[00:00:00] Jonathan: Welcome to the Difference Engine, the show for tech founders, investors, and innovators.
[00:00:16] Paul: Our guest today is Nigel Burden, whose current LinkedIn profile describes him as outdoorsman slash company builder slash three times fintech founder with one unicorn slash musician. For those unfamiliar with Nigel's achievements, he's founded and exited three pioneering category creating firms.
Evolution, sold to BAE Systems. Currency Cloud, that's the unicorn, sold to Beezer. And more recently, Railser, exiting to a consortium of VC firms.
[00:00:47] Jonathan: Born in Germany to an army family, he studied mechanical engineering at Warwick University, where he was a contemporary of a previous guest on The Difference Engine, Sumir Karahi.
A brief career in the automotive industry working for EBS followed before he found his way into financial services at Nomura and the rest, as they say, is history. He also works at Swiss Bank Corporation, now UBS, and was a director at Dresdner Kleinwert Investment Bank. Both banks recognized for their innovation in technology.
[00:01:16] Paul: Nigel Burden, welcome to the Difference Engine.
[00:01:24] Jonathan: Nigel, would it be fair to say that your entry to the world of IT entrepreneurship was a little delayed?
[00:01:30] Nigel: Uh, yeah, it's a bit of a reflection, uh, because I didn't have any real plans and at school I, uh, I discovered music and rugby, uh, and playing guitar. I did end up failing my levels and I distinctly remember calling my father to get my results.
Said, I'm afraid you've basically failed, uh, them all. But, uh, he did offer to pay for, to reset my A levels, which, uh, was very, very kind of him and Oxford. We had amazing couple tutor, especially Math tutor, who got all of us basically straight A's in our math because he taught us. About, uh, the, the usefulness of maths, and the, the history of people like Nicholas Copernicus and others.
And, uh, made it interesting. It, it was, it, it just changed the whole dialogue. He said, I'm not going to teach you how to pass exams, I'm going to teach you the first principles. And it's been a lesson all the way through. Is that first principles just just learn the basics and you can derive everything
[00:02:32] Paul: and a levels took you to Warwick, I believe Tell us a little bit about Warwick because the UK doesn't have MIT doesn't have Stanford you know, but it's got somewhat of a reputation of Being very technically people are very technically adroit go there.
Um, we've got Imperial. That's where the DeepMind guys came from. We've got Cambridge. That's where dear old Mike Lynch, uh, came from. Tell us a little bit about your time at Warwick. What attracted you? And if it was this sort of breeding ground for future entrepreneurs?
[00:03:06] Nigel: Uh, a couple of friends and I went around the universities doing the visits type thing.
And, uh, our basis was. Our decision was based on how many bars there were in the Students Union, and Warwick nailed that. It sounds like a very clever way of looking at universities, but, uh, we also just looked at the courses and things. Warwick had a massive reputation for maths. It still is probably the number one maths university in the UK, possibly.
It's in top, in top numbers in the world. And, uh, the, it had a very pragmatic, uh, course on engineering. Known for pragmatism, I suppose, intellectualism. Did masters as well, uh, in, in manufacturing. And that was an interesting thing. The real learning there was actually to help later on in financial services because it's the operational things of putting a voxel cavalier.
As it was a time out of Luton plant, for example, it was like one every minute came out that thing and logistics behind that and learning about how Toyota was such an amazing company with the Kanban methods and the cell manufacturing that, uh, the U S academics put in after the restitution, essentially after the war.
[00:04:15] Jonathan: Again, at this time, it, you know, it struck me that you were, you were really getting, um, sort of soaked in the, in the world of automotive. And when it came. For you to finally leave Warwick, you went off to the unimaginable glamour of Vauxhall and their massive warehouse they have at Dunstable.
[00:04:33] Nigel: Oh, actually it was a company called EDS, which was owned by General Motors, so essentially owned.
The guy got lost for a while, went to US President, founded it next to IBM. And it was the same sort of culture as IBM, a friend of mine got sent home for wearing red socks. And it was, you have to look like this. I actually quite enjoyed it, because it just made you really concentrate on detail.
