even if you have this initial ball of understanding, ball of clay, you're going to keep building to it because again, it's going to shift a little bit, not the need, but the how the needs going to be serviced. And so generally this gets left behind, this gets segmented out to the commercial sales organisations and it just the natural tendency of organisations is to keep building more technology or more features, but those features don't generate the profit and the value proposition and differentiation they did one, two, three years earlier. And I've seen that pattern over and over and over. So you've got to bring those together and sometimes artificially bring them together for some period of time before they naturally will go split out again.

[00:33:34] We unfortunately have to wrap up. I know that we could go on for hours and hours and hours, but before I let you go, I want to ask each of you, 30 seconds, [00:33:45]what is the optimal way to approach product strategy? When you just are plopped down into a new project, a new business? Jay, 30 seconds, how are you approaching it? 


[00:33:56] Figure out which unmet customer needs you are going to satisfy better than your competitors. And that means having an understanding what customer needs are in the job, what the segment is. Why is there a group of people who are struggling differently than the overall market? And analysing how quickly and accurately your competitors, which also might be your existing product, get the job done and satisfy those needs. And ultimately, at the end of day, the product strategy is designed to create customer value, and customer value is getting the job done faster and more accurately for your customer. 

[00:34:38] I should have went it first. Oh, boy.

[00:34:41] So I'm going to have to build on top of that and just say that I guarantee that the current product strategy can benefit for some focus and to establish some non-goals based on what Jay just eloquently explained. And then to have conviction that your chosen direction is, and hopefully that maps to your strengths and your capabilities, is correct so that you have this prioritisation framework built into it. Because, again, the drift is going to happen, as I mentioned, kind of lacking the understanding of the core problem. But there's a drive of companies to want to expand. What's the second product? How do we keep going? How do we make more money? Right, and that's going to pull you in ways that don't necessarily align with the job market. And you got to be real careful with that. We all have to please shareholders and grow, that's what we do in these companies, right? But if you're not going back and keeping that somewhat aligned, which is often saying let's double down on a few things versus keep adding many things. And that's where strategies get diluted and try to accomplish too much and get too complicated, especially as you bring in portfolio strategy second, third and fourth products. It gets very complicated as you move to business strategy and how to manage that. So if you keep going back to these fundamentals and ground yourself in that, you'll be able to be much more with conviction on your prioritisation and saying no when you need to say no, which is very difficult to do.

[00:35:56] Well, thank you both for such a fantastic conversation. Thank you for joining us and giving me lots of reasons to giggle and talk about Olivia Rodrigo.

[00:36:07] There you have it. Did you ever think you would hear so much about music in an episode talking about tech and product management? I certainly did not. I'm so grateful to Jay and Kevin for walking us through how they think about product management, the different waves of frameworks and approaches to product management in their ver, very accomplished careers that they've seen. But also talking about the parallels that there are to recording music, to being in a live music audience, to being a fan of music, and even to a certain extent, co-creation and how we can do that today as consumers of music, but also the parallels that there are when we are building technology. And lastly, of course, my favourite topic was just nerding out about jobs to be done and how that is a really great place to start when thinking about one's own product roadmap. So that brings us to the end of this episode of Architects of Change brought to you by Mambu. Thank you to my two amazing guests, Jay Haynes and Kevin Trilli. If you'd like to delve into more of Kevin's work, please head to mambu.com/insights and to find out more about Jay's work, please visit thrive, thrv.com. For more Mambu podcasts, head to wherever you get your podcasts and don't forget to subscribe to our channels so you don't miss an episode. I've been your host, Nina Mohanty. See you next time.

What makes people tick and not click

[00:00:03] Hello and thanks for joining us for another episode of Architects of Change, a podcast brought to you by Mumby. The cloud banking platform to help you evolve your business. I'm your host, Emma Lindley, co-founder of Women in Identity. In this episode, we're going to explore how businesses can stand out in the crowd whilst maintaining customer satisfaction to the highest level. Many of us in the industry will have heard the words customer centricity over and over again. But why is it so pivotal to success? And how do top tier companies deliver on targets while providing customer value like no one else? I'm delighted to say to help me explore this topic and answer some of these questions, I'm joined by two brilliant guests Sabrina Dar, chief of staff to the CEO at Mambu and Pete Trainor, product designer, innovator and entrepreneur in AI and Data. Thank you both for joining us.

[00:01:03] So let's, I think, start with the basics. What do we mean by customer centricity? It's definitely something I've heard lots of people talk about. In fact, you know, I'm guilty of talking about it a lot myself. Is this just like a more modern way of thinking for organisations or as or have we as consumers changed our ways and do we just want more personalisation from the services?

[00:01:27] Customer centricity, I think, particularly in the tech industry, was something a lot of companies talked about and that for sure is now more about personalisation. But I do wonder whether, particularly in the last two years after the pandemic, what you would talk about in terms of the great resignation, whether having a predictive element to that is now where consumers, customers are more going. And personalisation may now be more of a defacto and the basis table stakes that more and more companies need to be providing. What technology can do, and I'm sure we're going to explore that throughout this conversation now, how the data can help make better decisions, inform me as a consumer about my health, my wealth, all of that I think is now where companies have an opportunity to really step up and give customers what they want.

[00:02:27] I just want to add to that. I agree with all of that. During the the the research for my book years ago now, when we were looking at terms like users and customer, we realised that actually they were fairly dehumanising terms and that was a product of the internet being spewed out for 15 years and kind of treating people like cattle. So the recommendation that I started to give certainty to clients in my own business was that we start to use terms like human and people more so that, you know, human centricity and people centricity suddenly brings back this value that people have, which is a personality. Not just personalisation. It also helps businesses, I think, hunt for a slightly different type of data when they're going to start going down a personalisation route. And if you start to treat people less like a number and more like a person, then I think you get to a slightly different place.

[00:03:19] So that's really interesting. And I think, I mean, most of us are living in a world where we're bombarded by technology and innovation. I think, you know, I'm certainly you know, and if I speak to my friends and family, we're not spoilt for choice when it comes to picking digital services. There's a huge amount of choice. And also most services pretty much, I think on the face of it, they seem to offer good personalisation. But is this enough? Is there more that can be done? And do we need services to be even more adaptable to actual individuals lives? And I think that I'm going to come back to you, Pete, because that's the bit that you're talking about, you know, not treating people like cattle being more individual.

[00:03:58] Yeah. And also the ethics of that as well. And I think what happened was, you know, the last 20 years, especially since I guess 2008, when people got smartphones, like massively when they become ubiquitous, we kind of spewed out a lot of technology that was almost like personalisation on steroids. And then suddenly we've got a thousand apps on our phones that are all pinging for our attention for every personalised offer and every, you know, minute of our attention. And it kind of went wrong, right? So I think what's really important is that we start to realise that it is about people's health and their wellbeing and what makes them tick and not just using personalisation and customer centricity to kind of scream for people's attention. Now I think the other thing that's happened just on that point is in the last couple of years, there's been a bit of a rebellion from, you know, generations of people that are saying, I don't want to be talked to like this anymore. I don't want to be at the end of a, you know, CRM tsunami, like, please treat me with respect. And therefore, it's really important now that I think businesses not just kind of create personalisation strategies, but also kind of ethics strategies around that communication as well. And how those there's tools in that data are used.


[00:05:13] Yeah, I think not only in how that is delivered as the conversation we're having right now is more human, I think the decisions that are being made, you know, it goes right back to then how companies are kind of looking to address this need to be human. You know, as more and more things can be done through AI, can be done through churning through data. It will be the human decisions, the leadership in these companies that are able to translate and do what technology cannot do today, that humanity needs to then of course, happen in the companies and and so much that leadership now is focussed on if you read, kind of, where that is is is on the mental health well-being of not only the employees but as we're talking about the consumers and the customers that you're servicing and what is it that we're all doing to protect each other's space? You know, the constant pinging happens internally when you're working as well, being on constantly. What is happening to that space that you're creating for the creativity, the innovation, that humanity, you know that that has to happen in companies as well to in order to address this. So it's as we were perhaps a little bit scared about where AI would take us and technology would take us, you know, there is ever increasing, I think, the need and the reality that humanity and leadership is absolutely called for to help us navigate through this kind of next, you know, transition that we're going on right now.

[00:06:47] Just to add to that. Years ago now, it was I think it was Barclays that we were working with. And they were really grappling with this kind of concept that maybe they needed a chief philosophy officer and a chief ethics officer before they really pushed their data and AI strategy through the personalisation funnel so that they were scrutinising every single beep and ping and notification that was sent out. And I thought that was really interesting. I've not actually seen a bank brave enough to do that yet, but I think even, you know, especially in financial services, when you're dealing with people's money and the impact that has on their life and work and their well-being, like hiring some of those roles could be really fascinating as a concept.

[00:07:28] Yeah, for sure. And you see that C-suite, because you're right, it goes through everything that you do. So it doesn't sit in one function. It's not one person's responsibility. It's got to be pervasive if it's actually going to work. So right through from the engineering side and the actual design all the way through to the customer facing interfaces and wellbeing also now being a role that I've seen a few kind of large companies hire at that C-suite as well, you know, which is just really interesting that companies are understanding it and figuring out a way to kind of make it pervasive and through their entire operation.


[00:08:03] Just really quickly on that, I do love this idea that the chief wellbeing officer is in charge of the customers, not just the staff like that I think is a really interesting point.

[00:08:13] Yeah, love that. There's a really interesting book actually written by somebody that used to work at Microsoft and it's called Tools and Weapons. And, you know, and we we think about technology certainly. I mean, I work in the digital identity industry and my kind of narrative around this is often is like just because we can we also have to ask ourselves the question whether we should, you know, develop those types of technologies and how we go about doing that. And I think that speaks to what you're both talking about, is trying to get that balance between, you know, the technology and the data in the AI and and, you know, the the ethics approach around it as well. So before we talk about how companies can get better at personalisation, because I'd like to dive into that in a little bit. Let's talk about some examples of innovators and what they're already doing and how they're doing it well and why are they doing it so well? What are the some examples that you can give to me of places that are doing it well?

[00:09:08] I'm going to go for parallel industry. I think the most interesting stuff I've seen over the last couple of years is in health care, largely because it's had to be done. It's been disrupted by, you know, pandemics and all that bad stuff. But also, I think it's it's an industry that's generating huge amounts of really interesting data that can be used for rapid personalisation. So I've seen a lot of kind of primary care businesses adopting DNA and epigenetics as a data source on individuals to really make sure that they personalising health care to be what we term in health care as salutogenic which is how do you treat the causes of something, not just push notifications out about the conditions. And I think health care is an industry that the financial services space should look at very, very carefully in terms of the way that choosing certain types of data for personalisation. I think that that's definitely an area with, like, rapid innovation. And it's right at the edges of ethics as well. So it's right there where you're kind of you've got to be very, very careful what you do. And so I love some of the stuff that's coming through in terms of personalised health care. And I think if banks start to think a little bit more like doctors, then they they will start to make some gains and wins that people would appreciate.


