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Graham Strain – Citoplus Ep 196.

November 15, 2024 · Hosted by Dexter Cousins

About this Episode

In Episode 196 of the Fintech Chatter podcast, Dexter Cousins is joined by Graham Strain, Co-Founder of Citoplus a digital platform for commercial broking.

The Citoplus Journey

Dexter and Graham look back at their first meeting and discuss Graham’s journey from traditional Banking to Start up. His recognition that he was a transformation guy at heart and wanting to do “cool stuff for customers” was the driver behind founding Citoplus.

He chats about support from great shareholders, and how they funded Citoplus through, what he calls the “Friends, Families & Fools” model, who have shown great faith in their vision.

Graham outlines the plans for the future and how Citoplus aims to reach 100% of the digital broking market through partnerships with Banks and Non-Banks. Watch out for lots of new announcements.

About Citoplus

CitoPlus is the cornerstone of modern, frictionless commercial lending. Designed by industry leaders, they launched a product that streamlines the laborious process of SME lending.

Citoplus has focussed on removing the paperwork-heavy process through automation. The result is a broker-friendly data-rich system that delivers better client service and achieves quicker outcomes, meaning deals are closed faster.

About Graham Strain

Co-founder of Citoplus, Graham’s background is in banking, including 13 years at NAB in product, business bank and corporate development executive roles. He held the position of interim CFO and Product Head at start-up Angle Auto Finance, an asset finance company. He was GM – Business Products at Judo Bank in the SME lending space.

Chapters:

00:01:15 Citoplus The Journey and Solution

00:19:45 Graham’s Backstory and Career in Banking

00:25:20 Why Startups and Banks are so different

00:39:00 Big News from Citoplus

Links & Resources:

Subscribe Newsletter: https://www.linkedin.com/newsletters/fintech-leaders-7092732051488980992/

Links from this episode.

More on SME lending and working with banks 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 connect with fintech leaders for a bit of a chat. I’m your host Dexter Cousins, and today’s guest is Graham Strain, the co-founder of Citoplus. Citoplus is an Aussie fintech who has come from nowhere in this last three years to now working with Australia’s major banks. I chat to Graham about their meteoric rise, how they’ve flown completely under the radar, and the approach that Aussie fintech founders must take if they’re to work with Australia’s major banks. Tune in as I also talked to Graham about his personal journey working with Australia’s big four banks before making the move into fintech and then taking the ultimate plunge by creating his own startup.

Graham, welcome to your Fintech Chatter debut.

Graham Strain
Thank you for having me, D. It’s an absolute pleasure to be here.

Dexter Cousins
It’s great to have you actually, because we have an association that goes back I think five or six years, and at the time you were working for one of the big four banks and I probably never expected to see this day that you’d be set up to sit me as a founder of a very successful fintech startup. So kudos to you, my friend.

Graham Strain
I don’t think I expected it either.

Dexter Cousins
Well look, before we talk about that journey, maybe if you could share with our listeners a bit about Citoplus, because you’ve totally flown under the radar, and then over this last month or so there’s been big announcements on LinkedIn and in the media where you’ve seem to have come from nowhere and all of a sudden you’re working with Westpac and your big four banks. What is Citoplus and what’s the big problem that you solve?

Graham Strain
So Citoplus is a unique digital platform for brokers who are writing lending, and the problem we’re trying to solve is everyone in banking in Australia over the last 15 or 20 years has spent every last dollar of investment and digitisation energy into home lending and originating home loans, either via broker or directly with a customer, and lending so but a poor cousin, if you like, in that it’s more complicated, it’s more archaic in terms of how it’s done, or more old school if that’s the right word for it, and it’s more complicated to digitise because of the sh nature of it.

And so what we’re trying to solve is bringing lending into the modern age, rather than the very manual, sort of paper based Excel spreadsheets, PDF application forms and all the problems that that creates for everyone involved, is sort of how lending has always been done, and it’s like being back in the 80s.

Dexter Cousins
Yeah. So it’s hot on the agenda for the big four banks and obviously we’ve seen over the last what, 10 years, the emergence of Prosper on De, other kind of smaller lenders, and then Judo coming in and taking a piece of the pie as well. What do you kind of sense as the appetite from the big four banks to actually start to really kind of take that space seriously? Because as a small business owner myself, can you’ve been through the process, terrible. And having the same experience with the same bank, but as a retail customer owner having a mortgage with them versus being a business owner, they’re just totally opposite ends of the spectrum.

