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Building an API Services Hub for Fintechs.

March 31, 2025 · Hosted by Dexter Cousins

Julian Fayad of LoanOptions.ai chats about Synapses, an API services hub for Fintechs

In this episode of Fintech Chatter, Dexter Cousins interviews Julian Fayad, CEO of LoanOptions.ai about the challenges and advantages of bootstrapping a fintech company from the ground up. 

Having experienced the challenges first hand, Julian has built Synapses, an API Services Hub for Fintechs.

LoanOptions.ai aims to revolutionise the loan application process. Julian shares insights into how they’re using AI to build a mobile first loan application process.

Julian first appeared on the show in 2023. We chat about his progress and the lessons he has learned over the past two years. Julian also talks about the transition from a broking business to a technology-focused company, and the launch of Synapses, the API services hub for Fintech! 

We also discuss the launch of HAILO and LoanOptions.ai, expansion into New Zealand and future plans for market expansion into the US and UAE.

Find out more: https://loanoptions.ai

Chapters

00:00 The Bootstrap Journey of a Fintech Founder

02:12 Innovating the Loan Application Process

10:45 Transitioning from Broking to Technology

18:04 Launching New Products and Partnerships

25:49 Building an API Services Hub for Fintechs

26:48 Navigating B2B Partnerships and SaaS Pricing Strategies

32:05 Transitioning from Brokerage to Tech: Lessons Learned

35:21 Building a Cohesive Team and Company Culture

39:47 Innovative Talent Acquisition Strategies

41:45 Valuable Lessons in Business Partnerships

46:22 Expanding Horizons: New Markets and Future Plans

Links from this episode.

Julian Fayad on Fintech Chatter.

More on lending, bootstrapping and expansion.

Full transcript.

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

Dexter Cousins
Imagine having to remortgage your house and raid your kids’ bank accounts just to pay your team. These are some of the things a bootstrap fintech founder has to resort to in order to succeed. And today’s guest is sharing their warts and all journey of how they built a fintech.

I’m Dexter Cousins, your host and the founder of Tier One People, the executive search and recruitment firm dedicated to helping fintech companies hire exceptional people. Julian Fayad is CEO of LoanOptions.ai, a Sydney-based fintech revolutionising the loan application process. Julian last appeared on the show in 2023 and he’s back to share their progress and exciting news on expansion plans.

But before I chat to Julian, a big thank you. We’ve seen 5x growth on the channel this year and it’s all thanks to you. If you’re new to the show, make sure you follow us if you listen on podcasts, and if you’re watching on YouTube, make sure to subscribe and hit that notification bell. And if you enjoyed today’s show, please leave us a comment and share your feedback.

Now, on to today’s guest. Julian, welcome back to Fintech Chatter. Great to see you again.

Julian Fayad
Thank you so much for having me again, man. I really appreciate it. Good to see you.

Dexter Cousins
No, mate, we always love sharing continued success stories. For those of you who didn’t catch the first recording with Julian, back in I think it was July 2023, and had what was one of my favourite chats ever. It’s been fantastic to kind of track your progress, and I guess today wanted to share that story with our listeners.

Julian Fayad
Yeah, and so much has happened since the middle of 2023. I mean, in so many ways, the vision and everything still stayed the same, but I just feel like we’ve definitely hit a new level in terms of our technology and new products that we’ve launched. And there’s a lot to update. And even just more recently, end of last year, me buying back all the shares and regaining 100% LoanOptions. And there’s a longer story behind that for another day, but I guess we’ll unpack that a little bit as well.

Dexter Cousins
Yeah, cool. Now, for those listeners who didn’t catch that first show, probably a good idea that you’d tell them a bit about LoanOptions and the big problem that you solve.

Julian Fayad
Yeah. Well, LoanOptions.ai started as Australia’s first AI loan marketplace, and we wanted to give transparency and speed to the customer. We built a platform that allowed the client to apply online, back then it was probably in circa 10 minutes, but they see real-time lending results from our credit matching engine. And at the time it was probably 50 or 60 lenders that we had integrated. Now that number is over 90 in Australia and about 27 in New Zealand. So it’s a pretty big lender panel now.

But as the client is applying and uploading their documents and everything, it’s reading and understanding their specific credit profile and recommending results that they’re eligible for only. So where you go to typical comparison sites, they’re just showing you all the results and typically they’re giving you a sponsored offer at the top. This is a totally unbiased loan recommendation engine. So we don’t accept money for putting lenders at the top. It’s totally unbiased in that way, and we show them only results that they would actually have a high probability of approval with.

And so four and a half years ago, circa a little bit less than that, when we launched LoanOptions, I knew AI was the future. I knew that this is where the product was going to go. I actually thought we were going to have more progress earlier, and I thought that we wouldn’t need sort of a credit-based rules engine as much as we actually do need that. And the reason for that is it takes a lot more data than people realise to actually build accurate AI models.

