Skip to main content
Talk to us ↗

Podcast

Rob Lincolne – Paydock.

December 13, 2024 · Hosted by Dexter Cousins

About this Episode

Dexter Cousins welcomes Rob Lincolne, Founder & CEO of Paydock to the latest episode of the Fintech Chatter Podcast.

Rob shares Paydock’s unique position in the payments ecosystem with a deep-dive into payments orchestration and the importance no-code solutions provide in Fintech innovation.

He discusses the challenges of attracting top talent, emphasising the complexities of building a global team operating on opposite sides of the world. He also highlights the resilience of the tough conditions his team in Ukraine has endured over the last few years.

Rob shares with Dexter his daily routines and the importance of maintaining a healthy work-life balance as a founder of a global Fintech venture.

About Rob Lincolne

Rob Lincolne is an accomplished entrepreneur with extensive experience in the payments industry. As Founder and Co-CEO of Paydock, Rob is dedicated to transforming the way we transact through the creation of the world’s most trusted payment orchestration platform.

His entrepreneurship journey began in Sydney 2007 when he founded a digital marketing agency specialising in the not-for-profit sector.

The Paydock vision arose when he identified the need for better integration between financial institutions and their merchant clients. Paydock’s innovative approach is aimed at unlocking the fintech market’s true benefits.

Before founding Paydock, Rob worked in merchant payments across retail and charitable sectors. A self-taught software engineer, he is known for developing cutting-edge payment and propensity modelling software. He has pioneered various digital and experience design systems.

Rob has also founded a successful “near-shore” talent placement agency in Ukraine, connecting software engineers with fintechs around the globe.

About Paydock

Paydock is a payments orchestration platform, leading the way in resolving costly issues for merchants who navigate disparate, fast-moving and fragmented payment service (and related) providers. Our innovative API-first technology harmonises payment, fraud, identity and other vendors (such as Stripe, PayPal, etc.) through a single interface while satisfying compliance, security, technical and other functional needs.

Key Takeaways

  • PayDock addresses the technology gaps between large banks and fintech.
  • Adopting a no-code solution within the payments industry is essential for merchant adoption of fintech.
  • Orchestration should be about enabling merchants, not commoditising services.
  • Building a global team has been crucial for scaling the business.
  • Customer relationships are vital in the fintech space.
  • The future of payments is modular and interoperable.
  • Attracting talent requires offering challenging problems to solve
  • Character and resilience are more important than skills.
  • The hype in fintech is over; it’s time for real business.

Chapters

00:00 Introduction to Fintech Chatter

01:59 Understanding PayDoc and Its Unique Position

06:06 Innovation and the No-Code Approach

10:58 Defining Payments Orchestration

14:58 The Journey of PayDoc: From Australia to the UK

19:09 Building a Global Team and Talent Acquisition

21:54 Supporting Teams During Crisis: The Ukraine Experience

25:32 Attracting Top Talent in Fintech

29:26 The Importance of Character in Hiring

33:56 Resilience and Overcoming Adversity

38:33 Current Trends in Fintech

42:14 Daily Routines and Habits of Founders

45:06 Looking Ahead: PayDoc’s Future Plans

Links

Visit Paydock website

Connect with Rob Lincolne

Connect with Dexter Cousins

Learn more about Tier One People

Links from this episode.

More on payments on Fintech Chatter.

Full transcript.

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

Dexter Cousins
Fintech Chatter podcast, brought to you by Tier One People, the leaders in executive search for fintech ventures.

Hello and welcome to Fintech Chatter, the podcast where I chat with fintech leaders about their secrets to success. I’m Dexter Cousins, your host and the founder of Tier One People, the executive search firm dedicated to connecting high growth fintech companies with exceptional leadership talent. With a proven track record in placing top executives in mission critical roles, Tier One People is trusted partner for many of the world’s most recognisable fintech brands.

Today’s guest is Rob Lincolne from Paydock. Rob, welcome to the show.

Rob Lincolne
Thank you very much for having me Dexter, it’s great to be here.

Dexter Cousins
Your Fintech Chatter debut, and I’m pretty excited because, as people will have picked up from your accent, you’re an Aussie, but Paydock is a UK headquartered fintech. So yeah, really curious to find out what kind of drew that move. But before we do, would you mind telling our listeners a little bit about Rob Lincolne and a little bit about Paydock?

Rob Lincolne
Yeah, thanks Dexter, and it’s great to make my debut here. As you rightly deduced, I am Australian. I’m from the north of Tasmania, in Devonport. I’m very proud Tasmanian. I think if most Tasmanians have their way it’ll be its own democratic republic at one point, but look, very proudly Tasmanian. Been living in the UK since 2018, but started Paydock in 2015, and in fact we were one of the first residents of the Tyro Fintech Hub.

