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Exploring Fintech with Joel Yarbrough: Moment’s Impact on Africa’s Digital Payments Ep. 198.

November 29, 2024 · Hosted by Dexter Cousins


In Episode 198 of the Fintech Chatter podcast, Dexter Cousins chats with Joel Yarbrough, CEO of Moment. Joel, an OG fintech leader, discusses his global journey with roles at PayPal, Grab, and now Moment, where he’s tapping into Africa’s vast fintech opportunities.


About This Episode

Dexter and Joel discuss the qualities of successful individuals in startup environments, emphasizing the importance of passion, collaboration, and a growth mindset.

Joel talks about the importance of giving back and building diverse teams, as well as the challenges of hiring in a rapidly changing market. He also provides insights into the future of Moment and the importance of being mission-driven in the business world.

About Joel Yarbrough

Joel is a passionate leader whose love of technology drives him to deconstruct complex systems and rebuild them to solve real problems. He has spent most of my career helping strategise, design, product manage, and deliver multi-channel solutions in and around the intersections of financial services, commerce, and technology.

He’s built a reputation as an evangelist and dot connector, working with partners to understand their strategies and solve their problems. The delight of leading product teams to make the vision a reality is a real joy.

Joel’s core belief is that together we can make the world a better place – even if it’s through our own enlightened self-interest. By doing things well, and being decent to each other we will all keep pushing to a brighter place together.

About Moment

Moment is an integrated payments platform for Africa, incubated as a joint venture by MultiChoice, Rapyd, and General Catalyst. We connect businesses and consumers in over 40 African countries. We’re able to do so through our broad network that aims to cover over 100 payment providers, 200 local payment methods, and 40 currencies.


Key Takeaways –

  • How Africa’s projected population growth presents unique opportunities for fintech.
  • Moment’s aims to build a comprehensive payment network for Africa, as the trend towards digital payments grows. 
  • Regulatory changes are shifting towards enabling innovation rather than just consumer protection.
  • Australia’s fintech scene is strong but needs to leverage its geographic and cultural assets more effectively.
  • Regional trade clusters are more valuable than cross-oceanic trade relationships.
  • The gig economy has empowered individuals in emerging markets, changing their economic prospects.
  • The diversity in teams provides greater problem-solving capabilities and drives a growth mindset for individuals.
  • Navigating hiring challenges requires clear communication to achieve high standards and cultural fit.
  • Giving back creates a positive network effect and greater sense of fulfillment.


Chapters
00:00.  Introduction to Joel Yarbrough and Moment

05:42.  The Unique Opportunity in Africa’s Fintech Landscape

14:01.  The Impact of Fintech on Personal Agency

19:44.  Australia’s Fintech Identity and Global Positioning

25:08.  Understanding Human Capital in Startups

30:32.  Passion vs. Mission-Driven Work

39:01.  Navigating Hiring Challenges in a Changing Market

Links & Resources:


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Links from this episode.

More on global payments and building teams 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.

Hello and welcome to Fintech Chatter, the show where fintech leaders join me for a chat. I’m your host, Dexter Cousins, and today’s guest is Joel Yarbrough from Moment. Joel is a fintech OG and he’s worked with some of the greatest fintech pioneers, such as PayPal in North America, Grab in Asia, and now Moment in Africa and the Middle East. Joel is joining me to share his fintech journey and some of his learnings along the way, as well as sharing some of the huge opportunities for fintech outside of Australia and North America.

Joel, welcome to your, I was going to say Fintech Chatter debut, but this is take two. We tried unsuccessfully in a very noisy Singapore Fintech Festival and I think the background chatter was just way too much to put out there as audio for people to listen to on their Saturday morning walk. Welcome back.

Joel Yarbrough
Thanks Dexter, great to be back, and the background chatter is almost a metaphor for Singapore Fintech Festival, so you nail it there.

Dexter Cousins
Awesome. Thank you so much for joining me. I’m really pleased to be doing this. You’re somebody who I think, through reputation and my network, people have spoken so highly about, and then I got to spend some time with you at Singapore Fintech Festival and it didn’t disappoint. I think the journey that you shared with me was one, really inspiring, but two, so insightful, and so I’m delighted that I’m going to kind of share some of those insights with my listeners. But before we kind of go into all of that, maybe if you could tell our listeners a little bit more about Joel Yarbrough and also Moment.

Joel Yarbrough
Sure, sure, sure. So I’ve been in the financial services industry my whole career. I started off originally at a strategy consulting firm, left and started an online learning firm which had a t9c little exit, went back into consulting, did internet consulting with many of the big banks during the internet 1.0 and 2.0 era, and eventually landed up at JP Morgan doing internet work for them for about five years through the GFC, at the end of which I was lucky enough to end up at PayPal, right.

