When Should A Fintech Hire A Banker?

“The Revolut Country CEO search took six months. The brief changed 4 times as the company grew from 700 to almost 2000 staff during this time. Customer numbers went from 4m to almost 10m. When a company is growing that fast in a highly regulated sector like Banking, it creates a lot of complexity, meaning hiring becomes complex.”
dexter cousins - tier one people

Are You Startup Ready?

Often the “Fin” in Fintech would denote a heavy hitter from a bank being a winning hire, right?

In the fast paced environment of Fintech, we have noticed caution on the part of our clients in making such a decision.

The hesitation is bound in stereotypes. Banking is often viewed as a mired in red-tape, compliance (or lack of, in Australia), too many chiefs, too many meetings and nothing getting done. Huge amounts of resources and dollars are thrown at projects that never come to fruition. Whilst their Fintech competitors move with stealth and agility, innovating at much greater speed with minimal resources.

The role of an Executive Search Consultant is to challenge stereotypes and get clients to view each candidate on their merits. The view of not being a team player and rolling up your sleeves is often a misconception in banking, but there are plenty who refuse to conform to the stereotype of a banker.

Tier One People is bolstering our position as the leading Australian Fintech Executive Search firm. Australia's growing FinTech sector has seen a rise in the search for C-suite and leadership talent. Counting Revolut, TrueLayer, 10x, Klarna and Transferwise as some of the many companies seeking our assistance.

How bankers can take control of their job search.

A more proactive approach job seekers can take is to look at where your big banking skills can have an impact. Assessing whether a company is at start-up or scale up stage will also aid you in making a successful move to Fintech. Read this article on Fintech Career Advice to gain a better understanding at which stage of growth you are best suited to.

Before embarking on the search it is crucial to take a step back and ask yourself;

“How would I cope moving from a structured and heavily supported environment to a one of a specialist generalist”

The best advice we can give candidates looking to join a Fintech.

"Focus on impact. How many years you have worked somewhere doesn’t excite a founder, showing a founder how you can make/save the company millions of $$ does."

Showcasing your skills in 2020 also requires more savvy than ever before. Looking good on paper doesn’t get cut through anymore. If you are in the market looking to join a Fintech you need to have a plan in place and a goal in sight. You need to utilise all of the tools available, LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Podcasts. These are all channels where you get direct access to decision makers, people who can hire you.

You can showcase your skills and achievements, bringing them to life and not being blocked by gatekeepers and recruiters.

Does FinTech Need Your Banking Experience?

Dexter Cousins, the CEO and Founder of Tier One People, has interviewed more than 300 FinTech leaders on the subject of hiring. He firmly believes hirers should consider the lifecycle of a Fintech to assess where the best candidate fit is.

It's very difficult for anyone to move from a corporate job to an early stage startup. But with the rapid growth of tech companies, a startup can become an enterprise in 5 years. Examples include Stripe, Revolut and Australia's Afterpay.

It’s a difficult process identifying the right time for a banker to join a Fintech. The right person can definitely make a significant contribution as the company scales. Often times the right hire is made but at the wrong time, which ultimately means the hire is wrong.

Fintech careers special podcast

We get inundated with calls on a daily basis from candidates seeking a move to the shiny new world of ‘FinTech’. However, opening your pitch with "hey, I've got 20 years experience in banking, I want to work in FinTech" might not be the best way to impress people.

It's also important to make the distinction between a Finance business and a Software business. Are bankers better suited to a NeoBank or a platform provider. Fintech covers a wide range of businesses and making this distinction can really increase your chances of securing a move.

Judo Bank, Xinja, 86 400 and Revolut in Australia have all hired highly experienced bankers early in their growth. Judo and Xinja are both founded by highly experienced bankers who were driven to change the industry.

FinTech’s are at the cutting edge of innovation with far fewer resources than any bank. The reality is no founder or investor gets excited by somebody with twenty years experience in banking unless they can demonstrate previous success in a startup and they have skills currently not in the business which are mission-critical to success.

When Founders need help with hiring.

The recruitment process to join a Fintech can be almost as intense as the job itself. If you can't handle the intensity of the interview process, it's highly unlikely you will succeed in the job.

The thing to remember is that FinTech founders themselves may not have the breadth of experience in HR or Talent to make critical hiring decisions. Hiring for a startup is often a make or break decision. We’ve watched some companies flourish and others flounder because of it.

For a founder looking to hire, specialist FinTech recruiters are more easily able to identify those candidates who are the ”right cultural fit.” Assessing if someone will relish the challenge of working in a FinTech environment is very difficult using traditional interview techniques. And a specialist recruiter can provide far greater access to Talent than an ad campaign and direct networks, especially in talent short markets.