Dexter Cousins
I remember, yeah, the good old days.

Rob Lincolne
Yeah, one of the first through the door there. I remember going back and to my wife, I think we’re fintech. I think that’s a name, I think that’s a thing. So it was a while ago.

Dexter Cousins
Yeah, so tell us a little bit about Paydock and the big problem that you solve.

Rob Lincolne
Yeah, thanks Dex. Look, the problem that we solve, the way that we look at it, it’s one of the biggest problems in fintech today and it’s a double-sided problem. On one hand you’ve got large acquiring banks, large acquirers. They occupy about 80% of the acquiring volume today, that’s online payments processing or offline, it’s really card processing. And you’ve got more fintechs than ever. So on one hand we have this incredible proliferation of new fintechs, alternative payment methods, buy now pay laters, fraud platforms, dynamic currency conversion, authentication, loyalty, you name it, right? The world has never had more fintech than exists today.

And at the same time you have large incumbent processors and platforms. I mean, some of this technology dates back to the 80s. You got fintech trying to get out to the market and then you have these large legacy tech platforms that can’t innovate fast enough. And so into the gap you’ve had people like Stripe and Adyen et cetera over the years, right? And they occupy 20 something per cent of the market share right now. But in reality, the problem that we’re looking at is that high 70% of payment processing right now, that’s trapped on these older systems, with merchants who are looking to shift to either the new incumbent fintechs or the new fintechs, or they’re looking for the incumbent bank to provide that capability.

So where Paydock sits, we sit between the large acquiring banks and their merchants, and essentially what Paydock does is we do two things. We keep the merchants happy in their relationship with their bank, and we provide a last mile distribution platform for fintech. So commonly this is known as payment orchestration, but where Paydock is unique is that we turn our focus on working with the incumbents, working with that large footprint of existing volume that’s looking for better capability but not really sure what to do.

And I think as acquiring heads towards a race to the bottom from a pricing point of view, the value’s got to move upstream. And so that value added services layer, whoever can provide the most efficient no code way of adoption of fintech is going to be the future where payments is going. So we want to help banks win, we want to help the incumbents win, we want to address that monster problem, the elephant in the room, which is what are we going to do with the 80%? Are they all going to move to Stripe, or is there another way of looking at the market?

And I think the market now is more modular, more interoperable, it’s more low or no code. And so I think we’re in for a very exciting season of payments, as Paydock at the forefront of, I guess, supporting the merchants that major banks have who want to be able to have Stripe-like capabilities but don’t necessarily want to move banks.

Dexter Cousins
Yeah, one of the things that distinguishes Paydock from many of the other hundreds and hundreds, if not thousands, of fintech startups that you mentioned about is the customers or the clients that you’ve got. Would you mind telling us and the listeners a little bit about some of the customers that you work with?

Rob Lincolne
Yeah, absolutely. We work with major banks, so major banks is our sweet spot. So in Australia we’re working with the Commonwealth Bank of Australia, where you work with them on a product called PowerBoard, and it enables their merchants to have world leading fintech while maintaining their relationship with Commonwealth Bank. We also work with a major retail group, which is the Coles, the Coles group in Australia, and their brands, providing orchestration services to them.

And globally we’re involved in opportunities in the GCC, in Africa, in LATAM, in UK, in North America. I mean, it is a major global problem that the traditional acquirers are looking to resolve it, and fundamentally it’s a single question. How do I keep my merchants? I need to retain my merchants, I need sticky merchants, and they have to deliver more value, but they can’t spend 500 million building a new platform from the ground up over the next five years. They need to do something faster, and Paydock’s the answer to that.

Dexter Cousins
So I guess in terms of your approach to innovation there, you kind of, you talked about no code. What has been the approach to innovation, and are you a tech-led innovator, finance-led innovator, what’s been the approach there?

Rob Lincolne
Yeah, that’s a great question Dexter. Interesting thing about my background is I’m not from the payments industry. I’ve been in the payments industry for over a decade now, but prior to that we spent a good seven or eight years working with merchants around the world, particularly in the not-for-profit sector. So my background is not-for-profit digital consulting. I did that in the US, the UK, Australia and other places.

And the problem that we saw there was merchants wanted access to the latest and greatest of fintech, but the distribution was always a problem for the fintechs and the merchants. If you would turn around and say here’s another great APM, right, here’s another buy now pay later, and the merchant say hey, that sounds great, how do I get it, and they say oh, here’s another API. Yeah, the merchant just goes, not another API please.

Dexter Cousins
Like, say it reminds me when I went to Singapore the first time and you go to pay by card, or about 15 different card terminals.