[00:04:54] Jonathan: You lasted about two years before you got one of those sliding moments phone calls from a mate?
[00:05:01] Nigel: Yeah, my mate Johnny Peacock, rest in peace, unfortunately. Uh, he, he joined EDS from, uh, the same day as me, he was in the, uh, he was in the Luton car plant, Vauxhall, the, uh, Cavalier car plant. And, uh, we, we trained together, uh, we used to go paragliding together, mountaineering and climbing and stuff together.
And, uh, the, he phoned up and said, Nigel, I've, I've just, uh, I'm leaving EDS, I've just joined a company called Golden Saks. And, uh, I had no idea what golden sacks were, uh, he just said for the same engineering maths they pay about 30, 40 times the same money, uh, so I, I left and joined, uh, uh, Swiss Banco at that time.
[00:05:40] Paul: And was there any regret that you'd left the world of hands and creating stuff? You're physically making things that are tangible in one job and now we're in the world of intangible, you know, finance. It's
[00:05:49] Nigel: still tangible. They had a long philosophical conversation, uh, with, uh, friends of mine from the arts world.
And design world, et cetera, and, uh, well, you can, um, there's the French writer, Baudelaire to find what beauty is on various things that can be ugly, but it's still be beautiful. And it was the, uh, with the design world, you can see it and experience it. So if you experience something built by Johnny eyes, even if you're blindfolded, you know, that is something else.
Uh, and, uh, same thing with software. Uh, and you can see a thing of beauty. That's somebody's designed, implemented, written, and you can see an absolute pig's dinner, uh, as well. I was asked by Gakamax Dunston, just saying that after I finished with Railzone stuff. He is saying, look Nigel, you're a maker.
That's what you are. You probably haven't realized that, but you're a maker, whether it's in the physical or the, uh, the non physical world. Yeah.
[00:06:53] Jonathan: So I think, you know, you can, you can have that philosophical view of, of making in it, but there's that other bit of making, which Paul and I have both, and you of course have experienced multiple times in our career, that's, that's building a firm.
So, you know, you were at Swiss bank, got into the world of FX, and then you decided to build your own consulting firm.
[00:07:15] Nigel: I met a guy called Nick Borner, quite a character. He was working with me on the FX floor. Uh, and my two buddies, one Johnny, who went to Goldman, and another guy, Simon Lyon, who went to Goldman.
And we all got chatting around, uh, this thing called the internet, which had just appeared. At SwissBankCore, we'd just done the very first foreign exchange trade on the internet between SwissBankCore and YuscoX, about 100 million cable trade. We set up, uh, Evolution. We didn't know what to call a consulting firm at the time, so we just said, hey, let's build a company and do something.
So we had SwissBankCore as a customer, Goldman as a customer. So we, we just built that and we realized we, what we were competing with was Accenture, or Anson Consulting as it were at the time, and others like that, so that's what it ended up, but we had product too, as well as consulting, we had a, uh, people, uh, like, uh, Lehman Brothers and others who all use our equity research product.
Where it just did all the automation of a research production, equity research production. I had no idea about marketing, positioning, category, or anything, uh, at all. Uh, so I've learned some very good mentors, uh, on it. I think, uh, our first board meeting, we, uh, we had a new chairman. Uh, his guy called Sir Robert Malpass, who was chairman of Eurotunnel.
He just said, uh, uh, well, this is what you're going to make if you've got this amount of people. And we thought that's massively insightful. He said, yeah, because you, you just make your bums and seats with this and just get used to it. And, uh, and the only way, the only thing that's different is training people better would just be friendlier or some of that, but it's so easy to displace.
That was a sort of, and he said he also don't make money while he's asleep. So hey guys, think about that. Uh, so we didn't sell the business.
[00:08:59] Jonathan: So after leaving, well, you know, having done that, that first adventure, it, to me, looking back at your history, it didn't take long before you were off on another adventure.
Um, but what was the opportunity that you'd spotted this time?
