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

This week we are presenting a very special Fireside Chat as part of Fintech Week London 2021 broadcasted live from Barclays Rise. Joining Lloyd Wahed, we’ll have special guests from PensionBee and Blackrock explaining different strategies to encourage green finance: excluding fossil fuel producers from investments, engage with fossil fuel producers and how to encourage them to change, impact investing and actually putting your money into companies that are actively doing things to make the world better.Romi Savova, who founded PensionBee in 2014 to simplify pension savings in the UK, following a difficult pension transfer experience of her own. As the Chief Executive Officer, she has played a pivotal role in advancing consumer standards in the pensions industry, from reducing transfer times to campaigning for the full abolition of exit fees. Romi is also a member of the government’s Pensions Dashboards Programme Steering Group, which was set up to advise on the delivery of pensions dashboards.Joe Parkin, Managing Director, Head of Banks and Digital Channels in the UK at BlackRock. In his role he is responsible for BlackRock's relationships with Private, Retail and Neo Banks, as well as Digital Channels in the UK.Big thanks to our co-organizers Erlang Solutions, the éminence grise behind some fintech projects of Klarna, Mastercard, Bloomberg LP. 

Speculations, hypes, doges, icos, nfts aside.. what’s next for blockchain in financial services? How can this underlying technology disrupt the banking system? This week we are presenting a very special panel session as part of Fintech Week London 2021 broadcasted live from Barclays Rise. We’ll have Chris Skinner, author of the Finanser, Marcus Treacher, board director of ClearBank/ ex-Ripple, Haydn Jones, PwC Director and Blockchain Specialist and the very Simon Taylor, co-founder and blockchain lead at 11:FS.Big thanks to our co-organizers Erlang Solutions, the éminence grise behind some fintech projects of Klarna, Mastercard, Bloomberg LP. Who this panel is for:All invested in the London FinTech ecosystemDecision-makers in financial servicesCEOs and founders setting the pace in the FS startup spaceFinTech scale-ups looking to accelerate growthCTOs, lead architects & senior developers wanting to share and gain domain knowledgeWhy you should listen:To discover where the real business value exists from blockchain away from the hypeLearn from those at the cutting edge of the tech powering FinTech’s next stepsFind jargon-busting real-world use cases from tech and business level experts to reduce costs, improve processes and gain competitive advantageFind more episodes on blockchain with previous guests from Binance, Kraken, Celsius Network, Gemini, Luno, Eterna Capital and more on searchingformana.com

This week, Luno’s UK Country Manager Sam Kopelman joins Ollie Brown, our Blockchain Associate Director for an enlightening chat about crypto, entrepreneurship, career progression and so much more!After graduating UCL, Sam joined Rocket Internet, building their operations in Minsk from employee zero to later become a Regional Head in Eurasia. Since then he worked in Berlin, and Paris helping other challenger businesses to grow and scale across Europe. With his new role at Luno, he shares incredible insight into blockchain and crypto space.Luno is a leading global cryptocurrency company with over 8 million customers across 43 countries to date. Touching on everything from DeFI, CBDC, Sam and Ollie talk everything crypto has to offer. Then they dig into Sam’s fascinating career sharing his stories from Belarus and other valuable lessons.Find more episodes on blockchain with previous guests from Binance, Kraken, Celsius Network, Gemini, Eterna Capital and more on searchingformana.comEpisode Highlights:02:27: Simplifying cryptocurrency investments03:43: Can blockchain revolutionise traditional finance?11:32: On altcoins17:45: Building a Rocket Internet’s venture in Belarus from scratch34:36: Berlin and Paris experience40:22: Sam’s Mana45:28: On the ads controversy47:40: On the future of crypto