Rob Lincolne
Exactly, it’s the digital equivalent of the cards, right. And yeah, I know, I relate to you, and basically the merchant’s doing what you did as a consumer in Singapore. The merchant’s looking at like all these APIs, all of them different, SOAP based, REST based, all got their own schemas. A lot of them, particularly the BNPL, they just built from scratch, often without a sense of what should a standard look like.

And so if you go to the merchant and you say I’ve got this great product, will you please use it, and the merchant says cool, how do I get it, and then you say another API, it’s too hard, it’s too tiring, the merchant has too much to do. And you end up in the situation where major players have to sh enormous incentive payments to try and get merchants to adopt their products, and then something will change, the merchant’s strategy will change, and they realise it wasn’t what they wanted, they had to do something else.

And so this whole transition that we’re going through right now, from sort of API first, API integration at the merchant layer, to no code adoption at the merchant layer, is one of the most significant things that’s happening in payments today globally. If you want to succeed in fintech you’ve got to be able to say to the merchant just push a button, and you’ve got to be able to say it’s available today on the App Store, it’s just there.

And so what Paydock does, in orchestrator, we have a no code widget and it enables the merchant to go, oh, today I’m going to use that, push a button, it’s alive. So distribution becomes a case of push the button, or it’s already there, activated it on the phone just now for you, and it’s available for your consumers in a millisecond. And I think that’s the transformation that orchestration brings.

And yeah, we love coming back to our founding DNA. I love nothing more than when a fintech comes to me and says, look, these customers, or we want to enter this section of the market, can I get on the Paydock rail so that merchants can just push a button? That’s so much easier than handing the merchant a dictionary of APIs and somehow finding space in the road map for the next 24 months.

Yeah, you’re just scratching the surface of the challenges that come with continual API integration, like security, right? What happens when you’ve got API keys floating around, you forgot to hard code in, who hasn’t heard of those stories before? So you remove a whole part of security concerns, you increase speed to market, you increase consumer satisfaction, you increase convenience, you increase revenue because conversions go up because you’re giving consumers more choice.

The benefits of what we do is that last mile delivery layer, it’s exponential. And I think this is why we’re seeing an overall rise in orchestration as a whole, and I think it’s why we’re seeing major institutions look to it as a cure for the tech debt and a pacifier, or I would say a big value add for their merchants. Yeah, it just takes the problem away.

Dexter Cousins
This wasn’t in the questions, but I think you raised a valid point, and I think something that I hear more and more of, we’re kind of really very, very fond about buzzwords in fintech, whether it be embedded or orchestration, and I see a lot of people talking about payments orchestration and it isn’t necessarily true payments orchestration. So for the benefit of our listeners, can you define?

Rob Lincolne
Yeah, that took, it’s a really good question, and I sympathise with that, because I think we’ve gone from 2018, sort of early 2019, orchestration wasn’t a term, to all of a sudden everybody’s using it and we don’t know what it means anymore. Yeah, so I completely understand, and ourselves we’re wrestling with, as orchestration becomes a very wide category, how do we create differentiation?

I think orchestration at its purest form is about equipping merchants to access the fintech ecosystem at speed, at scale. It’s about being that enabler. So orchestration in its purest form is an enablement device, right? Paydock, we’re a software company in the payments space, we’re not a payments company. We try to be a payments company, there’s lots of payments companies out there, we’re a software company.

I think where orchestration maybe gave itself a little bit of a bad name was when it was associated with least cost routing, race to the bottom, a lot of this sort of commoditising, arbitraging sort of stigma. I’ve always resisted that, and I remember in the early days in Sydney, I remember having some meetings actually in Circular Quay here in Sydney, only metres away from where I’m sitting today, where we were encouraged to partner with an acquirer to facilitate some volume routing, least cost routing, take clip of the ticket, and we violently resisted that because we always felt like the value was further upstream. The value was about getting fintech into the hands of the merchant and the consumer.

So I think orchestration of its lowest form is the least cost routing sort of arbitrage, pit everybody against each other kind of proposition. That is not actually what good orchestration is, I think that’s just a commodity device. I think orchestration is about get all the things in the hands of the merchant and allow them to create extraordinary experiences. And if you can deliver that value, that app store for fintech like value, where you’re an enabler, you’re a platform, everybody’s winning, and if everybody’s winning then you’ve got a job for life.

And so I think orchestration should be that, as it should be in its pure form, an enabler, not a commoditising. I think orchestrators really sit on two sides of that spectrum, right? So we aim to be on the enablement side, we’ve always been that, we’ve been religiously so, and I think for a long time may have been the only orchestrator that had that position in market. But trust me, people didn’t believe us until they saw it actually working. So it’s taking some time to build the brand.