[00:09:13] Nigel: That's brought into Dresden climate, uh, investment bank. My guy called Dave Wenman, uh, he dragged me in and said, look, can you help me turn the equities business around? Uh, and I said, well, I don't know much about equities. Look, you build a business, you know FX.
It was, uh, an interesting, uh, experience and learning. Turned around from 90 million lost to 150 million profit in 18 months. Stopping, uh, them doing stupid things.
[00:09:37] Paul: You did have a fair bit of, um, back to school to learn on the equity side of things. It was,
[00:09:42] Nigel: it's more complex because a lot of the settlements, uh, you know, you can extend settlement dates, you got, uh, dividends, you got all sorts of other bits and pieces to figure out operationally.
And and how to water make and that was a precursor into when I left there. Uh, the Was sitting in france moving to france to exchange some money from uh, And I phoned up a company called hrfx and there's a guy called steve lemon who then joined currency cloud I was put on to him Uh said to him look you're not charging me two percent on this transaction because I can see that the market's at about point zero one You Uh, 0.
02 at best, and we settled on 0. 2 percent as physical delivery. Then sent me a PDF by email, which I had to print out, and then fax back payment instructions. And I lived in a village, lived 20 minutes walk from the village, so I had to go into the village to find a fax machine, because Um, didn't have a scanner in those days.
And so it was, there must be a better way of doing this. So that was the inspiration behind was merging currency. Cloud was taking learnings and equities straight through processing and applying it to a retail world or deliverable foreign exchange. That
[00:10:55] Jonathan: was also the time when the idea of the API was, was starting to become current.
[00:10:59] Nigel: They used to be called SDKs. Uh, and then, then the word API, uh, sort of, so I asked Nick, what the hell is an API, uh, this guy, Nick Warner, and he explained to us, oh, we probably need one of those, and so we went around designing one, uh, and the, the, the idea came up for the naming, I was in, uh, in the first venture capital conference by a guy called Pavel in Bulgaria, capital, uh, I said Sofia, and, uh, there's a guy doing this platform that ran 3G for countries that didn't have telco infrastructure.
It's like a platform. You did it. And he had any, he had said he brought up the API word or acronym. And so SMS, this is again, pre WhatsApp SMS, Nick saying, can you register the currency cloud because his Wisconsin, the telco cloud, and, uh, that was it. That was, uh, early 2011. Then we launched it at TechCrunch, Geek and Roller.
We, we won that as the best startup or something. We had two wonderful initial customers, Fido Bank, and as we worked time TransferWise,
[00:12:08] Jonathan: essentially that infrastructure you built really paved the way for a sort of an explosion, uh, around FinTech. And, you know, 10 years later, you, you found yourself with a unicorn.
Um, and, and ultimately exiting, exit exiting to visa. Um, you know, what, what's a journey over 10 years? That was
[00:12:31] Nigel: great. And I was also out of the blue because, uh, uh, that bought Earthport, which essentially had the similar thing, just not, not very great technology behind it. So the rationale really was Earthport pre war compliance coming in had managed to build a global payments.
Uh, essentially Nostro Network all over the world, but the technology didn't really connect it together. And then, CountryCloud had all the technology and just needed a network, because it was impossible to open an account. So you slam those together, and that's what's called Visa Direct, uh, essentially, if I remember rightly, today.
[00:13:08] Jonathan: In 2016, you founded RailsBank, which ultimately became Railser. Again, what was the inspiration behind that?
[00:13:18] Nigel: It was basically the We still hadn't solved the problem, uh, that we needed a currency cloud, WISE needed, Revellit needed, everybody needed, which is programmatic access to banking. That's super simple.
That's what we needed. Is
[00:13:37] Jonathan: that what people think of as banking as a service? Yes, that's what
[00:13:40] Nigel: I call banking as a service, uh, and, uh, and just that very simple use case. We, we, we, we, I did a project for a bank called Catella in, uh, Luxembourg, and which they were trying to figure out with a banking license, they had a payments card acquiring business, and they had a, they had all this payment mails and other stuff, like SWIFT memberships and technology that they're trying to figure out how to make money out of, because they just sat there with a massive charge, uh, doing three SWIFT payments, so it's all like a week.
