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David Hanna – Finmo.

June 20, 2024 · Hosted by Dexter Cousins

In episode 187 of the Fintech Chatter podcast, Dexter Cousins is joined by CEO of Finmo, David Hanna.

David talks to Dexter about how he and the team are tackling a global problem affecting pretty much every SME.

David shares his Fintech journey as the Head of Risk and Compliance  at Paypal and Chief Risk and Compliance Officer at Rapyd.

Tune in to find out how to make the transition from risk to CEO, the optimal way to launch a global Fintech and how to win enterprise clients without a marketing budget!

About David Hanna

David is the CEO and co-founder of Finmo and has over 20 years of expertise in the financial services and payments sector. Prior to founding Finmo, he held global leadership roles in Risk and Compliance for Financial Services companies headquartered in various locations globally.

David has held senior roles across companies such as PayPal, Ernst & Young, Zurich, ING Bank, Banxa and others. He serves on several advisory boards and has invested in many startups around the world.

About Finmo

Finmo is a global B2B treasury management platform that is focused on providing the necessary tools for the “CFO Office” including finance teams, CFOs, and treasurers. The business provides a single platform to enable the core elements of treasury to be managed from one place.

Finmo does this by providing four core modules to its clients which are;

Money movement
Cash management, including AR/AP modules
FX Hedging capabilities
Integrations into existing accounting and enterprise software

Following 20+ years of working across the financial services industry with founders from organisations such as PayPal, Citi, and other big names, the Finmo exec team realized that everyone has a treasury problem!

In identifying this problem, we believe there is a significant gap in the market for a solution that serves the end-to-end treasury management lifecycle.

Links from this episode.

More on cross-border payments and treasury on Fintech Chatter.

Full transcript.

Lightly edited for readability — filler words removed, wording otherwise unchanged.

Dexter Cousins
Fintech Chatter podcast, brought to you by Tier One People, the leaders in executive search for fintech ventures.

Hello and welcome to Fintech Chatter, the show where I connect with fintech leaders for a bit of a chat. I’m your host Dexter Cousins and in this episode I chat with David Hanna, the CEO and co-founder of Finmo. They’re a B2B treasury management platform focused on providing the necessary tools for the CFO office. Finmo provides a single platform to enable the core elements of treasury to be managed from one place.

I chat to David about how Finmo is moving beyond the premise of building a feature up and tackling a huge and complex global problem. I’ll also get to quiz David on why he chose Singapore as the company’s HQ and I get his tips for Aussie founders looking to expand in the region. What makes this chat with David rather unique is that he’s actually the first ever CEO fintech founder that I’ve met who comes from a regulatory background. But before I chat to David, if you’re new to the show please follow us on your podcast player of choice and if you’re coming back, thanks so much for your support.

We finally made it happen. How long have we been trying to do this for?

David Hanna
For sure. No, thanks for having me Dexter. Yeah, it’s been a couple of months in the making for sure.

Dexter Cousins
I think it’s been longer than that. Weren’t we going to do this a year ago and you were going to get the licence?

David Hanna
I think so.

Dexter Cousins
So yeah, well mate, great to finally have you here. I guess first off, I gave a little intro to Finmo but, kind of your elevator pitch, tell us a little bit more about the big problem that you’re solving.

David Hanna
Yeah, definitely. So Finmo solving essentially treasury management for global businesses. So our philosophy internally is everyone has a treasury problem. And from our point of view, over the last 20 years the founding team has sort of been seeing the same types of problems with mid-market sort of enterprise. And so what that is, is essentially treasurers and CFOs trying to manage their cash on a regional, on a global basis, but doing it with sort of disparate tools and through kind of disjointed banking sort of relationships. So we’re trying to bring that all together into a single platform.

Dexter Cousins
Treasury’s always been a challenge for CFOs, probably even more so over this last couple of years where we’ve seen interest rate rises every month. And so kind of the stress and management of keeping on top of systems and kind of where positions are is hard enough at the most kind of stable of times, but we’ve had anything but stable times over this last four or five years. What kind of feedback have you been getting from CFOs and treasurers as to the kind of big problems that they’re facing right now?