Dexter Cousins
You mentioned how you were encouraged to become this kind of arbitrage, least cost routing solution, and talking about the early days of when you were in the Tyro Hub and launching the business, that was kind of fintech 1.0, where it literally was arbitrage and process improvement, right? Like, maybe there a nice little UX on the front of something. Seeing the journey that you’re on now, 10 years later, kind of that original vision is now coming through. I want to kind of talk to you about that journey, right? So 2015 you’re in the Tyro Hub, was it 2020 when you moved to the UK? I’m trying to kind of get my memory back in hold.

Rob Lincolne
Yeah, it was 2018 actually, 2018.

Dexter Cousins
So what prompted the move to the UK then?

Rob Lincolne
Yeah, I was a very naive founder, I’m not going to lie. I knew almost nothing about anything, and we had this idea from my years of consulting around the world in the payment space for not-for-profits, where they were like, hey, I want PayPal, now I don’t want PayPal, hey, I want this, no, I don’t want it, I want to work with this bank but I need webhooks. So we had this really sort of mechanical knowledge of how the industry worked. So we thought if we build this product they will come, and like every great founder it was build it and they’ll come fallacy, and then you quickly realise that you actually need to commercialise it, and then you realise you have to just distribute it, and each one of those step ups is exponentially harder than the one before.

So in 2018 we realised that we basically had every VC and every bank in Australia say no to us. Stripe was going to wipe the floor with us, merchants weren’t leaving banks, this product really didn’t have a future, and nobody liked a smelly arbitrage proposition, which we absolutely weren’t, but there was I think some stigma. So in 2018 there was a lot more happening in fintech in the UK, and in particular we had the opportunity to do some work around omni channel, pin on glass. We still love omni channel, we did quite a lot there now, which is really exciting.

And so we had the opportunity to partner with the fintech out of Level 39 in the UK, and honestly we did that for a couple years, kept the lights on, kept the dream alive and enabled us to prove the value that pure enablement orchestration had in the market. And so come 20221, ironically enough we started getting some great traction in Australia, were able to prove our value to the ecosystem, to the payment processors in Australia, and it started to work, and the light started to come on, and as we delivered more and more value into the market and more and more people talked about it, we established quite a footprint here in Oz. And we were able to use that to educate the global audience who is now looking at us from London, and the rest is history, as orchestration is now a real thing and people are using it to solve all kinds of great problems.

So I think the move to London was a survival, it was a pure survival move, and then it ended up becoming quite a strategic one in hindsight. We always knew, if this problem was as big as we thought it was, you’d needed more room to grow, and so London was sort of an organic step anyway. But to be honest, like most startup, survival is the rule, right?

Dexter Cousins
Yeah, survive your way.

Rob Lincolne
Exactly, live to fight another day, isn’t it? You earn the right to the next six months, I think. Yeah, kind you hession I seem to have every day of my life for the last 10 years.

Dexter Cousins
In terms of this, where you’re at now then, Rob, how many people are you all together at Paydock?

Rob Lincolne
Yeah, so we’re about 100 people here. We’re at 65, 67% engineering, so we’re very heavily engineering focused business. We’re very heavy on engineering. We’ve got a 2-year road map we can’t seem to get through fast enough. For anybody in the space and other orchestrators out there, you know this is really hard, what we’re doing, it’s not easy. The payments world is very fragmented, very diverse, making things work together well is hard work, but it is the future, right?

And if you can solve a big problem and give the merchant a wonderful experience, you’ve built an incredible business. And I remember Tobias from Shopify talking about, in any B2B sale there’s three parties and two heroes, and you’re not the hero. And I feel like that’s Paydock’s role. It’s not to be the hero, it’s to help the fintechs get to the merchants and ultimately to the consumers.

Dexter Cousins
Yeah, you mentioned there about the team. I think one of the advantages of being in UK is just its proximity, it’s not a lot less isolated than Australia. Time zone wise it tends to be a little easier there as well. What kind of advantages did the geography have as you were looking for talent and starting to scale the business?

Rob Lincolne
Yeah Dexter, we had a lot of problem with talent in the early years. I think being in the UK really helped. We actually had, still have a pretty significant engineering contingent in Ukraine. So we established that before the war, before Russia invaded Ukraine. One of my favourite memories about the story so far was the way our customers rallied behind the company and the team at the beginning of the war.

And we now have little hubs in Europe, across Europe, we have access to pretty deep talent pools across Europe. We still have some of our team in Ukraine, which is really wonderful, and we support them, but it’s certainly given us the ability to pull down world class talent into the business when we need it. So as our CTO used to run the wholesale banking stack at ING, this kind of global experience that we find in Europe, being able to deploy that directly into Australian banks and Australian brands is actually something I’m really proud of.