But back then AI wasn’t that sexy, and of course now it’s a buzzword, and a lot of people just sort of have a ChatGPT subscription and then call themselves an AI business. But really, we’re working on cutting-edge models in the financial services industry: deep learning neural networks that calculate probability of approval with different lenders, and lead scoring models, and all kinds of other real practical use cases that mean a better solution for a customer, but also a better solution for our brokers to be more efficient internally as well.

So essentially, to summarise what we are, is we’re digitally enabled finance broker for all kinds of loans except for property, so cars, boats, motorbikes, caravans, all that kind of stuff. But we’ve been a pioneer in AI and those kinds of technologies in the financial services industry.

Dexter Cousins
So I’m interested in the model that you’ve got, because clearly there’s really successful businesses that kind of do depend on that, I guess, commission style, hey, we’ll put you to the top if you pay us more. How have you changed the commercial model then? Because essentially, bootstrapped business, you’re not going to raise millions of dollars of capital to kind of be able to fund the product. It has to have been profitable from day one. How did you kind of get around that charge?

Julian Fayad
Yeah, it hasn’t been easy. At different points in time we’ve got a debt facility with one of the fintech lenders that we use and leverage on, and other things. But the key thing was to make it profitable. Year one we were profitable, and every subsequent year after that. We’ve leaned on things like R&D grants and whatever to help us sort of fund this journey, but also I’ve refinanced my house a couple of times and drain the kids’ bank accounts, and I think I spoke about that last time. It’s not easy, and it’s a very, very high-risk endeavour, what I’m doing.

Dexter Cousins
Yeah.

Julian Fayad
And there’s no guarantee of success, but the only thing I can guarantee is that I’ll work my ass off to do it.

Dexter Cousins
Yeah.

Julian Fayad
And so our business model is very similar to other brokers, where we’re paid only on success, and usually the commission comes from the bank or lender. But there’s also a fee for service that we can apply, and customers, given the service that we offer, are usually happy to oblige and pay us a fee for our service.

Dexter Cousins
Yeah.

Julian Fayad
But that doesn’t apply in every loan scenario, so it just depends which lender and what type of loan they’re applying for and the loan size. But we thought that was more important to stay true to the, I think if you actually look at those comparison site models, their incentive structure is not to give the client the best deal. Their incentive structure is to promote whoever’s paying them the most.

Dexter Cousins
Yeah. And so they’re marketing platforms rather than.

Julian Fayad
Correct platforms. They have their purpose and they’re great information tools and things like that, but their incentive structures mean that they are giving the highest bidder the most real estate. Our incentive structure, for those lenders that are on our platform, the 90 plus, and that includes the big four right through to fintech lenders and subprime options as well, the incentive structure for them is to have a better product for the client, to have it more competitive or have a better feature set, because we collect the client’s priorities through that application process.

We want to understand what’s important to them, and I think that’s a big part, because it’s not just price that clients find important. Sometimes they know they’re going to pay off the loan really quickly, it’s just a temporary band-aid, maybe to consolidate some debts, and they’ve got some money coming in, or whatever the situation is. So we want to ask them, what is more important to you, and order your priorities. So is it flexibility to pay off early? Is it a low repayment? Because a low repayment and a low rate are two different things. Some people might want to pay the least amount of interest possible, well then a shorter loan term is going to be more suitable in that situation.

We’ve had offers from lenders to prioritise them on the thing, even discreetly. We say no every single time, because we want to make sure that we’re not diluting what our core offering is and what people see as our core differentiation between these comparison sites, and that is the unbiased of it. You’ll see the real results, your actual interest rate that you qualify for based on your credit score, based on your employment history. We’re not showing you a catch-all rates from XYZ. We’re actually showing you the rate that you’re extremely likely to qualify for with that product based on your specific circumstances. So everything’s hyper-personalised to that client.

And we’ve managed to sort of diversify the model a little bit, and instead of just a B2C approach we have created partnerships and have referrals and things like that from other mortgage brokers or automotive dealers or financial wellness marketplaces and even other fintechs. There are a couple of ASX-listed fintech lenders that, when they can’t service the client from their direct channel, they push them through our technology and then we find them a solution.

So the technology has enabled all of these amazing partnerships, but because it’s white label as well, we’ve enabled a new type of model. Obviously embedded finance is not new, we didn’t invent it, but this is leaning on embedded finance to create a B2B2C model. So we create a partnership with another business that’s got an audience and very similar sort of values as us, and they get to leverage our technology to provide a fantastic service to those customers. But then also our back office, which is everyone behind me here, facilitate those loans, choose the correct lender and provide amazing service. We have over a five-star reviews now since last time we caught up, so I’m very proud of that, obviously.

Dexter Cousins
So how have you then made the transition? Because when we first caught up, you were a broking business aspiring to be a technology business. With the release of the new product, it’s a technology business and a broking business. How do you kind of keep the two running at the same time, and what is it meant for you as a CEO in terms of where your attention and your focus is?