David Hanna
Yeah, it’s an interesting area in that it feels like because of that environment, we’ve seen a heightened sort of focus on kind of the traditional treasury management sort of processes and solutions. And what I mean by that is we had a run on banks in the US a couple of years ago, we had the interest rate pieces that we’re seeing sort of around the town, and I think for global organisations where they’re working across different currencies, jurisdictions, that adds to that complexity. And what we found is that a lot of treasurers and CFOs actually work again with different solutions that don’t talk to one another.

So what Finmo is doing is we’re actually bringing the pieces of the puzzle together. We can get into a little bit later, but we sort of manage that through kind of a modularised approach, right. So if treasurers want money movement capabilities, if they want cash management, sort of yield opportunities, if they want FX hedging, if they want us to help integrate into their ERP tools, we can provide different sort of solutions for the different problems.

But one of the things is regional and global organisations have 10, 15 bank accounts all around the world. One of the things that we saw with the potential run on the banks is CFOs would say to the treasurers, “Hey, can you mitigate the risk by spreading the cash into different banking sort of environments? I don’t want that risk happening.” And so with that I think we saw a greater need for bringing kind of cash management balances together, where treasurers don’t need to necessarily log into 10, 15 different banking portals.

And actually what’s funny is all treasurers that we speak to use the unified tool called Excel, which is where they download it into Excel, manipulate it intraday and figure out where it is through a manual process. So we’re trying to automate all of that, yeah, essentially.

Dexter Cousins
And all, I remember back in the GFC, right, one of the big four banks almost went out of business because of an Excel spreadsheet, right. It’s kind of treasury and positions being on an Excel spreadsheet, so yeah, it’s a very, very risky game.

There’s obviously a lot of payments businesses around who are doing a really good job of fixing the problem of multicurrency and giving smaller businesses access to that. Sounds like you’re doing something a bit different and you’re targeting more the kind of bigger and medium-sized kind of corporations. Is that right?

David Hanna
Yeah, correct, Dex. I think what we would say, and we talked about it again internally, as sort of generation two is really about multicurrency, moving money from A to B. We think we’re the next generation of kind of fintech in that we’re not just doing multicurrency, we’re sort of allowing organisations to bring sort of balances together so they can holistically see where they are. They can run accounts payable and receivable processes within that environment and then they can hedge their risk. If they’re a dollar based company but you’re working regionally with Kar, Filipina peso, all these many currencies, you need to hedge your risk against that fluctuation, right.

And so I think what we’re doing is we’re moving away from just the traditional A to B money movement, we’re actually providing additional sort of value on top. I mean we can certainly do money movement, we are licensed in a range of countries, which we can get into, and we have 180 sort of locations where we can sort of pay into, but for us that’s not the focus of what we do. What we are doing, and certainly many customers come to us for that component, because I think we’re also pretty competitive there, but at the end of the day I think it’s that additional treasury value that we’re adding on top I think is relatively unique.

Dexter Cousins
Well there’s a few things that you’ve just mentioned there that I think kind of really come into some of the next questions that I’ve got. So the first one is you mentioned, you’re almost like fintech 2.0, and I think one of the concerns that I have of the Australian fintech scene at the moment is I think that we’re kind of still very much stuck in fintech 1.0 thinking. And what I mean by that is something that you touched upon, where multicurrency, it’s a feature, it’s not an app in itself or a business in itself.

And I think that kind of evolution is really, I’m not seeing it at the minute, and certainly it’s great to have you on the show to talk you and see that there are businesses out there that are starting to evolve and think beyond. And it’s not a bad way to go, you look at the success that Revolut has had starting that way, but there has to be a bigger kind of picture. It sounds almost like you’re kind of the super app but for treasurers and CFOs.

David Hanna
Yeah, no, look, it’s really interesting. I think we’ve sort of had a lot of conversations with big end of town sort of enterprise again that are sort of watching this space quite closely. Midmarket I think is what we’re initially targeting. So our typical customer is a regional or global outfit that essentially has multiple bank accounts through multiple org structures within the region. If you think about that as a starting position, they would struggle in understanding cash positions at any one point in time. That’s essentially what we’re solving for.