We want to have world class talent, we want to make it available to Australian brands, and we want to make it available globally as well. So London and Europe made good sense. I think the time zone one, I think we can make it more of an issue than it really is if I’m being honest. I think it has advantages as well as disadvantages, and yeah, it’s just about how you manage it.

Dexter Cousins
Yeah, I’ve got a client of mine and he had a head of engineering that was based in the hdes. They would call him the code fairy, because every time there was a problem they’d let them know and they’d go home, come back in the morning and it was all fixed.

Rob Lincolne
It was fixed, yeah, basically.

Dexter Cousins
It does have its advantages if you can get people in the right spots, in the right time zones.

Rob Lincolne
That’s right. Look, I think definitely the benefits outweigh them, yeah, outweigh the challenges.

Dexter Cousins
You talked about some of the team based in the Ukraine, and obviously it’s been awful time and terribly tough. I guess first of all, kind of what were some of the things that you did as a business, I guess, to try and kind of support your team, and what were the learnings from that as well? We talked about the challenges of startups and sometimes we can kind of overdramatise the challenges that come with it, and then you have an event like the Russian Ukraine war, it brings a lot of things into context. What was the kind of experience that you had as a leader going through that, and what did you learn about yourself, and what were some of the things that perhaps changed your view around how to manage a crisis and support your team through tough times?

Rob Lincolne
Dexter, I think I’m still, even years later, processing those early days. Yeah, we’re still working through it as a team. We still got team there, family there. I think because of Covid, operationally there really wasn’t a change for Paydock, in terms of we used to doing remote. It certainly changed my world view, it’s changed the respect I have for the strength of the Ukrainian people. When you’re sitting in Zooms and it’s, oh, I need to go down to a bunker, there’s an air siren gone off, not sort of the experience I grew up thinking, oh, that’s going to be part of my daily life now.

And when the war started, the first thing I did was turn on the news and there’s our office, with Russian bombardment happening on the hill behind our office, with our offices in the front and there’s all the bombs.

Dexter Cousins
Yeah. Wow.

Rob Lincolne
It was on the BBC, and I’m like, oh, I was like holy, that’s my office. Sorry.

So I think we did everything we could to get our team to safety. The team rallied up, just so impressed by the resilience and the courage of the team, and then we wrapped our arms around them to the full extent that we were able to. I think, feel like in some ways Covid was a real blessing in terms of setting us up for this, in terms of way we manage our code, the way we manage releases, our pipelines, everything like that. And then I think the way that we saw our team also rally internally to support and wrap arms and help with transport and migration, everything else, and I know a lot of other companies did exactly the same thing.

And then the thing I think, one of the things I’m most proud of and humbled by, was even the response of some of our customers. I’m happy to name drop here, but the guys at Coles all recorded a beautiful video and sent it around to the team to express their concern and care, and I was just blown away by that level of, and I think the sense of the partnership orientation we have to our customers and relationships. Yes, we’re absolutely transparent and we have deep partnerships with our customers because what we’re doing is hard, you’re deep in the trenches with our customers and it takes that level of trust and relationship between us.

And I think to see all those things come together, us supporting the team, our customers incredible support during that time and understanding, and then the resilience of the team on the ground, it’s something I could never imagine happening in a million years. Tragic and beautiful at the same time. Yeah, and look, we hope that it comes to an end soon, we really do.

Dexter Cousins
Absolutely. And talking about talent, I mean, it’s always a challenge for, you’ve name dropped a couple of competitors there, Adyen and Stripe, I mean, got great reputations, yeah, huge budgets to attract talent. One of the challenges that I have is if I go and try and headhunt from those places, they get paid pretty well, yeah. Have you gone about attracting that calibre of talent that you’ve mentioned to Paydock, where I’m assuming you ain’t got the budgets to be able to match what some of your competitors are throwing at people?

Rob Lincolne
Yeah, I think two things there. One, I don’t really view Stripe and Adyen as competitors. I think they’re in a different lane. We support them as processors, if there’s merchants who need them, that’s fine. It’s sort of a different set of problems, which is how do we help your major incumbent banks provide exceptional fintech to their customers. And that means our banks end up competing with Adyen and fintech, our banking customers or our large merchant customers, but in the reality we sort of don’t exist in the same world. But like everything in payments, everything’s overlaps.

Yeah, but when it comes to talent, I guess the people that we like to hire, people who like to solve really big problems in innovative ways. So while we may not be able to compete on budget, what we can do, and hopefully in time we’ll be the Adyen, we’ll be the Stripe, people who can, but I think the people that we want around the table are the creative thinkers who want to solve really big hairy problems and stretch themselves and do something truly innovative.

