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Dan Jowett – OpenMarkets Group.

October 27, 2025 · Hosted by Dexter Cousins

Where Defi Meets Tradfi

In this episode of Fintech Chatter, host Dexter Cousins speaks with Dan Jowett, CEO of OpenMarkets Group, about the rapid convergence of Tradfi and DeFi

About This Episode

Tune in as Dan and Dexter discuss how OpenMarkets has transformed from a traditional stockbroker to a technology-focused fintech, the regulatory hurdles facing the crypto industry, and the future of equities trading in a rapidly changing environment.

Chapters

00:00 Introduction to OpenMarkets and Fintech Landscape
02:26 Evolution of OpenMarkets: From Stockbroker to Tech Innovator
06:08 Navigating the Future: DeFi and Traditional Finance
11:45 Regulatory Challenges and Opportunities in Digital Assets
15:37 Building a Strong Culture at OpenMarkets
18:47 Navigating Market Changes in Fintech
21:07 Lessons from Leadership During Challenging Times
23:22 The Importance of Networking and Global Perspectives
24:26 The Future of DeFi and Regulatory Challenges
27:24 Cultivating a Positive Workplace Culture
30:59 Finding the Right Fit in a Dynamic Environment

About OpenMarkets Group

Power your Fintech, Advisory, or Trading business with an end-to-end Wealth Management and Trading solutions. 

Openmarkets empowers financial institutions and advisers to deliver a seamless investment experience to their clients. They provide a comprehensive suite of trading, clearing and settlement, custody, and technology solutions that enable businesses to efficiently manage portfolios, scale their business, and support investors in achieving their financial objectives.

About Dan Jowett

Dan Jowett is the CEO of Openmarkets and has served as OMG’s Chief Executive Officer since March 2022 after joining in February 2022.  

Prior to joining Openmarkets, Dan was the Chief Operating Officer and Chief Financial Officer of Shaw and Partners Limited, an Australian investment and wealth management firm, between 2012 and 2021.  

Dan commenced his career providing financial assurance and advisory services while at PwC Australia and KPMG UK, and has more than 25 years of professional experience across stockbroking, wealth management, funds management and investment banking.  

Find Out More – https://openmarkets.com.au/

Links from this episode.

More on digital assets on Fintech Chatter.

Full transcript.

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

Dexter Cousins
Hello and welcome to Fintech Chatter, the podcast where I connect with fintech leaders to chat about their secrets to success. I’m Dexter Cousins, your host and the founder of Tier One People, the executive search and recruitment firm that’s dedicated to helping high growth fintech ventures hire exceptional people.

Today’s guest is Dan Jowett, the CEO of OpenMarkets Group. OpenMarkets Group is the fintech for fintech. They’ve engineered execution, clearing, and settlement so fintech can easily connect to the markets via APIs, delivering affordable trading to many Australians. Dan, welcome to your Fintech Chatter debut.

Dan Jowett
Thank you, Dexter. Great to be here.

Dexter Cousins
Yeah, great to have you. I guess for our listeners, it’d be great if you could share a little bit about OpenMarkets, who you are, and what you do.

Dan Jowett
Yeah, great place to start. And it’s an interesting place to start because when we talk about OpenMarkets internally at the moment, I see us in a few different phases. So what I mean by that is the OpenMarkets today, the OpenMarkets from maybe a few years ago and the OpenMarkets that we see going forward. So I might leave the looking forward piece to maybe later on in the chat because I think that’s a really really interesting place to go into a bit of detail for your listeners and to talk about what’s happening across the market.

But OpenMarkets is not a startup. We’ve been around for 12, 13 plus years. And OpenMarkets originally really was helping clients access the markets, open markets. And over time it became very technology focused. So the first CEO started in Melbourne, built the business from scratch. Another CEO came in about six years ago now. Again, very technology focused, very entrepreneurial spirit within the business. So really over that time we morphed into a fintech stock broker for want of a better word.

We don’t really see ourselves just like that today. We see ourselves in the last 12 months doing much more than just being a fintech stock broker. So, as a stock broker, we’re a clearing member of the exchange. We’re a trading member of the exchange and we help our clients connect to that market and international markets. But in the last year or so, we’ve really seen some changes that we think are really important to take the business forward. Technology focused and in particular looking at wealth management SaaS and that opens up new conversations with clients that clients want.

