Latest / Leaders In Payments / Ben Gleisner Founder & CEO of Cogo | Episode 285

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Ben Gleisner Founder & CEO of Cogo | Episode 285 · Leaders In Payments

• 0:01
  Speaker 1: Welcome to the Leaders in Payments podcast, where we talk to C-level leaders from across the payments landscape.
• 0:06
  Speaker 1: We'll be discussing the products and services that impact the payment space today, as well as trends and predictions for the future of payments.
• 0:14
  Speaker 1: We will also hear stories from our guests about their journeys to the top.
• 0:18
  Speaker 2: So Kogo actually almost is a verb that is manifesting what we're trying to do, which is to sort of empower hundreds of millions of people and businesses, sort of bring them effectively together in a virtual way, but then recommend things they can do and, as a collective, five, ten years from now, we'd like to be able to say, yeah, 300 million people and businesses yesterday did these behaviors that are reducing emissions by why?
• 0:40
  Speaker 2: And that's the sort of mission.
• 0:42
  Speaker 2: So yeah, let's.
• 0:43
  Speaker 2: Kogo is one of our taglines, which means let's go change the world.
• 0:53
  Speaker 3: That was Ben Gleisner, the founder and CEO of Kogo, and he is my special guest on this episode, episode 285 of the Leaders and Payments podcast and I'm your host, greg Myers.
• 1:02
  Speaker 3: Kogo is a climate fintech that provides carbon management products that enable individuals and businesses to measure, understand and reduce their impact on the climate.
• 1:12
  Speaker 3: Ben and I talk about Kogo and what makes it unique in the market.
• 1:15
  Speaker 3: We also discussed the unique story of the founding of the company.
• 1:18
  Speaker 3: Although Kogo isn't a pure payments or fintech company in the sense that they move money, ben does an excellent job of connecting the dots between payments or transactions and their impact on the climate.
• 1:29
  Speaker 3: We've got a great episode ahead, so let's get started.
• 1:32
  Speaker 3: Hi, ben, thank you for being here and welcome to the Leaders and Payments podcast.
• 1:41
  Speaker 2: Great to be here too, Greg.
• 1:42
  Speaker 2: Hi to all listeners.
• 1:43
  Speaker 3: So let's go ahead and just dive right in.
• 1:45
  Speaker 3: So tell our audience a little bit about yourself, maybe where you grew up, where you went to school, where you currently live, a few things like that, and we'll circle back to your professional career in a few minutes.
• 1:53
  Speaker 2: Sounds great.
• 1:53
  Speaker 2: So we were born in England, in Manchester a bit of a football fan, so I've spent 10 years there.
• 1:59
  Speaker 2: And then my parents decided maybe we should live somewhere else.
• 2:02
  Speaker 2: So we went for one year, traveled around the world through the States, actually, and through Australia, new Zealand, southeast Asia and got back to England and was like, nah, there's some better places to live.
• 2:10
  Speaker 2: And so we moved to New Zealand, which is my home now.
• 2:13
  Speaker 2: So 11-year-old arrived here and now two kids, happy life, you know, panta and I, and we're in Wellington, the capital city of New Zealand Awesome.
• 2:21
  Speaker 3: Well, let's talk about the company Kogo, so tell the audience what Kogo does.
• 2:25
  Speaker 2: Great, yeah, well, Kogo, I guess we all spend money and make payments on things.
• 2:28
  Speaker 2: What we do is not just tell you how much you spend.
• 2:31
  Speaker 2: We tell you the impact of that spending on various sort of environmental and social indicators.
• 2:36
  Speaker 2: So we all here, I guess.
• 2:38
  Speaker 2: I spent years working inside government on economic policies, around climate change, for example, and I guess I always found it a bit challenging that we were sitting in these little rooms and flying around the world actually and causing climate change, trying to solve it, but there wasn't really any information that individuals, households or SMBs could actually learn about their own impact.
• 2:57
  Speaker 2: So I guess what we do is we enrich banking data.
• 3:00
  Speaker 2: So when you open up the banking app from, say, NatWest in the UK or Commonwealth Bank in Australia, instead of seeing all the payments you make which you obviously do see anyway we tell you how much carbon footprint is of each of those payments.