And I consider myself kind of early third generation PayPal. Was there for six years in three different roles, both a global product role, I was in Asia, I led the product team in Asia for a couple of years, and then I went back to the US and was able to work with really all of the big internet companies really you’ve ever heard of, with the one exception of Amazon, except that I have spent plenty of time with Amazon off and on in other contexts as well. So I had this kind of incredible exposure to the breadth and depth of Silicon Valley.

And I came back to Asia. I’m sorry, when I was in the APAC role I was in Singapore, and I came back after a couple years to lead product for Grab and then helped walk Grab into the payments era and the super app era fairly early on. And then Rapyd for six years, right. And Rapyd was about solving the global payment problem that we saw with a lot of these big internet companies that I mentioned, where they wanted to be hyper local everywhere around the world but not invest resource into actually building out those teams, right, that they weren’t their core business, which was typically advertising, that’s where people’s careers were made, and so the payment teams were relatively small given the scale of their operations. So there for six years.

And then Moment is a new company focused on building the last effectively payment network for Africa, right, the biggest network, the widest network, that touches the potential of a billion and a half people today growing to two and a half billion people over the next 20 years. It’s a partnership. Our largest strategic investor is the biggest TV entertainment company in Africa, company called MultiChoice. Legacy is in the satellite dish, digital antenna, now streaming era. They own TV studios, they own sports rights for every sports you can imagine, and they manufacture an enormous amount of local content and then have about 100 million monthly active viewers sitting on couches all around Africa watching content.

So there’s a unique opportunity to get a huge bootstrap into building a payment business, addressing an already large corporate customer, already operating in 40 countries, and we’re leveraging that opportunity, right. So as of today we’ve been processing actually just for under 12 months at this point. We’re actually processing payments in 44 countries today across two of their brands. We’ve gone to the market to start to bring in additional corporate customers, which is kind of where we are from a product journey at this point, and open up access to those corporate customers to a truly pan-African collection suite that at the same time has done things like launch the first consumer to business real-time payment collection solution in South Africa on top of their RTP rails, while also having a huge multi-million location physical cap footprint, while also processing CS across this kind of vast sweep that I mentioned, etc.

Why does it matter, right? It matters because Africa is the only population around the world that’s effectively still growing, right. If you look at any demographic birth rate map around the world, you could see almost every other economy, population rates are going down. Africa, they’re still growing up meaningfully, and the expectation is that they’ll continue to be high for about the next 20 years until they finally turn down again in Africa, which means you have a billion people yet to be born, and an additional billion and a half people who will be coming into the economy. When you hit that 20-year horizon, you’re going have the largest working age population in the world in Africa, the largest urbanised working population in Africa.

And what I think is very unique, and I’m physically sitting in Singapore at the moment, we met in Singapore Fintech Festival, what’s really unique is that when you look at payment trends around the world, whether it’s LatAm, whether it’s Central America, whether it’s South Asia, East Asia or Southeast Asia that we know very well, all those trends have some little analogue today, or in the case of places like Kenya, some big analogue today in things we’ve seen other places around the world.

But for a continent of 54 countries and this huge number of people, there isn’t one story, or there isn’t one product you can roll out, there isn’t one magic solution. So if you build a team that’s diverse enough and if you bring in inputs from around the world broadly enough, you can build a platform that is flexible enough to then have the right tools to address different cultural and local needs all across this quite enormous continent. So that’s what’s very exciting for me, is to take a career’s worth of payment experience, hopefully some insight but definitely experience, and then apply it to one of the biggest mission driven opportunities in the world.

Dexter Cousins
So one of the things that we kind of tend to get bogged down in fintech is buzzwords and terms. And you were the super app of all super apps, Grab, you were there. We’ve had embedded finance, now the kind of latest term, and they always to me seem, rather than kind of descriptive of what is the problem and the opportunity that you’re solving, they seem to be very much just kind of buzzwords that make it easier for us to go and talk at conferences. What you’ve described there, I couldn’t put a term on that to summarise it. Have you been able to come up with a term to describe, in like one or two words, what it is that you’re building at Moment?

Joel Yarbrough
At the end of the day, we’re building a network and a business that lets us digitise the population, right, and move the path, right, the population from cash to digital. And why does that matter? It’s because people get lower prices, better access to services, more secure services, we unlock credit, and we unlock therefore human opportunity, right. At the end of the day, right, the more cash you take out the system, the more opportunity you can unlock, and for a large number of people, that’s what we’re focused.

Dexter Cousins
And that was, I guess, the kind of roots, the origin of fintech, right, was to create this fairer society where wealth was distributed a little bit more evenly and there was kind of access to financial products and financial services that people didn’t have. Why have we lost sight of that, and we’ve kind of all gone off into these different tangents and become wedded to solutions? If you think the essence of crypto is to do exactly what you’ve talked about, and it sounds great, but in application there’s a lot more complexity than just creating ways of exchanging value. What have you seen as been kind of the moments, excuse the pun, that have kind of got us to lose sight of that bigger vision and kind of all go off and become very kind of closed-minded around the solutions that we’re building?