Okay. So, we’ve now got more product features in the suite than just accessing the market. So portfolio rebalancing, tax engines, performance reporting, workstations, bringing managed funds into the business, bringing fixed income into the business. So much more than that equity focused broker that we probably had a couple of years ago.

Dexter Cousins
And so when you kind of look at the big problem that you solve, what is it that you kind of identify that has then cap this kind of move and evolution of the business?

Dan Jowett
Well, the new evolution. So, let’s talk about that for a moment because this, you’ll see my face later, but I think this is such a great place to be. So, let me maybe ask you a question. I don’t know if you trade markets at all, but you probably got some super, but I don’t know. Have you placed an order on an equity trade in the last 12 months or so?

Dexter Cousins
Yeah.

Dan Jowett
Okay. So the way you did that, whether you did it through a business like OpenMarkets or CMC Markets or Interactive Brokers, whoever you did it through, the way you did that, whether it’s in Australia or America, you ain’t going to be doing it like that in 10 years time, I don’t think. And what I mean by that is the massive change that we’re seeing at warp speed onshore and offshore around token assets and coins.

Dexter Cousins
Yeah.

Dan Jowett
And the way that that will change the landscape, not just for broking in this example but for everything, right, is coming at warp speed. 10 years, could be 8 years, could be 15, I couldn’t tell you, but I can tell you you’re not going to trade an equity in the same way that you did last week, last month or however you did it. So for a business like us we’ve got two pathways here. We could go, well, okay, world’s changing, let’s just stay in our lane and do what we do. We’re pretty good at that, but we might not have a business in 10 years.

Or we can look over the fence to what’s happening in DeFi that’s still evolving but moving quickly. And that could be regulatory, that could be jurisdictional, that could be operational. Start talking to the people in that industry, whether they’re fintechs or technologies or ASIC, whoever it might be, and start to build out that DeFi strategy, that tokenised real world assets, if you like, and how that’s going to change what we do today in equities in the near term. Yeah.

And the time frame is really interesting. You’ve already seen some major, if you think about the world’s biggest exchange, Nasdaq. They came out a month ago. We’re going to tokenise the exchange. I don’t know quite when that’s going to happen, but they’ve come out and said it because they know it’s under threat. You see BlackRock, world’s biggest asset manager. We’re going to tokenise our assets. So, world’s biggest exchange, world’s biggest asset manager, it’s coming. So, I think for a business like ours, we have to look at it because we’d be foolish not to.

In that part of the strategy, which we’re still on a bit of fact finding for because it’s complicated and it’s moving quickly and the regulatory environment is following that but it’s challenging for ASIC and I think participants, and I think at some point we’re going to run, well, we will run DeFi and TradFi almost in parallel, okay, and then at some point they’re going to converge and maybe at some point the TradFi will disappear. I’ll probably be retired by then but that’s probably how we see it at the moment.

So we want to be relevant. We look over the fence into that DeFi world and it first of all is truly fascinating. But that is firmly where we believe relevance for us is going to be and there’s many more things around that, okay, in digital. So whether that’s having your own stablecoin, having a DAT possibly, all those different aspects to a digital strategy really, really excites us at the moment.

Dexter Cousins
Yeah. You’ve obviously got a business to run, you got people to pay, you got clients to service. How do you kind of manage the R&D process and then kind of figure out what bets are we going to place?

Dan Jowett
Well, and also what clients want because that picture I painted of a TradFi world, which is what we do today, and a DeFi running in parallel. Well, that’s great. But if you go to some of our customers now and I go, “Hey, we’re going to move all your assets from how you deal with them today on CHESS and we’re just going to move into a digital world.” If I go to our family office clients and suggest that,

Dexter Cousins
Yeah,

Dan Jowett
they’re going to put the phone down pretty quick, right? So, you need to have people ready for that.

Dexter Cousins
We’ve had the ASX challenge where they made the big announcement of we’re going to go on chain and it never happened. And so there’s, I guess, a level of scepticism.

Dan Jowett
There’s a lot of scepticism and there’s a lot of work to do again in the regulatory space and I’m sure most of your listeners will be familiar with Project Acacia and what’s been happening there with some real time examples of industry participants doing great things in the project. That interests us a lot. We’ve spoken with many of those participants.