• 3:12
  Speaker 2: So really just translating your spend data into a carbon footprint.
• 3:16
  Speaker 3: Okay, so I've seen this term, which is kind of new to me, but you're a climate fintech.
• 3:21
  Speaker 3: That's a fair phrase, that's a new category.
• 3:24
  Speaker 2: And it's sort of.
• 3:25
  Speaker 2: I guess there's lots of things like personal finance management features that's obviously by now, pay later.
• 3:30
  Speaker 2: Think of us like another add on that banks are wanting to do to support their customers on, yeah, I guess, issues around their environmental and social impact.
• 3:39
  Speaker 2: So yeah, climate fintech working with banks, primarily in Asia, europe and Australasia.
• 3:45
  Speaker 3: And so these banks this is sort of is it an app that they add to their existing core platform?
• 3:52
  Speaker 2: So it's an API, so it sits within the core banking app.
• 3:56
  Speaker 2: So if you give us a couple of years, maybe open up Wells Fargo, bank of America, chase, whatever one of these main tier one banks inside their banking app.
• 4:06
  Speaker 2: It'll just be a feature, so it sits inside your existing app.
• 4:09
  Speaker 2: So you don't have to download another app or sort of consent for things outside.
• 4:14
  Speaker 2: It's basically just inside, built into your current mobile banking app.
• 4:17
  Speaker 3: Okay, and then you mentioned small business, so is it a similar solution for small businesses and corporates?
• 4:23
  Speaker 2: Yeah, so the SMBs.
• 4:25
  Speaker 2: We have a product which actually uses their accounting data.
• 4:28
  Speaker 2: So the payments you make is a household of pretty generic, pretty easy to sort of categorize.
• 4:33
  Speaker 2: Let's say you went to Starbucks, you bought I don't know American Airlines flight.
• 4:37
  Speaker 2: It's pretty generic, the categories of your spending, the payments you make, whereas for a small business they're buying a lot of direct bank transfers, there's not cards being used, so we don't have merchant categories and things.
• 4:50
  Speaker 2: So it's just a little bit more complicated to just use the banking transaction data to see where the payments are being made, so that the small business product sucks in the accounting transactions, which is just a little bit more enriched.
• 5:02
  Speaker 2: It allows us to sort of identify things like wages are already broken out and things like that.
• 5:05
  Speaker 2: So it's just a almost exactly the same concept of let's use the financial data of your business just like we use it of your household, but it does the same ultimate, I guess solves the problem around what is my impact as a business on climate and what can I do about it to reduce it.
• 5:21
  Speaker 2: And that's part of the proposition around banks they like well again, they're being regulated now to actually not only measure the emissions of their customers but also support the transition to a low-carbon economy.
• 5:31
  Speaker 3: Okay, so it tracks it.
• 5:33
  Speaker 3: And then do you also provide recommendations?
• 5:35
  Speaker 3: Yeah, that's exactly right.
• 5:37
  Speaker 3: We say that we help measure, understand and reduce so there are sort of three things.
• 5:41
  Speaker 2: You can obviously measure it.
• 5:42
  Speaker 2: That's relatively important but straightforward.
• 5:45
  Speaker 2: I think people also then are like well, what does this number mean?
• 5:47
  Speaker 2: So helping them understand it, like, how much is that?
• 5:50
  Speaker 2: How does it compare to other households in I don't know Connecticut, or how does it compare to other businesses that are in the hospitality industry?
• 5:58
  Speaker 2: So helping people understand what the footprint represents.
• 6:01
  Speaker 2: And then really the business sort of.
• 6:05
  Speaker 2: The reason we've set this up is to obviously help the companies and households using it to reduce their emissions.
• 6:11
  Speaker 2: As a world, the emissions are not going in the right direction, if you like, and we are seeing obviously those impacts of that through different storm events.
• 6:19
  Speaker 2: You name it like I'm not a scientist, so I'm not going to claim that I know the science, but there is a lot of evidence that we are doing something to this climate and we should be reducing the emissions we're making, which is basically what we're doing is to try and help people say you know, you can always point the fingers as well point the finger to a government, point the finger to NGOs, point the finger to oil companies.