Julian Fayad
Well, I think our broking business is certainly more mature, so over time that requires less and less of my time and energy. But I kind of explain the transition into a tech company, because I’ve always seen ourselves as, in the very early days, we were an aspiring fintech. Right at the beginning we had some tech and some IP, but it probably wasn’t executed at this scale and this level that we obviously have over the last sort of 18 months or so.

In 2022 we launched our first sort of widget model, where we could embed this on multiple websites, and that idea came from us having great success using that technology to grow our own business. And we grew quite a lot, triple-digit growth. And I said, if our vision is truly to actually impact the entire industry, well, you can’t say that and then people can only gain the benefit of using your technology if they deal with you. So that was a mindset shift of like, no, our vision is right, we do want to actually make a big impact in the entire industry, and if we truly believe it’s great technology that helps customers, we need to get it in the hands of as many people as we possibly can.

And so then we’re like, okay, well, how do we monetise that? Because effectively we would be enabling direct competitors. So there’s a consideration there, given we’re a bootstrap business, not to self-destruct. So what we did was we came up with a model where mortgage advisers, mortgage brokers could use the technology, the asset deals, the asset finance loans will come through to our team, we’ll facilitate and revenue share, and they to keep the mortgage enquiries, the home loan enquiries. And so that worked really well. We grew hundreds and hundreds of these partnerships, and thousands in other areas, not just mortgage broking: accountants, financial planners, affiliates, et cetera.

And so that made me double down on the fact that the technology we’re building is game-changing. And so then when we launched, in December 2023, version three of our technology, that was when we knew that the destiny of our company is to be a tech provider for the industry. At the moment, just for transparency, the way we fund the technology projects is from the brokerage.

December 2023 we launched LoanOptions 3.0, or AILO 3.0, and that was a game changer, because there was a new technology that we added into that release. It was called an autocomplete engine. And essentially, instead of a traditional finance form where somebody had to go in and type their name and their date of birth and license number and fill out everything from scratch, crazy, we’re like, okay, well, most of that data is going to be on the documents that we eventually need to get.

And so the whole industry had the whole process backwards, in my opinion, because they felt as though they needed to build trust. They would ask for the information and then ask for the documents. We said, in the interest of efficiency and speed, let’s build trust through our marketing, through our social media, through, let’s call it, social presence, and let’s tell the client that we can give them an extremely fast process or they can have the old school, fill it all out manually.

And so that was a bit of a hedge from us, like, let’s actually track the data on how many people are going to be hesitant to upload their, instead of filling out long forms, just upload your ID, connect your bank account and provide your payslips, we’ll read all of that data and prefill all of that data into your application. And it was overwhelming. The majority of customers were happy to do the AI-powered autofill.

And then from there we actually just removed the manual entry option. We initially had, which journey do you want to go on, and we encourage them to the autocomplete journey. If they don’t want to upload their ID or connect their bank, they still can fill it out manually, but the manual entry isn’t as prominent. And then they’re happy to do it, if you build enough trust in your marketing, in your execution of the technology. And now we have ISO 27001 certification, so we have bank-grade security and data handling standards and things like that.

So that was LoanOptions 3.0, and that was really when our business started to go vertical, again triple-digit growth, but the partnerships that we unlocked through that new technology and this sort of sub five-minute loan application, the press coverage. It’s not that people didn’t take us seriously before that, but that was the first time our technology was so far ahead of what else was available. And from there, lots of other people, either competitors in different verticals or even competitors in the same vertical, have tried to emulate our journey.

We won awards for the technology, and that reinforced in my mind what we can execute on, because of our knowledge in the tech. My background is in web and app development before I got into finance, building and deploying my own app on the Apple App Store. Because of that background, I think I’m uniquely positioned to help the team execute. We have much better engineers and things like that than I ever was in here, but I think it’s the combination of my understanding between how the finance and the technology dovetail.

So then we sign up all these partners and we’re growing the business, and a lot of the mortgage brokers that are using our technology say, this is amazing, but when are you building this for the residential lending?

Dexter Cousins
Yeah.

Julian Fayad
And of course in that space there aren’t that many players that actually have good tech solutions. So I mean, obviously Lendi’s the dominant player in that regard, and they built a great platform and all that kind of stuff, but it’s for Lendi brokers. You need to be under Lendi to use that. There was nothing really available where mortgage brokers and advisers could leverage an agnostic piece of technology, it doesn’t matter which aggregator they’re with. All the technology in that industry is held at the, so you basically choose which aggregator you want based on what technology they offer or what technology your business needs.

And so we wanted to build something agnostic. We thought we were best positioned to do that, because we’re a broker ourselves and we work so closely with so many different mortgage brokers that we understand the problems that need to be solved. And that led us to doubling down on, we need to build SaaS products and diversify our model away from just broking revenue.

Dexter Cousins
Yeah.

