Searching for Mana with Lloyd Wahed

Building anything that is going to survive and prosper requires a solid foundation and that is what Sean Lee CEO of the Algo Foundation described when he met Lloyd Wahed in this week’s Searching for Mana Podcast.  The Algo is the native token of the Algorand blockchain, and the Algo foundation helps users solve real-world problems using the Algo ecosystem which is based on four basic principles:Speed, as it sends money anywhere in 4 secondsScale, to support billions of users without slowing downSecurity, to operate without any forks, andTransparency, as anyone can see how many Algo are in useTo add to that compelling mix of benefits the Algo takes no mining to use, so this is a green, carbon-neutral technology using consensus as an alternative. Here is a different type of platform to solve the blockchain trilemma of being fast, scalable and secure together.Currently, there are 2m Algo transactions a day and Sean sees their role as part of a new generation of technologists with a vast array of opportunities in front of them and a “rising sea to lift all our boats”. Sean studied computer science before working through what he defines as a series of technology-driven waves that have transformed the way life and business work. The first wave was the internet driving new business models, and then social networks changed the way we communicate with each other, which was followed by the “sharing economy” enabled by the cloud and here we are now on a rising tide of transaction innovations increasing efficiency, transparency and security.The Algo foundation invite applications from institutions around the world who want to use the Algorand blockchain, and Sean describes a project with the University of Cape Town, which they will be funding for some years to create a centre of excellence to apply blockchain solutions to digital currency and identity issues across Africa. This is part of the foundation's belief in education and helping the tokenisation of assets release the benefits of ownership and provide equitable financial assets to those that don’t have them. For Sean crypto assets create an economic model by engaging with communities wanting to leverage the blockchain to empower them through better owner models and frictionless ways to transact.If you like what you hear, please subscribe and leave us a review! And don’t forget to follow us on social media:https://twitter.com/manasearchukhttps://www.linkedin.com/company/mana-talent/

Ben Chemla CEO of Shares and Lloyd Wahed of Mana Search met to discuss how Shares is making share dealing a social activity and how Ben has learnt how to grow a company fast in a new market.The idea for Shares came from social investing, seeing friends chatting about their ideas and sharing views, having fun and learning from each other. He saw the opportunity to enable communities around making a safe space to explore opportunities with friends, sharing portfolio activity in real time.Ben uses a comparison with Strava, which informs the community you connect with about the route you took and what you found, but you choose what you share and with whom, and for those that share that interest it’s compelling and often inspiring. Like many entrepreneurs Ben studied law but didn’t want to make it his career, however his creative spark surfaced at university as he created the student association at Le Sorbonne. Creativity has driven Ben to want to build things, he has surrounded himself with the best people to learn from and he is interested in all parts of the business. Solving problems is a creative act and seeing how the whole organic structure functions allows him to use that talent.It’s vital to keep learning and Ben learnt very early on about the type of investors who could support him in the best way, and he clearly thrives in the company of those who can give him the benefit of their experience. The result is that Shares is only 8 months old, they have achieved their first raise, they have 60 employees, and the ambition, vision and belief come from Ben and everyone they hire. Each member of staff needs to demonstrate Ambition, the ability to Impact, the ability to take Ownership and think globally. They want to do business across the EU from March next year, they will add the UK imminently, and they expect to raise every 6 months.Ben uses a chess analogy of thinking 5 steps ahead all the time, and part of making that work is building a strong community as a foundation to rapid growth. Every opportunity to publicise and play their part in the democratising of finance will be taken. He wants his people to have strong views, to be able to express them, but also to be able to listen to each other and understand their contribution and to be happy with the result of an exchange if it is the best way forward. No obstructive ego, learning is about being open to the ideas of others. Ben talks about what he learnt of the intensity of the US tech and scale up scene, and how taking a global view from day one works so well there. This company is very ambitious and Ben is leading the team at a fast rate to a prestigious position in a market they are helping to create.

On this week’s Searching for Mana podcast, Jason Trost CEO of Smarkets and Lloyd Wahed discussed the evolution of Smarkets and how it is disrupting an old fashioned market in betting, and Jason’s own journey to create and lead this London based business from his early years growing up in the US.Smarkets is on a mission to make betting online easier and less expensive “to get out of the way” of the consumer, and simplify what has become over-complicated, and to many inaccessible. Sport dominates online betting but he is a “politics junky” and his passion for politics and trying to understand political outcomes is clear and an important part of the Smarkets product range. The company has been steadily growing for 13 years, and Jason explains how his appreciation of how quickly time passes has changed as he has learnt and matured himself. He is a fearless optimist and was always ambitious to do something big but wasn’t sure what it should be, in fact, he went to university without knowing what he would do, but once in the world of work he looked at the betting industry could see how technology could solve the problem of complexity and user experience and his focus crystallised.On that journey, he has found that people rather than technology have been his biggest area of interest. Understanding the people he works with and how they work with each other is interesting. He is fully appreciative of how a diversity of interests and abilities can exist together successfully in a thriving business, but he sees a weakness in how people are so often not good at the hard conversations that are necessary to move a project on. He wants to “get the most out of people and help them be the best they can be” and his role is to facilitate that, but he sees a weakness in our societal inability to engage in “respectful good faith conflict”. Jason’s view is that our society is at the teenager stage where we are uncomfortable sharing our own views and vulnerabilities, and as a result businesses can be slow to develop. Not everyone is driven in the way that an entrepreneur is but everyone can make the most of their opportunities with more frank and non-judgemental interaction, bound together through transparent targets for the future.