[00:10:22] The other area that is, you could argue one of the biggest problems we've got to solve right now is as well as health care is our impact on the environment. And I think sustainability is, you know, not just about the environment is about inclusion. And I think the financial services, again there, can really play a part. I think more and more people are aware now that the money is a huge lever that they have to potentially change an impact or have more of an impact in a certain area to help them make better decisions about where things are going. And so, first of all, it's about having more inclusive experiences within the banking sector to allow anyone everywhere the ability to think about their money and have it being used in a particular way. But then also that having more visibility and transparency across a number of different kind of just ecosystems and industries and supply chains that have existed for years that now have the potential to be disrupted and are ripe for innovation, but maybe have been sacred because of, in part a lack of that transparency about how things work, how they operate, how things are funded. And I think that's a real big calling to a number of different industries. And if they don't take that up, I think there's the ability here for people and the average consumer to make their voices more more widely heard as well.

[00:11:51] And would you say there's a best practise way to approach it? Is there, you know, is there kind of anything out there where you go that's the methodology to use, or is that something that still needs to be developed?

[00:12:02] I think you've always still got to think about what's going to delight a customer. I think you've always that's always still got to be at the heart of what you're trying to do as an entrepreneur or as a scale up company. You can't lose sight of that, even if it's something that customers don't know they want today or they don't know they need today, or they don't know they can have today. It's got to be, I think, something that is now more and more design led. You know, it's got to be an experience that delights and you can use and it's intuitive to a large extent and it fits within the rhythm of the world that I operate in. It's not something over there or tangential or kind of hard to get to. So I think accessibility more and more now, wherever you are in the world, however you are engaging in the world digitally or you know, maybe less, more so in rural parts of the world, you've got to think about that. And I think that's kind of one thing that you could get the scale from and get the traction because the scale up then of your idea and how you get to arguably the tipping point of this being something that's pervasive is that still is a little bit of the old world type thing, which is, you know, you've got to get people on there, you've got to go find money to kind of fund your idea that can now be in small, different ways, but you've got to try and get that traction. And I think the more you think about customer delight, the more you think about accessibility, the more you think about being everywhere you are more likely to have success quicker.

[00:13:34] There was a really lovely point in the beginning of that about customer choice. And, you know, the question is about are there any good examples? I think is like a graveyard of innovations and companies that didn't think about this customer centricity and have failed and not building things with that customer centricity in mind is probably, you know, the norm. And so I think building with sustainability and ethics and that kind of stuff is a really kind of important point like and I think it's actually difficult to find good examples, but it's really easy to find like a, a spattering of really bad ones. There's a great book just as a little, kind of, prompt is a guy called John Alexander has just released a book called Citizens, and it's about the companies that are winning by harnessing citizen power to build their businesses. And I think it's definitely a really good, modern, very contemporary reference to how this works well now.

[00:14:33] So it sounds to me, correct me if I'm wrong, we've got this kind of customer led approach and then there's also an engineering technology led approach. What are the main considerations for founders and senior leaders when adopting each of these approaches?

[00:14:51] Yeah, it's definitely something that we're kind of, you know, kind of working through and enjoying  the challenge of thinking through right now. You know, there's no doubt about it that what technology can do today is enabling customer choice and potentially customer decision making in a whole new world. So where the engineering capability sits and how it does what it does combined with the design led, you know, you do see now more than maybe 15 years ago, the idea and the creativity and the innovation kind of coming from that space. What you've got to do is combine that with the customer kind of view, the customer centricity, constantly getting that feedback, constantly almost co-creating, once you get to a point. You know where is that input coming from and ensuring back to the ethics piece that that is diverse, that those are from voices that may not be typically the ones you've heard from today or the ones that the loudest or educated or visible in that space, particularly as women, and I know there's a couple of really good books about where women are just almost invisible in this space because nothing today has been built with the kind of female kind of side of things down to air conditioning temperatures, which I think is just a very relatable one to both sides of the fence there. So, you know, even I think it's a bit of a miss not only to think that it has to be engineering led or it has to be customer led. I mean, the reality is it's got to have the customer at the centre of everything you're doing. But there's no doubt about it what the technology can do, where it can take you, that innovation and creativity is coming absolutely from the engineering place. I love the idea of being in a co-creation space, bringing them both together and getting the best of both worlds there.

[00:16:43] I was just thinking, you know, and I always think like this anyway. It's like respect, collaboration, consideration. Like I think when you get people understanding our strengths and weaknesses across disciplines and almost forcing that through organisations, then you start to create some of that environment that Sabrina is talking about. And I think for far too long businesses have kind of gone fast and broke things without that, you know, pause of respect to collaborate, you know, respond and you know, have engineers understand the design process, help designers understand the engineering process. All of the, you know, the biases and isms that are caught in those groups of people, they have to be washed out before anything is pushed out into the world, because otherwise you just amplify the worst parts of us rather than the best parts of us. So I think respect is probably the main thing in any kind of design and learning process.


[00:17:38] Why do you think some start-ups? Because I can certainly think of some in my field of digital identity where they've lost focus and developed teething problems. Why do they lose that focus, in your opinion, and in kind of your field of expertise? They might they might be similar to mine. But I'm interested to get your perspective.


[00:18:00] I mean, I've grown up in an industry completely dominated by idiots that look like me, and I think that's been a huge problem, right? And I think a lot of the the sins of technology as an industry is because it's been largely designed up until this point by people that aren't victims of, you know, biases and racism and sexism and ageism and all the isms. And I think that's changing. And I think that's great. And I think we're kind of like driving that out, but I think a lot more needs to be done. We've got a long path to walk down in order to get to a place where founders especially understand that what they do have has a massive impact. And a lot of that has to start internally at companies. You can't do personalisation unless you're doing it for everybody. And if you're basing it on yourself, then you failed automatically.

[00:18:50] I think it's a great point, Pete. And you know, if you carry on with that thought process, it's not been an industry that's attracted that diversity of thought, you know, and then retained that diversity of thought throughout the layers of leadership and decision making. So, you know, we've got to find a way collectively as a society and some big companies kind of help with this with their kind of investment in training and development and certifications. But governments and schools, we've got to go right up the way back through, you know, girls and not just gender, but girls have to be engaged in coding and thinking that STEM subjects are of interest, that they have a place there, that there is a way that they can contribute, their voice will be heard. But also I will say geographic diversity as well. You know, you've got such amazing skill sets in different parts of the world that haven't sat in the typical hubs of Silicon Valley where I've worked other big hubs in the US, in Europe, and it's great to see some of the EU funding that's going into and we we work in Lithuania, Romania. Just trying to get kind of just even that geographic diversity as well as different experiences as well along with gender and the other isms is, as Pete said, that the other kind of biases naturally kind of drowned out. And if these people aren't in the companies designing the products and making decisions, then we're falling short by a long way. And that will be a big contribution, Emma I'm sure.

[00:20:26] I think if you're looking for the classic example of technology that lost its focus and kind of subsequently went wrong with radical personalisation, you've only got to look at social media. And like social media is an example of kind of radical personalisation that, trigger warning, is consume the lives and killed a huge amount of teenagers through, you know, advertising algorithms that push self-harm content out. And, you know, it was never designed for that. But the people that designed it never possibly considered the fact that it could be used for that. And I think, you know, as an example of an industry that grew up around technology that's based on personalisation and algorithms is the one that we can learn the most from and not make those mistakes in health care and fintech and, you know, edgy tech and all of the other tech spaces that are popping up. And we have to learn from those mistakes.

[00:21:14] So just moving on to, you know, in terms of like personalised products, I think it's, you know, it's all well and good offering consumers personalised physical products that make our lives easier. But, and we've touched a little bit on this, but where does the responsibility of customers mental well-being come into play?

[00:21:32] This is a big one and it becomes ever bigger. And again, I would add to it, it's the health and the societal impact as well. You know, where where is that responsibility? And as I think we're talking about, it's got to sit it's got to sit with the people who are not only making the decisions and gathering that data, but the ones that are making decisions about citizens and public health. They sit in the government, they sit probably in the regulatory space. And you know, what we are finding and what we see everyone sees today is that those are probably not where the speed will come from first. The innovation will come first and the regulation and the policies will come after. And so, you know, as Pete says, unfortunately we've probably already got some really good examples of this, where, yeah, being outpaced today. And ultimately consumers, I think, have to realise that they have an extraordinary amount of power here and they have the ability to vote either with their money, with their time, with their attention. And it's going to be very interesting how that dynamic now changes. As we've talked about, you know, we've had a lot of this being screamed at us. And so, you know, we're like, oh, my attention is over here now because something's pinging me quick enough or I'm getting all these notifications and we take a step back and we're like, Actually, where do I want to spend my time? What is it that's worthwhile for me and what do I believe in? What do I actually think is the right thing here? And which companies do I want to be involved in that reflect me and my passions, my brand, my ethos, my family values? And that's not necessarily a power that has been firmly held with consumers up until now. You would argue it's been very much, well, we have a product we're going to push out if you want it, great. If you don't, you kind of miss out. And I think that that dynamic is absolutely on the change now. And consumers, I think, have to realise that they probably have the quickest and loudest voice here to really give feedback back to these products that have been developed by corporations.

[00:23:38] The other thing just on that point is that, you know, fintechs and financial services businesses who probably don't think that they have, you know, an obligation to look after people's health and wellbeing are so wrong because they're the ones that are collecting a massive amount of data where you can spot problematic patterns right? So, you know, I think is ethically the responsibility of those platforms and those people to stop, you know, problematic gambling behaviour, you know, problematic spending, problematic, you know, debt proactively and ethically like beforehand. And to Sabrina's point, there are enough people now saying, if you don't do that, we won't use you. We'll switch using an open banking API over that, whether those people are considering those things. And I think there is a very fuzzy line between kind of too much asymmetric paternalism and behavioural finance, where it gets too nanny to a bank that cares or to a fintech that cares. And I think those things are if you are a fintech, and you are the custodian of that data, you have an obligation to do something that keeps people well and alive. And if you're not doing that, then people are not going to use you.


[00:24:49] That for me is that element of prediction. You know, you've got data now that you can correlate and you can correlate it in a very unique way, because at this point, you are the only one that has that data. And so how this data is now correlated and then using to predict where there might be problems, I think that is absolutely and has to be part of the decision making process in these companies today. And you can't really shy away from it. And if you do or you don't or you get it wrong, I think that's where the feedback from consumers has to now get louder and louder.


[00:25:24] And just one other point on that, because I think this is quite a pervasive area, is that, you know, the other people that need a voice in this are the regulator. And I think, you know, financial services and health care are two regulated industries. And I think, you know, the CQC for health care and the FCA for financial services are starting to, you know, mandate a certain amount of this stuff. And having governance and regulation in these tools is not there to be the fun sponge. It's there to keep people safe. And I think working collaboratively with those regulators can actually be a lot of fun and be really interesting and set those guardrails to make sure that things are done ethically and correctly.


[00:26:03] I think interesting just to bring some of those things together. You know, you talked about gambling and obviously we've seen some of the fintechs kind of blocking gambling transactions. And Sabrina, you were talking about, you know, the regulation coming afterwards. Interesting, the regulator very recently, the gambling commission has put more guidance out around problem gambling. And I think it is that, you know, that it's the responsibility of everybody to ensure that people people are being safe and they're not overspending. They're not over gambling because it's bad for people. It's actually in the long term, it's really bad for businesses. So I think, yeah, it's just bringing those two points together I think that's super, super interesting. So I think one of the other important things for companies to consider, aside from choosing this kind of successful approach that fundamentally helps consumers lives, is having a USP, a unique selling point. Is a USP the third and final factor that contributes to making a good recipe for success, is that the is that the tipping point? If the former considerations are met.