But to achieve these results a client needs to invite us 'into the tent'.

The key to success is communication

Being attuned to the changing demands of the business is vital to ensure success when hiring.

“The Revolut Country CEO search took six months. The brief changed 4 times as the company grew from 700 staff to almost 2000 during this time. Customer numbers went from 4m to almost 10m. When a company is growing that fast in a highly regulated sector like Fintech, it creates a lot of complexity. Hiring becomes even more complex.” commented Dexter Cousins.

There is a need for the modern executive search consultant to set realistic expectations with their clients. Being transparent and honest (even though clients may not want to hear what you have to say) is the only way to achieve lasting success. This approach is core to the values at Tier One People. The search for the “blue eyed unicorn" is never a realistic one and usually wastes significant time and business opportunities.

Ep 20: Open Banking Special

Join your host Dexter Cousins for a HUGE celebration! Open Banking is now live in Australia and in honour of this 'Game Changing' event for Fintech we have an amazing line up of guests. True pioneers!

In episode 020 of the Fintech Australia Podcast co-host is our good friend from True Layer, Marie Steinthaler.

And a bunch of our other friends crash the party 🥳🥳🥳 including:

Gareth Gumbly - Frollo https://frollo.com.au/app/
Stuart Low - Biza https://biza.io/
Rob Hale - Regional Australia Bank https://www.regionalaustraliabank.com.au/
Fred Schebesta - Finder https://www.finder.com.au/app
John Rayment - Identitii https://identitii.com/

019: Tim Cameron, Transferwise

In episode 19 Dexter Cousins is joined by Tim Cameron Australia New Zealand Country Manager for Transferwise.

Launched in 2011 with the vision of making international money transfers cheap, fair, and simple. Transferwise now has over 7 million customers and processes over US$5bn per month in international transactions

With investors including Sir Richard Branson and Paypal founders Peter Thiel and Max Levchin, Transferwise is one of the worlds most successful Fintech.

Dexter chats with Tim about his own journey with Transferwise and their growth plans for Australia.

017: Carolyn Breeze, GoCardless

Welcome to episode 17. Dexter is joined by Carolyn Breeze, General Manager for the ANZ region of GoCardless.

They’re a global payments platform designed for recurring payments whether they be, invoice, subscription, membership or instalment payments.

Processing more than $13bn each year, GoCardless is backed by major players in VC including Accel Partners, Salesforce ventures and Google Ventures.

Carolyn is a payments veteran holding senior positions at eBay, Paypal and winner of the ‘Woman in Payments’ award in 2019.

We talk about what it takes to launch an international Fintech in Australia and what makes GoCardless such a unique place to work.

Ep 16: Francine Ereira, Klarna

In episode 16 I am joined by Francine Ereira, Australia Country Head of Klarna.

Klarna was founded in 2005 in Sweden with the aim of making it easier for people to shop online.

They are now one of Europe’s largest banks providing payment solutions for 85 million consumers across 205,000 merchants in 17 countries.

Klarna offers a smooth one-click purchase experience that lets consumers pay when and how they prefer to.

Launching in Australia in February 2020, Klarna counts Commonwealth Bank, Sequoia Capital, Visa and even Snoop Dogg as investors

Francine shares her experience of working with Klarna and their unique approach to team, culture and structure.

Emma Weston - AgriDigital

Emma Weston is the CEO and a co-founder at AgriDigital, an AgTech meets FinTech company. They digitise and de-risk global Agri supply-chains with a current focus on the grain and cotton industries.

When did you found AgriDigital and how big are you now?

Emma: I've got two co-founders, Bob McKay and Ben Reed. We've actually all worked together for a really long time. There's lots of gray hair on the team and the main focus of our domain is agriculture and green supply chains. That's what we know really well, but throughout our history we've been building our own companies and our own tech and we've also been building out supply chain finance businesses.

We came together again in 2015 as a trio and founded AgriDigital. The mission, to build a single source of truth platform that was going to deliver simple, secure, and cost effective core supply chain operations technology to the SME sector in the supply chain.

And at the same time crucially provide access to working capital. That was the mission that brought us together. We had a small core team, with a couple of developers that we'd worked with previously, in previous businesses. And we're now at just a little over 40 people with operations in Australia and a team of 10 people in Manila in the Philippines. We're also now branching into North America, both the USA and Canada.

What Opportunities Are You Seeing In The US Market For AgriDigital?

Emma: Massive, just in terms of scale for us. To give everyone an idea, our target market is farmers and buyers, traders, and consumers of grain commodities. Our customers would be a dairy or a feedlot or a mill as an example, but also storage and logistics companies.

