Building the Best Culture in Fintech. Ritchie Cotton – Valiant.

Ritchie Cotton, CTO and Co-Founder of Valiant Finance talks about their journey on Fintech Chatter Podcast

In this episode of Fintech Chatter, host Dexter Cousins speaks with Ritchie Cotton, co-founder of Valiant Finance, about the company’s journey over the past decade. 

Key Talking Points

• Valiant connects small businesses with the right finance options.
• The company has helped nearly 25,000 small businesses with over $2bn in funding.
• How Ritchie and Co-founder Alex Molloy met and the genesis for Valiant.
• Building one of the best working environments in Fintech.
• Valiant’s push into embedded finance solutions.
• Getting the right combination of technology and human touch.
• How COVID-19 was a pivotal moment for Valiant.
• Valiant’s plans for global expansion.
• The companies customer centric values.
• Ritchie’s leadership style and focus on empowering teams and fostering collaboration.

Find out more https://www.valiantfinance.com/careers

Full transcript.

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

Dexter Cousins
Welcome to Fintech Chatter, the show where I connect with fintech leaders for a chat. I’m your host Dexter Cousins, founder of Tier One People, the executive search and recruitment firm dedicated to helping high-growth fintech ventures hire exceptional people. Today’s guest is Ritchie Cotton, co-founder of Valiant. Valiant celebrates 10 years this year, and I’m here to chat to Ritchie about the highs and lows he and his co-founder Alex Molloy have experienced over this last decade. Ritchie, welcome to the show.

Ritchie Cotton
Fantastic to finally be here.

Dexter Cousins
I’ve got to say, what a vibe. It’s great. We’re going to talk about that later on, but this is without doubt — certainly in the last five years — the best environment I’ve walked into in terms of an office.

Ritchie Cotton
Amazing. That means a lot. I appreciate it. Thank you.

Dexter Cousins
We’re going to cover some of your other secrets to success. But before that, could you give our listeners and viewers a little insight into Valiant and the big problem you solve?

Ritchie Cotton
Sure. It’s interesting — one of our early investors sent us the initial PDF the other day, the one we’d sent them to apply for their accelerator way back in 2015. Reading the articulation of our vision and mission, it really hasn’t changed much, to be honest.

Ultimately it’s about how we better connect a typically underserved market — small business — with the right finance options for them, at the right time, on the right terms. Small business are often lumped into the too-hard basket from a financial services perspective. Underbanked. Lending is difficult. You have to give up the family home and other things. Mix that with the fact it’s an unregulated market from a credit code perspective, and you end up with some bad actors, people who prey on small business.

Our vision was: how do we create the platform and the mechanism to make the best connections between small business and the right funding solution, and then make that process really seamless? So as your business grows and evolves, those solutions grow with you. You’re not having to hunt and find them yourself. And when you do decide what you want to do, it’s as simple as clicking a button — rather than another 30-page application form, five PDFs here, this here, that there. Leveraging technology and process to facilitate that end to end.

Dexter Cousins
You’re one of what I’d class as the OGs of Australian fintech. You’ll have seen a number of businesses come and go. Tell me about some of the achievements you’ve had over this last decade.

Ritchie Cotton
It’s hard to distil down to one or a few points, so maybe I’ll talk about a few things I’m particularly proud of.

One was the way we navigated the business through Covid. Small business were hurt and impacted hugely during that time, and the economy stopped. Lending dried up in certain areas, and the natural way our business is diversified across multiple funding types — working capital, asset finance, commercial development and so on — really helped with managing that portfolio.

But ultimately our crowning achievement would be the customers we’ve helped. We’re just shy of having helped 25,000 unique small businesses, and just shy of funding $3 billion for Aussie SMBs.

Dexter Cousins
A lot of jobs.

Ritchie Cotton
A lot of jobs, a lot of GDP. You can approximate a few measures to it, but I’m really proud of that. It’s very easy to look at numbers on an aggregate level, but when I think about what goes into that $3 billion, it’s a whole bunch of people who sleep easier at night. It unlocks opportunity for them. It takes an idea that’s in their head and makes it a reality. We aren’t a successful business if our customers aren’t successful, so the way we’ve been able to help them succeed is what I’d hang my hat on.