[00:27:05] Market dynamics play out eventually, you know, and so demand and supply. And how does that work? And that model still is very much based on human psychology and human behaviours and demands and wants. So I think, you know, the technology can now go in so many different places that companies can make themselves believe that they have a USP. I think it's got to come back to or the way that that gets regulated. So you make sure that there's an ethical way that this is being rolled out is that customers have something that they are engaging in and have access to. So it's got to be an experience that is delightful. The USP can't just be something that's kind of in the background, if you know what I mean. It's got to come to the fore. Customers have to engage with it. And then I think there's got to be transparency there a little bit maybe the further back in that supply chain or further back with a context so that people can make more and more informed decisions. And they're not just kind of attracted by the the new flashy thing that's out there, which can be used to mask maybe some of these decisions that haven't been made in the best way or not being fully thought through. So it's a long way of saying you still need to be unique, you still need to delight, you still need customers who are going to use you. But I think there's going to be a little bit more around that and a bit of the transparency around that has got to come. And we have to demand it as consumers if it's not ever ready at the forefront of your product that you're taking to market.


[00:28:37] I think a USB for me is, you know, what is the problem you're trying to solve? And does it solve that problem? And I think if you boil it down to that truism, what you end up with is people have problems and they want the businesses that they work with and collaborate with banks or otherwise to solve that problem. Keep my money safe, maximise my money, you know, don't lose it, don't abuse it like those that the USPs and truisms that banking has always had. And I think what we're starting to see now is customers and people, humans demand more than that. You know, the unique part of a selling proposition has to be how we're doing that better and how you can measure that success. I think a really great example in fintech space is Money Box. Who, you know, popped up years ago now just sweeping those little bits of every spending transaction into a little savings pot and kind of growing your savings organically. And then suddenly, you know, people who couldn't save are saving better and they kind of made good on their promise to help people save. And I think as a USP, they lived it and they preach it and they did it. And I think you have to do that. Otherwise people are going to see through you and just move on to the next one because it's so easy to switch products now, that's the other problem.

[00:29:59] I mean, that certainly sounds like something for kind of founders and fintechs to think about when they're embarking on a new project. So I've got one final question. What happens next? Like the democratisation of technology and how do we regulate it? We talk a lot about kind of ethics and regulation. What's the next steps?


[00:30:22] Oh, you know, I think more and more open source is is coming. So I think, you know, that is it's just, you know, more and more out there how people can engage and interact at the very at the very start of a project, all this sharing of information, I think that will just continue and open source, you know, as and how regulators kind of engage with that as well will just be actually more in the hands of the people that want to control it. So educating yourself, I think, and having a, you know, the younger generation kind of growing up in this world that is more comfortable with the technology and understanding it and then engaging with it through coding and open sourcing and having that visibility, I think means that that will come and they probably are going to be also the generation that have seen, you know, the downside of not having either company ethics or regulation and policy at the heart, you know, not only the teenage impacts you talked about, Pete, but I've I've lived a bit in the U.S. and just the shootings and kind of the use of social media by very extreme views out there. You know, it will be the younger generation that I've grown up with that impact. They will be the ones that were in schools and saw it firsthand, had friends, had family impacted by it. So their voices are going to be really loud in this if we don't figure it out first. And I think it's really lazy of us in our decision making roles that we're all in to say, well, you know, the younger generation will come and they'll sort it out. So we've got to step up. I think we've got to engage in the conversation. Wherever you sit in this, in companies, in public places, in government, in regulators, as a consumer, and realised that this is a challenge that we've all got to address and we can do it quickly. I think this kind of age old almost legacy thinking of, well, to change this is just going to take a long time. Technology doesn't wait for that. And so I think, you know, just us catching up with that, not waiting for me is, I feel, a really big call to action for all of us.

[00:32:29] I think the flip side of that, and I completely agree with all of that stuff in terms of people power is, I think what we're going to see in the next couple of years is those radical, smart, transformational technologies being opened up to even more people. So we're going to see, you know, NLP and machine learning and AI or autonomous machine reasoning now rather than the term AI, make the point is that like a lot of this technology that's been fairly exclusive to groups of people that know how to harness it are going to be open right up so that all of these bedroom entrepreneurs are going to start tapping into some of this stuff. Now, that could go in one of two ways. It's either going to go really, really well, and we're going to democratise the use of this powerful radical technology and see some huge changes and cultural shifts. Or it's going to go to exactly the same way as social media when, you know, there were going to be catastrophic consequences unless we get the regulation and the frameworks in place to do that. But we can't stop it. And I think, you know, open banking has done, has started this movement and I think the movement is only going to get more radical as, you know, software becomes easier for people to create their own banks and services through. And I think it's going to be really exciting in the next few years, but I do think it's going to be bumpy. And so there is a kind of warning in my final thoughts that, you know, it's going to be a bumpy couple of years, going to be mistakes economically and financially. I think people are going to struggle. We're seeing that right now with crypto, but it's tanked and it was a great idea that's just not been regulated and a lot of people have lost a lot of money. And so I think the use of this kind of radical personalisation has to be done, it will be done by everybody that can use it. It's just got to be done in the right way.

[00:34:13] I would just add to that if I can Emma, as Pete was talking, I was thinking, you know, it's also probably about focussing it on the big problems we have to solve, right? Like, get that at the forefront of this and we might see it all kind of going in the direction where we've got a huge call to action here and all living in a very different way to kind of figure out how this planet kind of operates in the next decades to come. So that open technology, as Pete said, and the embracing of that, I do remain a technology optimist. You know, having that now being translated and focussed to solving the biggest problems we've got, hopefully is kind of what what does happen.


[00:34:52] Thank you, Sabrina. Thank you so much for your time. Really appreciate it.

[00:34:59] That was an absolutely brilliant conversation. And I think, you know, my takeaways from that are you really need to put the customer at the heart of what you do, really delighting your customers. But it's possible to combine engineering approaches, customer led approaches, and also ethics to really bring exceptional products to market. That brings us to the end of this Architects of Change episode brought to you by Mambu. I'd like to thank my two guests today, Sabrina Dar and Pete Trainor. It was absolutely brilliant conversation. If you'd like to delve more into this topic and see more of Sabrina's work. Please head to mambu.com/insights. If you want to follow more of Pete's work, please head to trainor.fyi. For more Mambu podcasts head to wherever you get your podcasts and don't forget to subscribe to our channel so you don't miss an episode. I've been your host, Emma Lindley. See you next time.

kennek: A Founder's story 

[00:00:04] Thanks for joining us for another episode of Architects of Change, a podcast brought to you by Mambu, the cloud banking platform to help you evolve your business. I'm your host for this episode, Nina Mohanty, founder of Blue Money. In this special episode, I'm chatting one on one with Xavier de Pauw, the co-founder of kennek. A vertically integrated lending solution for lenders and loan investors offered as a software as a service platform. Throughout this conversation, we'll discuss Xavier's humble beginnings up to the present day to the extremely successful entrepreneur he is today. We hope you find inspiration from Xavier Story along with valuable lessons and insight within the fintech industry. Welcome, Xavier. How are you?


[00:00:51] I'm very well, thank you. Thanks for having me.


[00:00:53] Well Xavier, let's start with a little bit about your background. You're Belgian, but your early life wasn't based just there, was it?

[00:01:01] That's right. So a Belgian national. But from the age of 9 to 17, I grew up in Cameroon, which was which was super interesting, shaped a lot of who I am today. I mean, those are the formative years. So I went to a French high school there. It's one of the reasons why I ended up also in London, because I was really looking for an international, cosmopolitan city, a place to live and working.

[00:01:27] When you went through your education and started to understand a little bit about the world, some of the influences, perhaps from your upbringing, both in Belgium and Cameroon, was the goal always for you to make it in the finance world?


[00:01:42] So certainly growing up in Cameroon, one of one of my uncles has started a company there. And so  my father joined that that company, which is why we moved there. That's that was my first kind of entrepreneurial exposure, if you like. And I thought it was really interesting running a business, seeing seeing how that happened and how that worked. When I went to uni, that really became more of, you know, doing business and looking more at the financial markets more than anything else. So that's really what what piqued my interest.

[00:02:17] On that note, though, you mentioned your uncle was an entrepreneur. Would you say that that had an influence on your entrepreneurial spirit or were you just entrepreneurial from the get go?


[00:02:29] I don't think it was entrepreneurial from the get go. You know, I never as a kid never set up a lemonade stand or something like that, I'm trying to get my kids to do actually, because they they are showing good, entrepreneurial kind of, you know, signs there. So I'm trying to get them to do some of these things. Though for me, it really started, I think later on as a teenager or as I said, I saw family running a company. I got into economics and finance and and so really, you know, you read about the number of people read about stories in the capital markets. And that really got me interested. And then throughout my career, if I look back at almost 25 years now whilst working at a financial behemoth like Merrill's, there was still a lot of entrepreneurial stuff that was happening that I was following. So I guess doing, doing deals, structuring deals especially is something I've really developed a keen interest in.

[00:03:31] So I wonder if you could tell us a little bit more about where your finance journey began? Because I want to talk about the companies that you founded, of course. But maybe let's go back in time to where you actually started to hone your craft within financial services.


[00:03:50] So I started in 99 at Merrill Lynch in London in what was called fixed income, structured finance. So we were trying to simplify this. We were our clients were banks and and nonfinancial or non-bank lenders who had portfolios of loans and needed financing solutions or capital solutions. And so we would put together in hindsight, quite complex transactions where either we would we Merrill Lynch would fund some of these portfolios or we would issue bonds in the capital markets which were backed by these portfolios of loans. Those were deals, to give you an idea that, you know, required three to sometimes six or seven months of structuring work from from cradle to grave. So they were quite complex. And that's actually what I what I really loved about that job is there was a lot of analytical work involved, but also legal work structuring. So it was a very multifaceted type of role. I'm somebody who who loves to do various different things. And that kind of role was really perfect for that.


[00:05:00] And if I recall correctly, were you still at Merrill when the financial crash happened?

[00:05:07] Oh yes. The proverbial what goes up must go down. So we built a team from single digits, four quarters, seven, eight people to 65 people by 2007. And then when the crisis happened and really started in the summer of 07 and then 2008, we went back down to five people. So I was one of the last five sitting there. So yeah a pretty brutal situation. But you know, at that time you're sitting there and you see wave after wave of of people losing their jobs, you know, irrespective of whether they're doing a good job or not. It didn't matter at the time, but then that the volatility in the market was so extreme and so overdone to a certain extent that it presented opportunities. And so out of that came, you know, we were first issuing our jobs had been to issue bonds in the markets. Now, all of a sudden, those bonds, which most of them I would say almost all of them were money good. So we thought, okay, these these things will we will end up repaying what they do to repay. But you can buy them today at a 30% discount to par. So that's where the idea came to start a bank where we would build a bank backwards. So start with a treasury. The stuff that I knew really well, you know, build a treasury buy some bonds, finance those bonds, and then create a margin of positive margin in the balance sheets, which would then finance the growth of and the build out of a bank, which is what we ended up doing with backing from a private equity firm.

[00:06:47] Wow. I want to talk about kennek, but before that, I want to actually talk about the digital bank MeDirect tact that you built from scratch. And so you built that over nine years. You developed a banking group active in three European countries, 300 staff, a €2.5 billion balance sheet. And then you also then co-founded the sub bank, Bank Belgium.