The consumer is driving up economic growth at an unprecedented rate around the world, and Claire Gates discussed with Lloyd Wahed in this week’s Searching for Mana podcast how the ease of paying for what you want to buy is a key part of that. Claire is the Chief Commercial Officer at the $1B+ valued PPRO a global provider of payments infrastructure that facilitates responsible credit transactions, making its own revenue from the merchant with the consumer protected and hassle free.Claire exudes energy and enthusiasm and talks animatedly about her own journey which has been opportunistic and focused as she started out with a degree in chemical engineering but through an early exposure to sales and a passion for international travel and business, has taken her to a prominent position driving the commercial success of this market leader. She is a strong advocate of the need for leaders to have a vision for their businesses and their teams and being able to help everyone understand where they fit in. Claire is customer facing and coaching her people with a clarity of purpose and dynamism. “Find what you enjoy” is vital advice for career development, and she describes her appreciation for effective salespeople and culture, and in particular listening as a key skill in commerce.Balancing an international commercial career, an infectious enthusiasm for making the most out of opportunities, being a mother and staying fit is an inspiring combination.

Treating customers as equals, in simple terms, without talking down to them, is the vital communication strategy that is helping Bux offer it’s affordable and accessible broking services to a new generation of investors across Europe, and it’s going well explains Yorick Naeff (CEO of Bux) in conversation with Lloyd Wahed of Mana Search, so well that they recently raised $80m to take their service into more European countries.Bux has nearly 200 staff and more than half a million customers already through understanding the mindset of next gen investors who want simple and mobile solutions. Bux has created their own solutions where they needed to so that the customer journey is simple, and charges are kept to a minimum.Investment carries risk, that’s a basic for opportunity, but the company tries to reduce risk through easy-to-read explanations of key terminology that de-mystify jargon, and they encourage investors to talk to each other through a platform while they provide alerts if it looks like an investor might be stretching their investments too far.Bux has focused on investors in six European countries so far, which until the pandemic had been a tradition of low risk investment through savings accounts, but with negative interest rates a new generation of investors has demanded more from their money. Yorick explains that with such low returns from traditional banking and so much uncertainty about how to pay for the future, people are being “pushed to invest” and this is a driver to the growth of Bux particularly from younger, and often, first time investors. It will make its own revenues from scale, not from an expensive business model, so they are targeting growth in the number of “active fund clients”, who are engaged users investing and trading regularly. Breakeven is a couple of years off, but BUX are ambitious, and they want to be the No1 provider in their market.Yorick’s own journey took a turn to entrepreneurialism in his early 30’s after a career in more traditional banking and was driven by a passion for making banking more affordable and accessible, and a great team that shares the same vision. He became CEO during a time of remote working and the biggest challenge was to hold onto and develop the culture, but as a tech company based in the cloud the “new normal” means that he expects people to meet more than they did during pandemic but not full-time office based for all. Yorick has a global ambition to become a sustainable company and market leader. Their timing is good and the demand for “affordable and accessible” looks set for the long term. 

Lloyd Wahed met with David Jarvis, Founder and CEO of Griffin on the latest Searching for Mana podcast where they discussed the challenges of being the fintech’s OS for embedded finance.Griffin is building a Banking as a Service (BaaS) platform to support the fintech ecosystem, and as a new player it can look forward rather than having to be slowed by legacy. The best supplier is one that enables you to do what you do best, and that will support you with an expertise that you don’t have and don’t need to have. Businesses rely on complex services that they cannot possibly always be experts in. Finance, Technology, Recruitment, Law and so many other fields of specialist knowledge can be bought as a service that is leading-edge, compliant, cost-effective and user friendly. That is what Griffin is bringing to the rapidly expanding and entrepreneurial world of fintech. They enable fintech’s through operating solutions for embedded finance. They build the tech stack and create the products and services their clients will need. For every solution, they create there is a product to be defined and marketed externally.David shares with us that Griffin can look forward in order to build what clients will need, not what they have needed, so new operators hit the ground running with Griffin solutions. Driving this is a team of experts, constantly building their intellectual property and domain expertise, tech nerds and professionals with authorisation experience. From there, the conversation dives into David’s background and how he grew up partly in Japan, UK and US, and how he learnt about finance from his father and how that world works in those different cultures. We learn about the family’s strong work ethic and entrepreneurial streak that David reflects on. He became an analyst, who learnt coding and became a software engineer in Silicon Valley with the likes of Airbnb or CircleCI. He has added to this background the ability to define a vision based on his view of how the middleware market can be better and he has the energy and intellect to drive a solutions business, build a team and attract the funding they need. David has taken full advantage of a favourable environment in the UK to build a banking business and looks set to change the world of Banking as a service.David’s book on ClojureScript language: https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/learning-clojurescript/9781785887635/