• 6:37
  Speaker 2: I think what more and more, I guess users of Kogo are saying is well, what can I do?
• 6:42
  Speaker 2: I want to do my bit.
• 6:44
  Speaker 2: I've got corporate clients that are buying my products, that want me to measure them.
• 6:47
  Speaker 2: So there's a bunch of different drivers.
• 6:49
  Speaker 2: But, as you say, the actual core of the business is how do you then recommend things that the users can do to reduce but also recognize?
• 6:57
  Speaker 2: So we have these two I guess we call them sort of machine learning engines, which is like how do you recognize people for the effort they're making?
• 7:04
  Speaker 2: So, say, greg, you're on the Wells Fargo app in a couple of years and you've gone and caught a metro somewhere in New York.
• 7:11
  Speaker 2: We'd like to be able to recognize you and say, hey, by choosing a metro, spending five bucks, you're probably saving about 30 bucks on the Uber and this much carbon as well.
• 7:18
  Speaker 2: So, trying to help people feel good about the decisions they're already making and we learn basically what people respond to and what people are, I guess, positively reinforced by, and then the same on the recommendation.
• 7:30
  Speaker 2: So it's like, hey, pat, you're on the back for doing these three things, but we can see your electricity bills growing over the last year and that's creating quite a lot of carbon based on the emissions from the grid in St New York State.
• 7:41
  Speaker 2: So here are three things to do to reduce your energy bills and your emissions from the payments you're making to your energy company.
• 7:49
  Speaker 2: It might be solar system on your roof or a battery technology or some heat pump.
• 7:54
  Speaker 3: So it's about recommending those things that businesses and households can do Okay, and I would assume you have some competition out there, maybe not directly doing what you're doing, but I would think in some similar way.
• 8:06
  Speaker 3: So what differentiates you from your competitors?
• 8:08
  Speaker 2: Yeah, good question.
• 8:09
  Speaker 2: So, yeah, definitely we like to think of Kogo being the category leader.
• 8:14
  Speaker 2: We have won the biggest tier one banks doing things that progressed sort of two, three years now of building out these features.
• 8:22
  Speaker 2: So we've managed to become the best in class.
• 8:23
  Speaker 2: But there's hundreds of other companies that are trying to do this to.
• 8:26
  Speaker 2: It's fair to say.
• 8:27
  Speaker 2: We say the differentiators.
• 8:29
  Speaker 2: Firstly, when you go and buy 50 bucks Macy's or I don't know $100 of food from Whole Foods in New York, let's say, being able to be confident that the amount of carbon that's coming back as an estimate is as good as it can be, is quite important.
• 8:43
  Speaker 2: So we do say our data around how we measure the footprint of a given spend is best in class because we partner with local government and NGO and academics inside each of the markets we operate.
• 8:57
  Speaker 2: Some of our competitors use just here's the global average standard and pours say that whenever you buy I don't know chicken burger, this is how much carbon.
• 9:05
  Speaker 2: But they don't factor in the sort of regional differences in the energy systems and stuff.
• 9:09
  Speaker 2: So I suppose we say we've got great granular data, credible emission data, to figure out what their measurement is.
• 9:15
  Speaker 2: And then the second big one is given.
• 9:17
  Speaker 2: We've got millions of users now.
• 9:18
  Speaker 2: We've built quite a sophisticated model around how do you change the behavior and actually ultimately give a give a service to these people.
• 9:26
  Speaker 2: That is something that they take on board this advice and actually change their behavior.
• 9:29
  Speaker 2: So we're seeing five to 10 percent reductions in people's carbon footprints relative to if they were not undertaking any of the recommendations we provide.
• 9:38
  Speaker 3: Okay, and where do you see this headed, say, in the next three to five years?
• 9:43
  Speaker 2: Yeah, there's a big regulatory like we've.
• 9:45
  Speaker 2: I can sort of say that we set this idea up in 2010.