[00:07:15] Yes. So in terms of my career, I started at Merrill Lynch in 99 and stayed there exactly ten years. Day for day. So until 2009. Yeah, the secret there was the financial crisis which started in the summer of 2007. Really, really went through 2008. And that's the period where, you know, the volatility in the market created it really an opportunity to start a bank and start building a bank backwards switch, which we did in the summer of 2009 with the with the launch of MeDirect out of the banking group MeDirect, we started with the bank in Malta, set up a London office, and then decided to start building banks across Europe. And the first one was the MeDirect bank in Belgium, which I led as a CEO for five years.


[00:08:08] I mean, having been in Merrill Lynch for some time, seeing the ups and downs of that and then going in, you know, saying, actually, we're going to do this on our own. What was your secret? What's the secret sauce here?

[00:08:23] First of all, just like now with kennek back then, I was one of a few co-founders. So kennek there's three of us who started the company. MeDirect there was four of us, four essentially co-founders. So that's one enough. It's a secret, but that's certainly something that I believe in, is doing things with not by yourself first of all. What I like to say also is you work hard, you're probably lucky to be smart, to have done the right studies and then pursued the right kind of career path. So you have to do everything right, but then you also have to have a bit of luck. And I like to be humble enough to say well yes I've done everything right but then you still need that element of luck of being in the right place at the right time. You know, I had the idea I wanted to do this and I was lucky enough to meet a private equity fund and co-founders who who had a similar idea, if I didn't have that one moment there, it probably might have stayed an idea right? So I think you have to optimise and maximise your chances of success or of doing something by doing everything right. And then you still need that little spark at some points in time.


[00:09:36] So a lot of preparation with a small dose of luck.

[00:09:39] Yes. I think, you know, ultimately in anything in life, right. If you apply for a job, you might be the best qualified candidate. I think in this case, I had that idea. I met the product and had the same idea. So I walked into that meeting thinking, surely there is a match here because I have the business idea that they believe in and that they are also starting .So we should start this venture together. But you need that element of the spark where they think ,yes, this is the right individual and not somebody else. So that's one thing there. And I think ultimately perseverance, my favourite word is tenacity and And when we were hiring at Merrill's, we were always saying, you know, you'd go on campus to some of the, the best universities in the world. And people would say, you know what makes a difference? And you look at 50 people, you know, different backgrounds, but ultimately same studies. Everybody's smart, everybody's studied, everybody's on this and that. And I would  say, well, but it's how tenacious or how eager are you to get there right to go for the next to the next mile so to speak.

[00:10:47] Now, I'm going to make myself sound old by saying this. But, you know, it really feels like nowadays people kind of expect things to happen overnight. One of the things that I've noticed recently and, you know, I would probably be classified as one of these young entrepreneurs. But you see a lot of these wonderkids, you know, Forbes 30 under 30, these young founders who have a great idea perhaps, but maybe don't have the experience that you have and perhaps don't understand the enormous responsibility that comes with managing a fund, managing other people's money, don't have those important relationships or connections or understanding of little regulatory quirks. Right. I mean, we're talking about fintech here and it is other people's money, so it does matter where things land and making sure that we're taking all the boxes and it's annoying. But what were some of the key benefits of your experience at Merrill Lynch and prior to being a founder? And what would you say to those that are younger who perhaps think that they can take on the world and say, you know, death to the banks or whatever it may be?

[00:12:08] One of the best compliments I had was from one of the guys that joined in, one of the young guys who joined us at Merrill's and joined my team. I had been drilled to work to a very high standard. And this is what you were expected to do there. And he later on became an entrepreneur or he was entrepreneur, joined us for a number of years and went back to entrepreneurship and said to me recently, thanks for being so hard on me because that means that I now go for the high standard and it helps me when  I'm an entrepreneur. So I guess just generally when when you join one of these large organisations, investment banks or some of the big consultancy firms, etc., it does give you a good kind of basis to start from. I'm not saying it's necessary. I'm not saying it's necessary at all. But it does bring that kind of experience. To your other point. Look, in capital markets, we've seen the proverbial kind of 25 year olds, you know, building some tech in a garage, going to one of my former colleagues on, you know, in a in a large investment fund and saying, hey, the way you're doing things is is obsolete. This is how you should do things. And in B2B, that's a very tough sell. It's usually badly received because people sit there, rightly or wrongly. But the reality is your potential clients sit there and think, well, you don't know you don't know what we do day to day. You haven't seen this. And so the disruptors amongst us will say, well, maybe it's good that a different viewpoint arrives in this market. Why don't we look at it differently? But the reality is, when you have an investor and you are managing billions for other clients, your appetite for risk and for doing things completely differently is reduced. So the element of age, experience, trust from having worked in those markets for many years in the B2B space certainly helps. I think the kind of superhero single founder that you read about in the press, whether it's fintech or other, you know, e-commerce, whatnot, I see that mainly as a as a B2C phenomenon, number one. Number two, it's also you see the tiny tip of the iceberg, right. For for every Mark Zuckerberg, there's probably 999 people that you've never heard of who tried the same thing. My philosophy and our philosophy at kennek is is actually, I guess, a bit more risk averse to a certain extent. I mean, we started a company from scratch again, so we are risk takers. Right. But there's a spectrum there of risk taking. So already starting with three people rather than one, we think it's important, actually. We're really five co-founders with with two late co-founders who've joined us. That means that there is a breadth of experience and of knowhow in the company, which means, you know, we help each other and we're humble enough to say, well, I don't know everything. I know what I don't know. And so that already takes the probability of failure down. We then apply that also externally. So not just amongst ourselves, we're not trying to maximise necessarily the percentage of shares that we have. It's what we're trying to do is make the pie as big as possible. Right? We're building a pie. We're making the pie as big as possible and then we'll split the pie. And obviously then we want as big a share of that pie as possible. But let's first make sure there is a big pie to share amongst ourselves. And what I see a lot of times and with, you know, people who think, oh, I'm going to be the next Mark Zuckerberg as they try to keep 100% of something and they end up with, you know, yes, great. You have a small cupcake all to yourself. But you haven't really  achieved anything in terms of, you know, building a company around us. So so we do that internally. We also look at that at the world externally. So, for example, you know, we're not building everything ourselves. There are phenomenal solutions systems out there. Mambu is one of them. We build on the lending engine of Mambu. And that for us is a collaboration. I would call it, you know, almost a partnership because we build on something quite important from Mambu to be able to give a certain service to our clients. And we do that with a number of other vendors. And again, it's about reducing the risk of failure, because when you start a company, the odds are stacked against you. That's just what the stats say. Right. So, so try to reduce that, rather reduce the probability of failure, then try to maximise for something else like percentage of the company or whatnot which is just in my mind certainly the wrong focus.

[00:17:00] Yeah. I really like this idea that you've brought up of, you know, let's build, let's bake a bigger pie instead of having a tiny little cupcake for yourself. I like that. Let's talk more about kennek. And actually, this is probably a good time to make sure that I'm saying it properly. So is it kennek? Is it kennek? please walk me through

[00:17:27] We say kennek. I'm somebody whose first name has been pronounced in 20 different ways here in London. So we're not we're not too focussed on how people pronounce it. But we've done some work with a great branding marketing company on the name. What kennek stand for is that it comes from the word connecting, right? And we're connecting a number of different things. First and foremost, we're connecting our clients who are all sorts of lenders, alternative credit providers. We're connecting them with much better data. So we're helping them do their jobs better by connecting data from from various sources, open banking, accounting, etc.. But we then also connecting those lenders with institutional investors who provide funding to those lenders, which then which then goes into the real economy. So those connections are there around us. So we're very fortunate to have great angel investors backing us and advisors backing us. And again, it's kind of an ecosystem where we connect people and that exchange goes in both directions. That's why we wanted the name, which is a palindrome, which you can read in both directions. So that's where that comes from.


[00:18:41] Okay. So now that we've got it right, kennek. So I was saying it right, that's good. Tell me where kennek story starts because you've got all this experience. You obviously know what you're doing in capital markets. Set the scene for us. Where does kennek actually begin?

[00:18:56] Well, it begins really with with a big shout out to my my two co-founders Thibault Lancksweert and Edmund Parsons. We really started talking with Thibault at the beginning of 2021, looking at what he was doing with Edmund in the alternative credit space. And that's what led to starting kennek in June 2021. So they they had been in a lender, a non-bank lender. They had built systems there for lending to SMEs in the UK and there wasn't a Mambu around there at the time. We're talking about it almost ten years ago. So they had built stuff and seen how hard it was. They had left the lender. They had been advising individual platforms because what they saw was that there was a lack of proper systems, procedures, policies, data systems in place for those smaller lenders. We were talking about this, the three of us, and so Edmund and Thibault were putting in place all your systems when they had done a lot of that work, then came to time to connect a lender with institutional investors. And that's where where I came in with my background from Merrill Lynch and MeDirect. And as we were doing that, we thought, well, we can keep doing this one by one. But actually what we're really looking at is a number of things. So it's a why now question. Technology has advanced tremendously. Platforms like, again, you know, banking systems like Mambu that you can take off the shelf and start building on top of. That means that we, you know, we will go live with our MVP within six months, which is unheard of. You know, it would be impossible without those building blocks being there. There was a huge amount of growth in that alternative credit space. It's a highly fragmented market, lots of lenders. They all need the same thing. And so for us, it was clear that they need technology. They also need funding. And the funding, you know, the large funds that we talk to, the large banks that we talk to need some form of trust in the system, that data and the continuity of those platforms. And so we resolve that by not going into them one by one, but actually building one software as a service platform, which is a plug and play credit infrastructure. So our clients still build the front end and this is important. The IP of most of these lenders, their IP is origination sales, you know, finding the niche that they understand better where they can deploy capital and that they can they can evaluate the credit quality of those borrowers. That's that's what they do. They are digging for gold, if you like. We are giving them the shovels. We're giving them the shovels to do that digging.

[00:21:45] One of the things I think is so important these days, especially, is what is your purpose? What is your mission?

[00:21:52] The ultimate goal and I guess north star, if you want to call it, is something I touched on before is we're building something, we're building lending infrastructure. We're not just building it, well we're building it because that's what we really know how to do. But ultimately, the goal is to to connect more capital with the real economy. There are huge statistics on what is called a funding gap. So the need for funding by SMEs, corporates that need funding to grow to hire people, to create jobs, to invest in sustainability and all these things. And there's a gap between that need and the actual supply of  funding. That's the reason why the alternative credit market has started. Alternative credit market essentially means it means various things. But simplified, it's the credit provided outside of the traditional banks, if you like. So our goal is to bring more funding through to the real economy. So if you think about, you know, the ESG, you know, we're probably on the S&G more than more than the E, we're not planting trees every time a loan is granted but we but we like to think that when we help the the certainly the SMEs gets better funding get more funding that creates jobs. And those are also the companies that innovate and beneficial to everything.


[00:23:16] And I'm curious when you talk about SMEs like a SMEs as in, you know, my hairstylist as in the coffee shop I visit every morning or what do you mean when you say this, these SMEs.