Julian Fayad
The three main product launches that we did on February 7th: HAILO, which is just an H in front of our AILO product, and that’s a five-minute home loan application that’s white labelled. And so that’s a subscription service. So it’s not a revenue model where it’s relying on loans to be settled. The mortgage brokers that want to implement this, or the aggregators that want to implement this for their broker and adviser network, pay a subscription, and that enables this technology to be integrated on their website with their colours, their logo, their branding, all of it configured to how they want.

And the client can go on their website, or they can just send a link to the client, and complete the full fact find, upload documents, IDs, property data report, Equifax report, bank statements, payslips, everything in less than five minutes. And so if you just think about how much time brokers and advisers spend following up these types of documents from the client, and then if you think about how many customers have rage quit completing those fillable PDF forms that mortgage advisers send to them, all those clunky online forms that say they work on mobile, but the desktop form shrink to a mobile and the types of fields, and I mean, it’s unfortunately.

Dexter Cousins
Where’s the okay button?

Julian Fayad
Yeah. Unfortunately this is the standard experience that customers have been accustomed to. And so ours is mobile first, which means we didn’t even design the desktop view until much after we optimised the mobile view. So it’s mobile first. That’s a key difference to how other people do it. They do mobile compatible, it’s an afterthought. They build the desktop first, because that’s what engineers and designers are working on, a desktop computer, and they forget that the average user, like we know most of our traffic, like 85% of our traffic on our asset finance application, is mobile traffic. So you do need a desktop view, because some people will do it while they’re on their work computer, or on the laptop at night when the kids are asleep.

Dexter Cousins
Well, that’s only because the mobile version doesn’t work.

Julian Fayad
That’s right. Yeah, that’s right. That’s the reason why, right? It’s true, right? It’s so true. And the mobile is particularly well designed for data and documents collection. So firstly, you have autofill on your phone, and I’ve got my whole life saved in the autofill, so anytime there’s a form I just go autofill and it prefills my name, my address, my phone, my work number, my work address, my personal address. I can choose with that autofill. So that’s one thing. The second thing is it’s got a camera, so if you’ve got your ID in your pocket and maybe you don’t have it on the device saved somewhere, just take a photo. Same thing with payslips and things like that. You can access your email from your phone, either screenshot or upload the PDF. So the mobile device is the ultimate data collection tool, and so we built it with that in mind.

And now mortgage brokers don’t have to put their clients through the worst possible scenario. And I think the way I see it is, there’s some stats around how many people get a second opinion and they talk to a handful of brokers before they make their choice. If one of them sends a five-minute home loan application that’s super slick, easy to use, and the other two send a fillable PDF or maybe an online form that’s super clunky, it’s a no-brainer which one they’re going to choose.

The second product we launched was an AI, effectively, BDM. So we’ve got 90-plus lenders on asset finance, and even what we see in our business is brokers asking scenarios like, hey, there’s a bit of a curly deal here, XYZ scenario, and then eventually they’ll communicate amongst each other, they’ll make some calls to BDMs and ask, and then they’ll find out the answer to the question. Here it’s got the models trained on the 90-plus lender policies, and then we’ll roll that out to New Zealand as well. But they can just write a natural language question in Slack, or in a separate user interface that we have, and it’ll give them the answer and it’ll give them all the reasoning and logic as to how it came to that conclusion based on all the lenders’ credit policy criteria.

So that’s a really cheap, easy SaaS product that the average broker can subscribe to, and we’re creating a community off the back of that, where if they don’t get the answer from the AI and it’s something totally off policy, they can liaise with other colleagues from the industry and help each other find the solution. And we think that community itself is going to be valuable, because we’re helping them solve problems in their own business. So there’s going to be value in the community alone, forgetting about the AI chat. But that’s 24/7, they can write a question and it’ll give them the answer. They can ask it weird and wonderful questions about maybe a really edge case or fringe part of the lender’s policy, and it should be able to answer that with a really high degree of accuracy. And the way that we’ve built that product, it has zero hallucination.

And then the last product, and the only way I can explain this is using analogies, because it’s a very technical product and it’s designed for enterprises, fintechs and other startups, but it’s an API hub. It helps businesses actually work on solving the real problems that they’re trying to solve. And the best way I can describe this, with an analogy, is at the moment, as a fintech community, it’ll be the equivalent of every person owning a car building their own roads to drive on. It just doesn’t make any sense.

Doesn’t matter what problem they’re trying to solve, all of them need to build these underlying industry-approved integrations, whether it’s, let’s say, a data bureau integration with Equifax, or bank statements integration with illion, or open banking integration with basic, or any of the industry providers. So everybody is building these same integrations over and over and over and over again, and so that blows out their development roadmap for actually solving the problem. The open banking part or the Equifax part is not the part that’s solving the problem or the customer pain point that they’ve founded their business on. And there’s no intellectual property value in building those things over and over and over again. In fact, we’re slowing ourselves down as an industry.

The analogy I used was, imagine everybody building their own roads. It’s kind of like that. Another way you could describe it is, to solve the problem, most startup founders and entrepreneurs think that they’re going to start from ground floor and then just build and solve the problem. They’re actually starting from basement five, all the way down here, and they need to build a certain amount of underlying infrastructure to get to the ground floor that can allow them to solve the problem.