I think to your point, the traditional kind of inch is more about how do I money in a various market and then pay it into another market. That’s multicurrency. I think what we need to do is sort of evolve in terms of, companies are typically global or regional from day one. That’s how they think today. So it’s changed from the traditional model of setting up in one market and hacking away and sort of moving to another market etc. I think most organisations want to be regional from day one, right. So we’re sort of providing that cont from day one that allows again these mid markets to sort of solve some of their needs.

I think we also solve the kind of traditional model because, as I say, we’ve started with money movement. In order to solve treasury you also need to move money near real time between banking institutions etc. So I think we’ve worked pretty hard over the last three years to acquire licences, become directly integrated into banking infrastructure and so on and so forth. But I think, yeah, we’re kind of thinking about the problem in a different way.

Dexter Cousins
Now you talk there about businesses have to think globally, regionally from day one. You spent a lot of time in Singapore, the business is based in Singapore’s up, right?

David Hanna
Correct, yeah.

Dexter Cousins
What was the thinking around Singapore?

David Hanna
Yeah, so interesting question.

Dexter Cousins
Stupid question.

David Hanna
Interesting question. I think for most of my career, of which it spans the last couple of decades, I think I’ve worked through Asia, through the US, had sort of dealings with Europe etc. I think for us, we wanted to solve treasury for the region and I think Singapore is a natural choice in terms of a regional headquarters. Some of the markets like Thailand, Philippines, Vietnam, Malaysia, Indonesia, very difficult if you don’t have kind of local expertise on the ground, sort of understand each of the markets. So whilst Australia is a very important market for us, I think from a regional hub perspective it made a lot more sense to base out of Singapore.

And most of our team is sort of up there from an exec perspective and we also have a development centre in Bangalore in India. So I think having access to our development centre engineers out of Singapore I think made a whole hit s.

Dexter Cousins
And with the customers that you’ve got, are you kind of focused on certain segments or you just focused on a certain size of customer?

David Hanna
Yeah, so we actually see ourselves as segment agnostic, right. What I mean by that is, because we’ve integrated into sort of the infrastructure kind of at the bare metal, anyone can essentially utilise our serving, right. And because we’ve also thought about it in a modularised approach, if you just want to use the traditional rails of moving money A to B and multicurrency etc, you can do that. If you want to sort of utilise the treasury services, you can do that. If you want to utilise FX hedging, AR/AP module etc, I mean we’re kind of agnostic to what you want to sort of use us for.

Having said that, I mean we obviously have a target few segments that we go after, because we think that the treasury problem those segments is much more prominent. So frankly speaking, we actually see a lot of demand come from financial services organisations, whether it be other fintech payment players etc. And again, if you think about the problem, I think it’s really about organisations that may not have thought of, “Hey, how do I manage my cash properly? Where is it coming from in terms of customer base?” etc.

A lot of fintechs don’t necessarily start out thinking about that problem. They think about the value proposition that they can provide and how they’re going to succeed and their runway and so on and so forth, rather than thinking, “Hey, I’ve got currency coming in from multiple different locations. How do I actually get ahead of managing that in a way?” So we’re seeing a lot of demand come from other payment players in that regard as well.

Dexter Cousins
And how have you got the product out to market? Because it doesn’t sound like it’s a kind of, put a website up, get lots of people come through the funnel. This seems like more of a high touch, longer sales cycle style product.

David Hanna
For sure. So we actually started sort of working through the licensing infrastructure over the last few years. So we’ve taken a lot of time to ensure that we’re regulated in the key regions. So we’re regulated in Australia, in New Zealand, in Singapore, in the US we’re an MSB, and we’re actually six weeks out from becoming a UK EMI.

Dexter Cousins
Oh, great.

David Hanna
Which is good. And so that was a lot of the initial sort of time that we took to establish the business across the different regions and then it was working directly with banking infrastructure, ensuring that we’re connected directly to the core rails, whether it be MPP here in Australia or PayNow in Singapore, fast payments in the UK, SEPA in Europe etc. There was a lot of time spent making sure that those components were ready.