And so. We and a colleague did some work for them and this guy called Joel Kitchen, and if you remember, he was at Worldpay and a bunch of others. And a guy called Dave Nether, both South Africans. They, we did this work for them. Uh, which said you could create a, a payment, a bank account utility and a bank account to bank account payment utility using your rails.
I know they're interested until they, until the CEO resigned and the new CEO came in and said, I'm going to do credit cards. Because he knew credit cards, and they did credit cards,
[00:14:59] Jonathan: and then went past it. Going through this adventure, it strikes me that implicitly or explicitly, category thinking has influenced how you built those companies.
You know, you really do seem to have some form of driving desire to reframe what the customer should expect in some distinct areas of the financial services you've traveled through. And you have built entirely new ways of satisfying their needs. So they don't have to have a discussion about 2 percent or 0.
2 percent on a, uh, a currency transaction. Um, I mean, is this about clarity of thought in the end?
[00:15:35] Nigel: It's really comes back to, uh, The obsession that, uh, Jeff Bezos, he's a glib example because it's everybody knows it. His apps, the obsession they have within the culture of, of Amazon where there's always an empty chair in a meeting, uh, which represents a customer, uh, just to get the thinking in the head.
So it, it comes down to the, the problem you're trying to solve and what value you're And what the value prop is to the customer around that. And if the value prop is, I save you a pence, Uh, okay, let somebody else go and do that. It's not hugely exciting to build. So trying to find things that have a big delta of value.
Which is essentially a new category, as you call it. Uh, and you guys taught me category, because I didn't know I was doing category beforehand. That's my point about implicit or explicit. Exactly. And then seeing, uh, okay, does that fundamentally shift, uh, either economics, or experience, or industry? Does it move industry along a different, uh, path that's just blocked, uh, that doesn't free something up?
So that, that's, that was the thinking. So the answer is yes. I did it probably implicitly, uh, by mainly thinking about customer and, uh, the problem. And I just don't talk, because when we all knew each other and when FinTech was sort of not given the moniker in Q1 2012, all of us were. running around, uh, being told that you guys are never going to achieve anything.
And so, uh, that, that was her thinking and more formalized, literally you guys did it when we, when we worked with you, uh, saying this is about categories. And you introduced me to that, uh, classic book, uh, Play Bigger.
[00:17:23] Paul: Did you find yourself in the right place at the right time, do you think? Because you seem to have been at places where the impossible task was Placed in front of you, um, thinking about your story about the Luxembourg bank, et cetera.
You know, how much of it is luck and how much is it seeking out these, these category opportunities?
[00:17:40] Nigel: There is a serendipity thing, uh, but I'm also a believer in not forcing, you know what I mean? Uh, when you can't force into something you can suddenly realize, uh, you don't keep the open mind of, of, uh, of where something is.
I'm working on a colleague, Dan, at the moment where our open mind at the moment is to find the most boring thing that we can achieve that people pay for.
[00:18:04] Jonathan: That again reminds me, I mean, you know, one of the classic tools to develop category is the point of view. And I know we've labored through those, those with you before, but I'm always reminded when I think about you about, you know, your focus on business, which is absolutely there.
And it was one of the acid tests you applied while we were. Building that point of view, um, the S F W test. Now, now for listeners, unfamiliar with S F W it stands for so, um, and then any expletive you like beginning with F followed by what, so the. Nigel Furton, so effing what test? Do you want to, um, explain how this works?
[00:18:51] Nigel: Yeah, it was, it came out of the first proper marketing person, uh, we had at CurrencyCloud, Zubari, who's now the CEO of Luxembourg House of Fintech, and a real character, uh, as a human being, a very good personal friend. It's become over time. Uh, and he, uh, he was, he was writing down some copy and, and stuff.
Uh, I said, Nigel, look, look at this copy we're going to do. And I said, so fucking what was it? I'm sorry. He has got the talent. He is so eloquent as well. I said, let's go back to your heart. And so as a, as a human and stuff, and then the next bit of copy was totally on point because he'd just been trying to be.