Joel Yarbrough
Well, I think, let’s be fair, right, I think a lot of this stuff, all of this stuff is actually quite hard, right. If you look at the roots of the modern banking industry, right, they don’t go back a hundred years, right, they go back thousands of years, right. And so it’s easy for us to say, gosh, the time horizon we should explore should be short, right, because we’ve all got short attention spans. But I think the reality, the time horizons are very, very long, and even in the last half a century, right, an awful lot of the work that went in was not altruistic necessarily. People don’t always work for altruistic reasons. Multiple currents of greed and opportunity driven forces come together and then you get this large net positive to society over time.

But I don’t think you would imagine, when I started working and you started working there was consumer credit crisis after consumer credit crisis, right. These are companies that were, I would argue, being a bit rapacious, depending on the example, but they still opened the door to companies that I think have done incredible good, like a Capital One, right, that brought data to the market. They inspired a huge number of lookalikes attempting to do what they did, and badly, and then companies like Affirm or an Afterpay I don’t think would exist, right, without Capital One having played the role that they did and created thousands of quantitatively minded intelligent people inventing new financial products.

Dexter Cousins
Yeah.

Joel Yarbrough
In the market. And those are great things, but that’s the work of many hundreds of thousands and millions of people over time that results in a societal good.

I think the other thing that has happened in a much shorter period of time is, when I started spending more time with regulators in the last, let’s say, 12 or 13 years, I think regulators generally around the world have very much a consumer protection mindset, right. That’s a very strong component of what they focused on, not enablement. And I think what has happened and changed very much is enablement has become a big part of what they think about, if not the term: how is my country more competitive, how are my industries more competitive, how do we create jobs, how do we speak to the industry and learn what’s going on.

And what you have now, maybe typified by what we saw together at the Singapore Fintech Festival, is this proactive engagement, and not just from one or two hero regulators but many, many regulators, that now they have their own peer group, other regulators, they’re learning from them, their own industry conferences, and they’re using that joint knowledge to drive economy forward. That’s a magical change, and the pace of the change is increasing so rapidly at this point, whether it’s real-time payments, whether it’s digital identity, whether it’s data sharing frameworks as well as protection frameworks that are proliferating around the world, to result in outputs that I think are much better.

Dexter Cousins
We had an event at the weekend which was the Mike Tyson Jake Paul fight, which for some reason has been all over LinkedIn. But I think that I was watching that fight and just thinking through our conversation today and just thinking, wow, I would have never connected those dots, right, that kind of event, the implications of that for fintech, the implications of that for exchanging value, name of the organisation, right, like Moment, right. Yeah, it’s those moments, right, that every one of them that I have, I’d love to say I had this great Zen life, but the reality is all the great moments that I can think of, at some point I had to pay for them. It was an exchange of value.

And I was like, it just was, I think, one of those kind of times where you stop and you get outside of kind of thinking about the problem and thinking about the opportunity and the breadth of that opportunity. And when you shared about Africa and, I guess, that one, kind of the size of the opportunity but also the kind of age of the population, you contrast that with Western societies where I think the average age is kind of, I think, early 40s and most Western societies, it’s kind of really mind-blowing to think just of the scale of what you’re building and the potential impacts that that’s going to have in the next 50 years.

Joel Yarbrough
Yeah, no, it’s a real, it’s a privilege, I agree. I think one of the things I love about the markets in which I’ve been able to work is, on average, these are countries where people’s lives are getting better year on year.

Dexter Cousins
Yeah.

Joel Yarbrough
And so as a result you work with a lot of optimistic people who see change as inherently a positive, versus people in parts of the West who see change as inherently threatening. And at the end of the day, hanging out with optimists is just much more fun than hanging out with pessimists, right. It’s a pretty simple framing. So that’s been a great privilege, and then to go create a little bit of tools and put that into people’s hands, right, is an incredible privilege to then accelerate that optimism.

I had no intention, because I didn’t know it existed, when I went from JP Morgan to PayPal, to stumble into an organisation that was deeply mission driven, and then I was lucky enough to join Grab, right, which is a deeply mission driven organisation focused on building jobs, or 100 million jobs. And then now with Moment I have the opportunity to unify sort intellectual part of my brain, right, how do these networks work, how does technology work, what’s these digital public goods trends we can bring to bear, with, again, a deeply opportunity-driven mission of saying how do we touch the lives of two and a half billion people, half of whom haven’t been born yet.