[00:23:28] As I mentioned before, we, we build the infrastructure and we build it. And I'm going to refer back to, to, to Mambu who has a has a phenomenal lending engine, which is configurable. And we have. You know, certainly Thibault and Edmund in the past have built technology for SMEs, which are mid-sized companies borrowing between two and £5 million. That kind of size of enterprise here. And what they saw is that when they wanted to change product, well, they had to go back to their engineers and build and invest money and time to develop a new product. So our thesis is we build the technology. We give a tool to any type of lender, whether they focus on real estate lending. And we have a number of real estate rich financing kind of clients who lend to two developers. We have a lot of platforms who do some sort of invoice discounting service to clients who are looking to provide a service. They have a cash flow coming to them in 60 to 90 days and they want that cash upfront. That's a sort of credit and then term loans, term loans to  midsized companies. So it can be really any type of credit. What's really interesting is if you think about this even further, there are corporates. So one of our potential clients, we're quite advanced with them at this stage. They  place people in, you know, for example, Amazon needs a hundred people in a warehouse. They will put a hundred people there, pay those people, and then wait for Amazon to pay them, you know, 60 or 90 days later. They then repackage those those receivables, if you like, and use that to finance themselves. That's again, a credit.

[00:25:14] So you've talked about Mambu and reference a few times, but you believe very strongly in the power of strong partnerships. Right. And you spoken about the types of partnerships you have and the importance of them. But what would you say has been the epitome of your desire to work in this way with your partners?

[00:25:38] We work with a few larger, you know, fintechs and companies. Mambu is one we look at Codat, which is an accounting data aggregator. We work with Looker which is a Google company now. So when I look at those guys and those companies, I like to say we're building on the shoulders of giants. They've already established themselves there. Let's not try to beat what they're doing. They're doing it really well. And it would take us years to build something of a similar quality. So let's let's work together. What's interesting is if you look at the history of fintech, right. Ten years or so, roughly the kind of new wave of fintechs. Right. Because there were fintechs before that name was even invented, really. But the new fintechs were really businesses typically that came to to steal the banks launch. Right. That there was a that was essentially what were disrupting or breaking up the banks or whatnot. A few years down the line those fintechs realise actually it's not that easy to acquire an audience. And the banks realised it's not actually not that easy to innovate and be faster than those that those fintechs. So there was a lot of cooperation that went from fighting to cooperating. And I think in these days, so a few years later, that cooperation, those partnerships are ever more important. People work together. You know, one plus one equals three, so to speak, right. When you work together, you just reinforce each other and you manage to serve a different client base, which is accretive to both parties rather than, you know, it's not a zero sum game. It's not if I do this and if I help you here, then it's detrimental to our business. It's usually the opposites, really. And so we we do that with the large players. We also work together with some some smaller companies where where we see benefits in helping out each other. And ultimately, there's a bit of good karma there that, you know, if we help each other with some good things will come out of that.


[00:27:45] So not to make you choose your favourite child.


[00:27:51] But I wonder if you could share with us your biggest success story or a big success story when it comes to connecting with your clients.

[00:28:02] Most recently, I won't pick out one single name of a client, but one. What was really great is, you know, we talk about how do you build these start-up right? You have to iterate fast and and show something to a client and and learn, you know, either they like it or they hate it or that any feedback is great because you learn, you adapt and and then you're iterate and become better. And I think one of the great successes recently as we're doing a lot of demos with clients is just a phenomenal feedback that we've been having from Frontline saying, well, number one, we. We don't see any system like this. Nobody's really offering that one stop plug and play solution for lenders. So we've been trying to plug a number of solutions together, but you guys are doing it in a vertically integrated way, which is super useful. And by the way, the whole user experience is fantastic. That's music to our ears, right? Because when you think about B2B, typically, you know, I was a user of Bloomberg terminals for 15, 20 years. I mean, 20 years ago, there was no UX of Bloomberg right. It was just a very strange looking screen.

[00:29:19] It's good to know that, you know, B2B companies like yourself are also taking your UX or user experience just as seriously as, you know, B2C companies. So before we wrap up this episode, I have to ask you, where is kennek going? What are your future aspirations and how are you visualising its continued relevance in the world?


[00:29:45] I'm glad you said world because that's that's ultimately where we're going. We started building kennek in the UK because it's in Europe. By far the largest market in terms of alternative credits and an alternative lender. So it's a it's a natural place to start this business, but the demand is global. We see we see in Europe, continental Europe, we see a lot of lenders being set up and needing systems, you know, smaller banks or, you know, even the whole asset management industry, the direct lending funds also need these systems. So I guess what I'm trying to say is where we have ambitions, both in terms of broadening the client base that we work with and certainly also the geographies. So when we launched our websites or the first version as there's a second version coming out in a few weeks, but the first version website that came out we had within the first week we had enquiries out of Hong Kong, Brazil, Continental Europe and the U.S. and so we're building ultimately something that that should be able to go and actually that can go globally. And that's certainly the ambition. So yeah, when we when we talk about baking a large cake to then share amongst ourselves that the cake has to be global.


[00:31:04] The cake has to be global. Perhaps that's your ticket back to Cameroon.


[00:31:09] Well, you're joking, but there's a lot of a lot of fintech innovation happening in Africa. So who knows? Who knows?


[00:31:18] Yes. I'm finally just speaking more broadly, I guess, a bit of advice from someone with your years of experience or deep knowledge. How do you see the lending investing landscape changing over the next few years? You've mentioned it's quite fragmented, but how do you see it changing?

[00:31:37] I think ultimately, look, companies need capital to grow, so there will always be demand there. The banks or I was CEO of a bank for five years. I can tell you the regulatory burden on a bank is tremendous. So banks are it's harder and harder for banks to lend. And so there needs to be an alternative. And that alternative is growing, it's the alternative credit space. I would say don't be discouraged by some of the headlines that you see because it's not the full macro picture. Right. Every company has its own story and every subsector. So so I think there's a lot of innovation coming. We like to think about embedded credit, but it's finance. So we talk a lot about lenders and we talked about corporates who become lenders. And that happens through some of these embedded lenders, which are the new kind of fintechs that have been emerging. When we think about our infrastructure, that could just power any company to become a lender. And so ultimately, I'll probably end up on that thought is that you know, lenders are growing, more and more lenders are appearing. But I would say the the frontier between what is a lender and what is not will become quite grey. And any company should be able to be offering financial products and credits.

[00:32:56] Well, you heard it here first. Thank you so much for your time and for your incredible expertise on this episode. It's been really eye opening and I can't thank you enough for joining us.


[00:33:09] Thanks. It was a pleasure to be here.

[00:33:11] Wow. Quite the story there. It has been such a great time speaking to Xavier, talking about his early experience working at Merrill Lynch, going through the great financial crash as well. But a lot of the learnings that he had which helped him set up a business that became MeDirect and that was also where he became the CEO of that business. I think what really struck me was his constant calls to building a bigger pie, baking a bigger pie even. Where you want to bring as many people in as possible about respecting your co-founders, about respecting your partners. And that's something that can be quite rare to find in this day and age. So it was brilliant to hear his thoughts on that and also, frankly, to learn a bit more about what they're building at kennek and why it's so important to our day to day lives in the economy and how they're helping small businesses access the funding that they need. And that brings us to the end of this Architects of Change episode brought to you by Mambu. Thank you to my brilliant guest, Xavier de Pauw. If you'd like to delve into more of his work and find out more about kennek, please head to kennek.io .For more Mambu podcasts, including the latest episode. Small businesses, big ideas, little funding. Head to wherever you get your podcasts. And don't forget to subscribe to our channel so you don't miss an episode. I've been your host, Nina Mohanty. See you on the next episode.

Small businesses, big ideas, little funding

[00:00:04] Hi there and thanks for joining us for another episode of Architects of Change, a podcast brought to you by Mambu, the cloud banking platform to help you evolve your business. I'm your host for this episode, Nina Mohanty, co-founder of Bloom Money. In this episode, we're talking all about SMEs or small medium enterprises, often referred to as SMBs, small and medium businesses in the US. SMEs make up 99% of the business population here in the UK where I am, we're a nation of shopkeepers. But globally the approximately 400 million SMEs are the backbone of economies around the world. They are the main source of job creation globally, accounting for over 95% of firms and 60 to 70% of employment. By the end of the episode, whether you are a founder, employee or newcomer to the SME world, we hope to bring you up to date with everything you need to know about the businesses that are always being described as the backbones of our economies. To help me delve into this ever changing landscape, I'm pleased to say I'm joined by Astrid Joosten, part of the leadership team at New10, and Richard Lim, CEO of Retail Economics. Welcome both.


[00:01:27] So to start off, I think we need to define some things, we've already discussed with the acronym is SME - Small and Medium Enterprises. But Astrid, please, could you describe for us what is an SME? We hear that everywhere. What exactly is it?


[00:01:45] We can divide companies like SMEs because based on the turnover, the number of employees, the profit they make. But in the end, an SME is also an entrepreneur and I like to look at it not from a business or industry perspective. I know we do from banking, from financing, from the industry, but in the end it's an enterpreneur that is running this business, that has a goal, that has a dream, a purpose with this company. For the entrepreneur, it's important to run this business.

[00:02:20] I quite like that approach, which is not the way that many of us in the financial services industry look at SMEs, where it's X number of headcount, you know, less than 50, less than 100 or X amount in turnover, which makes you an SME, but really anyone who has an entrepreneurial goal or vision and sets out to achieve it, I love that. Course, we have colliding macro economic conditions right now, so it can be both a great time to start a small business, but also a challenging time to start a small business. Astrid, would you say this is similar to what you're saying?

[00:02:59] So you see a lot of online behaviour now and it's growing. So in the Netherlands there is no lockdown anymore and there is a reduction of online sales because people are spending their money now differently. So I'm curious how that will, I think it's a temporary one. Everyone is familiar nowadays with getting stuff online, so the easiness of things is there. And for enterpreneurs, that also means that during this period they were yeah, they need to be creative for how to run their business, not manually in a shop, but also have a solution, a digital. I think that that is definitely growing, not as fast as we would think, maybe, it is a trigger, an accelerator, I would say, but it's not hundred percent still where we would have expected that earlier.


[00:03:50] That's really interesting to me. So that you sitting at New10 and kind of getting to see this all from a high level position. But I wonder from your perspective at New10, but also just as a product person, how are you defining success in terms of growth for a small business right now in this brave new world that we're living in?


[00:04:13] It depends how the entrepreneur by itself defines his success, right? So from a financial industry perspective, we would like to see growth of the company to see if it's stable. And again, it can handle his business. But there are also companies that like to stabilised and don't have a growth ambition, for example. So it really depends. Or they have more a social entrepreneurial spirit instead of only profit and business.


[00:04:45] I like that. Perhaps me asking what is success look like is a bit like asking an average person what does happiness look like? It can be so subjective, depending who you are and what you're trying to achieve. Well, I guess a caveat to this conversation, of course, is that the SME landscape is ever changing. And of course, no two SMEs are the same, right? And as you rightfully said, Asterid, that it very much depends on who they are, what they're trying to achieve. But what things are we seeing right now, Richard, which seem to be contributing to their success based on this definition of success? The Asterid is shared with us. And are there any new considerations in what worked before that might not be working now anymore?