So Synapses is an API services hub that has, and it will continue to expand, it’s effectively like an app store. The fintech founders, the tech startups, all of them, they just need to build one API integration and they’ll get access to the more than 20 services that we’ve already built in and all the relevant endpoints. That includes things like our OCR technologies, our machine learning models, our anti-fraud tools, our data bureau integrations, banking integrations, bank statement insights tools, and an endless list of things that we’ve built into that. And they just need to build one integration. It also means they don’t have the tech debt of managing each of these individual integrations.

And so those are the three products that we launched, and with the waitlist that we have on some of these products and enterprise partners we already have on some of these products, we’re well and truly now a technology business. And the broking business is still growing and we’re still doing great things there. We’re not turning our attention away from that, but we have a sales and an operations manager and we have team leaders and we have infrastructure there to support that business. And we’re all in the same office, so it’s not as though I’m detaching myself from the broking business. But because it’s a more mature business and all the processes are very robust and onboarding is slick for new partners and the client process is very mature, I don’t need to empty the tank in trying to optimise that business.

Yes, there’s small incremental things we could be doing, but there’s no real one lever that I can pull in that business that’s going to change the game in any kind of extremely meaningful way. We could land a big partnership in that business, and that’s great, I’ll be involved in those discussions, but those big partnerships come few and far between. They’re not happening every single day.

These sort of mortgage broking conferences, we’re exhibitors in a lot of them, we demo the products. Some people love it, some people might say the price point’s a bit high, and it’s not meant to be a very cheap product. It’s not a $50 SaaS product. It’s an enterprise-grade product that we’ve spent millions of dollars in R&D on, that they get to access for, call it, $500 a month. And the value that it’s meant to bring to them at $500 a month is to enable these kinds of unique B2B2C partnerships that made us successful, but also to remove the amount of time they spend on the phone following up documents and data and all those kinds of things and the bottlenecks.

It also is a great filtering tool. We have a lot of mortgage advisers and brokers that are creating lots of content on social media platforms and TikTok, and they’re becoming famous within their niche. And so a lot of people send them DMs on TikTok and how to enquire and whatever. At the moment, the best solution that those advisers have to help filter them is, book a 15-minute calendar appointment with me. And so the amount of 15-minute calendar appointments you need to get through to see which ones you can help and which ones are tyre kicking, that’s days and weeks of time per year that people are wasting, months even.

So if you had a better call to action, i.e. no problem, we’d be happy to help you, I want you to fill out this five-minute home loan application and then we can review documents and data and come back to you with a plan, that is pushing them to stage five of the funnel, instead of coming in at stage one and having to filter through that. The client is now self-serving to a degree. And it’s not meant to replace or remove the broker adviser from the process. It’s meant to augment the client’s journey, but also augment the broker’s process as well.

Dexter Cousins
I was going to ask you that actually, because what have you learned about how to position a SaaS product and get the customer right, and kind of target the right customer that looks at that and goes, 500 bucks for all that, wow? Yeah, I feel like I’m taking a lend of you, Julian, not. I already pay $30 for doggy sign.

Julian Fayad
There’s two conversations that we’re having, and my thought is it depends on the size of that particular broker business or that particular customer as to where they fit on the spectrum. So one end of the spectrum is, it’s too expensive, like other products, I was expecting $50 or $100 a month. So those are usually one-man operators and they’re probably at most doing two or three settlements per month, is what I’m thinking, sometimes less than that, on Hans. And so they can’t see as much value, because really they’re not trying to buy their time back.

Dexter Cousins
Yeah.

Julian Fayad
What they’re trying to do is find technology that helps them do more home loans, or they think that that’s kind of their limit and they’re not really wanting to grow beyond.

Dexter Cousins
Yeah.

Julian Fayad
Then there’s the other end of the spectrum, where people can’t believe how cheap it is, because they have five, six, seven, 10 offshore people, and they’re like, I think you’ve got the pricing wrong, and they’re saying it respectfully. I think in a SaaS product, or at least a B2B SaaS product anyway, you do want to have most of the bell curve in the middle saying that it’s priced right. There’s going to be outliers on the left and the right, some people saying it’s too cheap, and that’s just because these are sizable businesses. So the product for them, it’s not $500 for them, because they have more brokers and whatever, but it might be, say, $25,000 for them. $25,000 is not even the cost for one offshore resource, and this can do an infinitely scalable amount more than one offshore resource for them.

And now they can repurpose the offshore resource into other areas of the business that are bottlenecks. Right now it’s collecting and collating data and documents and following up customers who haven’t provided the payslip or they provided the wrong payslip, whatever it is. So I’m definitely learning a lot. I think the one area that we have an opportunity, and we’ve been discussing it internally, that we need to have a cheaper price point, is for new-to-industry brokers. And the reason for that is, again, they’re not our intended audience, but I do see value in bringing them into the ecosystem early as possible, because I think the more customers we have when we roll out future products, having that captured audience there, and having that distribution to say, hey, we’re about to turn on a new feature and it’s an extra X per month or whatever, I think you’ve got enough goodwill with the business to at least let them try it on free trial basis. I’m not going to say we have the pricing, pricing a SaaS product is really, really hard.