And to answer your question then on sort of capital and allocation and how do we think about investing into those different parts of what we want to do. We’re very fortunate first of all, we have a long-standing institutional shareholder here that we have a very close day-to-day relationship with as well as the capital and shareholder relationship. And we’ve got a really interesting capital market strategy, let’s say, for the next 12 months, which is difficult to go into in detail here for confidentiality reasons, but that is certainly an avenue for capital for us as we think about that DeFi piece because we have big licences here, okay?

We’re a clearing member of the exchange, we’re a trading member of the exchange, we’ve got very big AFSL, we could do MDA and so on and so on. But if we want to truly step into that DeFi, we need to upgrade the licence. That comes at time and cost. We need non-cash payments for stablecoins. We might need market making if we want to create a market in a different ecosystem. We’ll need a level two or level three markets licence from ASIC. And these things don’t come first of all quickly, but they require us to invest in talent and tech.

And I think, to your question, when we look at some of the tech that we believe we’ll need to deliver on that, there’s partnerships there, right? So, we’re not going to go and build a blockchain. That’s not what we’re going to do. There’s some fantastic businesses doing that today. We’ve signed an MOU with one of them, the Redbelly Network. I’m sure many of your listeners will know.

Dexter Cousins
Yeah. Yeah. Fantastic business.

Dan Jowett
And it’s early days but we see a lot of opportunity with those like-minded leaders in that emerging space here. And it’s not emerging now. This has been happening for some time. So I think we trivialise it a little bit when we say emerging but it’s still evolving.

Dexter Cousins
Yeah. One of the developments that we had very recently here in Australia is some final traction with crypto exchanges and the push now that they’re going to have to go down the AFSL route. Where do you see the platform like say OpenMarkets that does have AFSLs, that has all this technology and infrastructure being able then move it?

Dan Jowett
Yeah, this is a great question. I’ve got a couple of strong views on this actually. I think the first one is in a global context when we talk about regulation, if we look at the digital asset space. So, not just crypto coin trading or the crypto coins themselves or real world assets and tokenisation. We’ve seen some global challenges, right? Let’s be honest. In big shops or small shops, we’ve seen fraud. We’ve seen AML issues. We don’t need that. I think the industry has matured immensely.

So you go now, you were there on Thursday. We go the digital assets top 50. There are as many investment bankers or ex-investment bankers in the room as there are sort of tech people and these people, like we would see ourselves, we’re coming from a world where we understand AML KYC, we understand client money, we understand custody, we understand how to work with a regulator, how to deal with lawyers and accountants and all those sorts of things, but they’re important, yeah, right? They’re really important and ASIC want to see, globally regulators want to see that the people coming into the industry that are going to be managing millions or billions of money know what they’re doing.

So I think that maturing over recent times and that acceleration of global regulatory appetite and change, GENIUS Act, right, into what happened in Europe and now Singapore, Hong Kong and Australia coming in behind a little bit but moving in the right direction. We’re seeing a maturing of the people in that industry. So we believe, when we talk about it at board level, we think we’re in a really strong position here because we’re not startup, we’re not going into it cold, right? We did 200 million in the market yesterday, right? This is a serious business, right? 25 billion a year goes through the pipes here, right? That’s a lot of money, that’s clients’ money, so we know how to deal with that.

So when we look at what we want to do in DeFi, we’re not going to have 25 billion going through a DeFi in two years, that’s never going to happen, but we want to have something like that in a few years time. We want to build it with the right people in a mature and compliant way. So we bring that existing licence and skills into that new world and we build it out accordingly. And we’re not the only people doing this, right? There’s lots of really good businesses that have an established TradFi model, not necessarily broking, it could be payments, it could be whatever, moving into that space. I think that’s a great thing for the industry.

Dexter Cousins
So when you look at your competition in the kind of traditional road clearing solutions, what differentiates you and kind of what you see as being your competitive advantage?

Dan Jowett
Yeah. Well, there’s a bit of a challenge here actually in Australia. So this is one of the reasons why when I said at the beginning that the historic OpenMarkets business was this equities fintech stock broker and we’ve started to move beyond that into semi-platform you could almost call it, rebalancing engines, tax engines, performance reporting, desktops and so on, and the reason for that is the Australian market in just that sort of clearing is pretty overserviced, right? Australia’s got a mature and successful industry in asset management, in corporate finance, banking, all the way through. It’s no different in that space.