• 9:48
  Speaker 2: So it's 13 years and counting, originally as a charity and originally without payment data, but we quite quickly realized if you want to help people understand their impact on the world and help them reduce it, you sort of need to get into the payment data, because that really is the way which we will impact the world is what we spend.
• 10:05
  Speaker 2: So that was 2015 first integrated financial data with environmental and social data.
• 10:10
  Speaker 2: I suppose now, though, that was all a voluntary thing.
• 10:14
  Speaker 2: Banks didn't have to do it.
• 10:16
  Speaker 2: What we're seeing globally is the regulations around what's called financial disclosures to do with carbon are starting to really, I suppose, come into mandatory force.
• 10:26
  Speaker 2: New Zealand was the first country in the world to do this, and this year coming so 2024, all of the banks in New Zealand, as well as Australia, europe, now caught up.
• 10:35
  Speaker 2: They start having to be required to report on what are the emissions of your financing like, as in, if you lend money to a 10 million household, what are the carbon footprints of those households?
• 10:47
  Speaker 2: So I think the number one thing that's going to happen in terms of the next few years is banks are going to actually have to commit to both measuring these emissions, and the second part of it is setting targets to help reduce them, and I think that is a big game changer for a business like ours, because to date it's been a bit like oh, it's a nice thing to do.
• 11:05
  Speaker 2: You know those millennials and you know Gen Zedders.
• 11:08
  Speaker 2: They care about this stuff.
• 11:09
  Speaker 2: Maybe a few of them will keep coming to the bank and be happy that we've done this.
• 11:13
  Speaker 2: That's all it's nice to have, and the future is going to be a mandatory regime.
• 11:17
  Speaker 2: So that's the first thing, I think.
• 11:19
  Speaker 2: The second thing is probably, while climate change is an important issue, I think in the end, the idea we have is we want to help people go to bed at night knowing that the payments that they're making are contributing to a world that aligns with their values.
• 11:31
  Speaker 2: So if you want to support I don't know local, say, american or state-owned businesses, so businesses that are owned by local providers, people that are owned by minority groups, or you want to reduce your plastic waste, or you want to who knows Like effectively, you want the world to be different.
• 11:47
  Speaker 2: The one way to make that different is to put your money towards businesses that are doing the things that align with those values, and it's often hard to find.
• 11:54
  Speaker 2: So I think the second thing will be the future will be where payments are.
• 11:58
  Speaker 2: You're not just told how much you spend, but you're told the social and environmental impacts of your spending, and then you're able to choose businesses to buy from that are better aligned to your values.
• 12:07
  Speaker 2: Does that make sense?
• 12:08
  Speaker 3: Oh, absolutely Makes perfect sense.
• 12:09
  Speaker 3: So you're not quite in the US yet.
• 12:14
  Speaker 3: So what's the vision for that, or what are the challenges that you see, or the biggest challenges you see in the US?
• 12:20
  Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean in terms of the sort of climate thing.
• 12:23
  Speaker 2: It is sad because we see, obviously, all of the different markets in different states of maturity.
• 12:28
  Speaker 2: It is way too political in the States.
• 12:31
  Speaker 2: It's like it just unfortunately has got this and it's not the only thing that's stopping in.
• 12:35
  Speaker 2: In some ways I think it's getting better.
• 12:36
  Speaker 2: So I suppose this is sort of a little negative, but I think there's a bit of hope on the horizon that it's sort of like climate change is what maybe it was Al Gore don't want to blame Al, but whatever this sort of somehow this issue became an issue that the Democratic Party was promoting and I think that's changing, it's fair to say now.
• 12:52
  Speaker 2: But it has been historically something.
• 12:54
  Speaker 2: That's like you listen to the Republican debates and it's sort of like there are some, it's fair to say, talking about climate is an issue, but there is quite a lot that's like oh well, and that's not to say, because I think many young and even progressive Republicans actually do have a pretty strong desire to do something about this issue, but it has been a little bit, let's say, caught up in the past, which has slowed it down.
• 13:12
  Speaker 2: Is the truth.
• 13:13
  Speaker 2: So when you think about these regulations that New Zealand, then Europe and Australia and Asian countries are adopting.