Graham Strain
Yes. So you’ve experienced what I’m talking about. What I would describe it is everyone wants to do a good job. It’s just a question of priority, investment, capability, and not just tech capability but also internal capability to do that. And so if you go through a cycle where everyone, banks, despite being the size they are, still have finite capacity to change themselves and invest in things, and we are now in a cycle of where all the focus is on business banking, on serving customers well, because it is where the growth is, it is where the returns is, it is where the opportunity is now, where home lending is a sort of far more mature market and a slower growing part of the market now than lending.

And so the cycle has turned, both in terms of where the growth and opportunity is for banks as well as where the investment cycle is now. And so I think we are in a sustained phase of investment by all banks across the market in their business banking capability, and it’s not just tech investment, it’s people, it’s processes, it’s the whole box and dice. So if you talk to any one of the banks, they want to serve customers well, they want to deliver a great experience. Often they use people to shield business owners from the archaic processes underneath the covers, but as that investment comes to fruition they will radically transform the experience, and everyone is in the process of doing that now.

And so it was one of the conversations we had when we started Citoplus going, because that wasn’t the case when we first started. It was still very much mortgages, mortgage lending. One of the doubts that we had when we started was how quickly would the cycle turn and would that be the case, because you can’t go through another 30 years of it all being about borrow against your home, that drives consumer spend. You need a healthy and thriving business segment too. And thankfully enough it came quicker than I thought it would, to be perfectly honest.

Dexter Cousins
Terms of kind of the Citoplus solution, are you a fintech or you more of a techfin?

Graham Strain
Oh, we’re a pure technology company, right, in that we aim to be the B2B SaaS platform that most people will never hear of and never know anything about, but it’s just how business is done between the business customer, their broker, the bank, and it just makes it all work seamlessly in the background without anyone really thinking about it or consciously going, “Oh, I’ve got to use Cito for this or that.” It’s just the sort of technology infrastructure that underpins a seamless experience and a fast and efficient and easy experience for everyone involved.

Dexter Cousins
And so who have you been targeting, and is it purely just the banks, or do you the big broker networks as well, or are you competing against them?

Graham Strain
Oh, it’s a classic ecosystem. It’s one of those opportunities where there is typically one platform, whether it’s PEXA in the case of digital settlements, or whether it’s, there’s a company called NextGen ApplyOnline that’s done what we’re trying to do for home lending and being the very successful player in that market for a long period of time. And so it is always, there’s usually one platform that everybody uses to do this, and so you actually need to bring everyone on that journey and it’s a classic chicken and egg.

The more brokers you have, the more the lenders actually want to work with that platform. The more lenders you’ve got, the more brokers want to work with the platform you’ve got. So you’ve sort of got to bring everyone on the journey and build enough relationships on both sides of that ecosystem for it to reach the tipping points where actually adoption starts to drive on the critical mass of brokers and lenders that you’ve sort of brought to the table, if that’s the right.

Dexter Cousins
How did the kind of idea for it come about then?

Graham Strain
The idea for it came about actually sitting inside lenders. So I was working at NAB, working at Judo Bank 3 opo, and my job was to help scale, in the case of Judo, help scale Judo Bank and help it truly take on the big guys. And it’s a classic, you see the problem on the inside but realise the problem can only be solved on the outside of any one lender, i.e. it’s a many to many problem. Brokers want to deal with many lenders, not just one. Lenders want to deal with many brokers. And so by definition that means no one broker or one lender can create the solution that everybody wants to use.

And so it was actually sitting in Judo, but a culmination of many years of experience of NAB and time at Judo Bank, going, well, sort of three contentions. One, that ultimately lending will digitise. That’s not hard to get your head around. It’s just a question of how, and what’s the catalyst for that. The COVID period actually accelerating digitisation in a way that would have taken 10 years otherwise to happen, and so a real stimulate into the system that would otherwise have not been the case and digitisation truly accelerating. And then the realisation that no one had actually created the solution yet, and that I was brave or silly enough to try.

Dexter Cousins
When did you launch?

Graham Strain
So the business started about three and a half years ago in terms of the idea and the sort of seeding of the idea. We’ve had a platform in market for over two and a half years now. We had 10 brokers that were sort of…

Dexter Cousins
What was the first iteration of that?