And it was amazing to see Paydock won, we won the best fintech banking partnership at the Pay360 Awards in London a few weeks ago, and to see that the industry is recognising what we’re doing is truly innovative, solving a large problem. I think that’s really exciting to some people, to say look, here’s a really big hairy problem, if we get it right we can change the world. 80% of acquiring volume is stuck in this old way of doing payments, let’s bring them into the no code fintech enabled future.

And to see the industry recognising that as a different way of doing payments, a completely different way of doing payments, is really exciting. No longer is it about the form factor, no longer is it about the specific instrument, the lines between online and offline more blurry than ever, and we have to do something different, because as we saying before, just a million APIs, go for your life, is not the future of payments, but there’s definitely a million vendors out there and we want to capitalise on them more. And I think that’s a really interesting problem for people who love payments and want to solve these kind of problems.

And so we actually see quite a lot of inbound resumes and requests from people in the incumbent saying, look, I really like what you’re doing there, I can see how this solves a lot of the problems I’ve seen in my role for the last 10 years, maybe I can help you solve it for us and others. So that kind of recognition is really exciting. So I think great talent is about great problems to solve, and also about great culture, and I think giving people a lot of room to stretch and flex and be creative.

Dexter Cousins
Yeah. Are there any other qualities, other than that kind of creative, wanting to build, wanting to problem solve approach, or that there any other qualities that you kind of have found over your years as a founder, that, I’m sure you’ve made some hiring mistakes as well, like, look, I’ve got to make sure that they’ve got these five qualities, and I’ve got a system or a method for being able to test, yeah, kind of that quality?

Rob Lincolne
Like, I think Dexter, I’d love your feedback on this, you have much more experience than me in hiring.

Dexter Cousins
But my experience isn’t as painful as yours though, right? Well, that’s right. I see what happens when it goes wrong, I might have to try and fix it, but I don’t get to kind of deal with it, right?

Rob Lincolne
That’s a, well, help me with this then. I think my biggest mistakes have come when I’ve over indexed on the resume and under indexed on character and tenacity and resilience. Yeah, I think skills can come very quickly, and we live in this AI enabled, instant learning world, and particularly when you’re doing something new, like the last thing you want to do is just say, well, this is what we did at insert large brand here for the last 10 years. We don’t want to repeat the mistakes of the past when creating the future. And so really under indexing on resilience, tenacity, creativity, and over indexing on, hey, what logos were in the resume, I’ve probably regretted the time that I’ve oriented myself towards the latter rather than the former.

Dexter Cousins
Yeah, 10 times. I think that’s a common kind of learning process, right, which is everybody gets excited by the big names and then you kind of make all these assumptions about how great the person is without getting into the character. And I think, look, you’ve got some real experiences now of that. You got a whole team where you’ve seen their character in the toughest of times, right? And I think that’s the hardest thing to be able to assess for during an interview process, is that everybody’s awesome when everything’s awesome, right, saying when things are tough, that’s when you find out who is really awesome and who actually isn’t a team player, maybe doesn’t have the character traits that you’re looking for.

And I think the only thing that you can do really in an interview process is to dig deep into those life experiences that people have had, right? And like, we have they had to overcome adversity, right? And it could be that they were younger and their parents divorced and they moved country, or whatever it is. Like, everybody’s had a something go wrong in their life. And I think, without having to kind of pry, it’s just understanding, hey look, kind of what was the process that you went through to deal with that setback.

And I think when people give you setbacks that are kind of pretty minor, it’s a good indicator that they don’t really grasp the environment that they’re about to enter. I think that’s the biggest issue that I see, Rob, that, particularly for founders who, you’re so close to the business, you want it to be successful, you so want the person to be the right hire, and so you tend to oversell as well, not just over index on the person but oversell what your environment’s like and the support and the resources available to that person. And so what you get is this massive mismatch, right, of both sides, the mismatched expectations, and that’s why nine out of 10 people who typically leave large tech firms and large corporates to go to a business on the journey that Paydock’s on will leave within the first six months. It’s just because it’s just not the right environment.

And I think that you’ve got the right idea about testing on that wanting to solve the problem, because that is definitely what I would say is a common thread in all of the people who we’ve put in front of our clients. Yes, salary is important, but what’s the mission, what am I going to be building, who am I going to be building it with, am I going to be able to point it to my family or my kids and say, hey, I was part of that. If somebody’s genuine about that stuff, I think that’s a real strong indicator that they’re the type of personality that you want in the business.