[00:05:33] Going back to what I was, what I touched on earlier around the shift towards digital and help businesses need to, to react and in many cases kind of shift their operations to embrace a more digital customer journey. I think in terms of how that can support success metrics, principally financial ones, I think that that's, you know, that's really important. I think the reality, though, is that for lots of small businesses, they often lack skills to be able to do that. There might be a kind of a skills gap in terms of what they have in the business and what they need to be able to transform their business digitally. So there's often a skills gap and that can be around anything from kind of optimising websites to optimising fulfilment and things like that. I think a lot of that skills gap is currently being filled by more innovative partnerships. So again, I think this is one of the key areas that we see successful businesses really manage to scale, you know, scale their operation through partnerships. Those partnerships can come in many different, different forms. Some of that might be in terms of logistics and be partnering with couriers to be able to, for example, take back online returns and get them back into the supply chain more efficiently. And some of those partnerships will deal with those reverse logistics and things like that. But in other ways, it might be just partnering with technology, partnering with some of the big tech platforms that might be with Amazon, eBay or Etsy or Shopify, but really trying to leverage the value that a lot of investment has gone into building that infrastructure to really try to, really try to kind of scale their business operations. And then I'd say finally in funding is really, really important and being able to partner with the right companies in order to finance efficiently and then have supportive funding partners that are going to support the growth of the business, again, is a really important attribute of success for SMEs.

[00:07:54] Well, Richard, you have made it wonderful for me to speak about funding because I think there is this idea that we constantly hear that SMEs are underfunded. And I think broadly the data does bear that out, that oftentimes that can be the case. But I think it's important that we do a bit of myth busting around SMEs. So we know that SMEs provide a vital backdrop for economies. So let's discuss the myths that surround them and why SMEs might not be as easy to sustain or might be actually more challenging to run than the average person might think. So first, we're going to get straight into it. The myth number one is under funding. First of all, there is the myth that there is a huge funding gap generally. Astrid, is this fair to say?


[00:08:50] Yes and no. So, like, if you look at the numbers, that would definitely be a yes because there are lots of SMEs and lots of them are also not financed. However, there is also a no because from my point of view there are opportunities to get the funding. And New10 was started to bridge the gap to get the funding for SMEs that they need because the regular, like the main bank approach where you need to reach out to a relationship manager, you have to deliver lots of documents, you have to wait to to know if you can get your funding, and that was difficult, and what we've changed is within 50 minutes you know if you can get money, yes or no, and how much you can get based on the input the entrepreneur itself is giving us and this is not difficult data. So it's familiar data because it's related to that company and this is the basic knowledge an entrepreneur also should have. So where Richard spoke about a gap in tech or in logistics, a consumer also can do a lot online at the moment, like with healthcare, with buying stuff, with banking, you can do everything beyond your computer or your phone. And we made that, that same feeling or experience for an entrepreneur to request the funding. So coming back to your question, there is still for a lot of SMEs maybe a data gap, but it's made more easy for SMEs to to get funding. It's sorry to say it's a yes and a no in there.


[00:10:34] Richard, I wanted to quickly go to you because, you know, a lot of governments like to say that they support small businesses, as we've said, multiple times, SMEs are the backbone of our economies, and many politicians like to say that when they're campaigning. But are governments actually good at supporting SMEs? Would you say?

[00:10:57] Of course you've got a different kind of spectrum of support across different countries. I think in the UK, I think probably there is an element of more support than in other countries that you see across the continent. But from a retail perspective, again it's, you know, it's really the retail sector for the UK is really, really important. Two thirds of the economy is consumer spending. A third of that is, you know, the retail sector. And actually, I think going back to the pandemic and the impacts of the pandemic and some of the measures that the government introduced in the UK and, of course, across the world quite, quite frankly, quite astonishing in the speed that they did it. So, you know, in the UK we had the furlough scheme, we had a business rates holidays and the business rates essentially a tax on property in the UK, for commercial property in the UK. So, you know, they stepped in, they put a business rates holiday in place. There was emergency loans that were made available to businesses. So actually, you know, without these measures that were put in place, given the nature of lockdowns and the impacts that the pandemic had on people's lifestyles in terms of the way they communicated and lived their lives and shopped, of course, it would have been a huge scar to the economy that was that was thankfully kind of alleviated by some of these measures. I think there is always more that they can do, though, of course. And a lot of that will come around, I think, you know, training and support. There's also some issues around a fairer tax system when it comes to business rates in the UK, and business rates have a really kind of old archaic system that is no longer fit for purpose in today's digital world. So some kind of more level playing field between, you know, bricks and mortar operations or pure online retailers that reflects the contribution they have towards the economy. And an economic wealth is definitely something that needs to be addressed and needs to be addressed urgently. There's still a skills issue within the UK that the government should step in and try to, to try to support as well. And that comes from essentially grassroots in terms of making sure that school leavers leave school with appropriate skills that are adequate for today's modern economy, where all of those skills are digital and a lot of those skills have relevance across all aspects of the various different industries in the economy. So I'll go back to Asterid, a bit of yes and a bit of no. There is support in place and it has been a lifeline for SMEs over the last couple of years. But absolutely there's still so much more that the Government can do in terms of support. And if I was going to pick one area in terms of the UK, it would be around business rates. You know, in some parts of the UK, the tax the retailers pay on their properties is higher than they pay on rents and it's just disproportionate burden on retailers that have a physical presence and it's not fit for purpose in today's digital world.


[00:14:04] That's fascinating. Who would have thunk, hey? Tax. Astrid, though, I wonder what you think in terms of if the government is supporting enough. Because one of the things well, Richard touched on it already was that there was a lot of action quite quickly from the government. But what I noticed from where I sit was that there was government mandates, but that actually needed a bit of partnership with the private sector. For example, the bounce back loans here in the UK, they needed a vehicle to get those out and oftentimes it was the fintech companies coming in and distributing those loans. I also love the idea of a bounce back loan where I think of, you know, someone on a trampoline bouncing back. But I wonder, would you agree with Richard that the government did a decent job or in general, are they doing a good job at supporting SMEs?


[00:14:56] I think they did a decent job and it's quite a challenge of course, and that there was a lot of support for, I think all companies. I can see in the Netherlands they created some new options for entrepreneurs and specific corona related loans and indeed they needed the fintechs and the banks to get these, these products to the entrepreneurs. So in the Netherlands, you had the the small corona loan. It took quite a long time to get it approved, so where government can learn, so we are talking about digitalisation and, and going online like the whole government surrounding is not digital by itself so they had to step up and I state I think they can do a lot more in making agreements or decision making and also facilitating online delivery of documents for entrepreneurs towards the government. So there is there is a gap where we are looking into opportunities to support entrepreneurs fully digital. The government is not by itself but from the the support perspective there was a lot of tech support and these loans and they needed us. So within New10 we we created a smooth journey specifically for Corona impacted companies. And after the formal approval, it I think it took sort of three or four months. Within a few hours we were live because we knew the product, the products, and we had a good journey so we could launch it quite fast. And we were able to facilitate around 50, 60% of all the entrepreneurs in the Netherlands for this product, all banks. So not only ABN Amro as we are a subsidiary of ABN Amro, but all Dutch banks. So we were one of the companies that supported most of the companies with this product. And that is a good learning because we we are digital already. So for us it was easy to put it in our sort of our product scope, but now we have still the process to register these loans and the extension of the loan last year. So at the end of December 2021, this product was going to stop. But then there was a new variant of Covid. It was like, Oh, no, so, oh, maybe this product should, should be extended. And it took them till the end of March to have that approved. And we said, we are not going to stop offering this product because we want to support clients that really need it. So we kept it open and I think that's the best to do. Even the government is still working on it. Try to do what we can to support these entrepreneurs. And I think what Richard also touched is we don't know what all this support now really means, because the support is ending also for for the tech support. And now it's it's time where we really will see what the impact is on the on the market.


[00:18:23] They were given a trampoline to bounce back, but let's see if there is a net to catch them once they do. Moving on to myth number two. This is one that I find very interesting, which is that SMEs need money to make money. So could a reason be that SMEs struggle is because they're having to deal with many different competing priorities. One which is, of course, making money because they have to. But also trying to do socially good work or to be, you know, very creative or dedicate it to whatever art or work that they are putting out there. So should SMEs be more focussed perhaps on ensuring that they are financially educated, that they have the right working processes, that they have the right tools like technology in place, as we've discussed a lot about already? Or is the answer simply that they just need better financial products? So Richard, you had a lot of thoughts on digital skills and the democratisation of digital. I wonder what you think about this.


[00:19:32] Ultimately, it depends on the aims and ambitions of the entrepreneur and the founder of these businesses. And there's many, many success stories out there where businesses have managed to to grow sustainably and haven't needed to access external capital or things like that. But I think this is really a question around ambition and speed as well. I think for most businesses, there's no doubt that when your starting off in your start-up, there's so many competing priorities for the business. Do I invest in people? Do I invest in technology? Do I invest in stock? Do I invest in, you know, there's a whole range of different opportunity costs and trade-offs between where to allocate your resources, and there's different growth pains at different stages of the business. A lot of that can be alleviated by access to capital and I think is really that trade off between speed and growth for most businesses.


[00:20:36] Moving on to another myth, and this is one that is very prevalent in my life but also prevalent within the SME industry, is that fintech is the answer, that fintech alone can save us. So more and more innovations are being developed on a daily basis. They make our lives easier, our businesses lives easier. But is the answer to a better SME economy simply improving the technology behind it? And I'm very interested on your perspective on this, Richard, because you've discussed the different partnerships, but there are also partnerships and tech enabled partnerships as well. So what would you say? Is FinTech doing enough here?


[00:21:21] FinTech plays a critical role in the SME, kind of, infrastructure and supporting the growth of businesses. There's just no doubt about that. But of course, it has lots of different, kind of, channels into business. It could be around funding, it could be around payments, it could be around even just supporting a better customer journey. So there's you know, there's lots of different areas of that. And one of the things that we've seen really kind of fast development of in the UK has been around customer payments and the growth of things like Buy Now, Pay Later. You know, that's one of the areas that has seen enormous growth in the UK, is something that consumers have really embraced. They like to have the flexibility to be able to spread payments or or delay payments to so they can better manage their, you know, their personal cash flow. For businesses, it also enables them to offer a better, you know, kind of a different variety of payment options as well. And for many businesses, what that what they help them with is build customer loyalty increases the frequency of purchasing and and essentially enhances loyalty of customers. So there's lots of different aspects of the fintech I think around customer payments is definitely one from a consumer's perspective has worked, that's worked really well. But of course, fintech from an operational perspective helps with international payments and making that more seamless. It can help with payroll really crucially as well. So we're seeing lots of kind of innovation around there and just being able to be more flexible with payroll for companies. So yeah, lots of innovation and definitely a key supportive role.


[00:23:09] Astrid, I wonder then if Richard thinks there's lots of great parts of fintech. Do you think fintech companies or banks are missing, kind of, some obvious gaps or key consideration when it comes to actually progressing technology? FinTech for SMEs. The reason I bring this up is something that you remarked on previously about what is manual and what is digital?

[00:23:33] For the like the bigger banks, it's quite difficult to change the whole business into a digital business. And where fintechs from day one are digital. So that is the biggest difference. And it's more easy from a fintech to to change or to improve their journey or the processes. And I fully agree with Richard that fintechs play a big role in in changing the environment, at least with trial and error. And they are sort of they have a mindset of deliver fast and also feel fast to learn and not sort of thinking out processes for a year and what is the best and then sort of have the like 100% true thing and just, yeah, put something live and learn together with clients. That is what in my opinion most of the fintechs do. They do it together with the enterpreneurs and with clients. So that is a different mindset where they can really change the world of financing and funding for entrepreneurs.