Graham Strain
The first consideration was actually just build the first version of a platform to have something that any broker could use, forgetting about sort of the full end to end digitisation of it was just…

Dexter Cousins
And you built it from scratch?

Graham Strain
Built from scratch.

Dexter Cousins
Not like you going to T Aus?

Graham Strain
No, no, no. It was completely from scratch. So we had an offshore development team from day dot in India and a CTO and myself and my co-founder, and that was it. We sat in the office of some friendly brokers that we’d known, we were ex-colleagues, and literally built. It was true customer testing and true build from scratch and iterate on the fly. So for six months we just created the fat platform from the foundations up, and I’d call that the true MVP too. When you’re doing a startup you can’t afford to get it to the sort of perfect product, you just got to get to something that you can put in the hands of a customer and then give you real feedback really quickly on, okay, hate that, don’t like that, that’s not going to work, but can you do this, this and this.

And so we started with 10 brokers and a platform from scratch, and that we launched in March 22, and then it’s been for the first year and a half after that a tech release every week for the period after that, to go from MVP to something that we thought, actually this is starting to be a reasonably good product, but not perfect. And then you’ve actually got it sort of to crack into, well, we can’t, if there’s 20,000 brokers in the market and roughly 40 or 50% of them do write lending, we can’t go door to door to 10,000 brokers and do that sustainably, and you’ve also got to have the supply side of that ecosystem in place, which is the lenders too.

And that’s where there’s this concept of aggregators in the broker market, and that’s, if you like, the homes to groups of brokers. And then you go to any lender that would take the conversation and try to get them to buy into the concept of what you’re trying to do and be one of the first to sort of really get behind you. And I’m sure every founder out there doing fintech knows those first couple of customers, in terms of big enterprise customers, they’re true sliding door moments. If you land them or don’t land them, it makes such a difference to your journey, and you just got to find one or two that are going to back you and be brave, right, because you’re not ready yet. You’re not the perfect solution for them yet.

Dexter Cousins
So what about funding? Did you go out the markets and raise capital?

Graham Strain
So we have raised money two times and actually we’ll raise again in the future. We’ve done that through friends, families and fools, I would describe it. Anyone who’s doing early stage seed funding is very brave and they’re really backing the people first and foremost, because if you don’t have product market fit, you don’t have a proven solution, what you have is an idea, an opportunity and a team of people that they’re backing.

And so we’re incredibly lucky to have very supportive shareholders from the beginning that knew what this journey looked like, had experience of this. Most of the people involved in my company have a very good understanding of the banking market. I don’t need to explain to them exactly the story you shared, what lending looks like today, and for them to actually see that that is a big problem to solve and a big opportunity.

And then it’s about, can you execute, Graham? And we’ve been pretty disciplined. The first couple years we didn’t fund the business for two, three years of runway. We said we’re going to take this amount of money, we’re going to hit these milestones, and then if we do that, everyone’s in for more. And so you’ve got to live or die by both the commitments you’ve made in terms of the progress you’re going to make, as well as the build out of that at a pace that…

Dexter Cousins
I think that’s a, for me, I think that’s a way better way of doing it, particularly in the Aussie market. I think the biggest frustration of is you kind of see the announcement and then you get a call to say, “We’re looking for a chief of staff,” and you’re like, “Well, the VC said we should get one, right?” What is that? How is that person going to move the needle? And I think I really like the investment for stage, and can it’s, what this money will allow us to do is build X, which then we can then kind of go in and start to position ourselves with a big four bank, right. It makes a lot of sense.

Graham Strain
And obviously if you go through the procurement process of a big four bank, you can’t be funded for three months in runway. They’re not even going to sign the contract, right. And so you do have to think consciously about what earns the right to, what gives you the credibility of execution to demonstrate a track record that people will then fund for the long term, but also when you actually need to be set up, or if you’re asking a bank to sign a three or five year contract, they’re not going to sign it with an organisation that has two months of runway and then needs money, right.

Dexter Cousins
From a commercial perspective, one of the challenges that I see, particularly with software businesses, and international ones who look at Australia and they want to launch their kind of idea of the time is wildly overly optimistic, and you have to point out some fairly, I guess you kind of clear challenges, right. So one might be, if you get a big four bank, the likelihood is the other three aren’t going to work with you, because they’re going to ask where’s the advantage. Sometimes you can get one big four bank and the other three start to get FOMO and all of a sudden the floodgates open. How have you kind of navigated those types of dilemmas with your technology solution, and what do you see as being your total addressable market?