In the blink of an eye, Tink has gone from a B2C player in one country in Europe to a B2B solution in eighteen markets, giving them access to more than 250m customers in Europe.Rafa Plantier, Head of UK & Ireland at Tink describes to Lloyd Wahed how Tink is product growth led and their innovation is driving a rapid development in networks and services to providing accessibility for millions of people to the trusted institutions that hold and manage our money. One institution with decades of “trust capital” is Visa, who recently announced to acquire Tink, that will further their “network of networks” concept faster than they could have hoped a few years ago, opening up a global opportunity. You can feel the excitement from Rafa when he describes the opportunities that are presenting themselves around the world as markets open up.Rafe worked at Stripe prior to joining Tink and so he has seen twice recently how a company can “grow out of a crowded market” and in open banking he is able to be part of “optimising the foundations for growth” at enterprise level. In Europe there is work to be done with the EU over regulation as the “currency of open banking is trust” and that needs suppliers, enterprises and states to be aligned.Tink has nearly doubled it’s headcount in two years and because most of that time has been in the pandemic there are a significant number of staff who have not worked from a Tink office or met their colleagues face to face. Tink managers prioritise understanding the individual challenges of each staff member and this is also key to helping the integration of acquired teams. The nature of open banking is collaboration so one cultural pillar comes from the market, but there is no room for complacency, as the changes in work induced by the pandemic are unprecedented.

Myles Stephenson (Founder & CEO, Modulr) sits down with Lloyd to talk about how his company provides payments infrastructure to the likes of Revolut, Sage, Liberis, iwoca or Salary Finance, enabling them to efficiently automate and embed payments transactions.After receiving a biochemistry degree at the University of Oxford, Myles developed his expertise in finance and retail building up the charge and credit facility for Marks and Spences in London and Ireland. In the midst of the financial crisis in 2008, he founded CorporatePay offering pre-paid card programs for corporates, turned into supplier payments and supplier disbursement platform. Fast forward to 2016, Myles founded Modulr, backed by Blenheim Chalcot that powers leading Fintech companies with API payments infrastructure. To date, an excess of over 70 billion pounds worth of value has been transacted on the Modulr platform.In this episode, Lloyd and Myles discuss the ways Modulr support other fintechs to build out new products, lend to SMEs, or access multiple payment methods before outlining the benefits of automated B2B payment flows. Later they delve into Myles’s entrepreneurial experience and learn about his Mana!Episode Highlights:03:22: How Modulr enables access for businesses into the payment systems?15:31: Journey to Profit17:47: Processing 4 billion GBP monthly19:03: Journey to entrepreneurship30:11: Setting up a fintech company  in 200837:39: More than open finance43:38: Universities and fintech partnerships58:15: Myles Mana

This week, Bitstamp CEO Julian Sawyer comes back to Searching for Mana to join Lloyd for an enlightening chat about fintech, crypto, altcoins and so much more! A financial veteran with over 20 years’ experience, who previously co-founded Starling Bank in 2015, or later served as UK MD at Gemini, Julian offers incredible insight into both blockchain and financial services in general.Bitstamp is the world's longest-standing crypto exchange, continuously supporting the Bitcoin economy since 2011. With a proven track record and mature approach to the industry, it provides a secure and transparent venue to over four million customers and enables partners to access emerging crypto markets through time-proven infrastructure. The platform allows companies and individuals from all around the world to buy and sell over 30 available cryptos.

This week, TokenGuard CEO and Founder Kamil Gorski joins Mimi Nguyen, our R&D Head for an enlightening chat about due diligence in blockchain, smart contracts, ICOs and many more! Tokenguard is the first automated rating agency for Ethereum and other blockchains. The technology aggregates the best techniques for ICOs / smart contracts automated verification, allowing investors, VCs and banks to check the project they want to invest in. Together with Blockhunters - the mother venture of this project, it has previously received a whopping $2.3M grant from the EU European Regional Development Fund for their R&D activities within the blockchain security space. Touching on everything from crypto and DAOs Kamil and Mimi talk everything blockchain has to offer. Then they dig into Kamil’s fascinating past as a hacker and his entrepreneurial journey including setting up a hardware startup.Find more episodes on blockchain with previous guests from Binance, Kraken, Celsius Network, Gemini, Luno, Eterna Capital and more on searchingformana.comEpisode Highlights:01:38: Automating due diligence15:15 How to regulate blockchain?25:14: EU grants for blockchain R&D37:24: The hacker’s past41:50: Kamil’s Mana