Dexter Cousins
If you don’t mind, I want to do three parts today. First, Valiant and the journey you’ve been on. Second, the culture you’ve built here and your approach to leadership. And third, where you see fintech as a whole in Australia right now, what we can do to move forward, and what we can expect from the next decade of Valiant.

Let’s rewind all the way to the beginning and the genesis of Valiant. How did you and Alex meet?

Ritchie Cotton
We met at university. Funny story — in my first year, Alex was actually one of my tutors for one of my courses. I was probably that kid in class who, when no one else put their hand up and there was an awkward silence, said fine. The next year I joined the same tutoring program and became a tutor, so we ended up working together, and that’s when we started to hang out as a broader group.

By major I studied quantitative economics — econometrics and finance — and Alex was studying commerce and law, so the introductory commerce and economics subjects were what we tutored together.

We were both part of a contingent that went to university up in Brisbane, at the University of Queensland, and part of the big cohort that comes down every year from Brisbane to join investment banking, consulting and so on here in Sydney or Melbourne. We were part of a Brisbane contingent here that all hung out a lot.

Then we got to the point in our analyst tenures. Alex joined McKinsey as a consultant. I joined Credit Suisse in investment banking. I should caveat that this was a very deliberate decision, to learn as much as possible and really try to understand how the real world works.

Dexter Cousins
What year was this?

Ritchie Cotton
January, February 2013.

In consulting and investment banking you have the analyst program, where there’s a split — people decide to do an MBA, or leave, or do something else, and some stay and choose it as a career. In our respective positions, Alex at McKinsey had got what they call a fellowship, where McKinsey sponsors your MBA and you have a position when you get back. I’ll very happily sing Alex’s praises — he got into Harvard and Stanford and was working out what he wanted to do. He had the world as his oyster.

On my side, I wrapped up the analyst program. I was really fortunate at Credit Suisse. I worked with some great people who gave me great opportunities to travel to the US on a few deals and work on some IPOs. I saw how that part of finance and markets really worked — part of the reason I studied economics, because I find the psychology of that stuff fascinating. And at uni I taught myself to code and made a few apps that paid for coffee every day. It was never that serious, but that’s where I got bitten by the bug: I want to be in technology, but before I start something or build anything, I need to know how it’ll work.

Dexter Cousins
You’re hands-on engineering.

Ritchie Cotton
I am. I still love PRs. I genuinely love it. The team probably don’t love me doing that. But I like staying very close to the detail, and I enjoy the minutiae of the problem solving that goes with designing and architecting a really robust solution.

We reached the end of those analyst programs. I had an option to potentially move to the US in banking. Then we were at brunch one day and sat back and had a chat, and thought: we could go do that, or why don’t we do something here and start our own thing? Worst case scenario, we’ve got some pretty fantastic careers to fall back on. We were young enough that we didn’t have a mortgage or kids or any of the things we have now. It just seemed like the right time.

So we drew on our experience from our respective positions as to where to direct that, and where we knew there was opportunity.

Alex at McKinsey had done a host of consulting for big four banks around technology strategy. This was just pre-royal commission, where everyone was nervous about how insurance and wealth management were going to be treated, and where they were directing tech investment. It seemed to be overwhelmingly in consumer finance. Neobanks were becoming a thing. It was very obvious that SMB and B2B, outside of corporate, was going to remain an underserved and uncatered-for market.

On the investment banking side, some of my colleagues in the US as well as in market — we saw the IPOs of Lending Club and OnDeck in the US, and a lot of attention being devoted to fintech. You had the UK and New York mainly, a lot of big companies popping up. That trickled down here where you started to see some of the local players start up — Prospa and all those kinds of companies — and they were raising funding from really good sources, whether private equity or private credit.

So we knew there was a really strong opportunity in SMB. We knew there was capital seeking that type of return profile, and that there was a product gap in the market.