Graham Strain
Yeah, so I’ll do the total addressable market first and then I’ll do the question on how you navigate. I think it’s both banks’ sort of desire to build things themselves versus partner, as well as then how do they drive advantage from that. I think there’s two components to that question.

The TAM is, there’s actually 1.2 trillion in lending in Australia, of which 30 to 40% is via brokers today, depending on which sort of publication or statistic you believe. It’s not as well covered as mortgage lending, so it is a little bit more opaque in terms of that exact percentage, but it’s on its way to 50. And I was involved in helping NAB into that market in 2012, and back then it was 5%. It’s gone from 5%, 30 to 40% and rapidly on its way to 50%.

And lending is actually shorter tenure than home lending. Most home lending, the average life is four or five years. The typical lending is actually a three-year loan, right, in terms of behavioural life. But you’re talking about 400 billion dollars in US lending a year, of which let’s call it shortly half will be via brokers. So there’s 200 billion in lending per that we’re trying to help. So that’s a nice sizeable TAM.

In terms of your question about the dynamics of working with players like Westpac or the banks that we’re partners to, the unique component about what we’re doing is digitising an application, or the transfer of information between you as the customer, your broker and the lender that they end up submitting the loan to, doesn’t drive a source of competitive advantage. What is the source of competitive advantage is what the lender does when they receive that application, or their capacity to deliver a great experience from the moment they receive the application until give you the money.

Now the beauty of digitisation is you’re getting consistent, standardised, aligned to their systems and processes information, and so they can invest in everything downstream from receipt of an application to drive advantage versus others, which is all about their internal capability. They don’t have to invest in the bit that actually makes no difference to whether they have that advantage or not, which is just the digitisation of the input into that.

Dexter Cousins
Got you.

Graham Strain
And so when we have, because the first conversation we have with every bank is, “We can build Citoplus,” and I go, “Yes you can, but,” it sort of goes back to the dynamics of many to many problem, not many to one, and why invest in something that drives no competitive advantage for you? Spend all your money on the things that do drive advantage. Let us take care of the ticket to play. And that, as a business case for a bank that has many competing priorities and lots of things to do, is actually quite an interesting use case for them to contemplate.

Dexter Cousins
Yeah. Were you a technologist or were you finance?

Graham Strain
So I’m sort of in the, I call it, I’ve got three different stages of my career. I started my career as an investment banker in my 20s. The first 10 years of my career I was an investment banker and a finance guy in the purest sense of the word. And then the next 10 years of my career I sort of was a commercial banker, like in the guts of actually working with customers, creating product for bankers and to serve customers directly in the commercial bank. And then this decade has actually been, this is not my first startup, I’ve done two startups this decade, and I’m sort of really in that sort of tech-led, sort of digital and data-driven experiences as my true passion that I found.

Dexter Cousins
Where did you get the kind of, I guess the guidance, knowledge, support on the tech side to go out and start to build a technology solution, given that you’re not a CTO, you’re not an engineer, and this is obviously a massively complex problem? There’s a reason why the big banks have challenges with their systems, and they’re you all and archaic and complex.

Graham Strain
I guess it’s a lot of battle scars, right. So my time at NAB, my last role, I was responsible for consumer banking, banking and institutional banking, for everyday banking, payments, transaction accounts, merchant acquiring facilities, etc. So I was working with teams that were building how NAB faces off to the market, both direct to customers through the app or through internet banking or through the website, as well as when they go via a banker, the actual platforms that the bankers were using to process the opportunity, to work with the client, to have a great experience delivered to the customer. So I ran very large transformation teams that were building digital and data-driven experiences.

And so I had an extraordinary opportunity to both do that at scale, but do that across a variety of different experiences and parts of the market and a variety of different solutions in those different segments. What you do in institutional banking for a complex treasury function versus what I give you for your everyday banking and just what you want to do in making payments and paying your bills, completely different needs, experience components, solution components, engineering challenges and technical capability required to do that. And I just had an extraordinary opportunity to learn that within an organisation like NAB, surrounded by people. The one thing the banks do have is lots of very capable, very talented people, and if in the right teams, with the right opportunities, with the right funding, you can do a lot and a lot of really good stuff.