Dexter Cousins
Yeah, I think that was actually something that you just mentioned there which really struck me. I was in Bali, I think, five or six weeks ago, and it was the first time I’d been in about 12 years, and the biggest difference that I could say to you from my visit 12 years ago to the visit that I’ve just been on was Grab. And I don’t mean that just for my convenience, but I mean that for how I could see that there were, how it impacted people’s lives, right.

And we talk about the gig economy a lot in the Western world and I don’t think we kind of realise just how impactful it has been in emerging economies like Indonesia, for example. We had one example where we were out for dinner and the guy who served us gave us a QR code and said, hey, if you want, could you leave me a review, right. And he’s like seeing himself as an independent wait staff who his personal brand, right. And I think it’s, yeah, that didn’t exist 12 years ago, right. It’s incredible.

Joel Yarbrough
Well, personal agency, right. To enable agency and to give people those tools, right. And at the extreme end, right, and mentioned the Jake Paul fight, at extreme end, I mean Jake Paul is a hyper personalised agent, right.

Dexter Cousins
Yeah.

Joel Yarbrough
Leveraging digital tools to build a brand, to manifest something, right. This guy manifested this idea that both he would become a boxer and that he would fight Mike Tyson.

Dexter Cousins
Yeah.

Joel Yarbrough
And then probably that the world would care, and that you’d be able to watch it on a Saturday, I guess, afternoon for you, all around the world. I mean, that’s incredible, that’s a vision, right. And to be able to give everyone around the world who’s still in the learning threshold, which hopefully is most of us, this world that says, hey, I can put tools in your hand and you can think things and take care of yourself, take care of your family, you can unlock your potential. It’s an incredible privilege, right, and I’m very glad to be part of it. I’m glad that our generation is such an important part of it. But then I watched the fight with my Gen Z daughter, and it was very much like, oh, this is your people, right, beating up on my people.

Dexter Cousins
Yeah.

Joel Yarbrough
And it was very interesting, right.

Dexter Cousins
So, yeah, I was full of bravado, said my kids, you’ve never seen Tyson fight, like, guy’s an animal. And yeah, I think it was a bit sobering to go, okay, yeah, yeah, age definitely.

Joel Yarbrough
Yeah, might think I’m 21 in my head, but physically, yeah, I don’t want to get hit. I appreciate where the guy’s coming from.

Dexter Cousins
Interesting though, that point that you raise about the tools and us being able to manifest that. I absolutely agree with that as well, and I think it’s one of the perhaps challenges facing the Western world, with an ageing population that is reluctant to change, that has been sold or told their whole life, you go to school, you get a degree, you get a job, you have a career, you got a job for life. We’ve seen that change obviously in the last 20 years, but I think for a lot of people it’s still kind of ingrained in their mindset that they have to be beholden to an employer and get a regular salary in order to be able to create wealth and live comfortably.

And I think that’s one of the, again, I think one of the kind of really great kind of byproducts of what we’ve seen from these fintech solutions like Grab, right, like what you’re doing, is just that, how it now changes people’s mindsets, sets them on another path, gives them other opportunities. I think here closer to home in Australia we’ve seen Uber and people be able to kind of supplement their income and invest and do other things through that. I think the buy now pay later, I’ve met with a number of single parents in my network who were able to get rid of credit card debt using buy now pay later and now don’t use buy now pay later, right. You think these have been kind of net positives, as you say, for society.

I want to talk a little bit about, yeah, you’ve talked on to a couple of things there. First one being human capital, which I’ve dedicated, what, the last decade of my life to really trying to understand what are the qualities and behaviours and skills and, yeah, I guess it’s essentially the profile of person who is successful in a startup, scaleup environment, and why. I’ve been fortunate to work with businesses on four different continents, it’s still always been kind of here from Australia, and you’ve actually gone and you’ve built teams and you kind of been part of early growth teams as well across now three continents. Are there differences in terms of the attributes that you look for on different continents, or would you say it’s kind of a ubiquitous, startup, wherever you are, in terms of the qualities and kind of aptitude that you need to find in people?

Joel Yarbrough
I think what I look for, and I think some of the companies I was lucky enough to join look for, I think first is really passion, right. People who wants to go make something happen, right. I think it was Steve Jobs that said you want to punch a hole in the world, maybe he was quoting somebody else. People want to make something happen, but then the corollary to that is people want to make something happen as part of a team, right. Most truly great things involve more than one individual actor, so you have to have the ability to collaborate, the ability to learn, the ability to respect that you don’t know everything, while also wanting to make things happen, right.

Peter Thiel kind of considers that these kind of oppositional attributes that you look for, right, people that are stubborn but at the same time inquisitive, right. As I think those are the two oppositional attributes that I really look for, is, right, people who are passionate to make something happen, and to make something happen as part of a team.