The marketing you get from marketing and copywriting people who can write lovely English and stuff but can't get something that, uh, turns somebody's head. It gets you on the door and I learned that from the music, uh, friends in the music industry and others about the art is getting them in to the front door and then sell to them because you put something like a mannequin up or something like that in a, in a shop window, gets them in the door, don't necessarily know whether they're going to buy or not, but a holiday is getting the door.
So the art of, of communication. Is, if it doesn't mean SFW, this could have walked past your door.
[00:20:12] Jonathan: To use that mannequin point, once you've got them through the door, you have to be clear about what difference engaging with you will make to them and their lives. And I'm also, I'm also reminded here, Stripe is one of the great, A European fintech story, you know, it's, it's a killer payments company and it is the category leader.
I think when it's about, when you're talking about embedded e commerce payments, um, because they didn't position themselves when they came out as APIs for payments, you know,
[00:20:42] Nigel: which was, uh, Except, uh, uh, payments online in two lines of code.
[00:20:48] Jonathan: Embedded commerce payments with two lines of code? Genius.
[00:20:51] Nigel: So that strapline itself was that, that almost became the sort of category, uh, the, the, became the sort of prelude into, into them being a category leader.
And they, cause they radically changed that category. They didn't, as you guys well know, they didn't incrementally change it. Based beforehand, it was a pain to get set up, to get your, uh, acquiring bank, to get all the other bits and pieces you need to get in place, and the cost structure was there, it was, the cost structure was opaque, and it was just like 0.
2 percent or something, or 2%. And two lines of code, it was just like, boom,
[00:21:31] Jonathan: done. It changed the life of any developer that needed to add any form of payment to their product. You know, essentially job done at that point. And as you say, they took the brakes off an entire industry. So can we just go back to, um, the, the funding, the most boring thing, what was it that made you want to, want to do that as, as, as an idea?
[00:21:55] Nigel: So down the line, just thinking, look. Because of the way interest rates are raising up, there's a lot of people looking for side hustles, and there's a lot of people who don't want to be contracting because RF35 is screwing you up, for example, in the UK and stuff. But you want to have a business that's generating stuff, and a lot of people don't want for the man.
Uh, there is a sort of artisan movement of, let's call them tech builders, API tech builders. Who are doing some incredibly boring things that people need to use. And so if you look at our expertise, it's taking API and interesting value props to market and building especially Dan, an incredibly robust, well engineered tech that just works.
As we're looking at what boring stuff can we power? Uh, and how can we help people having to not learn to do the boring stuff, get to market quick. We call it single feature businesses. Uh, that, uh, are sitting on a robust infrastructure. So much Shopify enabled anybody to, to, uh, like, for example, this, uh, this photo in this frame here was, uh, somebody on Shopify repurposes old, uh, plates from cameras, okay, into real life frames.
Shopify gave them that ability. So we're looking at something along those lines.
[00:23:19] Jonathan: I was just wondering, even though you've got to this, you know, another revolutionary idea, Um, are you still bringing with you some of those early lessons that you, you, you learned at ADS, uh, EDS and early on about, you know, focus and process and all those other things?
[00:23:35] Nigel: One of the big learnings is, uh, customers don't buy features. Buy a value proposition.
[00:23:44] Paul: Yeah. That's really interesting because I, I guess you can't really complete your p until you figured out what your MVP is.
[00:23:49] Nigel: We've been working on that one actually. Uh, it's because we're looking at the, and it's like a, you've got thesis, essentially.
Concept we've working on is a bunch of tests. Right, that gets you to product market fit, MVP, product market, we call it first feature fit, uh, if you see what I mean. Uh, and MVP, we read, uh, that as minimal viable proposition for people. You can then start shaping your point of view, because it will evolve into a more substantial thing.
So you take the learnings a bit further forward in the, in the thinking process, but the rigor, and this comes back to another learning, the rigor of like EDS and the rigor of engineering testing and stuff like that, so wheels don't fall off and that type of thing, uh, is, uh, another thing that you, you should really do with your value problem.
It's a piece of engineering to, to, to, that's just personified in words.