[00:24:40] And finally, one last myth is that the pandemic hasn't changed the SME landscape very much. So, you know, how has the SME landscape changed compared to how it was pre-pandemic and what we see now? And do you think we've seen the full effects of this, Astrid? The pandemic kind of forced everyone to be quite digital quite quickly, not just the SMEs, but as you've said repeatedly, you know, the actual offerings, the banks, the fintech companies serving them. So, you know, New10 works on an entirely digital basis. Were you better placed to continue this work when the pandemic hit?


[00:25:25] Yeah, we definitely were a better place because we were already set up as a digital solution for enterpreneurs. When New10 started or when the idea was born, it was six years ago and we were expecting that within five years the whole business or the finance requests would be online. So 100%. And we see based on the pandemic as well, that it is growing. And so now the final the last research showed that 40%. So it's still 60% not, but 40% is at least starting orienting for a financing need online. So there is still a big part that is not running the business or the debt part online and still yet go to their banker and their relationship manager. So it is growing. That's what we see.


[00:26:18] We've touched on before how the pandemic kind of moved us towards digital transformation and we talked about cost holidays and that sort of thing. But of the companies that have navigated the pandemic well across the entire digitalisation spectrum, so, you know, you've touched on logistics to banking, to social media, what do you think were the keys to success here? So was it something in particular like being open minded and quick to adapt, or was it adopting a technology faster that helps them get through the pandemic and perhaps even thrive?

[00:26:56] Agility. That is one of the key aspects for businesses to be able to react to shocks and uncertainty. And so just to put some numbers around that and touch on some of our research. But the shift towards online was enormous, in the UK and across Europe. Then we went through about 19% of sales online in 2019 to 28% in 2020 and then 29% last year. So between 2019 and 2020, we saw about five years worth of growth in just 12 months towards that. That shift was online. So the way that businesses had to react in terms of trying to embrace that kind of more digitalised customer journey, you know, it had to be fleet of foot. Businesses had to embrace disruption and they had to adapt in a really agile manner. And so I think agility is absolutely one of those key points. And I think further than that and peeling that layer back a little bit further, I think in context of the pandemic it is around just being more agile when it comes to digital technology. And so we kind of kind of touched on that phrase of a digital democratisation. But in the world of the next SME, I think there are so fewer barriers to entry than there were, kind of, a decade ago. You know, businesses have access to lots of different digital platforms, whether that's from the beginning of their journey in terms of supply chains and and digital aggregators, for being able to reach out to new suppliers in various different countries or having digital access to shipping merchants to be able to get the goods from one country to another. In terms of sales, there's been a huge kind of digitalisation around the big platforms and Shopify being one of those, kind of, key examples but Amazon and eBay. But then also when it comes to distribution and as we said, there's been a huge investment in having access to digital distribution platforms and courier services and even things like Dropshipping allows that. And then digitalisation at the final part of the customer journey when it comes to dealing with fulfilment and being able to track orders when, you know, how closely they are to being delivered at home or if there's a problem, you know, you can go online, there be a chat bot there that's ready to kind of answer key questions and things like that. So that kind of that shift towards digitalisation and companies embracing that disruption and becoming agile while they're doing so. I think it's been really, really important.


[00:29:40] To wrap up this conversation. I want to leave us with some parting thoughts, which is, first, the key considerations that SME owners should be thinking about or employees should be thinking about, but also what we can see from within those building for the SME space and and what can we do to encourage that growth and progress. So, Astrid, I'm going to go to you first. First, putting on the hat of that SME owner or that employee, you know, what are the considerations that we should be keeping in mind? And then the second hat is, as a builder of products for these people, what are you doing to encourage the growth and progress?


[00:30:21] I think the entrepreneur by itself should be served the best with all the solutions that are already available and so have at least an open mind. And look what is possible and ask, yeah, how others do it. I think there is a good network and entrepreneurs definitely help each other. From my point of view as a responsible for products is listen really carefully to the needs of the enterpreneur. I can translate or we can translate these needs into good solutions for them and we will definitely, definitely continue that and also the coming years for sure to support them.

[00:31:02] And Richard, wearing two different hats here. The first, you know, you are that small business owner. What are you thinking about? What are you keeping in mind? And then the second hat, as someone who's looking at this broader space, what would you counsel people building for the space to be thinking about.

[00:31:20] As a kind of a business owner? I think what's really important is to I think, as you said, this really eloquently is about listening, you know, listening to the market, listening to customers. And in the sake of, you know, the industry that I know best, if you look at retailers, you know, they need to listen to their customers needs and wants. And so for many families, households, you know, they're walking out of a pandemic into a cost of living crisis. And so they'll be looking at the different value sets that consumers have and their purchases are driven by a set of values. And much of that revolves around kind of cost, quality, experience, convenience and also sustainability and and the value that they attribute to retailers ethics as well. So, you know, there's there's this kind of constantly changing set of consumer values. And as we go into this cost of living crisis, what will come out of that is a more cost conscious consumer. And so businesses really need to listen to their consumers, listen to the pressures that they are under, and they need to kind of embrace and pivot their value proposition to align to what consumers want. So from a, from a business perspective, I think it's really important, yeah, to listen to the consumers and align with kind of a heading into this cost of living crisis and from a, from a business point of view, again, kind of I think, you know, agility is of course, really, really, really important, but you know, using data to make decisions and may even use retail economics to do that. But then they're also they'll also look at their customer data as well. But really being able to drive better insights through data and have data led decisions, you know, kind of like really, really important from that perspective.


[00:33:12] Great way to wrap it up. I want to thank you both so much for joining me for this fascinating episode on Small and Medium Enterprises. And that brings us to the end of the Architects of Change episode brought to you by Mambu. Today we busted some myths around small and medium enterprises, or SMEs, if you like to call them that. We talked about what an SME is and what success looks like for them. Astrid talked a lot about how we can be much more digital and agile and that there's a lot left to do in actually digitising the processes for SMEs. And Richard brought in a lot of interesting insight into how partners and tech partners are starting to add a lot of more flavour to the ecosystem and making it easier to democratise digital for SMEs as well. Thank you to my two guests today, Astrid Joosten and Richard Lim. If you'd like to delve into more of Astrid's work, please head to New10.com. And if you wish to follow more of Richard's work, please head to retaileconomics.co.uk. For more Mambu podcasts, including the latest episode on the great resignation, head to wherever you get your podcasts. And don't forget to subscribe to our channels so you don't miss an episode. I've been your host, Nina Mohanty. See you on the next episode.

Work life - one size fits none

[00:00:04] Hello and thanks for joining us for another episode of Architects of Change, a podcast brought to you by the cloud banking platform to help you evolve your business. I'm your host for this episode, Emma Lindley, co-founder of Women in Identity. In this episode, we're chatting about the phenomenon that is the great resignation, something that we've seen emerge and continue to grow at a really fast rate since the start of 2021. But why did this begin? And what changes are being made to help the problem? And what are the global trends amongst employers and employees? And what do we expect to see in the short- and long-term future? To help me answer these questions and expand on what possibilities the future world of work holds for us, I'm thrilled to say I'm joined by two fantastic guests that are already thinking about this future change. Charlie Johnson, Chief People Officer at Mambu, and Biba Binotti, Founder of Global Warriors. Welcome to you both.

[00:01:07] Great to be here, Emma. Thank you for the invite.

[00:01:09] Thank you. So the great resignation is real and it is happening. And I was reading an MIT Sloan report which was completed in the US, and in that report, it analysed 34 million online employee profiles. So really super big piece of research and I was pretty astounded by the results, to be honest. Some of the results that came out of that showed that more than 40% of all employees were thinking about leaving their jobs at the beginning of 2021. And between April and September in 2021, more than 24 million American employees left their jobs, which is an all time record. I mean, I read that and I was like, these are astounding facts. So my first question I think is for you, Charlie, you know, you’re the Chief People Officer, you know, at a fast growing fintech. This is a real problem supported by big numbers. Is this something that you've been monitoring as well?

[00:02:08] Absolutely. So, I mean, I think what we are seeing right now is we are out there trying to attract talent, but we're also keen to think about how do we retain the talent that we've got. We're a young company, that’s a hypergrowth company, and we’re a company which I think is very purpose driven. So it’s something that is top of mind for us, particularly as we're trying to attract talent. And I can tell you from my own personal perspective, and, you know, I left a big company because I was feeling like it was time for change. I think COVID was a time of real reflection for me. What's important, what do I want? And I sort of took a leap of faith. So more and more of our people are doing that. And I think what's really important that we really listen to what they want and we really engage with them and sort of design their experience and recognise that everyone wants something quite unique in this moment. And the traditional rules of work and more importantly, the traditional roles of leadership have fundamentally changed in these last couple of years with everything that's happened in COVID.

[00:03:08] Do you think this is a global phenomenon or do you think this is just a U.S. thing that's happening?


[00:03:14] I think it's a 100% global phenomenon. And I think no one is excused from this. I think everyone is really evaluating what's important. Every company in every industry, some more than others. And I think a huge part of this goes back to what's been the response of my company during this period of time. What's my leader saying right now as we go back to the kind of normal ways of working, are they expecting to be back in office and just going back to the way it was or the thinking, and more importantly, they asking me, are they listening to me and asking what's important to me? So I think right now we're just in a really interesting period as well all across the globe. And I sort of feel like boundaries have changed, people's expectations have changed, and I think those rules are being rewritten right now. And I don't think anyone actually has the answer by the way, lots of people profess to, but I don't think anyone really has. I think it's a mixture of things that's going on right now in the world.

[00:04:09] Okay. So what I'm hearing you say there is, you know, it's not just a US thing. This is a global thing. All eyes are kind of on this and interesting to see, you know, some of the reasons why that could be so I'm interested in your perspective on what you think the driving factors could be behind this incredible shift. Why is it happening?

[00:04:25] I think the thing that seems to be foremost is that it's all around purpose. There's something that's happened in the pandemic and people suddenly realise that life short or life matters in a different way, or there's something beyond ourselves and wanting to do something that maybe is more purposeful and more community based, I think as well more in support of something bigger than themselves. So I think that's kind of the fore fronting part, I have looked at some research around and those different things kind of challenging some of that. You know, one of the challenges is saying, well, actually, you know, it appears to be purpose because a lot of the people interviewed that were talking about maybe burnout, wanting lifestyle changes as well were white collar workers who typically spending their days on own, kind of on camera all day on virtual lives. So it wasn't a very kind of fair mix of the population. And there's also stats to show that actually a lot of it was migration of lower wage workers switching to higher, higher rates. So there's something there. But I guess from kind of coming back from a kind of personal perspective on that in terms of leadership and culture, is purpose seems to be the driving one. So whatever the reality or not that sits behind there, it does seem to be about purpose and whether it's actual or perception. I think that doesn't matter. It's what people want it to be. So there's something about a drive now of people wanting to see that there is more hope in the world, I guess having come through a pandemic, that there is us as a human race shifting to something a little more than beyond just ourselves. And I think that's a really, really important part in there, that I think it is more about the hope that we have in there. And what often happens is that we then drive it, it becomes self-fulfilling prophecy. So whether it was or wasn't, it will then start to drive it. And it just takes one or two people seeing that leap that then others start to follow. So I think that's what we're seeing now is almost like, you know, some of the early adopters have moved and now it's like others are now starting to follow. But I guess one of the other things that you see that kind of echoing Charlie on leaders, what I have noticed in organisations, it might just take one quite purposeful or meaningful leader to leave an organisation and then a lot of people then follow. So I think this is where I have an interest in terms of leadership, you know, we've often said that, you know, people follow people. And I think this is what for me the great resignation is showing is people really do matter, that people leaders really do matter. And when you've got a good people leader that maybe leads somewhere, others will follow suit too. So I think that's part of the migration as well.