And so I just had an extraordinary couple of roles where I learned, in an environment where you’re surrounded by people who know what they’re doing, who can work with you to create great solutions, and that just sort of builds your, there’s nothing like experience and battle scars. And not every one of those projects went well, right. Some of them were actually really, really problematic projects that went way over budget, way over time, and those lessons were even more valuable than the projects that went well, because you actually got the chance to look and go, what caused that one to have that outcome? And that sort of takes so much longer. There’s sort of invaluable lessons out of that, but you just can’t get any other way other than through doing.

Dexter Cousins
I want to kind of take this conversation to the next level, but before I do, there’s something that you said there that really had me smirking. You mentioned there about banks being full of people that are highly talented and highly capable, and had a conversation I think maybe three, four years ago, one of the big four banks had approached me about helping them find great talent, said, “Hey, where do you go for engineering talent?” And I, well, got to be honest, “A headhunt from you guys, and I can’t understand why you’re having a conversation with me, because every time I have a conversation and I approach somebody in your business who is really good at what they do, by the sounds of it, not utilising them, and that’s why they’re having a conversation with me.

So maybe rather than looking externally, you could be looking internally and finding the right people that are just ready for a challenge, right, and need to do something different.” I think that’s a very true kind of dynamic that you see within these big organisations, where they spend all this money on getting the best talent and then they kind of underutilise them.

Graham Strain
Yeah, there’s so many great people in all the banks, some empowered to actually perform and do what they want, others in the wrong role, others not set up for success. But they’re not short on talent, that’s for sure.

Dexter Cousins
Now I want to kind of progress the conversation, because you and I were first introduced and I think I kind of politely said to you, “Hey look, I don’t have any real success in helping somebody move from a big four bank into a fintech. Nine out of 10 people tend to leave within the first six months. I don’t think I’m your guy to help.” And you took that very graciously, and I remember we caught up at the fines, maybe it’s two, three years ago, and you’re like, “I remember that conversation and thanks for it.” What I’m really blown away by is how you’ve been one of those 10%, not only to make the transition but now to go and have your own startup and to go on that journey.

There’s not many people that we see move from a big four bank, take one step into going into a fintech, and then the next thing they’re out there doing their own thing. What I guess first of all, what’s that journey been like, and what advice have you got to anybody who’s kind of sitting in a big four bank feeling a bit underutilised, who’s dreaming one day of maybe being a founder, as to how to get there?

Graham Strain
Yeah, I’ll be honest. I mean, when I was at NAB when we first met, I wouldn’t have envisaged five, six, seven years later, however long it’s been now, that I would be a founder of a fintech, to be perfectly honest.

Dexter Cousins
2019 when we had that conversation.

Graham Strain
So 5 years, yeah. So I would never envisage at that time that that was the journey on. At that time all I knew is I had a real passion for doing cool stuff for customers and wasn’t intellectually driven and excited by just being 3% better each year and not making mistakes. And often, despite how many great people there are in these big organisations, often success is as much about not making mistakes and not doing too risky things, because they invariably lead to mistakes, as it is about your capability to drive big teams and lead to the right outcomes and drive both the P&L and the customer outcomes and everything else that comes with the expectations of roles in those organisations.

And so I was in my heart a transformation guy, and liked to do sort of things that really move the dial for customers. And so at that time I just knew that was the passion I wanted to pursue, and I knew that actually if I wanted to move at pace and do things that move the dial, it’s hard to do that in organisations like the big banks when there’s so much, even if they have the desire to do that, to execute on that with their legacy technology, with the way the dynamics of the internal processes and controls and governance and everything else.

Even when they want to move quickly. They’re great in a crisis, because what happens in a crisis is everyone gets aligned and focuses on the goal, and so during COVID the banks did things that they would not have done in normal times and really moved quickly, made decisions quickly, did an enormous amount of good stuff, didn’t always get credit for it, I did do that. But in normal times, in non-war times, it’s not that easy to get the level of alignment needed at all levels to move quickly, because they’re just trying to do so many things.

Dexter Cousins
There’s almost a paradox in what you’re saying, right, because the environment to make mistakes is the big four bank, because you got so much protection there.

Graham Strain
Yeah, right. They don’t like it.

Dexter Cousins
Yeah, right, right. And this is kind of why the kind of original conversation of nine out of 10 people don’t work out, whereas the environment that you’re in now, you make a mistake and that has massive implications, right. Like people lose jobs, right. You could lose a business, you lose customers, right. Material impact. So I guess there’s two questions for you, right. The first one is, how have you shifted the mindset, and I guess the second one’s a leading question, because what I see is that mindset of making mistakes or not being able to make mistakes and they get punished when you’re in a big four bank, you get scolded for making mistakes, whereas you transfer that into a startup environment and you make a mistake, you have to quickly forget it and move on.