Most of the things that we do are not unlearnable, right, they’re not unresearchable. When Grab was getting going, and I joined at the time when Grab had 30 engineers, right, almost all of whom had moved from gual and Po, and almost all of them had no senior engineers, they had learned an awful lot from the internet and SourceForge and within their own community, because they didn’t have two layers of experienced engineers above them to learn from. And that’s a scrappy, get it done mentality that had created a business that was already worth a couple billion dollars, right, by the time that I had joined.

And I see that all around the world, where people say, oh well, the tools are there and the education is there and YouTube videos are there and all these other wonderful things are here, like, I don’t need someone necessarily to teach me everything, but me and my cohort, we can get together and identify a problem and solve it. I think that comes from mentality.

Dexter Cousins
So that point that you raised there is something that I’ve actually been trying to push, not only with my network, but I’ve even spent Australian government, educators, about that. That is for me the key difference now of the world that we’re in now, versus the one that the people in their 40s and 50s still want, versus the one that you’re helping create. The number one quality that I think we have to look for in people when we’re hiring them is their propensity to learn under pressure and their kind of growth mindset around how do I actually learn this thing, how do I solve this problem. The information’s there, the education system can’t keep up because it’s moving that fast, and so it really is, I think, down to the individual now to go, hey, what is my responsibility, and how do I develop the skills that I need.

And I think the challenge that I see is that there are so few people that actually have that mindset, right. It’s like, okay, I don’t know this, what are you going to invest in me? And I think that challenge that we have is, if you look at the average tenure now of somebody in a role here in Australia, it’s gone from, I think, 5 years in 2008 down to 2 and a half years now, and I think it’s going to get even shorter. And so, kind of portfolio as you said, right, more and more people have a portfolio of work that they do. But I guess the point being that if you’re going to go and work somewhere for 12 months, is it their responsibility to invest in you or is it your responsibility to invest in you?

And I was thinking, going back to the Bali experience that I had and that guy who was wait staff, taking ownership for his personal brand, right, and his professionalism and his, yeah, seeing that, hey, this is my kind of net worth, right, and now I’ve got the tools where I can go and get connected and I can build that brand and I can kind of increase my net worth through me investing in myself. And I think that’s kind of the mindset that I see in people who are successful in these types of environments, is they first of all kind of are mission driven, to your point.

Joel Yarbrough
Yeah.

Dexter Cousins
It is for the greater good.

Australia itself, cuz I think one of the things that really struck me coming back from Singapore Fintech Festival was that we’ve got this term, punching above our weight, and I would say that where it applies in Australia is entrepreneurs definitely do punch above their weight. I think they’ve been successful, and businesses like Afterpay and Zip have been successful without VC investment, without regulators supporting them, without incumbents helping them out, right, without government supporting them as well. And so despite all of those things against them, they’ve built really successful businesses. But I came from Singapore and it was the exact opposite. That is a region that’s punching above their weight, where fintech community, incumbents, government, regulators, investors are all aligned, and everybody’s having conversations with each other, respectful, collaborative, supportive. What’s your kind of observation of Australia, and if it’s searching for an identity, as an outsider, what would you kind of say that identity could be?

Joel Yarbrough
I think Australia has obviously such incredible assets, right. But I think one of the perils with being an asset-rich society is you kind of lean on that, right. So you have, I think, a segment of society that’s very real estate oriented, that’s very extractive industry oriented, and then for cultural and historical reasons, I think all of us who aren’t Australian have thought that most Australians pretend that it’s in Europe versus in Asia at the end of the day, right. And so you have this incredible asset of being physically part of Asia, having language alignment, having geographic alignment, having natural resources export alignment, having an incredible tourist economy alignment. There’s all these great assets that say, hey, but this is one of the anchors of Asia, but at the same time Australia doesn’t seem to be turning its attention primarily to how you amplify that.

And in any region, regional trade clusters, right, are much more powerful and much more valuable, right, than cross-oceanic clusters, right. Like, the economic activity between America, Canada and Mexico is off the charts, right, despite all the horrible things we may or may not say about each other. That region is way more vibrant than America’s trade with anywhere else, and that’s an important thing to recognise. And I don’t see that, right, between Australia and Indonesia, Australia, Japan, Australia, China, to the same scale that you would expect, and I would imagine that’s a net loss.

I think the other thing that is funny, and one of the probably four things I say most often about Australia, is that almost every sector of the Australian economy is an oligopoly, right.

Dexter Cousins
Yeah.

Joel Yarbrough
You have these kind of invisible oligopolies that are inherently resistant to change, that don’t make it easy for people to break in, and they are, I assume, somewhat protected oligopolies, by whatever mechanism. Whereas in a society where you’re willing to let people fail and you’re willing to let industries fail, but then pick people up from the ashes, you get a different type of vibrancy.

Dexter Cousins
Yeah.