[00:07:03] So Charlie, as a Chief People Officer, what's the day to day reality for employers amid this problem? How real is this?


[00:07:13] I think it's very real. I think right now it is all about hiring the best talent, retaining the best talent. I think it is about how we bring people back to work in a fundamentally different way. You know, I think the kind of workplace has shifted and the way we're going to kind of collaborate has shifted. And people are really questioning, do I have to go and do that commute that I used to do? Could I do this differently? I think that you do need to make sure that people and culture is at the heart of your business strategy. I think, you know, you could say we've always had to do that, but I think it's become like a non-negotiable that you can't ignore that this shift is happening. You have to be really thinking about what does this mean and what am I going to do differently? Because everyone's coming after the best possible talent, particularly diverse talent, you know we're battling right now internally. How do we allow our people potentially to do things differently right where they work? Like can they go and work anywhere in the world? Because we kind of allowed them to do that just anywhere. And now suddenly we're saying, okay, well, this might just become the thing. And the tax systems, the political systems, immigrations all set up in a fundamentally different way. So there's there's major challenges, I think, right now for companies. And then, of course, there's just this whole geopolitical, social, demographic shift that's going on. I think there's so many challenges in the workplace that we're having to respond to. And just as you get through one thing, along comes something else. And I think for all leaders right now, it's a time of a ton of uncertainty, a lot of ambiguity. One thing is certain; continue change. And I think what's really important during this period of time is resilience. So that ability to kind of find the balance in all of this, have perspective, manage oneself is really important too. So I think it's a real melting pot of major issues right now. And I think everyone I talked to, regardless of what business they're friends and family, everyone is struggling and struggling for different reasons. And so I think what's really important for the Chief People Officer, or HR Department is really tapping into that, not applying a one size fits all, really trying to put the human back in all the discussions, put the heart back. Meet people where they are and be okay with raw emotions, be okay with some of the polarities that exist right now, and to really think about how you kind of do your best and recognise you're going to make some mistakes and it's certainly not going to be perfect. I keep saying to my team, Right, no progress, no perfection. If we try to strive for perfection, we're going to kill ourselves in the process. So let's do our best. We'll make some mistakes and that's okay. The key thing here is that we do evolve and we see this as an opportunity and seize it right now. And so I think that's kind of the reality that I feel like I'm dealing with in this moment.


[00:10:14] I actually went into London this week because I live just outside of London and I tried to do the school drop off and tried to get into London for a certain time for a meeting. And I was late and I honestly just kind of got to the end of that and I was like, How did I used to do that? I can't actually even think about how I used to make all of those things work and be on time for things, you know? So I think I think you're right. You know, I think we've got to this kind of different stage of like being able to do those things and being there for the school drop offs and things like that. And now actually trying to cram everything else in is really hard. And also people, you know, still want to spend time with their families and want to be there for those things and don't want to miss those things anymore. So do you think it's a problem, just for big companies, or do you think it's affecting smaller companies in the same way?

[00:11:03] What I would say is I think the issues are exactly the same in a big company, in a small company. I think what I feel right now, certainly in our sector and our size of company as we scale up, I mean, we've literally doubled the size of our headcount in this last 12 months and we can feel it. And it's been relentless. And I think that's our shift to change. The pace at which we're moving in this kind of smaller scale up environment is just very different to maybe where I was before, where it was a bit slower. And then you've got the same issue. You know, a lot of our people just have never met. They've never met their manager, they've never come together. And we literally you know, I had some of my team together just a few weeks ago. For the first time, many of them were meeting, coming from all sorts of different backgrounds, different companies, and the level of emotion that was in the room because people were just like, I'm just enjoying the ability to pause. Thank you for giving me the permission to just stop for a second. And so I think that what we've been experiencing, certainly in the technology sector, is more of what we had before, but a different pace. And I think maybe some of the social norms and rules and rituals that you would apply when in the workplace, you just don't do as much when you're doing it virtually. And so, there is just this need, I think, for us to kind of pause and reflect and think how do we do work differently? And we really are thinking about that here at Mambu right now. I don't have the answer yet. I'm going to try lots of different things, but I think this is the time for us to kind of get out of our comfort zone, to not restrict ourselves to the kind of dream of new ways of doing things, and really look at what are what are the things that are getting in the way of us doing that? Because I think so many people are thinking exactly like you. Why do I want to go back to that when there's an alternative that I've seen? But by the way, the alternative is quite relentless and has its downsides as well. So what's the balance? How do we kind of go from totally virtual to to something then between that hybrid world? And I do sort of maintain this piece of leadership, I think it is of every one of us. And Biba and I are working on this right now at Mambu. We have a philosophy here at Mambu that everyone is a leader. And yes, some people have to lead things, but we all have to lead ourselves and we have to kind of think about how we interact with others. We have to think about the kind of conscious impact we're having. And when we're at our best and when we know our best and what we might need to do to ask for permission. And it's okay to say, look, here's what I need to be the best possible version of myself and serve in that real high trust environment.

[00:13:55] I so relate to what you're saying there. We've got to re-imagine and create new ways of doing things. And it really reminds me of when I was looking at some neuroscience recently around creativity and it's like for actual real creativity, there's two different elements, processes in your brain. So there's the focus stuff that you do when you're really kind of focused and in that sort of place. And then to really get the divergence, to be able to bring everything that's around and create something new and make the connections. It needs a different fit. But what we tend to do in the workplace, particularly, and I think this has been sort of like, you know, our virtual lives, we've been in this space just on one camera for like two years in this really focused space, and we've not had the chance to just bring the whole range of things literally. I've heard a lot of our leaders saying working from morning to night just in this one space. So we do need space now. We do need the pause. You know, I know one of the things you talk about at Mambu, is the four day working week. We need that extra space to get away, do something very different, and people might. Nothing's happening in there. But that's when the magic is really happening because the real connections and the innovation is happening. So it's so vital that space. I don't think we've given ourselves credibility to how much we need that over the last couple of years. I think we're yearning for that now.


[00:15:15] We've talked a little bit about leadership. I wanted to just touch on culture because I know, Biba, you were talking about, you know, people are leaving because they want to be something more purposeful. And, you know, if a leader that has led with kind of purpose and they leave, then other people are leaving as well. So I want to just talk a little bit about company values and company culture, because often when something's written down, you know here are our company values. Sometimes companies don't necessarily culturally abide by those values, and those two things kind of don't actually marry together. In some companies it does, and that's great and it's fantastic. And that's great because before we have better retention, less people leaving, better inclusion and all those types of things, but sometimes those two things are different. So do you think it comes down to value, the alignment between values and company culture, or do you think it's something, something different?


[00:16:14] I mean, I think this is the challenge right now for everyone, because it's really easy to say we want to be a world class employer. We want to be the we want to sort of embrace new ways of working. And we can have nice fancy statements and PowerPoint all around the place saying that, Emma, but is it the reality? And I think that that is what I always think about culture is what actually happens when your boss isn’t looking, and that's what really is going on in this organisation where people really stand by this and they felt really safe to do so and how you tap into that. And for me, I think it's really important to create that sort of safe environment where people can share their perspectives openly and what’s great and what maybe needs to change. And I do think it comes back to the kind of shadows that the leaders create on an organisation like is it okay to sort of rock the boat and have a perspective that might be counter my peer, you know, is it okay to challenge the status quo? Is it okay to be really honest about how I'm feeling in this moment? And so, you know, I've always felt strongly that this kind of role modelling from the very top is the single most important thing I can do as the H.R. leader is to sit and say, okay, well the CEO and the top team don't actually walk the talk, those fancy slides and all those nice words, they mean nothing because people kind of go, okay, well, yeah, that's all my slides, but it's not actually what I see happening on a day to day basis. So I think again, in this moment, that's where people are challenging that kind of going, okay, we're saying these things, but are we actually doing it? And they're looking at their leaders and seeing what they're modelling. And I think everyone right now that I talk to, regardless of age, gender, where they're from, is talking about this sort of idea of I want to work somewhere where there's purpose driven. I want to feel like my voice counts. I want to feel like I'm surrounded by different types of people, not all the same. I want to see myself, particularly at senior levels. I don't want to see people that are not like me. I want to know that there's high standards and things like ethics and performance. And most importantly, I want to be working for leaders that I want to follow. I want to believe in them, be inspired by them. I want to see that they're having an impact. So I think, you know, the external factors, I like things like Glassdoor where employees can go and basically say what they want about a company in a very anonymous way are again shifting things because we can't control that and anyone can go and see what's Mambu really like to work for in the eyes of our employees, rather than what I might tell you here on this on this podcast. Back to this thing you know I think there was  a great quote from I think it was Accenture who basically said, you know, COVID 19 for our leaders and HR teams has been like a time machine to the future and it's not going back. And so, you know, leaders and H.R. teams just need to realise that. But I do think this piece about, you know, walk the talk is so important. It's always been important, but I think is really important right now.


[00:19:32] I just echo that, Charlie. I think it's as you say, it's always been important and it is vital now, you know, I know I was looking at an article from the New York Times at all the activities and interventions that Google and Microsoft and other large companies are doing to try and bring people back into into the office, into working in the space. And it feels like employers are having to work really hard to hold and retain the people. And also to attract. Now harder than before what it feels like a lot of those big companies images and beautiful stuff you know, trying to create good environments but it's about adding value and actually it's about what is the values versus the adding the value that's important. And someone said to me recently was the CEO of a company called Huddle, and he said values are to be lived and not laminated. So I totally echo what you're saying that Charlie is like actually, it's not about in the past. I think you could get away with slightly remove leaders kind of just leading, you know, in a way now people want to see, feel and experience their leaders. They want to be following and not being told what to do, you know. So actually walking the talk is never more vital now. So I think values and company valuation is important, but it's more about how it’s lived, what's being lived in that organisation. And we all know there's a kind of formal and informal culture and I think the everyday informal culture is really kind of taking the forefront now. That's what people are attracted to or not.


[00:21:07] I totally agree with all of that. One of the things I would say, as we've done here at Mambu is, we literally have just recently rewritten our employee value proposition. We called it the Mambu Deal and we basically just went out and asked people, you know, when are we at our best? Like, what are the things are getting in our way, where should we be trying to go? And they created what we called our manifesto and the deal and what it is, is a two way deal. So it's like, here's what we expect of you and here's what you should expect of us. And it's like this kind of adult-to-adult relationship that I think we need to have with our employees and we need to expect to them as well. And I think it's just it's a new world. And so actually it's been 99% written, the words have come from people's minds and the principles we've used have been the ideas of our people, not from consulting company, or more importantly, the leadership team, it is our employees, and we're using that to sort of frame everything we're doing. And we're checking in. We're saying, are we doing this like, you know, give us your voice, share your perspective. And we're not just talking about all the lovely times we do it well. We are talking about the times like we made a mistake or it wasn't quite like that. What did we learn from that? How did we do things differently going forward? So it's trying to sort of very consciously shift from what I think maybe we did a few years ago is sell top down. This is the culture and I think in this new order it's like, let's build bottom up and let's work together. We're in this together, we're all part of this journey. And, you know, we're going to make some mistakes. We're not probably going to get it right. It's certainly not going to be perfect. But, you know, let's kind of share this are success and the future in a very collaborative way.


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