I always look at hiring like it’s an investigation, right, kind of trying to build a case for or against the person being right, and you kind of find evidence along the way, and kind of some of it circumstantial, some of it’s right, but there’s data everywhere to be able to kind of put together a picture of an individual.

I remember interviewing somebody who had gone from sleeping rough in Sydney to a very significant role in about 8 years, and I so badly wanted to hire them because I was like, you told me about your resilience as your first, and he said because of my history people didn’t want to talk to me. I’m like, well for you, you’re straight to the top of the list because you’ve had that resilience, you’ve had that adversity. And when somebody comes to me and they say oh, well, I was the exco or I was the ex this, I was the ex that, I’m like, that doesn’t really tell me anything about who you are or how you respond when things get really tough.

Yeah, I wish people come to me and say look, this person overcame this and they overcame that, I know that they won’t quit and they’re tenacious. I’m like, well they could do pretty much any role. The reality is, right, like you haven’t got the time to be able to train and develop people. The kind of development happens on the job and it happens every time you break through that resilient moment, right, where you didn’t quit. That’s where the development happens. You try as much as you can to guide people, but I think a lot of people’s learning and growth comes through them breaking through those barriers and those moments, not what somebody’s told them and shown them.

Rob Lincolne
I love that. Every decision to not quit builds resilience. I love what you said there. It’s just every time you make that decision to not quit, you’re stronger for it. Yeah, I absolutely love that. I’m so encouraged.

Dexter Cousins
I’m not into failure porn, right? It’s, I’ve seen people really close to me hang around too long when they should have quit, and so I don’t think it’s not necessary to say you should never quit, but to know that if you can hang around, like, there’s a game of survival, right, in your game. You talked about this earlier, right, like you just had to survive. You’ve earned the right now to start to see your vision. Those days when everybody was telling you to get into arbitrage, you’re like, no, we can see something much bigger. You hung around to see the day where actually, I was right, right, like, kind of made the right call.

And I think that’s the hardest thing, right, in the innovation game, is when you’re visionary, it’s amazing, right, but if you haven’t got the timing right, it’s like you’re not successful. And I think this is the biggest, to me it’s the biggest mind screw of being an entrepreneur, is you can have the vision, the work ethic, the skills, the capability, the charisma, all of that stuff, but if the timing’s wrong.

Rob Lincolne
Yeah, and look, I’ll be the first to admit we were too early, and I think the only benefit that came from being too early was the opportunity to not quit when you’re tempted and the resilience that comes through that. Yeah, but you were right, our timing was way off at the beginning, and we learned other lessons, and we managed to survive till the timing was right, and I think that’s a message for a lot of other startups. You might not be wrong, it might just be the right time, so hang in there.

Dexter Cousins
Yeah, exactly. Now, you’ve obviously been around for quite some time. What’s your analysis of fintech at this moment in time? You’ve got operations here in Oz, in the UK, across Europe, you got a really good view as to, I guess a sense check as to where we’re at globally at this point. Are you excited, optimistic, or do you think we’ve had the kind of worst of us behind us now, or do you think we’re in, 202’s got more kind of challenges ahead?

Rob Lincolne
I think we’re down to real business now. I think the hype is over, I think it’s down to solving real problems and creating actual value. A few years ago I would have said fintech is like, here’s a new wallet, here’s a new APM, here’s a new BNPL. Like, I wouldn’t say that that was really adding like sustainable value to people’s lives, like it wasn’t infrastructure. And I think the season that we’re in right now is like, there infrastructure level problems that need solving, because we’ve had so much pumped into the system, we’ve all looked at that and gone, whoa, whoa, that’s a mess, like, how do we actually make this all glue together, right?

And I think orchestrators have a central role in the future of payments. Done well, orchestration is infrastructure, orchestration is enablement, because someone’s got to clean up the kitchen and make it accessible to all the acquirers and merchants out there. And then if we do that, the future of payments is very exciting. If we create environment where it’s easy to create and deploy and reach the consumer with your new fintech through enablement platforms, at Paydock I’m hugely excited about that. So I know people felt like orchestration, we’ve talked about it for a long time, but I think as a concept it’s only just beginning to get into its groove.

And you look at the places that we’re working, our incredible pipeline, our great partners and customers, it’s just a testament to the direction of travel, and I think that’s because we are just solving a really practical problem that needs cleaning up. And so I think the hype days of fintech are definitely behind us. I think now we’re just problem solving, creating value, solving structural issues, and alongside that we’ll be able to see new innovation come through those new systems. And so look, we look forward to being at the front of that. Yeah, but I think the hype is definitely behind us and I think we’re just on with business now in the fintech world.