Joel Yarbrough
And I just don’t, I think these entrench doop have an awful lot of structural advantages, right, and then they extract rent from the rest of the society to some degree. But at the same time, and I’m a follower of the Juice Media videos, my impression is that the Australian government is led by people that are pretty happy with the powers that be, versus unhappy with the powers that be.

Dexter Cousins
Yeah.

Joel Yarbrough
Whereas if I were to contrast that, and not to suggest that Singapore has done every single thing right, but the reality is they recognise their position in the world and their natural resource assets, which is location primarily, and that human capital is the number one thing that they can focus on, right. So very intentional about how they invest in human capital, and not just an early age but mid-career education, kind of across the entire life cycle. And then similarly they look at small business formation, they look at business vibrancy, they look at investing in innovation at all levels as another layer on top of that. And they have this kind of collective set of investments that they make to invest in people, invest in businesses, invest in regulation to drive a vibrant, what is actually not just an economy but a community.

And I think it’s a very different approach, right. As I mentioned, I was lucky enough to be in Silicon Valley, I had to work with a lot of amazing companies, and I would still never call it a community, right. It’s people that are doing the same things with similar skills, etc. But I think it just doesn’t feel the same, where you have a walk-in experience with a regulator and say, here’s the problems that we’re working on, and they say, yeah, come back in six months and tell me how it’s going, and we’ll share information, right, and then we’ll build regulation around kind of the union of all those conversations.

It’s just a very, very different approach, I think, to governance, right, recognising that the people on the Little Red Dot are kind of in it together. People that choose to come to Singapore kind of joining the party and have something to contribute, versus being aliens, right, who are extracting value from the society. They’re very clear it’s the other way around, right, that anybody who comes is adding, right, generally, and that community overall becomes richer and more resilient as a result.

Dexter Cousins
So there’s a lot of people at our meet who confuse being passionate with being a jerk. That kind of happens.

Joel Yarbrough
Yeah, yeah.

Dexter Cousins
It’s kind of, say, hey, I’m really passionate, and then I speak to their team and like, what a joke, guys. And I think that’s that kind of, as you pointed out, being mission led, passionate about that mission, passionate about a cause that is bigger than you and a legacy that you’re going to leave behind, but also that, what is it that you’re willing to contribute and sacrifice, right? What are the kind of delayed gratification, what are you going to invest in yourself, how are you going to make yourself better when you get to the end of that mission? What is the prize? Is it a big payoff, or is it who you’ve become as a person? And I think the thing that I’ve found that kind of bonds everybody that is successful in these types of environments is ultimately they’re always looking at their next opportunity as a growth opportunity at the end of it.

Joel Yarbrough
There’s that, but there’s also the giving back mentality, right. As I told one of my daughters, right, most of life you can pick up in the first 15 minutes of The Godfather, right. And what happens in the first 15 minutes of The Godfather is he’s helping somebody. Someone comes to him and he helps them, someone comes him and he helps him, and that’s his philosophy of life, and of course it plays out a certain way for him. But people, I think, that are really great in this industry, and I assume in every industry, are people who are actively looking to help others, right. That means they learn, opportunities come to them, they build a wider network, they build a more resilient network, frankly. I think they have more fun, right. They have more fun because giving is fun and learning is fun.

Dexter Cousins
Yeah.

Joel Yarbrough
Trying to figure out how to make every interaction extractive in your benefit is, I assume, exhausting, and probably doesn’t work very well because people stop giving you opportunities pretty soon. And I think that giving mindset pays back in spades, right. Some of the investors that I work with who are absurdly successful, people who they surround themselves with are people who are also givers, right. And you see this kind virality of karma surrounding these very successful people, and you think, this cannot be a coincidence, right, this has to be some compounding benefit.

Dexter Cousins
Yeah. There’s actually a book that I read on this subject called Give Take by Adam Grant, which I read in 2016, and it fundamentally changed how I go about acting in business and in life. And essentially he is an organisational psychologist and behavioural psychologist, done a load of studies around kind of what success is and how that manifests itself in a workplace. And what he found was that at the top of the tree were givers and at the bottom of the pile were givers as well. Underneath the givers at the top were the takers, and we all know who those people are, and then the vast majority of people are matchers. So it was like, hey Joel, made an introduction for you, I’ve now made two, you haven’t made one for me, screw you, I’m never doing anything to help you again, right. That’s kind of how most people view that transactional kind of nature of business.

What was really interesting though was the givers at the top and the givers at the bottom, and I think what distinguished them was the givers at the top knew when they were dealing with a taker, and so they wouldn’t give indiscriminately. It was like, okay, I maybe just have to change my game here, or just not deal with that person. Whereas the givers at the bottom just give indiscriminately and kind of tend to get trampled upon. And I think that point that you made there about the people that they surround themselves with, that I think is the secret to the success, right. It’s like, you kind of got to give to the people that, not that it’s a transactional thing, but it’s, hey look, we share same philosophy, whatever you need, right, like, I’m here, just ask, I’ll do whatever I kind of help.