So there’s a number of different participants in the industry. Each one got their own strengths and weaknesses like we would have as well. But that creates quite a crowded market. What does that create? Lot price competition. So if you were new looking at this part of the market as a VC, you probably wouldn’t enter. It’s mature. However, that move out, when we talk to our clients, they want more than just that execution and clearing. We want to deal, same tech stack, one provider with single sign-ons, multiple product opportunity with the same provider without having to switch between different ones. So we see that opportunity going forward. So that’s a bit of a differentiator. I’m not sure there are many if any that can do portfolio rebalancing straight to market through the broker in the same business but we can do that.

Dexter Cousins
So I guess if we looked at the consumer side we’ve seen the emergence of super apps. Revolut for example, crypto trading, equities trading within their app. From the perspective of you helping other fintechs, have you kind of seen much demand of emulating that super app?

Dan Jowett
Yeah. Look, we do, it’s a really good question. So just maybe if you look, whilst we do a lot with fintech, we have three broad customer channels of which fintech’s just one. So maybe just worth a second on that. So we have fintech is probably our primary channel. So onshore and offshore fintechs accessing markets and other things through us, API-driven, API first. We have advice professionals. So that’s family offices, financial planners, shadow brokers, more traditional advice, and then we have traders, on and offshore traders. So three very different categories. We have most business in fintech and advice and they’re different price points.

But going to your point, in that fintech channel, that’s where yes, we do because again, if you have a fintech that’s built into our APIs for lots of different content, if we can offer other product in the same tech stack, so let’s say crypto trading, that’s very attractive. We should talk about crypto trading actually because we don’t currently offer that in the product suite. We had it built a couple of years ago and unfortunately for us and the industry, ASIC put out

Dexter Cousins
Yeah.

Dan Jowett
I’m going to say a bit of an unhelpful note, which they do sometimes, but I think at the time it was appropriate and that put everything on hold. Now, everything’s moved on since then. So, we’re getting our fintechs now saying to us, “How can you help us connect to a crypto exchange for the major coins, right?” We don’t, they tend to not want the specky stuff. So, it’s the tier two or tier three coins. It’s those larger ones. And that’s of course driven by their demand, right? It’s seen increasing appetite and maturity in that sector.

Dexter Cousins
I want to shift the conversation a bit onto yourself and more I guess the leadership side and the cultural elements of what you’ve been kind of building here at OpenMarkets. Now, I know that you came in at a fairly difficult time for the business. It was a difficult time for the industry as well.

Dan Jowett
Yeah.

Dexter Cousins
Do you want to maybe share a little bit about kind of what you came into and what over this last few years being able to build and kind of create as a culture.

Dan Jowett
Well, look, I think the first call, so yes, when I joined, we had a few challenges and a number of those are public. We had a regulatory issue which we dealt with in record time, happened before myself and the current leadership team were here, but we just moved through it. I mean, we improved and matured the business and regulators got a job to do. We hadn’t done things well. We addressed it quickly, professionally and we moved on.

But despite some of those challenges in that early period, what I was very very fortunate to walk into was an incredible culture here at OpenMarkets. So what I mean by that is entrepreneurial spirit, motivated and engaged workforce, people just on the journey. Now as a CEO often you’re trying to build towards that. I kind of inherited it. So that was fantastic. I had a bit of a challenge though. We took staff numbers down from about 105, 110 down to about 50 quite quickly because we didn’t have the right balance of skills and experience. So we made a number of changes and that can have a disastrous impact on culture.

And I think from working hard on that, this is not now a me thing, this is people within the business, we’ve been able to maintain that culture and I think continue to improve it. So bringing people in now as we’re moving into a growth phase that embrace that entrepreneurial spirit, that embrace that core values that we have as a business is so important and I still feel privileged to. We had our town hall in here actually in this room yesterday. We did a monthly town hall and it’s one of my favourite parts of the month. We have an hour, very open, we take all sorts of questions, we obviously talk on what’s happening, strategy, growth, clients, but it’s a really open forum and that gets people engaged and it’s tremendous.

Dexter Cousins
Yeah. What was your background before you joined the OpenMarkets Group?

Dan Jowett
Yes. Well, I started my career in the big four accounting firms which had about 12, 15 years maybe, KPMG in the UK and PwC over here and that’s what I’ve always done and I did corporate finance work and audit and advisory and transaction work in that space. I then went to work for a client, what was then Shaw Stockbroking, now Shaw and Partners, was there for a little over 10 years and that business went through tremendous growth in that period. It pretty exciting time actually, learned a lot, great team there and it was just ready for me to do something different. 10 years is a good tenure these days and that was about three and a half years ago now. Yeah. Most of my career in markets.