We are very much a whole of supply chain tech in terms of our offering and the market in the US and Canada. Well, let's just take North America. It has a combined market almost 15 times the size of the Australian market, and that’s just by an economic value, but in terms of number of participants, it's around about 25 times the size, so in terms of the number of users it's a massive market as well.

How did your make the move into the US. What were some of the challenges that you faced?

Emma: It's been pretty challenging this year, that's for sure. Location was critical. What is the best location in a massive market, where should we launch? How do we get the talent needed for our business? How do we easily access to our customer base? Our farmering customers in the US and Canada are spread across the country, which makes it difficult.

It's not possible to have an office footprint that's going to serve everyone. Location was a big challenge to begin with. Covid-19 has forced a change in our thinking. We recognise now our focus should not be on location, but on talent. Where is the talent and how do we tool up the talent and bring them on and use our culture as a bonding tool to ensure that we can all work together, even if we're not in the same location.

So that's been an initial challenge, also just maintaining and seeding a culture, if that makes sense. How do you take what you've built in Australia and take that across from a team perspective. Most of the challenges have been internal as opposed to the challenges of the market or the challenges of the customer, all the product, which we really do have a good handle on.

Emma Weston on the FinTech Australia Podcast.

How do you position blockchain with a Farmer? Even people in the FinTech industry often struggle to wrap their heads around blockchain and what it actually is.

Emma: I think it's a really interesting question as to whether we have deliberately tried to position anything at all, or whether we have allowed the product and the problem to speak for itself. Increasingly we have worked with our audience to understand that blockchain is not a silver bullet. It's not a solution in total. It's part of a toolkit that we need in order to be able to attack these really big problems around integrity and trust within our food and agricultural system.

Also, so we can deal with quite operational matters, such as back office efficiencies, trading book or position reconciliation in real time, payments and so forth. So we've really focused on three areas or three buckets as we call them.

One of those is around payment and transaction security and talking about that with farmers and others. Another one is around network and market efficiency. So the value that we all get by starting to come onto a common platform and common piece of infrastructure. And the third area is around the transparency and providence piece.

You've got a new Product WayPath.

Emma: You are being very kind giving me an opening here Dexter. We do have some good news to share, a new product Waypath launching on 26 June. It's a global product targeting farmers, not just in Australia and North America. It enables farmers to become their own trader, their own elevator or storage operator and to be able to enter the supply chain and manage their commodities into the supply chain in their own right.

We're really excited to be offering WayPath. It is a way to connect the digitalization on the farm with the digitization in the supply chain. We're basically providing a product that is the last link between farm digitization and supply chain digitization. It's going to be really, really big for farmers. We've got heaps of interest and engagement by our early adopter group.

It really is just the beginning. It's initial focus is our supply chain, but we have plans for Waypath to deliver our supply chain finance in the future. So we'll be bringing finance at the click of a button to farmers globally.

Ep 15: Shadi Haddad, Till Payments

In episode 15 Dexter is joined by Shadi Haddad, CEO of Till Payments.

Till are the payments people behind payments, enabling millions of transactions across the globe.

Founded and head quartered in Sydney,Till payments is another example of Aussie entrepreneurship and innovation in the payments sector.

And with a Series A raise in late 2019, Till is now in scaleup mode and rapidly growing.

Shadi talks through the journey so far and their growth plans, plus his thoughts on why Australia is a world leading innovator in payments.

014: The Blockchain Podcast

Dexter Cousins knows nothing about blockchain, so he gets back up by Alan Tsen, Chairman of FinTech Australia for a bumper podcast episode!

They are joined by;

- Caroline Bowler, CEO https://www.btcmarkets.net/
- Niki Arysinghe, Head of Partnerships https://www.r3.com/
- Claudio Lisco, APAC Director https://consensys.net/
- Katrina Donaghy, CEO https://civicledger.com/
- Emma Weston, CEO https://www.agridigital.io/

Alan Tsen you can follow on twitter.com/alantsen or sign up to his newsletter https://fintechradar.substack.com/

Ep 13: Katrina Donaghy, Civic Ledger

I'm joined by Katrina Donaghy, CEO of Civic Ledger. They build modern digital platforms to help governments transform the way entitlements and public resources are managed.

Winner of multiple awards Civic Ledger recently delivered a world first by using blockchain technology to facilitate a transparent and trusted way to trade water in Australia.

Katrina shares the highs and lows of a startup founder and her views on the future of blockchain and widespread adoption of the technology.

Marie Steinthaler -TrueLayer

Dexter Cousins speaks with Marie Steinthaler, VP Asia with Truelayer about Australia's 1st July launch of CDR and open banking.