How did you kind of shake that off and kind of be able to put the risks to one side, the fear to one side, know that the stakes were much higher now if you did make a mistake, and still kind of go out and do it?

Graham Strain
I would say I’ve actually always been a little bit unusually brave, and the reason I’d say that is probably there’s two quick stories of two. One is, my old team at either NAB or Judo would probably smile if I told you one of my favourite mantras as a leader in both those organisations was do and ask for forgiveness later. And I would say make 10 decisions. If seven out of those 10 decisions are great decisions, how much more progress are we going to make than if you spend the next 3 to 6 months agonising over one of them?

And so I was a big believer in, you hire the right people with the right capability, you actually need to get out of the way and help them go faster rather than sit over them, and sort of the reverse of that doesn’t get you anywhere. And so that was one of my favourite mantras even when I was at NAB, and it was something I tried to drill into all my leaders.

The second part of it is, one of my old bosses who I loved work, there’s lots of great leaders I had in my old organisations, less than me, died a couple of years ago, but we kept in touch, even at one point in my time at NAB he passed over me for a promotion, for a bigger role I wanted to go for, and one of the reasons he did that is he said, “Graham, I love all these things about you, but you’re too honest. You say what you think and that’s dangerous.”

Which sort of goes to part of the story, where the conversation we’re having now, which is I like challenge, I like to have an opinion, I like to sort of do my homework, come up with an idea and then see it through, and not everyone’s comfortable in doing that. That’s never been my weakness. I’ve had plenty of other weaknesses and plenty of other things that have held me back, but that has never been something that I’ve struggled with.

Dexter Cousins
I think that’s one of the biggest issues for founders when it comes talking about talent, and if they’ve come from a large corporate, right, you’ve got a much bigger talent pool to pick from than you have if you go into a startup, and the reason being is for part of what you’ve just said, right. You kind of have to go in with that radical transparency, that feedback and criticism, you kind of take it on board, right. Like when somebody’s saying something to you, they’re not saying it to you, they’re trying to help you. Yeah, they’re trying to help you, right. And it might feel good, but upon reflection you look, you go, “Hey, they’re right, I need to fix this.”

And there’s just not many people, right, that actually respond to that and enjoy that, well not enjoy, but that’s how they operate, to see the good in it. And I think it’s a real challenge, because you then translate that through to what does that look for a talent pool, and you’re talking about maybe it’s 10% of the workforce who are really geared up to work in a startup environment where there’s nowhere to hide, where you’re accountable, where you’re going to get harsh feedback and you’re not going to get built up all the time, and it isn’t rainbows and rocket ships.

Graham Strain
Definitely. I mean, there’s three things I talked about everyone who joins Cito, which is we’re here to do cool stuff for customers, get done, excuse me, and have some fun on the way. And everything after that is you just got to own it and drive an outcome, and it, there’s not in your job description, it might not even be something you’ve done before, but if you don’t do it you’re passing it on to someone else who has just as little time to do it as you, and that’s not helping us move the company forward.

So you’ve actually just got to grab stuff and run with it and figure it out and ask for help when you need it, but give it a go. But not just give it a go, make sure it happens, because give it a go implies that there’s an optional component to it, right. You’ve actually got to own it, drive it, get an outcome.

Dexter Cousins
Yeah, and look, it’s that kind of accountability piece, right, that the number one reason why people don’t work out in the first six months in a startup, a scale up, that’s usually as accountability, right. And it’s that very thing that you’ve talked about, is that look, kind of isn’t anybody else to do this, right. You got to find a way. And I think that the challenge is that for most people a job is a job, right. It’s a means of generating an income so they can live another life outside of it.

And then there are some people who, a far greater amount of their identity is tied up in their work and their career, right. And I think it’s kind of a founder’s job to me is to be able to identify those people, right. It’s like we kind of use these esoteric things like, oh, building a legacy and all of those things, but they actually are correct, right.

