This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that has the power to give every one of us the luxury of financial freedom. My guest is Sam Abrika, Co-founder and CEO of Cash Coach.

He’s an engineer, contrarian, ex-banker, and now gamifying personal finance.

After he achieved his Master of Science at the Paris Sud University and MBA, he started his career as a Risk & Analytics consultant at IBM.

Sam then moved to PWC, followed by UBS, where he became Head of EMEA Liquidity and Funding Risk. Finally, he moved to Mitsubishi UFG Securities, where he designed new liquidity analytics which allowed to save $1Bn in liquidity.

He then co-founded Cash Coach, a company that’s on a mission to gamify personal finance and make the world better at managing money and more fun for the millennial generation.

This inspired me, and hence I invited Sam to my podcast. We explore what’s broken in the consumer world when it comes to financial health – and how most consumer technology companies are designing to make this worse, not better.

We dig into why there are no incentives to fix this, and what innovation opportunity that really brings. We also address why having a solution is not enough – and that changing user behavior is possibly the biggest challenge to crack. Lastly, we explore what’s required to build a software business that’s worth making a remark about.

Here are some of his quotes:

The big idea nowadays in our economy is, you either be in debt or wealth. And unfortunately, no education or university, no one is telling that to people. It doesn't tell them how to manage their money, how to live their life financially free.

And actually, it's even quite the opposite. The whole financial industry and the consumerism machine is trying to push people to consumerism for so that they buy stuff they don't need, with money they don't have, to impress people they don't like.

We want to reverse that trend. We want people to feel actually rewarded when they have good behaviours; when they're saving; when they're building their wealth; when they're achieving financial freedom.

So the big idea is to make it a game. And we want people to compete against themselves, against the friend, to being better at saving.

During this interview, you will learn three things:

That a lot of innovation can be found by doing the opposite of what the industry aims to achieve
That making black and white choices is key, even if that means you’re going to side-track millions and millions of users
Why going for some ‘extremely happy’ users is so much more valuable than to have everybody lukewarm
How to uncover opportunities people don’t even know they have a problem around

For more information about the guest from this week:

E50: Keith Zhai, veteran journalist on China, media and 2024

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