Dexter Cousins
So baptism of fire in fintech. You came in, you had regulatory challenges, the market itself was super challenging.

Dan Jowett
Well, it was and people forget, right, this was early 2022 and interest rates had just started to turn and markets changed very very quickly. So in businesses that are fintech where typically you’ve got a capital challenge, right, in your business, markets changed immeasurably. If you think about your personal life or I do, it feels like we’ve been in a recession for a couple of years to be frank. We’ve had incredible inflation and we all know how much it costs to go out for a steak these days. The world’s changed and that’s been difficult for leaders in a business because you want to keep your team and you don’t want people to leave, keeping cost control where you can. It has been tough.

Now what I can say, cuz markets are forward-looking as you know and we’re heavily connected to the markets, if the last couple of weeks is anything to go by, you’re seeing a lot more activity come back both primary and secondary and a lot more flow, certainly from what we’ve been seeing come through the screens in the last two weeks in particular. How interest rates are going to move in the next 6 months I couldn’t tell you, that’s above my pay grade. I think they’re probably not going to move as quickly further down as some people think but we’re definitely coming out of a really long protracted challenging period. It has been hard.

Dexter Cousins
Have you kind of learned about yourself during this period, Dan?

Dan Jowett
In that three-year period?

Dexter Cousins
Yeah. And that baptism of fire.

Dan Jowett
Baptism of fire. Well, you learn a lot about yourself, I think. And as a leader, you have to remember things don’t always go according to plan. In fact, things rarely go according to plan. So, you’ve got to build that flexibility into yourself and you’ve got to not get worried about failing. I think we all know when you look at some of the world’s great success stories, Elon Musk springs to mind immediately. He goes forward, got knocked over, came back, went again, got knocked over, came back. You don’t normally get it right first time.

And I think we’ve had a bit of that here at OpenMarkets. We’ve looked at some strategy ideas which we didn’t end up moving forward with, but that was the right decision to do. We came back, we regrouped as a board and we go again. So when I think about that DeFi I talked about, that’s been a dissection of the last 6 months and that does get us really excited and that one I think we’re not going to come back from. I think that is going to be…

Dexter Cousins
I think the challenge is it’s a bit, I use this analogy all the time, but if we’re talking about 24/7 on demand streaming, any video game, movie, song, whatever you want, right? Like we’re kind of still in the CD, MP3 stage but we’re kind of not, we’re still 10, 15 years away from the kind of the nirvana of what we’ve got

Dan Jowett
That change. Yeah. Does it make you feel that it’s…

Dexter Cousins
Well, I think it kind of makes me feel, yeah, I guess grateful that I’ve seen that kind of journey, right.

Dan Jowett
Well, it’s a journey. Sorry to interrupt you but we were talking like everybody does. We’re talking about AI. We got an AI consultant in here two days a week at the moment sitting with everyone from ops to product to marketing to finance about how we can look at the world differently and myself actually and everyone talks about AI now which is great and they should be doing at speed but you go back three, four years, not really I don’t think in most businesses. And I think if we really challenged ourselves, I think as a leader, unless you’ve got people in the business like we have now, I won’t name him or embarrass him but he’s just phenomenal, some of the things that we’re looking at implementing for in particular just blows my mind. We haven’t even got going. We have not even got going.

Dexter Cousins
I think this is what I try to kind of get across to everybody is, particularly when it comes to this DeFi space, is just because you don’t see it doesn’t mean it’s not happening. And I think we kind of can fall into this trap of living in our bubbles and kind of talking to the same people. And for me one of the benefits I think I’ve got of just being broad across fintech, when I say fintech, it covers everything, is that you see all of these different kind of worlds and it’s kind of I get this view of seeing what’s real and what’s not, what’s hype and what isn’t.