Ritchie Cotton
We originally wanted to start a small business bank. We went through that whole series of emotions, and very quickly realised we just didn’t have what we needed to pull that off at the time. It wasn’t only things like the regulatory sandboxes not being ready — there was a whole host of other things. We realised it wasn’t a good idea, and nor was it the best way we could have impact and help, because you then have to tackle payments, merchant facilities, transaction accounts.

So we said, okay, where else has there been a massive transformation underpinned by some technology that changed the market? The roadmap we saw as really relevant was what happened to residential mortgages in the mid to late nineties, where you had Aussie Home Loans, Wizard and others. The advent of warehousing structures introduced a massive swathe of competition into the market, which bid down rates and opened things up to customers. There were just more options, and there were people who could help you with this.

So we looked at it and said, if that model of the mid-nineties was a bricks-and-mortar franchise style, what would it look like if you built it today? It would be technology driven. It would be centralised. You’d have end-to-end workflows. You’d have a human touch, because this stuff is serious and impacts people’s livelihoods — you want to give people that comfort, and have a pilot in the plane, if you will. That’s what we put to paper.

Dexter Cousins
So you’re not a lender yourself. You’ve focused very much on the marketplace.

Ritchie Cotton
The way I’d describe us has evolved quite a bit. Small business have every type of finance need possible. Working capital. Asset finance, whether a massive truck or small assets like computers and office equipment. Through to commercial and development finance — I’m building a 20-storey apartment block, or I’m renewing a two-house dwelling as a developer.

As a result we’ve worked with every type of lender, every type of process, every type of customer. Over the years we’ve had to build a lot of technology to make that process seamless, because our customers are funded through everything from small family offices to big four banks and everything in between, fintech funders included.

What we’ve found now that we’re 10 years in is that over the last two or three years a lot of people have reached out and said: that tech you’ve got powering your marketplace, can you help me power a finance solution for my customers? Because when it comes to the nuance of credit policy, managing multiple submission routes, the complexities of the process and the data requirements, they don’t feel equipped. It’s not a core competency of theirs, so they shouldn’t build it internally.

So we’ve spent a lot of time over the last two or three years productising that technology. The way I’d position the business now is that our expertise and secret sauce is at that top-of-funnel experience layer for a customer — when I want to see my options and get a quote, but also how I get an application to a lender and get that feedback going.

Dexter Cousins
Rather than filling in all those details and waiting for calls.

Ritchie Cotton
We’re firm believers that a quick no is often better than a slow yes in SMB land, because it just creates stress.

Dexter Cousins
That’s true in every aspect of business.

Ritchie Cotton
I agree. So the technology we build, and the direction we’re heading from a tech perspective, is that we’re really an experience and orchestration infrastructure platform for B2B finance.

The part we find particularly exciting, as AI becomes more embedded in our daily lives, is the embedded lending context. As a manufacturer or a reseller or a distributor, how can I embed finance at every part of my sales motion, so I can increase basket size and help customers get the most cost-effective way to stay on a regular update lifecycle?

Technology is moving so quickly now. I’m looking at someone’s hardware there — if you look at what MacBooks are today with Apple Silicon versus three, four, five years ago, it’s a different beast. So how do you give people certainty around budgeting in that context?

That embedded finance experience orchestration platform we describe as infrastructure, because we’re helping other people power those programs. And it’s all coming from the technology platform powering our own core marketplace, with 85 different lenders, almost thousands of different products and millions of permutations of product policy. That’s becoming quite a powerful proposition.

Dexter Cousins
One of the things I love about this podcast is how people like yourself are so generous in sharing their experiences and insights, which inspires the next generation to do things differently. What I’m interested in is — we’ve talked about the genesis and this leap to where you are now. Was where you are now always the vision? Or if we go back 10 years, when you’re building out an app — how have you got to this point? Was it a big bold vision, or was it, look, we’ll start with something and get it out there?

Ritchie Cotton
We always had the vision, and it was part of the reason we picked the name Valiant. We wanted to pick a name that we had to earn.