And so we actually started with the money movement capability, had merchants and customers test our pipes, and we found that adding the treasury on top meant that they could see the additional value, again back to the earlier comment of not just working through kind of that generation 2 fintech that’s traditional money movement, but actually getting some value on top of that in terms of treasury. So it was pretty natural I think for kind of our evolution into treasury and providing those services to our customers. But we haven’t done any much above the line marketing, it’s really just been through kind of founder network, the industry context that we’ve had etc.

Dexter Cousins
Yeah, awesome. So how big are you now in terms of people and number of clients etc?

David Hanna
Yeah, so we’re around 40 to 45 people now, and from our point of view, grown pretty rapidly in the last sort of 18 months I would say. I think from a customer base point of view we’ve actually had a couple of hundred sort of merchants sign up to the platform, right. So we’re pretty blessed in that regard. I think from our point of view we’ve got about a hundred active merchants that are working with us sort of month-on-month. It varies in terms of how merchants work with us. Some merchants work with us in a kind of couple of transactions a month sort of way, to very active merchants. So when we say 100 active, that’s where they’re working with us every day, they’re moving money, they’re working with us on the treasury platform etc.

Dexter Cousins
Yeah, and what kind of feedback have you had from clients so far?

David Hanna
Look, pretty positive feedback from clients I think. We’ve instigated things like quarterly business reviews with our clients, constant feedback in terms of how we can improve our platform, the UI, the API connectivity etc. But I think overall it’s been pretty positive. I think we’ve taken a stance that we want to work directly with treasurers and CFOs in building the product, is we want to solve directly with those stakeholders in terms of the problem that they’re facing sort of day in, day out. So our internal philosophy is let’s not build it in a windowless room and then sort of throw it out to market. We’d rather work with practitioners and solve actual problems. So look, we’ve constantly been receiving feedback week on week and we incorporate that into kind of what our product looks like.

Dexter Cousins
Yeah. And with the, I guess, the size of the opportunity, have you had any chance to kind of really sit down and figure out globally how much this is potentially worth in terms of a market?

David Hanna
The market is pretty big in our minds. So we’re, as you mentioned, B2B focused, and in our minds, B2B, based on reports and surveys that have been conducted, is $150 trillion opportunity, right. So the size is pretty big in terms of the payment volume and the problem that we’re tackling in terms of treasury. I think for us, the focus is definitely on Asia. There’s probably been other like-minded companies in the US that are tackling it from a slightly different perspective. They look at it more from a perhaps traditional open banking point of where you can sort of pull in cash balances etc, but you can’t necessarily move funds within that environment, right.

So what we’re doing is we’re doing the opposite, which is because we’ve directly integrated from an infrastructure perspective, we’re also able to get access to balances and some of the services that we need. So yeah, look, I think in our mind the opportunity is pretty big. I think we want to focus on Asia. The reality is that in Singapore, if you work with the top three banks…

Dexter Cousins
Bit like Australia, right, in the sense that there’s big four, and then, well if you work in Australia and only work with one of them, right, the other three won’t touch you.

David Hanna
Exactly. But in Asia, I think in Singapore in particular, I think it’s pretty open in terms of top three banks cover 80 to 90% of the market, right, from a mid-market point of view, but that’s how.

Dexter Cousins
Okay. There’s obviously a lot happening in tech innovation, some of it very kind of real, some of it noise, some of it kind of, is it ever going to happen. You’re kind of right in the thick of it, whether it’s payments innovation, CBDCs, digital assets. What kind of, I guess, input are you getting from clients around their demand for things like digital and being able to have that as part of the treasury? Or is that kind of just noise being made by people? Or do you think there’s actual real physical demand there?