Dexter Cousins
That’s kind of why I asked the question, right, as to how you’ve made that transition from being a broker to a tech business, right? They’re fundamentally two very, very different businesses, and I’ve seen this quite a bit within particularly the banking technology space, where you have people come out of banking and their view of product is completely different to what product is in a technology business. And the kind of business model is totally different. You’ve got very, very different types of people that you need to hire as well. And then the pricing piece, right, like how get it right? And I think it’s one of the things that you can either test and learn, or you just have to suck it up and get experienced people who go, hey Julian, sorry mate, I know this is your baby, but.

Julian Fayad
Yeah. Look, I’ll be the first person if I feel that we did get it wrong. And it’s hard, because when the product goes live and we have some real case studies and some real tangible things on the home loan tech, it’s going to be easier to say we got the price right or we got the price wrong.

Dexter Cousins
So look, I mean, what’s fascinating about this discussion, right, like these are all problems that you don’t have to deal with when you’re just heading up the prog.

Julian Fayad
Yeah, exactly, exactly.

Dexter Cousins
And kind of the mental agility that’s required to move from, this is said with utmost respect, right, but when you were broker, all you had to worry about was deals, right? Where am I going to find them, how am I going to close them, what is the pipeline looking like? Now it’s, where we going to find deals, right? Where we going to find more customers? How am I going to kind of make sure that the salespeople happy and they’re delivering? How are we going to look after the game? Right, like how do I make sure the engineering team’s delivering? What’s product doing? So you’ve got now like 15, 20 different sets of problems that you never had before, and they all come at once, right? They never come like one at a time, sequential. It’s like they get pounded on you all at one time.

Julian Fayad
It is, it is. There’s definitely more things. I think that’s why execution is so important. Everybody knows the vision and everybody knows what we’re trying to do. I think that part is one of our unique parts. I think a lot of companies, they hire so many engineers, and probably the bigger their team gets, the further and further disconnected the engineers are with the vision and the goals of the founder. Here, because I’m sitting right next to everybody, and the engineering team is very small compared to what we put out. Our whole product team is seven people. That includes policy analysts that are doing the lender credit policies and stuff like that. So few of them are engineers. I’m essentially the product owner or product manager.

So it’s not a very big team, but they punch so much above their weight, because they are very, very aware of what we’re trying to do and they’re fully invested. And that’s a prerequisite for us when we’re bringing people into the business. Do they just want to write, or do they actually care about their craft?

Dexter Cousins
Yeah, and this is, I think, where all this talk about talent shortages, and why I kind of push back on that. It’s not a talent shortage, right? Like we got 8 billion people, most educated ever in the human history of humanity, right? And you can contact them literally from a handheld device, 24/7. Anybody in the world can work for you. So you’ve actually got access to more talent than we’ve ever had, right? The challenge for a founder is that only 10% of the population is going to care about your business and product as much as you do, right? And how do you find those people? And the reality is that you don’t find them by doing three interviews and competency-based questions and everything else, right? The stuff that we’ve done for over 100 years doesn’t apply to this world. This is about attitude, capability, skills, propensity to learn and ability to execute under pressure.

Julian Fayad
And one of the ways that we’ve actually been able to get really good talent is because of the way we position our business. We have quirky marketing, and we don’t market the same way financial services businesses market. We lean into culture, we lean into humour, we lean into pain points that real customers have. Myself and our CTO, we write a newsletter, and the newsletter is about all the nerdy things that we love, and I literally don’t care if nobody reads it. I enjoy writing it, he enjoys writing it, but it’s surprising how many times somebody will read that newsletter and then enquire for a job, send me a DM directly, no job ad even live. They’ll send me a DM and be like, I saw this, I’ve been watching your socials for so long, I saw that you’re very strong on your viewpoints around this issue.

So I think it’s really important for founders to be very clear about who they want and attract those people. Don’t put an ad up. We have ads running, because there’s a very specific, like a BDM role or something, you want to see what people apply and whatever, but more often than not, more hires in here have been from people reaching out to us than from the candidates that we get.

Dexter Cousins
Yeah. This is kind of when people ask me about content and they ask me about talent acquisition, that’s what I say to them, is, hey look, you treat talent acquisition like you do customer acquisition. If your marketing campaign is putting an ad up on seeking LinkedIn, right, that is the same as just doing Google ads and having that as your only way of getting customers. You got to have a fully integrated, multi-channel campaign where you’re leveraging content, you’re leveraging paid, you’re leveraging partners, right? You’re leveraging everything that you would in your business to acquire customers. You have to do exactly the same to acquire talent.