Dexter Cousins
Yeah, actually that’s the exact same synopsis that I made when I did the Singapore Fintech Festival review with Chris Rogers a couple of weeks back, and I think we both agreed as well that, hey, the overriding theme that we got from that festival was there was nothing new, bright, flashy and shiny, it was we don’t need any more shiny stuff, we just have to make, like the technology, we ain’t getting any kind of, we’re going to get incremental kind of improvements, we got to try and make all of this work together. So absolutely agree with you on that. I think it was kind of loud and clear message coming through at Singapore as well.

We’ve come to a wrap, but before we do, one thing that I always like to ask founders is just about, I guess, their daily habits and routines and life hacks. I’m not trying to turn into the Andrew Huberman show, but I think, look, our kind of mental and physical ability to, is critical to the success, right? And I think over this last couple of years it’s become a subject that I think a lot more of my listeners have wanted to understand, hey, like, what secrets do people have, what’s your typical day look like? Do you have any kind of routines that you stick to, or habits that you’ve got that you kind of just have to do, and if you don’t you feel crummy for the rest of the day? I’d love to know what yours are.

Rob Lincolne
Dexter, I’m learning. We’re always experimenting on ourselves, but as I get older it’s not automatic, and because we’re a global company, Paydock runs 24/7, I could be working 24 hours a day if I wanted. And so for me the lesson I’ve had to realise that I’m not as young as I used to be and I need to carve out time and space to do some healthy things. And so I did little things like intermittent fasting, cold showers, that even just try and do at least like 10 minutes of yoga and some meditation, some other things, just feed my soul and to feed and to allow my body to breathe when we’re spending so much time behind laptops has been really helpful. But I have to say the single thing that’s given me the most energy, ironically, has been intermittent fasting. Has been so good for me.

Dexter Cousins
So what one have you done, because there’s 37 different forms of intermittent fast?

Rob Lincolne
For me it’s the 18:6 thing. I try to do that, so eat in a six hour window, and more recently just if I can take a whole 24-hour to let my body be, look, it helps me a lot. Have more energy, more focus, more clarity. I don’t know why, it’s just the one thing that just worked really well for me. I’ve been very inspired by a gentleman by the name of Arthur Brooks, and, okay, he recently wrote a book called Strength to Strength, which to anybody listening out there, I can deeply recommend in terms of getting balance with your life and your health and your mental energy, and I think as a founder, not losing your family or friends on that process, which is an easy thing to neglect. Yeah, but he’s a good bloke.

Dexter Cousins
Yeah, awesome. Yeah, I’ll check that out. Before we wrap up, Rob, we’re at the end of a year, can you believe it? What can we expect from Paydock in 2025? A lot more delighted and surprised and thrilled on LinkedIn, right? Isn’t that what we’re all doing? Humbled, humbled Rob, humbled.

Rob Lincolne
I forgot that one, humbled. Dear, what does it world become. Look, I think we’re really focused on executing. I mentioned that we’re nearly 70% engineers, so we have massive road map that we’re just ploughing through, all of which is very innovative and built on the platform that we’ve developed over the last nearly better part of a decade. But things, thematics that we’re really excited about include omni channel, sort of no code workflow, and really making sure that from a white label point of view we do it in a way that banks can pick it up very quickly.

So I’m hoping that we’ll see a few more announcements of things that we’re doing in other continents around the theme of what we’ve done so successfully here in Australia. I think Australia is always been an adopter and an innovator, and we feel so pleased and thankful for our great customers here, and really seen as leading the way globally in payments. So we might be based in London, but in many ways Australia is really leading the way through the work that we do with our customers here.

Dexter Cousins
Brilliant. We’re listened to in over 40 countries, we have amazing talent listening to this show. If anybody’s interested in careers at Paydock, where’s the best place for them to go?

Rob Lincolne
You can send an email. Also, I’m very easy to find on LinkedIn, just drop me a message there, connect with me and I can hook you up.

Dexter Cousins
Fantastic. It’s been great to chat, Rob, thanks for coming on.

Rob Lincolne
Thank you for having me Dexter, it was a real joy.

Dexter Cousins
As always, folks, you can connect with me on LinkedIn. If you’re new to the show, make sure that you follow us on your favourite podcast player or head over to YouTube, Fintech Chatter TV, waai and follow us and hit that notification bell so you’ll get alerted every time you put up new videos. We’re going to have a load of new content coming out next year as well, so make sure that you follow us on YouTube. Until the next episode, keep well.

Fintech Chatter is brought to you by Tier One People, leaders in fintech executive search. We’ll help you bring in world class leadership talent to build world class fintech ventures, and you can find us at Tier One People.

← All episodes

More like this

Related episodes.

Looking to scale your fintech?

Talk to Tier One People ↗