David Hanna
No, I think there is physical demand for digital asset in particular. I think, look, my philosophy, and I’ve spent the last 20 years in the regulatory space, right, so been watching it pretty closely. I think some regulators, particularly the MAS in Singapore, as well as sort of local regulators in Australia, have kind of embraced this notion of stablecoin. So the MAS released their framework around stablecoins. I think in our minds that’s probably the closest thing to what would be in demand from a treasury perspective. If you think about it, the form factor for real-time money movement is sort of very similar in the stablecoin sense, right. It’s near real time, it’s…

Dexter Cousins
I mean, hold Bitcoin on a treasury, I mean so volatile, right. Like even when it’s not volatile it’s volatile.

David Hanna
That’s right. That’s right. Yeah, so I think there will be stablecoin issuers, as there are today, and I think we see some synergy between RTP and stablecoin. But until it matures I think our focus is still kind of on the traditional infrastructure, and then we’ll be watching that very closely.

Dexter Cousins
Yeah. Speaking of other technologies, saw a great meme the other day. It was Leonardo DiCaprio in Wolf of Wall Street, where the semi says “Sell me this pen”, and then the next pic is the guy holding the pen saying “It’s AI powered”.

David Hanna
For sure.

Dexter Cousins
Sure, but look, a serious question is, you touched on something before which I think is certainly what I see is perhaps one of the real powerful kind of components of AI and the potential of it. You mentioned within your platform there’s the ability to actually move money, and we’re seeing markets do move that fast that, do you see a case where you can have AI helping to make those decisions? So, “Hey, we’ve just noticed FX prices changed. If you converted to this you would kind of save X and the risk tolerance would be Y.” It sounds very interesting and exciting.

David Hanna
I think we probably have to take a fairly conservative approach when it comes…

Dexter Cousins
Goes wrong.

David Hanna
When it comes to AI and money, right. I mean AI for general tasks and so on and so forth, no-brainer in my mind. I think AI and money, I think that still needs some learning, right.

Dexter Cousins
Like I started recruitment 25 years ago and the thing I learned really quickly was, when I started I had 200 contractors, so were essentially our employee, and I had to payroll them every week. And we had one computer and we were always making mistakes because we were that under stress, right. And getting somebody’s pay wrong, it’s the worst thing you can ever do, right. So yeah, I agree with you, kind of messing with money and use an AI or technology where it can go horribly wrong.

David Hanna
Yeah, I mean look, I think there’s certain aspects that you can automate in terms of workflow. But I think we’re a fair way out, I’m sure, for the rudimentary kind of processes that are A to B rather than added complexity. But over time I can see also those things sort of moving towards kind of an AI framework, but we’re nowhere near there at the moment, right. I think there still needs to be a lot of further innovation as to how we apply it, things like that, in my mind.

Dexter Cousins
So I want to talk a little bit about your background and backstory, David. 20 years in fintech, I mean when you started it wouldn’t have even been a word. How did you get involved and what was it that attracted you to the industry in the first place?

David Hanna
Yeah, for sure. So I spent the last 20 years in the regulatory space, interestingly, and I kind of say for my sins. But I think that is probably one of the things that led me to where I am today, right, which is the core of what we do is essentially regulatory. And you’re handling client money, you’re operating across the globe, there’s a whole bunch of compliance and risk and regulatory aspects that you need to perform robustly, right. So I started my career at ING some 20 odd years ago.

Dexter Cousins
It’s kind of like a startup then, wasn’t it, right? Would have had, what, a couple hundred thousand customers?

David Hanna
Correct, correct. It was the branch free environment, so they were doing things differently in that regard as well, right.

Dexter Cousins
I mean obviously Billy Conards, the lion rangang doing the rang.

David Hanna
Funnily enough, I actually named that lion. There was a competition in Australia to name the lions. I named it Rory. I didn’t have much of a creative mind at that point. But I think that from ING went to sort of Zurich and then worked at Ernst & Young for six years, and at Ernst & Young I think that’s where I was on the advisory side, dealing with McAri Bank and CBA and insurance companies, bank, really cross sector. We even worked across energy, discount retail, whole range of segments.

And then one of my customers was PayPal. And so PayPal essentially was the original fintech, right, and so naturally, logical move from Ernst & Young at that point is to head over to PayPal and figure out how they can sort of innovate and sort of build through the region etc. And so spent six years there and that was I think the first kind of real foray into fintech at the time, and kind of gave me the bug as to using some creativity, some innovation, but figuring out the regulatory complexities of that business. So that’s how it all started.