[00:24:48] Paul: Amazing insight. I think that's, that's really valuable. So I think
[00:24:51] Jonathan: what we can take, take from this section is, is, you know, first everything you do can give you valuable experience to, to use. In later life, um, the key is to do something as, as well as you can, don't rush into it, think it through and think it from the customer's perspective, build your network, because that's where you'll find the opportunities or they'll find you and those people.
To take with you on your journey, because that's a recurrent theme. I think Nigel, from, from what you're saying, um, say, I think that the sort of last thing that we, we have to remind our, uh, our listeners, you know, when they are building those businesses in, in this holistic, uh, way is to always ask, so can what,
[00:25:48] Paul: so now you're primarily known as, uh, somebody that's steeped in FinTech, that's certainly what we've seen with the bits of Google. What we've done together, um, and it may come as a bit of a shock for those of us observing the current group of, um, neobanks and, and in things like Buy Now Pay Later and Klarna, et cetera, um, that a lot of these Folks don't actually make any money, they just continue to burn investors funds.
Um, trying to look like winners, hyping the possibility of IPOs, which may or may not happen, you know, when's Stripe gonna IPO, we don't know. Um, would it be right to say that the hype around fintech is, is well and truly over in your view at this point?
[00:26:26] Nigel: Hype around a lot of, uh, cheap money. Is part of the interest rates have gone back up, uh, and foreseeable future that will stay at a reasonable, reasonable height level.
And, and you look at majority of venture capital over 10 year risk adjusted thing that it's turning one and a half to 2 percent for the risk you're taking is insane. Uh, and so, uh, except the exceptional guys who, who knock the ball for part cash and they're more than double digit, sometimes double digit more returns, but they're very, very few, they're category kings.
[00:27:00] Paul: They are. And this is the power law, right? That the VCs are looking for. They, they, they need those returns from one or two companies because it returns the entire fund. It does. One wins, all the rest don't
[00:27:10] Jonathan: care about it. Would it, would it be true to say that, The real innovation in, in FinTech, as we know, it stopped about five years ago.
There's not really been anything new.
[00:27:21] Nigel: Yes, but on, uh, around that time, it's because, uh, the banks were hated, uh, after the credit crunch, uh, and things. And, uh, and they, they also, the processes they had for innovation. Most institutions now have possibly fixed their innovation or fixed their, uh, sort of like, uh, feature to market, uh, uh, cadence.
And they started to actually care a bit more about the customer as well. They may not feel it, but they have. So that moment in time, When there was anti bank, uh, all the, the whole world was. And sort of smoothed down, because the banks caught up and suffered, and understandably have always been run by pretty damn good people.
Uh, and then the, the amount of money that could get into fintech, lots of people are playing with stuff. Fundamentally, it came out to a more innovative banking.
[00:28:24] Jonathan: So, I mean, I know Paul and I've got a particular thing about neobanks not being a category. We just, we just think of them as at least initially more efficient versions of.
Big banks, there's some better, but there's really no different. I mean, possibly with the exception of Revolut.
[00:28:42] Nigel: Yeah, Revolut is interesting. They seem to, if you looked at sort of the law of what they're doing, it's about, it's a lifestyle business. It's looking after your telco. I can get my, uh, data sims from them.
I can get my other bits and pieces because they know how to do stuff at scale. They can service you and if you pay more, you get better services too, which I'm fine about. The product is actually pretty good. There's lots of complaints, but when you've got some 40 million customers. Uh, there's going to be noise, uh, around it, but it seems to be picking off things that some finance, some utility, and other things, it's almost like a finance and services utility business, which hasn't been done before.
[00:29:30] Jonathan: You know, you have created two category areas in FinTech, even though I postulated earlier that FinTech stopped innovating about five years ago. Do you think there is. Any possibility banks and even their banks will innovate quickly in AI.
[00:29:50] Nigel: What I can say have been useful for is there's so much waste and disconnect.