Like it’s people who are looking at how am I going to make an impact and play an active contribution into this journey, this business, what’s going to be my legacy. That’s like 10% of the workforce, right. The other 90% are like, how much you going to pay me, what are the hours, how many days a week do I have to come into the office, okay, is there a bonus, right. Like that’s generally the kind of decision making factors, whereas the kind of people that I tend to talk to are more about, what’s the opportunity here, where they at, what are the resources they got, where do they want to take this thing, if I make it work, what’s the upside for me, right.

That’s the last question that they ask. So I think it’s a really kind of challenging dynamic, right, for any founder, because you kind of hire an experience prior of that, it’s completely different, right. It’s like, can somebody do the job, yeah, they’ve done it for 20 years, is it at NAB, right, right, yeah, they’ll be fine, right. Like hire them, we’ll give them an extra 5, 10 grand, they’ll be happy. It’s not it, you just can’t do that in the startup.

Graham Strain
And when I talked about fun too, my version of fun is not foosball tables and we have a beer on Friday night. My vision of fun is when you do cool stuff that moves the dial and you actually make a customer’s lending experience fundamentally better. That’s fun. Like, I describe to people as you should pursue something you’re passionate about, and if you’re passionate about it, you’re going to enjoy it and you’re going to be invested in it and you’re going to do the extra 5 or 10% that someone who isn’t passionate about it isn’t going to do.

Dexter Cousins
Yeah. And sorry to interrupt, but I think it’s such an important point, right, because I remember when COVID was happening and like the manufact sh or forced fun went through the roof, right. So you’re seeing people kind of rock up on Zoom calls in fancy dress and your boss is dressed as a pharaoh and all this stuff. Like, this is not fun. And I think this is what people have lost, right, particularly in startup world. They’ve kind of seen that and gone, all right, we’ll make it fun, right.

That’s not why people are at your business, right. Their idea of fun is your idea of fun, right, not dressing up in fancy dress. And what it does, it then attracts the wrong people and it also kind of turns off the right people, go like, this is crazy, right. I’m not kind of rocking up on a Zoom call, it’s like Friday afternoon, I’ve got stuff to do, right, like it’s, we got a release, yeah.

So I’m glad you brought that up, because I think it is, again, we kind of use all these terms and people have their own interpretations of what fun is or what a culture is or what work-life balance is. It’s not, for every person it’s different, and you have to really drill down and go, “Hey, this is what we mean by fun, right. Like if that’s not your interpretation of fun and you want to dress up as a pharaoh on Zoom calls, maybe it’s go somewhere else.”

Graham Strain
Well, to use a sporting analogy, a sports team, they have a lot of fun on the journey and they have a big celebration when they win, but the fun is in the achieving a common goal that everyone aligns on.

Dexter Cousins
But Graham, we’ll come into a wrap now. What news have you got to share and what can we expect in the next four months?

Graham Strain
Lots more announcement of banks and non-banks that we’re going to be working with, and with a bit of luck, lots more partnerships in the broker community too, that take us from, at the moment we’re working with aggregators and lenders that should see us get to half of all brokers in the market able to use Cito and more than 75% of all the lending they do being digital.

Dexter Cousins
Wow.

Graham Strain
And we want to take that to as close to 100 and 100% as possible.

Dexter Cousins
Wow.

Graham Strain
And so you’ll see announcements along the lines that bring that to reality.

Dexter Cousins
So you’re kind of talking about significant market share already?

Graham Strain
Yes.

Dexter Cousins
Wow, that’s amazing. Well done.

Graham Strain
But like I said, we’re a B2B SaaS platform that most people probably will never hear of.

Dexter Cousins
Yeah. I think it’s kind of one of the things, right, that these stories that you’ve flown completely under the radar. Where can people find out more about Citoplus?

Graham Strain
citoplus.com.au.

Dexter Cousins
That are often hard to get in the office. So awesome. Well Graham, thanks so much for joining me.

Graham Strain
Thank you for having me. It’s been an absolute pleasure.

Dexter Cousins
Well, thanks for tuning in, folks. I hope that’s given you some ideas and inspiration. As always, you can catch up and follow me on LinkedIn. You can also follow us on Fintech Chatter TV over on YouTube. If you’re new to the show, make sure that you give us a follow on your favourite podcast player. If you’re coming back, thanks so much for your support. Please consider sharing this episode on your socials. It really helps in elevating Graham and great Aussie fintechs like Citoplus to a global audience. We’re listened to in over 40 countries, and just having been Singapore FinTech Festival, it’s amazing how many people actually do listen to the show. Until the next episode, keep well.

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

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