• 13:18
  Speaker 2: It isn't like forcing people to do anything.
• 13:21
  Speaker 2: It's saying that the regulator is going to ask these banks to disclose at least just publish the emissions from their customers.
• 13:29
  Speaker 2: So I think number one is it's been a bit slow to sort of come, but right now the SEC are trying to get consulting the banks and the I suppose, each state on these rules around.
• 13:40
  Speaker 2: Well, what sort of disclosures should they be required to do Once that comes in?
• 13:45
  Speaker 2: Or at least those things are being signaled?
• 13:46
  Speaker 2: California has already done something, so they've sort of gone ahead of the game and then pushed forward these disclosure requirements.
• 13:52
  Speaker 2: But yeah, we hope that right now there isn't a bank in America where you get this service, and so in some ways it feels like people that care about this stuff are missing out.
• 14:01
  Speaker 2: But, good news, many of the tier one banks we have conversations with are talking about a sort of when rather than an F, so I think the question is is it a year or is it two years away that you'll start being able to see this experience in your banking apps in the States?
• 14:17
  Speaker 3: Okay, great.
• 14:18
  Speaker 3: So let's switch gears a little bit and talk about you.
• 14:21
  Speaker 3: So tell us about your journey there to founding the company and being the CEO.
• 14:25
  Speaker 2: So, yeah, we, as I said, I was working as an economist at the Ministry of Finance here in New Zealand, so, I guess, through a bit of financial stuff, but helping, I guess, make sure that we're spending money as a country efficiently and, I don't know, ensuring that the investments we're making on health and social and environmental, would be good value for money, if you like.
• 14:44
  Speaker 2: And yeah, one of the issues I was working on was climate change and we were flying around the world and there was, I don't know, probably thousands.
• 14:52
  Speaker 2: There's just been one of these meetings recently.
• 14:53
  Speaker 2: It's these COP meetings, so conference of the parties, which all of the 100 plus countries around the world all get together and I just thought a little bit like we were causing more climate change than we were solving, basically because we were flying around.
• 15:06
  Speaker 2: Literally, I had to fly business class.
• 15:08
  Speaker 2: I wasn't allowed.
• 15:08
  Speaker 2: I was like, surely I can just do economy.
• 15:10
  Speaker 2: No, no, no, we've got to do business.
• 15:11
  Speaker 2: It's, you know, got to arrive, you fresh.
• 15:13
  Speaker 2: I was like, oh, no.
• 15:14
  Speaker 2: Anyway, we're flying around the world to these big UN meetings 2007, 2008, 2009.
• 15:20
  Speaker 2: So three years and I just felt like it was just talking, a lot of talking, and I think that was like, yeah, there was good intentions but there wasn't actually anything happening.
• 15:28
  Speaker 2: And even now, just looking back on the last 13, 14 years since then, not much has changed.
• 15:33
  Speaker 2: The emissions that we're creating as a world keep on growing up to the right.
• 15:36
  Speaker 2: And we've had all these meetings.
• 15:38
  Speaker 2: I think it was partly driven by that that I was like, look, I don't know if we're going to change the world.
• 15:42
  Speaker 2: If you like, sitting around at the UN, it's necessary, but it's not like not going to really move the dial.
• 15:47
  Speaker 2: And so I was like, well, look, what's changing the world?
• 15:49
  Speaker 2: And looked around and software and obviously Facebook wasn't there.
• 15:51
  Speaker 2: Yeah, but I could, just knew that there was going to be a software sort of revolution that would drive mass behavior change, whether it's now the hotels you book through or Airbnb, effectively the Ubers you name it all the different tools that you're using, your financial software, mobile banking was not a searound back then, but there's just been so much change in software and it's created so much behavior change and, ultimately, shifted economies.
• 16:14
  Speaker 2: I was like, well, let's build a software solution, hence the sort of climate fintech sort of positioning.
• 16:19
  Speaker 2: So, yeah, we founded the idea of 2010.
• 16:21
  Speaker 2: We launched and it was me and a co-founder that I'd went to university with.