Of silos and processes within larger financial institutions. Uh, and also within the view of the customer, the single view, like the Amazon's view of the customer. Which is insane. They can make a decision. I'll replace your goods to Nigel, because he always pays us, to somebody else, not because, whatever, they trust or send something back.
So, that is where, I think it's an optimization to just, like, perhaps margin improvement, more than anything, and service improvement. That's not changing a category. That's just Doing better.
[00:30:34] Paul: I'm wondering if, um, you AI to predict needs though, um, which isn't really a banking thing. It's more like a customer experience piece.
If that in itself will drive innovation that could create categories.
[00:30:46] Nigel: Yeah, it is the propensity to do something. So, banking has actually been doing that for years. Bizarrely enough, uh, using propensity analysis, uh, which AI just probably makes it a little bit better, uh, in terms of your, your, uh, you have, you, you can make more use of your data rather than it being sort of like sequential
algorithms on things which boom, give you an outcome you wouldn't have actually already thought of. So the, uh, it, it can give propensity to buy or something. Uh, and what is almost like a category out there of marketing shit that doesn't annoy people.
[00:31:31] Jonathan: Just go and repeat that new category, marketing shit that doesn't annoy people.
You heard it, you heard it first on the Difference Engine there.
[00:31:39] Nigel: And so, you're almost like A category of companies that can just say this customer won't read, that's not relevant to them. That doesn't, that won't resonate with them. It's like hyper
[00:31:50] Jonathan: personalization. So looking back, you know, if we think that, um, fintech has been a bit of a bubble where we have, you know, even, even the ones that have, uh, managed to, to get through and to innovate looking for exits of various sorts, what, what might the entrepreneurs and the financiers learnt looking back at this thing, what, which was supposed to radically change finance
[00:32:18] Nigel: credit.
So credit and credit has its positives and negatives, uh, which is, it's a notion of Sherlock thing to anybody in banking. Uh, and one of the things I hope they've learned from is making credit a positive, uh, for people that, uh, maybe, uh, a learning, but that's nothing to do with tech that's to do with, uh, economics and society.
[00:32:45] Jonathan: Well, as we often point out, you know, tech doesn't exist in its own bubble. It does exist within the confines of economics and society.
[00:32:53] Nigel: What I hope they do solve though, because tech has massively accelerated. Uh, fraud, and you've got these fraud villages, uh, in various parts of the world, the ones with name and shame, but, uh, and human trafficking to staff these, uh, fraud villages and, and stuff.
So you've got a whole, uh, whole set of people abusing society, uh, and then using that, and the police can hardly get at them because they're, they're not in, in the location, not in, say, UK or France or US. Uh. The fraud has been committed, so this is a way of, of learning how to harness tech to a, shut these places down, or how to protect individuals, because there's lots of people talking about it.
I was working with a company called GetSilver. Uh, and it was about helping the people over 50, uh, technically as fraud, uh, and things. And there's lots of people who have, uh, trying to do good things, but nobody's actually cracked it. And police can't arrest somebody who's trying to defraud us, they just don't have the resources.
So there's a way of using tech to, uh, uh, detect suspiciousness in a, in a, in a way that stops you doing something, protects you, and is a way to figure out how to shut. Things down so you can create it up to a, an NCA, National Criminal Agency and other international bodies, a team so you can shut the networks down, that, that would be super helpful because the amount of fraud coming in is pushing.
The cost of boring the cost of business and everything,
[00:34:40] Jonathan: you know, as, as ever, uh, technology creates its own problems and can create its own solutions. But I think just looking back on the history of FinTech thus far, um, it strikes me that once a category exists in the minds of a majority, um, it could be a category that's, uh, pretty soon going to be over and you're pretty on the money when you essentially are indicating that FinTech's innovation engine has run down.
It's probably had as much impact as it's going to have at this stage and inevitably it's going to be absorbed into other stronger or more distributed categories.
[00:35:18] Nigel: That's a good story.
[00:35:26] Jonathan: I want to talk about Something that Nigel brought up earlier in this episode, which is the idea of a more artisanal future. Um, I think because of this sort of pervasion of technology, lots of people still want to be founders, you know, despite, as we all know, if we live long enough, the pitfalls of that choice can lead to.