Julian Fayad
Also, to your pattern I’ve noticed, that backs up exactly what you said. We see now, when people apply, let’s say it’s a LinkedIn ad that’s up, we see them view my profile as the founder: who am I going to be reporting to, where does the culture start from, who is that person? They’ll view the company page as well, in no particular order. They’ll go and follow or view stories or whatever on our Instagram page, and then they’ll apply.

Dexter Cousins
The amount of clients I’ve got, or people that have been on the podcast, that say, yeah, when we’re interviewing candidates from wherever, and they go, yeah, listened to the podcast on Fintech Chatter, right? And it’s because people want to know who they’re working for, right? And also who they’re working with.

Julian Fayad
Exactly. Team members, like let me see the personalities of, let’s say I know my role is going to be reporting to the partnerships manager or to the operations manager, let me go and see what I can find out about that person and whether or not I feel they’re going to be good fit. There’s so much of everybody online these days that they have this choice. So if you’re not putting out there the fun aspect of your business and everything is just serious, then it seems like a really boring place to work. If you’re just putting out silly stuff and not putting out your achievements and high-performance culture and all this kind of stuff, then people are going to think, oh, this is going to be a laid-back job, I’m going to put my feet up there. It’s about getting the balance right, but I think generally speaking, more content is better.

And we’re in a multicultural company, country, sorry, and we’re running a company that has pretty broad skill sets, from sales to service to engineering to product design and all those kinds of things. So you’re going to end up with people with different personalities, different backgrounds, nationalities. I think if I hired everybody that believed the exact same things as me, we’d been loop of yes men. You almost want people to have different views and different lenses and different perspectives in life, because you’ll understand your customers a little bit better that way too, because you’re getting a more broad view on how people actually see the world.

If somebody’s thinking about bootstrapping a fintech startup, I would say, if you can raise capital, raise capital. That’s what I would say. It’s not for everybody to do this. I don’t know if many people can handle the stress level that’s required to do it this way. What it’s enabled me to do, though, is to build this business into a position where it is now, where I have options. And so now I own 100% of the business. I initially owned 100% of the business and then got to a point where I thought having partners and things like that would be good. It didn’t play out the way.

Dexter Cousins
Let’s about that lesson, right, because it’s a lesson that kind of, since the last time you on the show, you’re now wiser for. Kind of, what have you learned from that experience?

Julian Fayad
I think if you’re going to get other people involved in your business, the way that the agreement needs to be structured is in a milestone format, right? Do not hand over the keys, or the shares in this case, unless everything that has been agreed on the other party’s end is actually delivered. And if it needs to be staged, then do it that way, i.e. 5% get unlocked when this project is delivered, 10% is unlocked when this project is delivered, and you should literally map, because then the incentives are aligned for them to actually deliver it, because otherwise they don’t own anything in the company unless a minimum amount of stuff is delivered, and then incrementally it gets up. So that’s a main lesson. The structure of the deal is very, very important.

And don’t be a tight ass on getting legal and tax planning and other M&A advice. And even if you’re going to have other people involved or whatever, make sure you get your own independent advice. Do not use the same people. Get your own, someone who’s looking after your wife and kids and their interests. I think that is very important. And also understand that there’s different structures, unit trusts, all this kind of stuff, and there are pros and cons to everything. And sometimes if you have too many layers, you actually don’t own shares directly, and that may limit your ability to do certain things and veto certain things.

So yeah, get the right advice. Talk to other founders who have been through the bad end of the stick. If anyone wants to come and talk to me about the lessons learned there and get into more specifics, I’d be happy to share it, and I’d be happy to tell them exactly where I screwed up and what I would do if I was doing it next time. And speak to as many people who have it up, and excuse my language, but so many people have screwed it up.

And I guess there’s some element of people not wanting to pretend that they don’t know about this stuff or whatever, because on face value, if people looked at how things were, they would have said, yeah, that seems all good. But nobody put the pessimist lens on that and said, what if this doesn’t occur? What if this part of the agreement isn’t on? What if, what if, what if? There was still so much trust, and assumptions that were made that things were going to be delivered. And that’s just it. I’m glad, because I learned lots of great lessons. It’s definitely made me way more aware of how important it is to have alignment in your core values as a person, but also your business’s core values. And I’m not talking about differences of opinion or politics or religion. I’m talking about just fundamentally, who are you as a person? Or maybe a better way to position it is, how much does your word actually mean, and are you willing to keep your word even if it comes at a great deal of personal cost to you?

Dexter Cousins
Well, it’s funny, one of my old bosses, mandor, he said, if you can keep your word, you shouldn’t have any issues with it being in a contract, right? And I think that’s kind of the lesson that I’ve heard, is like, look, I trust you, yes, right, but we trust each other, we should sign the contract, right?

Julian Fayad
Agreements should be trustless, which everybody knows what’s expected and there’s no element of trust needed. The agreement is the agreement. Everything’s outlined very quickly and very easily. So there’s that. But just going back to that, now I’m sort of in a position where we were very fortunate to be, we applied for the New South Wales Going Global Fintech to the USA program.