• 16:25
  Speaker 2: She also quit her job in government and we quit our day jobs, started doing four days a week, actually paved, and then got a day off to do this and then we ended up jumping in all in 2012.
• 16:35
  Speaker 2: And yeah, evolved it iterated, pivoted, did what you do in your startup and founded the actual company in 2017.
• 16:43
  Speaker 2: Was originally a charity, so we incorporated the company and I don't know, expanded out of New Zealand, moved to the UK.
• 16:49
  Speaker 2: We were the first open banking climate sort of sustainability app in the world.
• 16:54
  Speaker 2: So we were the first company to integrate open banking data into an app.
• 16:58
  Speaker 2: So originally we weren't with the banks.
• 16:59
  Speaker 2: We're a standalone app for the banks, all this and so this is cool.
• 17:02
  Speaker 2: Let's put it into our banking app.
• 17:03
  Speaker 2: But yeah, that's the journey.
• 17:05
  Speaker 2: We're alive and it's not been the easiest year or 80 months, but we've got to end of the year.
• 17:09
  Speaker 2: It's been good.
• 17:11
  Speaker 3: Great.
• 17:11
  Speaker 3: So I always have to ask this whenever there's a unique name.
• 17:14
  Speaker 3: So where did the name Kogo come from?
• 17:16
  Speaker 3: Good, question.
• 17:17
  Speaker 2: So the original company, the original idea I'd mentioned 2010 we launched was called Conscious Consumers, as in yeah, we want to be able to make payments that are sort of at least conscious of the impact of those right.
• 17:29
  Speaker 2: So, conscious consuming, conscious consumers, of the name.
• 17:32
  Speaker 2: But after a few years, we're like oh my God, people don't know how to spell conscious.
• 17:35
  Speaker 2: We had lots of people like you know, we looked at all the different Google results of what people got to a website and just the numbers of different spellings of conscious was like oh no, this is not working.
• 17:44
  Speaker 2: I think as well.
• 17:45
  Speaker 2: Consumer the label being tilts as a consumer, people are a little bit like I don't know if I want to be labeled that.
• 17:51
  Speaker 2: So we're like okay, cool, and this also, it's long and it's hard to you know whatever type.
• 17:54
  Speaker 2: So we're like let's look at changing the name to launch into the UK, basically.
• 17:59
  Speaker 2: So we sort of like the idea, like the words conscious consumers start with the word co.
• 18:03
  Speaker 2: So we're like oh, coco is quite a cool name.
• 18:05
  Speaker 2: Give us fast forward.
• 18:06
  Speaker 2: Five years from now, you'll be interacting with us through a sort of like AI not a bot, but some sort of entity where you'll be like hey, it'll wake you up.
• 18:14
  Speaker 2: I will mention in the morning hey, greg, this would be Coco.
• 18:17
  Speaker 2: And why we thought Coco was quite cool is that it's got like an idea of a sort of you could see it as a character.
• 18:22
  Speaker 2: It actually became a Disney movie, obviously, I think, coco.
• 18:24
  Speaker 2: So, long story short.
• 18:25
  Speaker 2: We thought let's create a name that could potentially have its own unique sort of personality and effectively be something that you engage with through voice, where you're like, hey, I'm looking to books and travel or I'm trying to find a hotel, and it would come back and say, hey, well, here's some ideas based on your values.
• 18:40
  Speaker 2: Anyway, coco was already got.
• 18:42
  Speaker 2: Coco Chanel own that particular brand, so we didn't get Coco.
• 18:46
  Speaker 2: And then we're like we like the shortness of Cocoa.
• 18:48
  Speaker 2: So we're like well, cocoa is quite a cool name.
• 18:50
  Speaker 2: It's short, it's sort of I don't know, it's got a nice sort of ring.
• 18:53
  Speaker 2: So literally it was on the back of a short word that had the word co.
• 18:57
  Speaker 2: We like co being collaborate, cooperate, communicate.
• 18:59
  Speaker 2: So co was cool and then go.
• 19:01
  Speaker 2: Anyway, we changed the name.
• 19:02
  Speaker 2: And then about a month later, one of our team was like oh, I really like the name.