Dan Jowett
Yeah. And you need to get out and about. So we’ve been up to Singapore twice this year, maybe three times actually. Two conferences, Token, you’ve been to that I know, Token last month, and we did the AI conference rather in about June I think it was and you need to get on a plane and go meet new people, network with new people, talk to new people, whether they’re from Hong Kong or Singapore or the States. If we just stay in Australia or in London or wherever we might be it’s not enough. You really need to hear what’s going on offshore and I think that’s where a lot of the inspiration for some of the things we’re looking at has definitely…

Dexter Cousins
So I think there’s all of these things that are starting to play out. And the challenge, I guess, is kind of picking the right time. And we saw this with streaming, right, where you had Quickflix who copied the Netflix model and put it here in Australia, trying to put streaming out. The infrastructure couldn’t…

Dan Jowett
Yeah. Well, it’s a difficult one actually because again, it goes to the point you made before about allocation of capital for investment. Because if I think about that DeFi strategy that we’re looking at here, because of the regulatory licence upgrades and because of the partnerships and all the different aspects that hang around it, it’s not an overnight thing. This is a 2-year journey to sort of get to that end point and that will evolve as we move through that time. Maybe not two years, but my point is it takes time. You need to be patient. You can’t set one course and just stay on it. You need to be ready to move because again, the technology keeps moving, the regulatory environment keeps moving.

Dexter Cousins
Yeah. If we’re looking kind of 10, 20 years in the future, and I think this is where kind of Redbelly Network for me is, I think that very much is the glimpse into the future that’s here now. How do you see us bridging those gaps? I talked about moving from VHS to CD to DVD and MP3 and then streaming. What do you see as the kind of next step that we’ve kind of got to get to, to kind of move this journey along?

Dan Jowett
Yeah. Well, I think first of all, for a business like ours, we’re fortunate because we’ve got this existing business here already that’s growing and maturing. So whatever happens on that DeFi side as we build it out, we’ve got this great growing business here. And as I said before, I just like this idea of convergence. I just don’t know when it’s coming, right? Three, five, could be 15 years. I don’t think so. But they will converge. And will the other one go? Maybe not, but they might be running. I don’t know. That’s the future.

So how do we get to that convergence? In this country, we need the regulatory frameworks to continue to mature as they are. Consultation papers keep coming out. Industry participation and there’s way more happening here than I think sometimes people recognise. Why that is I couldn’t tell you actually. So some really really good stuff obviously happening and you’d be across that as your listeners would. So that needs to move forward and it needs to continue to move forward at a good pace I think, because what Australia doesn’t want is to fall a long way behind.

In Asia would point to Singapore and Hong Kong I think in particular, of developed markets that have got a better established framework around this than perhaps we have here today, and as I say, you don’t want regulatory arbitrage, right? That’s not a good thing either and Australia has a phenomenal law system across everything it does in financial services, is a broad category, and it should be leading in this category as well.

Dexter Cousins
Now I want to talk a little bit more about the culture here and what it’s like to work here. You talked about the town hall earlier. How would you describe the culture here and kind of why people turn up at the office?

Dan Jowett
We have a three-day in, just on that, and some days are quieter like Fridays in the city as you would know walking around are quieter but we find there’s a really good balance on the three days. Some do four, some do five. Three works really well. I don’t want to change that. It was a change to what I was used to in previous lives, if that’s the right word. And it works really well. I think if you empower talented people who, as I said before, are on that journey, if they want to go home and pick their kids up from school at 4 and then come back online for 2 hours in the evening, if the job gets done, fantastic. Right. And I think when you give people that freedom and it works for the teams, it really works for the business.

So we have a lot of that. So I think that empowerment is huge. We need to keep quite agile and entrepreneurial here. We have very open engagement with staff. When we started talking about AI a couple of years ago, a number of people put their hands up. It was really good actually. We didn’t make massive progress. We looked at things and we recognised we probably didn’t have the right skill set for some of that which is why we have a consultant in now a couple of days.

But it’s really interesting. His feedback was he goes into a lot of businesses. He goes, “Everybody here is so engaged. You’ve got that, how can we do things differently? How can we do things better? Everyone’s got their eyes and ears open about that because you don’t often see that in a business.” Now, I suppose because we’re a bit of a fintechy business, you would expect that compared to maybe I don’t know a different part of the industry, let’s say, but that’s what works here and everyone’s on that journey like I said before and feel quite privileged to lead.

Dexter Cousins
Yeah, there’s a lot of talk at the moment about the kind of 996 and working hard again and all of those things and for me if you’re going to choose this world I say to everybody, if they’re looking for flexible hours that’s great, it’s 24/7. That’s not suggest that you’re going to be working 24 hours a day 7 days a week, choosing something like this becomes your life

Dan Jowett
because it’s hard to switch off, isn’t it, these days, and phones have changed

Dexter Cousins
By that is, kind of Sunday night 11:00 p.m. and an idea comes to you.