One funny thing with the name is that in most historical contexts, someone’s only described as having fought valiantly if they’ve died in combat, or something has gone a bit wrong. But that idea of connecting you with the right solution — we’ll go to the end of the earth. That’s been a consistent theme since we started. We will be the platform that facilitates it, and have the people that help facilitate it. We’ll turn over every rock. We’ll fight valiantly and be in your corner. That part of the name always resonated with us.

So the core vision hasn’t really shifted much. The way we’ve executed definitely has. When we first started, because it was the path of least resistance for us, we started in the unsecured working capital space, where you can be a little more digital and the competitive landscape is much more digitally focused. At that time in 2015, things like AdWords in fintech — those acquisition channels weren’t mature, so there was opportunity there.

But as we evolved into asset finance and other spaces, having a more personalised and in a lot of cases a human concierge experience was really important, empowered by great tech to make it smooth and fast and easy. Particularly as our customer base broadened. An experienced 20-year veteran business owner looking to upgrade their fleet of vehicles wants to talk to someone and know: you understand what I need and you’re going to help me.

Dexter Cousins
Catering to every different customer journey.

Ritchie Cotton
So the way we’ve delivered the model has evolved, but we very quickly realised it was going to be this beautiful combination of tech and people. The biggest change in how we’ve delivered things to date is really this embedded finance and embedded lending opportunity we’re pursuing now on the tech side.

Dexter Cousins
Were you able to get the business and a product out without raising much capital, or was it quite capital intensive?

Ritchie Cotton
We’ve definitely raised a fair chunk of capital now — we’re a Series C company. It’s funny, I’d say that’s a lot of money, but our core marketplace business is now profitable, or near profitable. When you spread that capital over a 10-year period, it probably doesn’t feel like as huge an amount relative to some other companies.

It’s really guided how we attract the best people and acquire the best channels. Through a period like Covid, how do we weather the storm and come out the other side? Capital is a huge part of being able to do that and make sure people still have jobs and roles. We have a duty to our team — they rely on us to help them live their lives and their livelihood. That’s really important to us, so capital was all part of that story.

Dexter Cousins
I want to talk about team and culture in a bit, but let me dig a little deeper into the journey. What was the moment you thought, we’ve cracked this, we’re onto something?

Ritchie Cotton
There are probably a few different moments where I felt the emotion in different ways.

One was when we secured our seed round. It was no longer a thing we were toying with. It was a pretty uncommon thing to go and ask strangers for money in Australia at that point. We were entering a time when, for example, Ben and Toby Heap had just kicked off AWI, and they were about to roll it into H2. All the accelerators were just starting. Our lead investors in the early rounds, Reinventure and Carthona Capital, had only just really started investing. They’d have just had SocietyOne and a few others, but we were in the first fund for them and for Reinventure. It was still very early days.

At that point we were part of a very select few that were able to raise like that. That’s probably where we thought, okay, now we have an obligation to make this work. Let’s go. There’s a group of people who really know what they’re talking about, who see the whole market, and they’re telling us they believe in us. That carries a huge amount of weight, and it’s not a responsibility Alex or I take lightly.

I think coming out of Covid was the other big one. The fact we could survive that and came out the other side more resilient than ever really said: if we can survive that, we can survive most things. That phase allowed us to knuckle down and get battle fit. Coming out the other side it was, okay, we’re going to be good. We have a plan and a roadmap.

Up until that point we’d grown exceptionally quickly. With the benefit of hindsight it’s very easy to say, but potentially too quickly.

Dexter Cousins
Everybody was pushed. It was growth at all costs.

Ritchie Cotton
And then very quickly it became cut costs at all costs. You have that whipsaw and you land in the middle somewhere. I think we landed in a really healthy place. Full credit to Alex — while I was busy trying to manoeuvre the technology to help us streamline operationally, he shepherded the business incredibly through that period.

And the latest moment where I’ve gone, wow, we’re almost starting a new business — but built on the foundation of everything, we couldn’t have done it without the eight to 10 years prior — was when we had our first partner in the embedded finance space. We launched a pilot with them here in Australia, and they said, this is actually really great, we’d love you to come to the US.