But equally, lots of people don't want to be founders or they want to be a different sort of founder. But that always, has that always been the case, Nigel? Um, what? What, what's happening now that you're observing?
[00:35:56] Nigel: Looking at this as a trend, this is, colleague Dan Bruce and I, uh, before even deciding what we're going to do, have been just trying to look at, uh, the trend.
Post COVID, there seems to be a, I don't want to go back to work, not to work trend, but I don't want to go back to the office thing. One of the things the office does provide is a sense of community. Uh, which is important, sometimes it sends a purpose if it's a good company. So we're just looking at, there's people who have wanted not to work in, say, the, the urban areas, but work, and then did move after COVID and stuff, to the countryside.
Can you, and that is a sort of an anti urbanization, or also does it all. Trend, can you help them have a sense of purpose, community work, and, and also get rewarded for that? Is there a type of, uh, instead of being a
say,
uh, is a sort of software, uh, engine or tech. Artisanal type business where people can be in a Whitstable, for example, Uh, and, and have a community there. I noticed they're actually like, it's not a WeWork, but a similar sort of thing in the back of the church. Generate good income. I mean, you're not wasting four hours of your day possibly traveling, two to five hours a day traveling.
The stress of traveling, the stress of work. You're getting a sense of purpose. You're also delivering something that's super useful. For other companies, big co, or even startups to do it. And, and if you look at what's needed for that, you can't do it in Salesforce, because it's like so many features, you just don't need all of that.
There's a way of being this mini, artisanal, uh, infrastructure, to be able to get stuff out super quick without having to do this massive stuff. And some of these may become big companies. So is there also then a market and there is a market, uh, somebody can sell their, their sort of tiny little API business for 60 grand, which is a great result for them.
[00:38:09] Jonathan: This is a very, very big idea, Nigel. I mean, what you're postulating here is, is that the entire development of Western society over the last 400 years, where we're seeing this constant drift from little artisanal, Enterprises in the countryside, people drifting into the cities, concentrating to bigger and bigger industrial units in bigger and bigger cities has come to the development of a technology where we're at such a stage now we can actually use that technology.
It's almost, and I hesitate to use the term go backwards because it's not going backwards in terms of societal point of view, but it is going backwards in terms of this apparently inevitable. Movement towards the cities, towards selfless jobs, and so on and so on and so on.
[00:39:02] Paul: It's interesting because that's, you know, that movement, um, to artisanal and, you know, individual contributor, if you like, work.
It goes against a lot of, um, what you see from, from the pushback, from the oftentimes, The larger organizations like consulting firms. I saw this morning there was a story in the FT that, um, I forget which one of the big, uh, consulting firms is not just mandating people back in the office. They're also going to do proximity, um, detection to make sure that you're actually not like mentally present, but physically present.
It sounds like we're gearing up for a big fight here.
[00:39:37] Nigel: I mean, you've lost a huge amount of trust both ways when you have to Okay, check into your desk, because this is going back to timekeeping. If, uh, you can create a new, it's almost like a new industry, uh, of micro, they call it technology microservices, but it's more like micro APIs and stuff, and you can assemble stuff on that.
They're creating a new, coming back to your, uh, your guidance on categories about creating a new type of economy. Based on this, sort of like micro future economy, uh, or the artisanal engineer economy or something along those lines. I think you can start to, uh, help regenerate. I know we're all into sustainability and nature.
That's one other thing which, uh, I don't know if all of us want to call out here. Uh, so all of that can actually, because there's a massive issue that we do need to, we, we, we build countryside and nature in general, and also the healing powers of nature. I spend a good number of hours per day getting into a meditative state, just walking.
[00:40:44] Jonathan: I think there's something in that though, isn't there, that, that, you know, we, we think that our so called flexible lifestyles have, have, have, have improved. Our life experience, but haven't we just a lot of us have just become prisoners of the machine just as much as anybody operating a loom in a textile factory in the, in the 1800s.
It looks like our relationship with the workplace is going to change our relationship with work itself is going to have to change and certainly even our relationship.
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