Joel Yarbrough
And what yourself with people that make you better, right, whether it’s in this manner or another manner, right, because the opposite, we all know, is a one-way ticket as well, right.

Dexter Cousins
Yeah, yeah. So I want to talk a little bit more about Moment and essentially kind of just around the business, where you’re at. You talk a little bit about the transaction volume in just 12 months. How have you gone about, I guess, first of all, building the team? So where are you guys based?

Joel Yarbrough
Yeah, most of the team, we have 55 people right now and most of the team is in Dubai, and the reason for that is, as I mentioned about team diversity, it’s one of the places in the world where we could build the most diverse possible team, right, with a mixture of folks who are African with African experience, but also with people, payments experience from every different region around the world. And we’ve been very intentional about trying to bring the most diverse team possible to bear.

Dexter Cousins
And in terms of, I guess, the challenges of having, I guess, you’re in Singapore, teams in Dubai, you’re serving customers in Africa, what have been some of the challenges and kind of getting things set up and launched, and kind of what tips could you share?

Joel Yarbrough
I mean, I live on a plane, so that’s my tip. Private jet, bad for the environment, bad for a lot of things, but that’s my hack. I think the hardest thing for us, right, cuz we’re lucky enough to be, as we say in America, born on third base, right. We have an incredible investor that represents an incredible initial customer, and so most businesses don’t have that, so if you get that, recommend it.

I think getting the right team together, right, the right foundational team, right, the leads in the right functional areas who can then build teams underneath them, again with the right attitude, and then if you do it right, the pieces all cohere together and you get a team where, I think, what we see now is faster and faster velocity, right, where I’ve got folks who were brought into the organisation, who are not direct reports, who are really picking up and just running with things because they feel that passion and they see the people around them, right, exhibiting that same passion.

For me now, going into the festive season towards the end of the year, we’re recording this in November, I can see what the team has to get done between now and Christmas, and my biggest role to play is to stand back, right. Not to push them to go faster, but actually stand back, because they know what to do and they’re doing it. I don’t need to be in a position of confusing people or slowing things down, right, by sowing doubt with what they’re already doing. And that’s an incredible place to be, and it’s entirely based on hiring a team of smart people who want to get stuff done and want to do it together.

One of the easiest things that I do in a given day is look at Slack and say, oh well, here’s a problem, and I can now see, 30 messages later, the problem has been correctly identified as being addressed, right. It’s like, most I’ve got to do is give them a cheerful emoji and move on.

Whereas in the old world, or with teams that were less effective, or when I was a less effective leader, I would want to get involved in every little thing, right, and not necessarily to the benefit.

So I think it’s really getting the team right, right, identifying, and it’s not new terminology that I’ve invented, but everybody knows that our hiring posture at this point is a default no, right. We’re not going to hire anybody that we’re not confident is a true bar raiser who is going to help our culture and help the organisation.

We would rather have many fewer people than we need than the wrong people. I was in a conversation a couple weeks ago with an engineering team lead and one of the PMs, and the PM said something that sounded kind of like, and then we could hire some people, and you saw the engineering team lead just like bristle. He’s like, we don’t need people that wouldn’t make us faster, we’ll do it ourselves. And like, yes, obviously that’s a non-scalable idea at some point, but it’s a great attitude, right, to say we’ve got this covered, if it’s a problem worth doing, we’ll do it.

Dexter Cousins
Yeah. And it’s an interesting point that you raised, because I think one of the challenges that I’ve seen a lot of kind of leaders get their head around has been, we’ve gone from Zer times, where you’d raise money and hiring lots of people was a signal of growth, now the opposite is true. But what I have not seen is the shift in mentality around hiring. And so that default of no is actually reversed, right. It’s like, how do we sell this opportunity to everybody? And unfortunately what then happens is you end up hiring people who get in on day one and it’s, hey, this isn’t what the brochure was selling me at the interview stage.

What have you found is that balance between being able to sell the opportunity to attract the right people, but also having that kind of default no, of having a high bar for people to get over, because you kind of don’t want to be too arrogant, right, that you then put off the right people?

Joel Yarbrough
I think it comes back down to mission, right. As I was talking to another Africa facing entrepreneur, like, there’s no one who’s going to work in the Africa market, right, or in a lot of emerging markets, who isn’t kind of good crazy, right.

Dexter Cousins
Yeah.

Joel Yarbrough
Like, there are way, I could go start a calendar app, right.

Dexter Cousins
Exactly, exactly.