Dexter Cousins
Yeah, and what was it that kept you in the industry?

David Hanna
I think just the innovation, right. Like I am that type of person where I think I do want to challenge the thinking, do things differently. Doesn’t sound like a regulatory guy, right, but I think for me, challenging the thinking from a PayPal perspective and doing it differently, I think was their kind ofo that stuck with me. I think after PayPal worked with a range of other fintechs as their chief risk officer and so on and so forth, and always saw the same problem: treasury, cash management, dealing with money. How do you effectively do it in a way that can solve global problems? And so started Finmo three and a half years ago.

One of the things I think that was really interesting, the start of Finmo was the founders all had complementary sort of skills. So typically what happens is one founder is missing, right. So you don’t have the IT guy or the compliance guy or the sales guy or whatever the case is. And so I think it was really interesting to complement one another.

Dexter Cousins
Yeah, it’s really unusual actually to have a regulatory person as a CEO. I don’t think I’ve seen that before actually. What was it that the kind of rest of the founding team saw in you to say, “Hey, we think you should be the guy”?

David Hanna
Yeah, so I think I’ve always had, through my 20 years of regulatory experience…

Dexter Cousins
You don’t seem like a regulatory guy, right. You’re sort of looking at things a little. Are you kind of Tau like the stereotypical kind of tick and Bush corre kind of audit style person?

David Hanna
Exactly. So the typical regulatory person, right, which is, I think the fact that I’ve been curious about business models, been curious about learning about customers, meeting with customers, wanting to be sort of in the conversation, and so that’s been I think a burning desire sort of throughout my career. And I think it’s telling me, and has told me, that a good balance of regulatory, risk management, commercial, I think is the right kind of piece of the puzzle, or pieces of the puzzle, to kind of lead commercially.

Dexter Cousins
What about our actual kind of operational and the building of and scaling of the business? Because that in itself is a fine art. Where did you get the inspiration, ideas from to kind of help guide you on that? Because that’s not an easy thing to do.

David Hanna
No, it’s not, but I think again, over the years I’ve worked in businesses where it has been about market expansion, it has been about setting up new offices, it has been about trying to get greater coverage etc. And a lot of that requires the operational aspects as well. So it’s not just the regulatory side, it’s not just the commercial mindset, I think it is also getting your hands dirty and figuring out who is going to be on the ground and so on and so forth. So again, natural kind of…

Dexter Cousins
It’s funny though, isn’t it, because like the tendency is you’d pick like a product, marketing or salesperson to being that CEO-style role. I’m just really fascinated to kind of see other personality types and experiences and backgrounds come into it and do a good job as well.

David Hanna
Yeah, for sure.

Dexter Cousins
I think it’s, one of the kind of issues I think that we have as an industry is, you mentioned this before, right, like I’ve not been going to events this year because I was just getting sick of the kind of group thinking, the same people and same conversations, and I just needed to kind of pull out from it and just have a bit of a broader view, right, and not be so deep into it. And it’s been really beneficial I think this last 6 months just to kind of open my mind up and go, okay, right, like what are some of the other things that happening, right. Like is fintech not to be all and end all.

And I think that’s one of the great things about the podcast and having people like yourself on, right. It’s like, it’s going to be other people out there who are maybe coming from a regulated compliance background who are thinking, no, yeah, what, I could be that person as well.

David Hanna
No, 100%. Look, I think at the end of the day what we do is we deal with client money, right, as I mentioned. So that’s all compliance, that’s all regulatory at the end of the day. And so I think having that at the core of kind of driving the business is really important in my mind. I think the curiosity needs to be there, you need to be able to understand a bit more strategically kind of where business models are going and perhaps have that exposure globally to new thinking. But to your point, I completely agree, we didn’t want to do something that was just the same as what everyone else is. We want to think about things completely differently, almost the other way around, right, and that’s our kind of philosophy.