Dexter Cousins
Can you say that again? Nobody ever says that about partnerships.

Ritchie Cotton
We’ve got a wonderful partner in them. The pilot here worked really well and they said, how do you feel about coming to the US? And I said, let me book my ticket.

So that embedded lending solution is now live in the US with them and a few others. It’s super exciting, because it’s another moment where you go: not only is what we built within the core business incredible, there are other people who want to leverage it. It’s a way we can have more impact on more businesses and help more people. And it all aligns with the same vision and mission we set out originally — just a different delivery model.

Dexter Cousins
I want to talk about the culture you’ve built here. I’ll probably take some video of the environment so people can see what I’m talking about, but I don’t think it’s going to capture the vibe of the place. If I were to describe it — and I’m showing my age here — it reminds me of a time I’ve not seen since the mid to late nineties, when I was working in design agencies. Because of technology a lot of us could work from home, but you’d come into the office and there was just a vibe. You didn’t want to leave. We’d have music on, mainly dance music. But there was this focus and at the same time this real energy.

It’s completely the opposite of what we developed through the 2010s and 2020s, of people faffing about on beanbags and whiteboards drinking kombucha. That was cool, but to me I can’t think of anything more mind-numbing. So how have you created this energy within the business, while also having what you can very clearly sense as a focus and a commitment to doing the work?

Ritchie Cotton
It probably boils down to a few things. I’ll start at the top and work down, because every layer of the organisation contributes heavily to the culture.

From the beginning, Alex and I have been very consistent with our values and what we deem important. We have a defined set of company values that have been the same for seven or eight years now.

Dexter Cousins
Is there much difference between the values you had around the Valiant name — what it meant for customers and for the business — and how that flows through to your people?

Ritchie Cotton
Definitely. Our values are, number one, customer champions. Everything we do — product, sales, customer facing — is about how we champion the customer. The way we build a sustainable long-term business is by getting them the best outcomes.

Our second value, and excuse the language, is get shit done. That’s general productivity, but also focus, and that relentless pursuit of moving forward. If you think it can be made better, make it happen. If a customer needs something, make it happen.

Dexter Cousins
Which also captures the idea of doing more with less.

Ritchie Cotton
And then our third value comes from our logo being two lines — the cub and the larger line. The lion has been a common motif across the history of the business, and we call the team the pride as a result. So the third value is thrive the pride: how do we support and help each other? How do we build not only relationships with each other but systems and processes to facilitate that, and management structures that make it happen? A big part of the culture now is how we’ve iterated the way we help the team thrive together over time.

Those three values really capture a lot about the top-down side. Alex and I have been relentless in our repetition of them, to the point where people probably go, we know, we know. But you have to be consistent there. We haven’t really wavered.

The other part is really iterating our hiring process. It’s funny — at the start of the business Alex and I did a founder’s coffee with every new person who joined. It got to the point where we were doing two or three a day and getting none of our own work done, so we had to make that more scalable.

But we distilled those things into what we call a cultural interview, which has nothing to do with competency or ability to do the job. It’s just: when we chat with you, what’s the vibe? A lot of companies talk about cultural fit. Obviously cultural fit’s good, but I’m not a huge fan of cultural fit compared to cultural add. That idea that when someone’s not in the office, you notice they’re not there.

Dexter Cousins
That’s the personality, isn’t it. The human things that make a company really special. I think it should be value fit, not culture fit.

Ritchie Cotton
Exactly. And then you’re really solid for cultural add, because what they bring makes it richer and a more wonderful place.

Dexter Cousins
One of the reasons so many businesses get into trouble going down the culture-fit route is that they haven’t really figured out what their values are. They’re aspirational values, rather than this is actually how we conduct ourselves.

Ritchie Cotton
Possibly. That’s another part of our evolution and maturing — the professionalism, performance management, all these factors that have evolved over time. We’ve ended up in a position where we have really phenomenal leadership. Alex and I have a leadership team now that’s incredible. They’re all very motivated and on board, and true reflections of the values. You can see the way that distils down into teams.