Joel Yarbrough
Like, if you just wanted to make money, I assure you, going to the US for the homogeneous market and coming up with some neat product idea is probably a way better place to efficiently make money. But if you want to do something amazing for the world, right, and for tangible people that you can touch and feel, I find there’s nothing better than going to a big market with real problems and identifying people that, to your question, are inspired by mission, or never thought about it but are now inspired by mission, and want to make something happen, and to punch that hole in the world together. I think that’s what we have to look for.

And there’s certainly amazing people that we’ve spoken to who just weren’t that inspired by it, right, or that it was in conflict with their needs for being near their family or personal comfort or whatever, and that’s fine, totally, 100%. Like, we all have different needs at different stages of our lives. But if you’re interested in getting in the arena, you’re going to have a lot more fun dealing with big problems that are existential than small problems that even you, five years later, will be like, eh, maybe that was not that interesting.

Dexter Cousins
You said my time, we’re coming to a wrap, but before we do, what can we expect from Moment? We’re nearly at the end of 2024, so what can we expect from you in 2025?

Joel Yarbrough
So we’ve got, I mean, it’s kind of a four-phase strategy, and the piece that I touched on was really around our role in commercial payments, right, helping businesses collect money. If you think about kind of the resume that I went through for myself, and how PayPal looks at things differently, how Grab looks at things differently, etc, you can assume that we’re not sticking just with the corporate collections market. So you’ll see us expand and deepen in that area, right.

We’ve had an incredible tailwind behind us, both of network and partners coming on stream, but you’ll see us go deeper into the MTH market, deeper into SMB, deeper into account-based models that you touched on a tiny bit with comments like Afterpay, and then from account-based models to demand generation to some other things after that. I think it’ll be a big year. As I’ve warned the team, I think we’ll get four times more done in 2025 than we did in 24, which was already a pretty exhausting year. But on top of an amazing technical foundation, on top of an amazing team foundation, on top of some great client names that we’re working with already. So exciting times, and happy to check in if I can later on and let you know where we’re at.

Dexter Cousins
That would be awesome. And look, one last question from me. You’re obviously somebody who has been around the industry a long time. I’d therefore kind of assume that you’ve got a lot of knowledge and wisdom in the space. Where do you go, podcasts, learning, to go and kind of keep topping up your insights and knowledge?

Joel Yarbrough
Well, all of them is the answer, right. I’ve got a very long list of podcast subscriptions, and of course you can overdose for a while, right. I was on a heavy 20VC rotation for a while, heavy Acquired for a while, heavy Founders Podcast for a while, but I listened to all of them, right. It’s been very helpful to me, right, in my current role, to listen to more and more business podcasts.

Dexter Cousins
Yeah.

Joel Yarbrough
Because there are certainly a lot of mentally challenging frameworks, and you mentioned Adam Grant, that are useful to get in the brain. But actually, let me go orthogonal, right. The real life hack here is, like, primarily listen when I’m getting exercise, right. So my reward for getting exercise is listen to podcasts, and vice versa, because I think getting out of the house, getting some sunshine in your face, is so critical to mental health, and this is a marathon, definitely, right, not a sprint, until you got to take care of yourself. So I marry those two things together.

Dexter Cousins
Yeah, yeah. It’s amazing the amount of people who tell me that they listen to this podcast at the gym or walking their dog on a Saturday morning. It does make you very, very attuned as to the quality of content and the quality of guests that they deserve if they’re going to give up their Saturday morning. So I want to thank you very much, Joel, for joining me and sharing your insights. It’s been a really fascinating discussion. Certainly it’s been eye opening to hear about regions like Africa and Southeast Asia and see the opportunities there. We’re listened to in 44 different countries. If we’ve got anybody who thinks they’re going to break that high bar and wants to find out more about potentially working at Moment, where’s the best place for them to find out about careers?

Joel Yarbrough
Oh well, we have a careers page on our website, we have moment.net. Obviously we’re listing jobs, among other places, on LinkedIn. I’m certainly on LinkedIn, as is most of the team, so yeah, feel free to reach out, we’d love to hear more. We’re currently, in addition to Dubai, we’re actually building up a team in Cape Town right now that will be our second site, and we’ll do quite a lot of hiring there for the next 12 months, and then doing a bit of hiring in Lagos as well. So yeah, by all means, we’re looking for folks that are inspired to make change together, and look forward to meeting you.

Dexter Cousins
Thanks Joel, appreciate your time.

Joel Yarbrough
Dex, thank you, and great to meet you a couple times now, and look forward to the third.

Dexter Cousins
Yeah, me too.

Well folks, thanks for joining me. As always, you can follow me on LinkedIn. If you’re new to the show, make sure you follow us and subscribe on your favourite podcast player, and if you’re coming back, thanks so much for your support, it really does mean a lot to me. Until the next episode, keep well.

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