Dexter Cousins
Yeah, look, I mean it’s simple, right, but if you want to be different you got to do things differently, right.

David Hanna
Exactly.

Dexter Cousins
One of the other challenges, and I think it’s probably the biggest challenge that faces leadership in fintech, is there’s a massive emphasis on raising capital, but the thing that’s probably going to determine success more than anything else is the quality of the people that you bring into the business. And unfortunately, hiring is a skill that everybody needs to master, particularly spot potential and developing people, but it seems to be an area where most founders and leaders spend little if any time in developing and kind of growing their capabilities in that area. How have you gone about hiring great people, getting them into business? As you said, you’re running a lean shop, so everybody’s got to be making an impact, there’s nowhere to hide. What have been some of the things that you’ve kind of learned through that process of becoming a hiring leader as well and bringing a team together?

David Hanna
I think that’s a critical area, Dexter. I think, so we’ve been blessed, right, there’s no doubt about it. Like our people are significantly skilled and every day I feel pretty blessed to be working across the leadership team, but also our engineers and developers, insane amount of skill set and drive. But starting with the founding team, I think one of the reasons why we decided to do it is we knew each other from a prior life. We got along, right. We weren’t sort of interested in more of the big business sort of mindset, I think it was more about kind of getting things done and working together, and as I said before, we complemented one another. So whether it be regulatory, tech, sales, product, network, finance, we sort of fit together from that point of view.

I think actually most of the founding team have 20 plus years experience themselves. So I think one of the things that’s different about Finmo is the founding team aren’t necessarily starting from a raw base, right. So typically when you think about fintech it’s the young kind of raw energy or whatever the case is. We’ve sort of been around the block a little bit, and I think again, in the philosophy of doing things differently, one of the motivations of doing Finmo was we’ve actually done it for others for so long, we actually want to do it for ourselves, right. So that typical motivation, well we didn’t start from a raw base.

Dexter Cousins
So you’ve got networks. The reality is, right, and people might get offended by this but it’s just the truth, A people attract A people, B people attract C, D, E, F, G, right. Like it’s, say, if you got a core group of people who are all aligned values-wise, calibre-wise, it stands to reason that high calibre people will want to be part of that.

David Hanna
No, for sure, but at the same time I would say that we’ve still had to work pretty hard at building the culture, maintaining the transparency etc. And I think one of the values that we do put forward every day is openness and transparency. So we have regular all hands, as an example, we share with everyone exactly where we are from a business perspective, right. We’re very transparent, and one of the bits of feedback from the team is, “Wow, we’ve never heard this before.” This is how many customers we have, this is the runway, this is the revenue, this is the processing, this is X, Y and Z.

And I think that’s one of the values that I definitely want to push through on an ongoing basis, because each person should know exactly where we are as a business, as opposed to, we’ve probably all worked in organisations where it’s a little opaque. You don’t quite know, then figuring out how to align to what you don’t quite know. In my mind it’s all about alignment and drive, right. So if you’re transparent, people can sort of hopefully hook into where you’re going and move with you, rather than figuring that out along the way.

Dexter Cousins
Yeah, I’ve been talking to quite a few leaders recently about this concept of psychologically safe environments. And I think there seems to be a misperception from a lot of people as to what that means and they’re mistaking it for being comfortable. And I think psychologically safe environments are kind of uncomfortable, because you kind of happen to be transparent and open and there’s uncomfortable truths there and people have to be accountable.

David Hanna
Correct.

Dexter Cousins
And the kind of accountability is the price that you pay for having a psychologically safe environment.

David Hanna
Couldn’t agree more. There’s the good and the bad, right, but the reality is that I would rather work in the environment personally where I know exactly where things are up to, and I expect that of others and I expect others to want the same thing, rather than come in and sort of have to second guess etc. So I’m with you 100%.

Dexter Cousins
You mentioned earlier you just come back from a trip. You’ve done Money20/20 in Asia, Money20/20 in Amsterdam. Anything that you’ve seen there that you kind of excited about or it’s got you kind of bit worked up?