We’ve spent a lot of time optimising how leadership works, how the recruitment process works and everyone’s role in it, to a point where you might interview for value and self opt out, because the process has shown you it’s maybe not a good fit. That’s totally fine. I’ll never hold that against anyone. If it doesn’t fit for you, it doesn’t fit for you.

But hopefully we attract a particular type of talent that’s highly mobile and wants to achieve. On the engineering, product and design side, I really look for three main things. I call them the three I’s — I don’t know where I got this from, I’m sure I got it from somewhere, it’s definitely not mine.

Intelligence — raw intellect. Can you piece the puzzle together? Intuition — can you read between the lines, connect the dots, think in an abstract way and make sense of what is otherwise a heavily regulated, complex space? And lastly, initiative. If you’ve got the intellect and the spidey senses are tingling, do you do something about it, do you make it happen?

If you have those three things combined, you’re really an unstoppable force, given the right resources, tools and structure to work within.

Dexter Cousins
I’ve got exactly the same thing but a completely different way of saying it. It depends on critical thinking, care factor, accountability. But I agree. Recruitment is never going to be easy, but it is a simple process, and it’s made a lot harder when you do things that are counterintuitive to it.

What we’ve brought into our process is trying to bring that intuition back, to say: how do you operate day to day? What’s your modus operandi? It’s first principles thinking, design thinking, and we apply those things to the hiring process.

Ritchie Cotton
And include people in that process. The cultural interview I mentioned — you’re actually meeting people who aren’t in your team, from a totally different part of the business, or people who are in your team. That way, if everything goes well and you rock up on day one, there’s a bunch of people who chose you, who knew you were coming and are looking forward to you joining. You’re not joining and going, hey everyone, I’m here now. There’s a level of familiarity, and let’s hit the ground running because we all know where we’re at.

Dexter Cousins
They know what sports you like, because you talk about those things when you were just hanging out. I’ve used this analogy loads — if you look at your partner in life, you didn’t meet them on a blind date with a clipboard of questions and interrogate them: tell me how much you earn, if I’m interested I’ll call you back and bring a friend along, we’ll ask the same questions, and then if that goes well you can move in with me. You’d go, what? But that’s what a lot of traditional processes are doing. For me it’s about relationships.

Ritchie Cotton
That’s what we miss most about when everything went fully remote for that period. You just miss those micro interactions that are really human.

Dexter Cousins
I’ve got to be honest — I remember being on a call after the Finnies or Intersekt, with a whole bunch of FinTech Australia members on there, and you were talking about what you were doing around culture. And I was thinking, I don’t think that’s okay. It wasn’t that I didn’t believe what you were doing. It was more that human behaviour is that, particularly for these types of businesses, when you don’t have physical interaction, your secret sauce is the team.

Ritchie Cotton
Symbiosis, knowledge sharing and other things are really important. We’ve got to the point, particularly with the customer-facing roles we have, where people want to come to the office. The majority of them are in three, four, five days.

Dexter Cousins
People don’t want to believe this when I say it to them. We’re called Tier One People because that’s what we go and find, and that’s where we operate. And they want to be in the office. They want to be around people, around those three I’s you talked about, because they know they only get better by being around better people.

Ritchie Cotton
As the business evolves, high-performing people attract high-performing people. Then you get a level of momentum with that in the team.

Dexter Cousins
There’s a fourth I for you.

Ritchie Cotton
What’s that?

Dexter Cousins
Iron sharpens iron.

Ritchie Cotton
Very good.

I’d give a huge amount of credit — the largest part of the business is the customer-facing, sales and credit roles, and the heads of those functions, Lukas and Henry, have done an incredible job of the recruiting efforts there. Felix as well, our COO, incredible effort. Josh, our head of talent and people, incredible effort. We just have a really great set of leadership who are aligned around what we are, what we want the business to look like and how we want to be. Everyone’s rallied behind that, which is amazing.