Dan Jowett
Yeah.

Dexter Cousins
Right. Like it’s kind of hard when you’re involved in something like this or you’ve got your own business or it’s hard for you to go back to sleep.

Dan Jowett
Yeah.

Dexter Cousins
Right. You kind of might just have to go and do an hour or two hours on it.

Dan Jowett
Yeah.

Dexter Cousins
And I think the challenge is that creativity and inspiration doesn’t come between 9 and 9 six days a week, right? It comes whenever you

Dan Jowett
It comes whenever you do, big time. I think it does. I mean for me personally I wonder why it is we’re all working harder and longer hours than say 20 years ago with all the advancements in what we’re doing.

So take AI by way of example. We know we can do things in seconds that would take people days and days before. We’re still working a 5 day week which comes to be a 7-day week sometimes to your point. Now, if you look to some of those Scandinavian countries that have had great success, I think Norway is a key one where they dropped to 4 days a week across a number of sectors and they saw productivity increase. I just would love everybody around the world to have a good look at that because even if you’re down to four days a week and you’re sort of recharging, you’ll still get stuff done if you need to.

I think for everybody’s mind, body, and soul, you have to get the balance. You do, I think in periods different people, different teams have peaks and troughs, right? If you’re in finance, it’s around year end. If you’re on a trading desk, it’s around volatility and so on and so forth. So, you do get used to that. I think you have got to then take time out to celebrate success, right? Even small things are really important like that. And we do that really well here actually. We have a sort of a monthly prize winner if you like for things that might have happened either internally or from client feedback every month. And we recognise them and we go through why that is. And you got to celebrate success.

Dexter Cousins
And what kind of people would you say are successful? Yeah. What are the qualities that they tend to share?

Dan Jowett
Yeah. Well, I use the word entrepreneurial a few times and just thinking about things a bit differently are really important and more so in some areas than others. Product would be good place for that. Maybe the back office less so, but we certainly have that here. And I want people here who want to be here. Yeah, when we do interviews from junior staff to senior leaders, you got to want to be here because this isn’t like going to work at a big bank where you got your big teams and you’re doing all your meetings. This isn’t that place.

You want to be able to, I use analogy, up on the balcony, down on the dance floor, right? You need to be as a leader up on that balcony looking down on the dance floor making those strategic decisions. But we’re a small business, so you need to be down on the dance floor sometimes doing the dance with the rest of the team. And that takes a particular type of person for more senior roles. And if that’s not for you, this isn’t the place to be frank. And that’s great because it’s a two-way thing. And the worst thing is you come into the business expecting something different to what it turns out to be.

Dexter Cousins
So we get some great talent listening to this podcast and watching on YouTube. And if people are interested in finding out more about careers, Dan, where’s the best place for them to

Dan Jowett
want to talk to industry leaders like you, Dexter, I think. But I’m always happy to, if people want to ping on LinkedIn or similar, we always want to be talking to talent, right? As a leader, you’d be silly not to. I actually frequently have coffees with people who are not necessarily looking for roles, but just having those conversations. It works both ways. I get a lot of value out of that as well.

Dexter Cousins
And we obviously get a lot of fun listening and tuning in as well. If they could see that there’s potential of kind of leveraging the OpenMarkets solution, what’s the best way for them to find out?

Dan Jowett
That would be via websites. It’s really clear there where to go if you’re whatever type of business you are. So fintech, takes you to the APIs and the sales desk on there, for advice and so on. So that’s a good gateway in and good place to start. But again, I’m always happy to take direct messages on LinkedIn.

Dexter Cousins
Yeah. Well, Dan, it’s been fantastic having you on. Really fascinating chat and thanks for a glimpse into what I think we both agree is probably an inevitable

Dan Jowett
Exciting times. Yeah.

Dexter Cousins
We’re just kind of unsure as to when.

Dan Jowett
Yeah. Great. Dex, well, thank you for having me. Been great to chat.

Dexter Cousins
Thanks. As always, folks, you can connect with me on LinkedIn and Twitter. If you’re new to the show, make sure you follow us or subscribe and like on YouTube. If you’re coming back, thanks so much for your support. It really does mean a lot. Until the next episode, keep…

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