David Hanna
Yeah, for sure. I think what excites me is everyone has a treasury problem, right. So we’ve spoken to small, medium and large and everyone actually says the same thing, right: we’re actually downloading into Excel, we’re sort of manipulating intraday. It’s the same conversation time and time again. So frankly that excites me and I think our kind of way of thinking has been validated a lot through kind of those conferences etc. It’s always a good party.

Dexter Cousins
But what was the sense that you got of where kind of the industry’s at at this moment in time? People optimistic or they kind of pessimistic? We kind of feeling like we kind of got through the worst of it and it’s moving forward? What was your sense as to how people were generally feeling?

David Hanna
I think people were generally positive, right. I think the sentiment is turning. I think people are feeling like you went through the dark days of COVID and all the stuff that came with that etc, and things are moving now in a better direction. Is it 100% the right direction? Perhaps not, we still have a lot of macro kind of activities happening around the world, but it’s certainly moving I think in the right direction, and we got that vibe from most customers and partners and so on.

I think one of the things is, again, if you think about Asia, even in sort of Money20/20 Asia as well as Europe, US folk would come across to the Asia conference and not expect that there’d be so many complexities with Asia, right. A lot of US or European sort of customers perhaps think there’s one way of doing things in Asia, as opposed to quite a few local nuances through the region, right. Thailand, Philippines, Vietnam, they’ve all got different sort of infrastructure that’s required. So we heard a lot of that, which we knew, but again, trying to solve the complexity of local market across Asia I think was a key theme.

I think the other thing is, as I jokingly said, everyone has a treasury problem. A lot of payment companies, financial services companies are wanting us to help solve this problem for them. It’s taking up too much of their time, it’s becoming more and more complex the more global they become and the more partners they work with across banking and so on and so forth. So again, it validated a lot of our thesis and thinking. So we’re very, very positive about kind of the outcome, for sure.

Dexter Cousins
Before we wrap up, David, I think it’s kind of common knowledge that anybody who’s set up a fintech in Australia has to be thinking global from day one. What advice would you give to Aussie founders who are looking to expand, and maybe go to Asia, Singapore or US, where you’ve gone? What would be your kind of advice, and just how to get things moving and get that off the ground?

David Hanna
For sure. I think one of the things is local expertise, right. So a bit like what I just said with some of our kind of customers coming from offshore or into Asia, I think you’ve really got to have that sort of local knowledge of how the different markets sort of operate and the complexities, right, whether that be from a commercial point of view or regulatory one. There’s a lot of different local nuances, and so thinking that you can just hop into Asia in the same way that perhaps you’ve done it locally in Australia, I think needs some further thought. And you need to really think about kind of market by market, as opposed to, it’s one big market, let’s just hop in and sort of hope for the best.

So my advice is definitely surround yourself with local expertise, right, whether it be help from kind of broader advisors that you can tap into that have local knowledge of the Asia sort of presence etc, or recruiting, right, at the right time. Now obviously as a fintech you can’t sort of recruit across all markets one. So my second bit of advice is start with a market, sort of understand that market and go deep into that market, rather than spread your kind of focus across the region and you’re not then able to sort of accomplish what you need to do.

Dexter Cousins
Awesome. We get lots of great talent listening to this podcast, watching the videos. If anybody likes what they’ve heard about Finmo, they’re interested in careers, what’s the best way find out about jobs with the business?

David Hanna
For sure. So finmo.net, yeah. But certainly keen for talent, people that like…

Dexter Cousins
We got CFOs listening to this as well.

David Hanna
Yeah, so, and also from a market kind of feedback perspective, we’d love to hear from people that kind of have these problems on a day-to-day basis and would like to solve it with us.

Dexter Cousins
Brilliant, thanks for joining me David.

David Hanna
No, cheers.

Dexter Cousins
As always folks, you can connect with me on LinkedIn. If you’re coming back, thanks so much for your support, and if you’re new to the show make sure you give us a like and follow us on your favourite podcast player. Until the next episode, keep well.

Fintech Chatter is produced by Tier One People, leaders in fintech executive search. We’ll find world-class leadership talent to build world-class fintech ventures, and you can find us at tieronepeople.com.

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