Dexter Cousins
I want to move on to the current state of fintech in Australia. You’ve got a lot of experience in this space and you’ve seen the evolution of it. What’s your sense of where we’re at now?

Ritchie Cotton
It depends on which part of fintech you pick. If you look at lending specifically, the rate environment looks like it will become a little better, and the general sentiment is that it’s going to become better. A lot of alternative funders that may have felt a real crunch if rates had gone up more are probably feeling better. Consumers have been pretty resilient through the uncertainty as well, so lending is still happening.

What we’re seeing now is a lot of: how can people leverage AI and those newer technologies, and how does that fit in a world that is very rules-based and needs to be deterministic because of the cost if it isn’t — understanding across the portfolio what performance looks like.

A general theme across all verticals, payments and lending included, is the idea of embedded. How do you get solutions and embed them right at the point of need, and connect people to the right thing at the right time? Whether that’s tailoring to a certain customer preference, or offering something that wasn’t possible before.

I chat with other founders all the time — embedded insurance, massive opportunities. Payments was already a fairly embedded piece, but the way you leverage the data and insights out of that is probably still a little bit removed from where it could be. So I see the concept of embedded as really cool.

What you’ll start to find is that once those services begin to embed — I know Stripe is doing a heap on stablecoins — once it becomes the one-button click, because they’re helping facilitate that, that’s when you see more widespread adoption. Crypto has been somewhat associated with speculation risk in some markets. For it to really be adopted en masse you need to give people that comfort.

The branding of stablecoin is great. If you were talking to someone on the fence, who says I don’t want to go into something I perceive as risky because of the commentary, the to-the-moon stuff — what does that mean? Whereas: here’s effectively a digital representation of a US dollar. Oh, I know what a US dollar is. And I respect the dollar.

Dexter Cousins
Stripe, Revolut, Wise, Adyen — as these companies start to implement crypto in their stack of available options, and the idea of having a digital wallet.

Ritchie Cotton
I often think about central bank digital currency. That’s obviously a huge move if something like that happens, and where you go with that, how it impacts things like welfare systems. We could talk for a whole hour on that. That’s when crypto will have its really shining moment — it’s now relevant for everyone.

Someone put it to me a while back that a financial technology is truly relevant, and remains relevant, if someone’s salary is paid through it. That’s why in the US cheques are still there. Here it’s not really a thing, because it’s all EFT. When you’re trying to create a system to replace something, here you’d say, okay, we’re replacing EFT or some mechanism of electronic transfer. Over there, there’s someone who really loves the feeling of receiving that piece of paper, because that’s what’s happened for so many years. That’s something that’s hard to navigate.

Dexter Cousins
In terms of where Valiant’s going, what can we expect in the next decade?

Ritchie Cotton
This idea of embedded is massive for us. We’re really building out our technology and product team capability to take it global. We’re in Australia and the US now. Over the course of 2026 and 2027 we’d love to be across the UK, Europe and potentially parts of Asia, because we’ve found we have a lot of market pull in a lot of places.

It’s continuing to build out the product suite, and continuing to focus on how we help other people who have SMB customers embed a finance process in the right way — one that doesn’t hijack their sales motion and doesn’t create noise in an otherwise quite nice process they’ve developed over time and that they own.

From a technology perspective, we never want to be the type of company that comes in and says, this is now the way you need to do it. We work with you to work out how we can add the most value and not hijack process, because that doesn’t really help anyone. And we’ll never go to a lender and say we know how to lend better than you. In some cases they’ve been doing it for hundreds of years. So how can we tell you anything? It’s more a case of: we understand your problems, we know why you do things the way you do. How can we work with you?

So things like bringing some of the risk and fraud assessment factors further up the funnel. How do we understand more about a customer’s KYC earlier? How do we embed options in the right way at the right time, run that pre-screening or pre-scoring that’s needed, so that when an application does hit their system they know it’s effectively a hundred percent approval?

Dexter Cousins
For me, the biggest mistake made with the CDR was that it should have started with small business.