Dexter Cousins
You were meant to wait for me to say, okay, now let’s look forward to the future, what exciting news you got to share?

Julian Fayad
It got me very excited talking about that, because always when one door closes another one opens, and sometimes many, many more other doors open, and that’s I think been the case for us. So that was kind of the segue that reminded me of this. But in terms of what’s new and what’s coming, obviously in the last 30 days we’ve launched these new software products. We’re going to roll that out into New Zealand as well. Oh, and since last time we spoke we launched into New Zealand, which was great, because I wanted to test the theory of, that saying of, if you were dropped on an island. If we were dropped in a country, our business, our brand, in a country that never heard of us before, and I had zero contacts or network, or very close to zero contacts or network in that country, how quickly could we get it off the ground? Could we remove the mistakes we had made, and how fast could we get to a point of profitability?

Because it is a smaller population, a lot of businesses avoid expansion into New Zealand, because it’s like, why would I do it, it’s such a tiny market. But the regulatory environment’s reasonably similar to Australia. The culture’s not the same, but similar enough, still English-speaking primarily.

Dexter Cousins
Mate, you’re talking about New Zealand like people from the UK talk about Australia, the kind of launchpad to test new ideas, or, hey, if we’re going to expand internationally, we’ll make that the first place, because you can make lots of mistakes and nobody’s going to know about, upset.

Julian Fayad
Yeah. But I was really excited by that. We launched at the beginning of last year there, and within eight months or so we’d turned profitability, so I was really happy with that. And it just opened my eyes to what other markets could we look at, purely on a technology basis, though. I have really no interest in starting brokerages in other countries. There’s no need for that. I think now that we have SaaS products that we can license in, we’ll just create partnerships and license our technology into these other markets.

So we applied for and we’re accepted into New South Wales Going Global Fintech to the USA. New South Wales Going Global, I can’t remember the order of how that program is structured, but basically the last few months we’ve had lots of meetings and sessions around how to correctly structure, and what to be careful of, and how to hire and train and all those things, leading up to basically getting you ready to launch in the US. And then that all culminates in New York Fintech Week at the end of April. Pretty much I fly to New York on Easter Sunday.

Dexter Cousins
Fantastic.

Julian Fayad
Yeah, my wife wasn’t too happy about that, but I made sure the flight was late enough in the day that we could have our Easter celebrations. So going to New York for a week, and then we’re also exploring the UAE market as well, and so we’re an exhibit Dubai’s fintech summit.

Dexter Cousins
Oh, brilliant. Do that.

Julian Fayad
So I’m excited. There’s lots of opportunities there. I’m not trying to divert our attention away from Australia and New Zealand. This is more planning for us. We’re going to spend the rest of the year planning for the expansion, not just launch and go for it and see what happens. We want to do the expansion properly. We want to see if we can actually have some paying customers signed up before we even go over there and set foot in there at all. And the reason we want to do that is to see if we can penetrate the market, and we think we can.

And so those are some things that have led us to question whether the bootstrapping model is actually going to be the way forward. So we’re in a position where at some point this year, we’re sort of getting our ducks in a row, but at some point this year we will have an open offer to raise capital for our business, and it might be in the software entity. I’m still working out what we feel the best way to do it is. It might be that we bring on a strategic partner into part or all of the business that can help supercharge a business. Lots of exciting stuff. Not turning our attention away from the Australian market, we just launched these products and the response has been phenomenal. This is more, what are we doing in 2026, 2027, after we feel like we’ve rolled out what we can here, and everything now becomes more organic for software sales. We’ve done what we can in the initial phase and then it’s a slower rollout after that.

Dexter Cousins
All right, we’re coming to a wrap. We get investors listening to this podcast, we get potential partners, other founders, great talent. If anybody’s interested in partnering with you, investing, working at LoanOptions.ai, what’s the best way for them to reach out?

Julian Fayad
Yeah, just reach out to me, either on LinkedIn, you can find me, Julian Fayad, or just send me an email. Don’t try and sell me offshore development sources, I get a thousand of them. We do in-house development, so we don’t need to worry.

Dexter Cousins
Mate, it’s been great to catch up again. Congratulations on the success and the launch of the new product. Thanks as well for just sharing the journey with our listeners and viewers. And mate, let’s catch up again another couple of years, where hopefully we’re talking about cracking the US and the Middle East, and you finally finding the right price point for the platform too.

Julian Fayad
Thank you so much. I appreciate everything. You’re the man.

Dexter Cousins
Awesome. As always, folks, you can catch up with me on LinkedIn. If you’re new to the show, make sure that you follow us wherever you listen to podcasts, or hit subscribe on YouTube. If you’re coming back, thanks so much for your support. Please consider sharing this show, because it really helps elevate great founders like Julian to a worldwide audience, and it helps me book great guests. Until the next episode, keep safe.

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