• 19:06
  Speaker 2: I just didn't have it all studied into it and I really like the fact that you know it's got these Latin roots.
• 19:11
  Speaker 2: You know, such a good choice and I'm like Latin.
• 19:13
  Speaker 2: And I went and looked online and was like the word cogo means to bring people together and to move them forward, which sort of makes sense, right, Co, bring together and go.
• 19:24
  Speaker 2: And so cogo actually almost is a verb that is manifesting what we're trying to do, which is to sort of empower hundreds of millions of people and businesses, sort of bring them effectively together in a virtual way, but then recommend things they can do and as a collective, five, 10 years from now, we'd like to be able to say, yeah, 300 million people and businesses yesterday did these behaviors that are reducing emissions by wine.
• 19:47
  Speaker 2: That's the sort of mission.
• 19:49
  Speaker 2: So, yeah, let's.
• 19:49
  Speaker 2: Cogo is one of our taglines, which means let's go, change the world, right?
• 19:53
  Speaker 3: Love it, Love it.
• 19:54
  Speaker 3: Well, final question.
• 19:55
  Speaker 3: So what are some things you're passionate about?
• 19:57
  Speaker 3: Maybe one business related passion and one personal passion.
• 20:01
  Speaker 2: Sure, I mean on business.
• 20:02
  Speaker 2: We as a company are very passionate about transparency and the way we operate, and so everybody at cogo knows what everybody else has paid.
• 20:11
  Speaker 2: As an example, everybody at cogo knows the exact financial position of the business and the forecast for 12 months, so effectively full of transparency on financials.
• 20:21
  Speaker 2: And everybody at cogo knows all of the investors in the company and we publish those.
• 20:26
  Speaker 2: So I guess I'm passionate as a business to be as transparent as possible about how we operate and make sure that there's no hidden things.
• 20:34
  Speaker 2: It's not like yeah, so yeah, that's been, that's.
• 20:36
  Speaker 2: I'm passionate about that.
• 20:36
  Speaker 2: It's quite unique in the business but I can tell you all of our staff and it builds a very, very high trust and very sort of inclusive environment to work in.
• 20:45
  Speaker 2: That's my business passion.
• 20:48
  Speaker 2: Personally, I love sports so I guess I'm getting close to 50 now but I love running half marathons, I love playing soccer we call obviously new air in the world basically getting out and about hiking, doing stuff in the outdoors that often have a competitive angle.
• 21:03
  Speaker 2: So I guess passionate about being healthy but also about winning.
• 21:07
  Speaker 2: Being honest, back to my transparency point yeah, I like a good race.
• 21:12
  Speaker 3: Okay, okay, great.
• 21:13
  Speaker 3: Well, ben, we've covered a lot of ground about you and the company and the industry and what you guys are trying to accomplish.
• 21:19
  Speaker 3: Is there anything else you'd like to cover before we wrap up the show?
• 21:22
  Speaker 2: Oh no, I think it's just great to hear that great podcasts like yourself on issues like payments are interested in these sorts of new ideas, because we hope that fast forward, you know, a few years, people when they make payments will know a little bit more about the impact of those payments, not just how tasty the ice cream and coffee or how good looking the shoes are that they're buying.
• 21:40
  Speaker 2: They understand a bit more.
• 21:41
  Speaker 2: So I think it's to me it's a really important part of the evolution of the payment ecosystem.
• 21:46
  Speaker 3: Yeah, it's a fascinating topic for sure.
• 21:48
  Speaker 3: So, ben, thank you so much for being on the show today.
• 21:50
  Speaker 3: I know your time is very valuable, so I really appreciate you being here.
• 21:53
  Speaker 3: No worries yet.
• 21:54
  Speaker 2: Thanks a lot, greg, appreciate the time.
• 21:55
  Speaker 3: Absolutely, and to all you listeners out there, I thank you for your time as well, and until the next story.
• 22:01
  Speaker 1: Thank you for joining us this week on the Leaders in Payments podcast.
• 22:04
  Speaker 1: Make sure you visit our website at leadersinpaymentscom, where you can subscribe to the show and where you'll find our show notes.
• 22:11
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