Marie can you tell us more about TrueLayer?

TrueLayer is a platform that provides global access to open banking. And what I mean by that is essentially a way for our clients to securely access their end users bank data, and payment capability through one normalised platform. And we do that by going out and finding the best banking API's out there. We then normalise across many different countries, use cases, API protocols, you name it, and then package it up in a platform that our clients can build on top of and innovate on top of by using their customers banking data or payment rails.

For those that don't know what open banking is, Could you give a brief overview for an everyday customer?

I would define open banking as a manifestation of the belief that the data that you create when you bank is yours. So the information that you create, every time you pay for something, you send a payment, you use your banking services, that is your data, and you should be able to use that data to your benefit. Whether that be better pricing, better access to products, verify certain things about your person that may otherwise be hard to verify. And to just make it very easy for you to be in control of how that data gets shared and how it gets used.

The empowerment of the customer is very much at the heart of open banking. Beyond that, at an industry level, it’s about making the collaboration between financial institutions and fintechs more open and more focused around the customer. That's at the heart of it. And TrueLayer was born to enable such a collaboration.

You recently partnered with Revolut. How's that going?

Yeah, going great. And we love working with Revolut and other internationally minded high growth, tech forward businesses. I like to call them an execution machine. They're so good at putting new products out there and listening to their customers. They make it very easy for customers to adopt new things like open banking. And we're excited about some of the new things they're working on as well.

You are about to launch in Australia? What is it about Australia that's attractive to TrueLayer?

We are building a global platform. So while we started in the UK and expanded to Europe, when we looked at the rest of the world, it was really a case of looking for markets where a few things are in place. One is a growing and well supported FinTech ecosystem. The second is regulators who are conducive and supportive of open banking, and want it to happen quickly. The third is our existing customers and if they want to expand to a region.

Australia scores well for TrueLayer on all three criteria. And, as I'm sure you know, FinTech Australia, and organisations like that are testament to the growing ecosystem in the market. There's also a huge amount of room for disruption. When you when you look at how profitable Australia is, as a market for financial services, as the saying goes your margin is my opportunity.

Australia has had some very well documented trust issues with banks and a royal commission. What have you learned from open banking in the UK that you think Australia can action to really help push ahead?

One narrative I've heard in a lot of conversations with potential clients or people in the Australian ecosystem is sometimes a bit of impatience or disappointment with the speed of the development in Australia.

If the CDR API is launched in July, it's still going to be faster than PSD2 was launched in the UK and in Europe. Fundamentally, I think for such a complex industry spanning project, Australia is doing a decent job at speed.

Obviously, that's no reason to slow down and I think we all want it to happen. ASAP.

I would focus on thinking about use cases and not being afraid to give use cases a try. The big questions and the most important aspect of CDR is Will people actually use this? Are they going to be willing to share their data?

When CDR launches I expect to see a rolling start. I don’t expect a switch to flick on July 1st and CDR will be all functional and ready. But the success of CDR does require some early adopters, innovators and thought leaders to take the plunge and use the infrastructure. It’s the only way to improve, because it's not going to get better if no one uses it.

That is a risk. Luckily in the UK, we work with companies who were willing to take that leap with us. I'm pretty optimistic that there will be companies in Australia who want to do this, don't want to give anyone an excuse to shut CDR down. It's up to all of us as an industry to say let's make this useful. And let's make it happen.

Ep 12: Emma Weston, Agridigital

Emma Weston is CEO and Co-Founder of AgriDigital, an Australian headquartered Agri/Fintech focused on digitising global agriculture supply chains. Founded in late 2015, Agridigital have been working with blockchains, distributed ledgers and smart contracts since 2015.

In 2016, they completed the world's first sale of wheat on a blockchain between a farmer and a buyer. There are now over 5000 users in the AgriDigital customer network, with over 16 million tonnes of grain transacted through the platform.

I spoke with Emma to get her views on the future of blockchain, the companies expansion into the USA and the launch of Waypath. A platform designed to enable farmers to manage their commodities as they move through the supply chain.

Ep 11: Tim Dwyer & Dan Peters, Limepay

In this episode Dexter chats with Tim Dwyer, CEO and Dan Peters, CRO of Limepay.

Limepay is the next generation of payment gateway, increasing revenue, removing friction at the checkout and keeping customers in the merchants ecosystem.

The platform brings together, for the first time, both upfront card payments and buy now pay later in the same native checkout with no redirects or competing logos.

It's a business model to disrupt the disruptors and tap into the global shift to BNPL schemes. I catch up with Tim and Dan the week they announced an over subscribed $6m seed round.