Ritchie Cotton
Interesting case.

Dexter Cousins
Because there’s a lot more friction there.

Ritchie Cotton
Definitely. And the reason that friction exists is that when a financial institution thinks about a business, it’s often very separate from the personal life that runs the business. The practical reality is the two are so much more meshed. It’s very hard to delineate, particularly with a sole proprietor, a sole trader or partnerships.

Dexter Cousins
Simple things, like me buying a car, and doing it through the company, and having my mortgage and my business accounts all with the same bank — and an experience that takes weeks. You eventually just lose patience and go to the car dealer and do a deal in 30 minutes.

Ritchie Cotton
And often that might not be the best deal. So how do you make sense of that madness and say, how do we help the people who are already on your side continue to help you?

It would also open things up. Finance can create relationships with brands. I gave the MacBook example earlier — my business runs on Apple, and I know that every two years I’m going to have the latest and greatest. You look forward to that moment. You can create loyalty and a brand relationship.

Dexter Cousins
If I look at my two experiences as a retail customer and a business customer of the same bank, one feels like banking at my convenience and the other feels like I’m banking at their convenience — and that’s the business side. There are a lot of problems where they’ve thrown a lot of money at technology and the problems still persist.

Ritchie Cotton
Ultimately it comes down to a cold, calculated view of what makes the most money. And in Australia, that’s mortgages. If you’re tossing up between lending against a house in Rose Bay and a new oven for a baker, from a bank’s perspective it’s obvious.

Dexter Cousins
It’s incredible that we’re talking about 10 years of Valiant, and I’m nine years into my business, and I don’t think I’ve seen any change at all in my business banking experience. I’ve seen a lot more in my personal experience. Technology has come a long way, just with everything happening in AI in the last six months. But here we are 10 years later, still talking about the problem you identified, and the banks are nowhere near further on solving it.

Ritchie Cotton
In some ways they are further along, because a lot of them have invested in core banking upgrades and a few other bits and pieces. But ultimately it’s the customer experience.

Dexter Cousins
This is what I’ve noticed over the last 15 years or so in Australia from incumbents, not just in banking but insurance. When they talk about innovation, it’s all internal back-end stuff the customer never sees. It’s still the same insurance policy I had 50 years ago, still getting hit with an increase every year, claims are still the same.

Ritchie Cotton
It is funny. I remember back in the early fintech days everyone talking about the unbundling of a bank, with that big chart of all the areas of a bank and all the fintechs tackling each area. We always had the hypothesis that people would do parts of what a bank does better, but the core fundamental value of a bank — fractional banking, cheap cost of capital — is such a competitive advantage that it’s very hard to shake. Banking has a natural stickiness to it, particularly once you’re established, and that stickiness is probably what has created some of the inertia in the experiences.

They maybe also took the view: we’re not going to be unbundled. And the parts they were happy to be unbundled, they’ve let happen. That’s where we’ve always seen banks and funding partners — that’s what we call them, funding partners — as helping meet that bridge. Their focus is a core banking platform upgrade, so we’ll look after the experience layer. How do we connect those dots and make that work for everyone?

Dexter Cousins
Ritchie, we get some amazing talent tuning in. If anybody’s interested in joining what I can guarantee you, folks, is one of the best vibes I’ve seen at any fintech in Australia — where can they find out more about careers?

Ritchie Cotton
Just head to our website, valiantfinance.com, or you can email us at valiant.finance. And reach out to Josh, our head of people — he’d love to hear from everyone.

Dexter Cousins
Brilliant. Ritchie, it’s been great to chat. Congrats on the first decade, and really excited to see what you do in the next decade as well. Let’s do something a little sooner than 10 years.

As always, thanks so much for tuning in. If you’re new to the show, make sure to follow us on your podcast player, or subscribe and leave a comment if you’re watching on YouTube. If you’re coming back — thank you so much for your support. It really does mean a lot to me, but more importantly it helps us elevate great Aussie founders like Ritchie and great Aussie fintechs like Valiant. Until the next episode, keep well.