Latest / Leaders In Payments / Andrew Hawkins, CEO of ShieldPay | Episode 245

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Andrew Hawkins, CEO of ShieldPay | Episode 245 · 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 we do those three things we verify, we hold and we disperse and we're pretty confident that in legal services, within what you would describe as being a fintech, we are the only provider of that triumvirative capabilities you can imitate that.
• 0:35
  Speaker 2: It's not easy.
• 0:36
  Speaker 2: It's taken us many years to get here and we have the controls and the regulatory oversight to make sure that we're doing that responsibly.
• 0:41
  Speaker 2: So it's not easy to imitate, but really, where our differentiator is in our approach and our culture.
• 0:53
  Speaker 3: That was Andrew Hawkins, the CEO UK in Europe for Shield Pay, and he is my special guest on this episode, episode 245 of the Leaders in Payments podcast, and I'm your host, greg Myers.
• 1:04
  Speaker 3: Shield Pay provides simple and transparent payment solutions to the legal and professional services industries and to marketplaces and e-commerce platforms.
• 1:13
  Speaker 3: Andrew and I go on to talk about his journey to the role of CEO UK in Europe, including working for both startups and large enterprises.
• 1:20
  Speaker 3: We also discuss his professional and personal passions, and he provides some great advice for those just starting out in the industry.
• 1:27
  Speaker 3: We've got a great episode ahead, so let's get started.
• 1:30
  Speaker 3: Hi, andrew, thank you for being here and welcome to the Leaders in Payments podcast.
• 1:39
  Speaker 2: Thank you, I'm looking forward to the conversation, greg.
• 1:42
  Speaker 3: Yeah, me too.
• 1:42
  Speaker 3: So let's go ahead and dive right in, If you don't mind.
• 1:45
  Speaker 3: 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.
• 1:51
  Speaker 2: So I'm based here in the UK.
• 1:51
  Speaker 2: I live about 50 miles west of London but I'm very much Londoner.
• 1:56
  Speaker 2: I work out of London.
• 1:57
  Speaker 2: That's the centre of gravity for my life.
• 1:58
  Speaker 2: I was very fortunate growing up have had the opportunity to live in a number of different countries.
• 2:03
  Speaker 2: Actually it's kind of a thread here that you can extend all the way to where I am.
• 2:06
  Speaker 2: I find myself now in my career and my life.
• 2:09
  Speaker 2: But when I was just over one year old my parents took the bold move, when they were very young themselves, to move to Geneva.
• 2:15
  Speaker 2: My dad read an ad in a local newspaper looking for computer operators at CERN, picked up, the family moved over to Switzerland.
• 2:24
  Speaker 2: This bold new adventure.
• 2:25
  Speaker 2: That was fantastic.
• 2:27
  Speaker 2: I managed to learn another language experience, even though at the age of one that you necessarily are that aware of the culture you were born into.
• 2:34
  Speaker 2: But it was definitely a different entry into life than a lot of others of that generation.
• 2:39
  Speaker 2: I got my first computer for my ninth birthday, which is a very long time ago now.
• 2:44
  Speaker 2: It was the ZX81 of all things, which kind of ages me if the 81 was the year that it came out.
• 2:51
  Speaker 2: I was then very fortunate again, my mum and my dad, very adventurous, took us off to Bermuda where I spent all of my teenage years.
• 2:58
  Speaker 2: If there's one thing I recommend every listener is to go and spend some time in Bermuda.
• 3:03
  Speaker 2: It's a wonderful country.
• 3:04
  Speaker 2: My dad's first glory into financial services and technology and financial services, which now I'm at the ripe old age of 50 in technology and financial services I guess the apple doesn't fall far from the tree.
• 3:15
  Speaker 2: But I came back to University College London to study engineering and started my undergraduate degree literally two weeks after the worldwide web was opened up for access from across the internet, way back in 1991.
• 3:30
  Speaker 2: It was kind of transfixed by the potential of this really niche new technology that really nobody knew anything about at that stage and have been hooked ever since.
• 3:40
  Speaker 2: My fascination with the internet and my career being involved with the internet and its many epochs has been a wonderful experience and I've enjoyed it very much.
• 3:52
  Speaker 3: Let's dive in and talk about Shield Pay.
• 3:54
  Speaker 3: So tell our audience what Shield Pay does, so Shield.
• 3:57
  Speaker 2: Pay.
• 3:58
  Speaker 2: We're a UK-based fintech and our mission is to be the leader in high-value, complex B2B payments.
• 4:04
  Speaker 2: We were originally founded back in 2016 by Pete Janes, who's our group CEO, and he had a friend had the experience of being defrauded.
• 4:15
  Speaker 2: They were selling a car online on the marketplace and, unfortunately, the car was stolen and no money was ever received, and it gave birth to the idea of having a safe intermediary who could enable marketplaces to be trustworthy on the buying and selling side of the equation.
• 4:32
  Speaker 2: So Shield Pay has been going for a while.
• 4:34
  Speaker 2: It has evolved a lot and it's been through many iterations and now finds itself as the trusted partner to the legal services sector here in the UK.
• 4:43
  Speaker 2: We're not about the legal services profession being paid for the services that they provide.
• 4:49
  Speaker 2: We're more about the payments involved in a matter itself.
• 4:52
  Speaker 2: I'll give you a few examples of those in a sec.
• 4:55
  Speaker 2: But really what we're trying to solve for the legal services profession is the highly manual effort, the manual processes that go into fulfilling a matter.
• 5:04
  Speaker 2: Today, there are spreadsheets and law firm will log on to their banking website and transfer money from here to there.
• 5:11
  Speaker 2: And as matters become more complex and as participants become more sophisticated, that's just no longer a scalable or tenable approach and it's laden with risk.
• 5:22
  Speaker 2: It's error prone.
• 5:23
  Speaker 2: Legal services firms are increasingly being targeted by cyber criminals who are trying to misdirect funds.
• 5:30
  Speaker 2: In fact, it was only a few weeks ago that GCHQ who are our intelligence, security and cyber agency here in the UK issued a warning saying that the legal services profession was actively being targeted by cyber criminals.
• 5:42
  Speaker 2: And to be aware that's our place really is to be the partner of legal services firms, reducing the risk, reducing the manual processes involved in fulfilling a matter, and to give you a few examples of the types of thing that we get involved in.
• 5:57
  Speaker 2: A key solution of ours, a key proposition of ours, is enabling mergers and acquisitions and capital markets.
• 6:03
  Speaker 2: It's a sizable industry worldwide.
• 6:07
  Speaker 2: By some measures, it's over 5 trillion US dollars exchanged in M&A and capital markets transactions annually.
• 6:14
  Speaker 2: We do many of these projects, but one very recently is a £1 billion M&A transaction in which 408 individual payments were involved in nine different jurisdictions, with a deferred consideration element.
• 6:29
  Speaker 2: So of that 1 billion, an amount is held back and, based on successful fulfillment of some commitments, it's then released in time.
• 6:37
  Speaker 2: So we're not just talking about a party paying another party in real time it could be a quite a complex, high value, high jeopardy B2B transaction.
• 6:47
  Speaker 2: Another really fascinating use case that we often get involved in is the fulfillment of settlements in litigation cases.
• 6:55
  Speaker 2: As an example, if there's a group litigation order that's successfully prosecuted and tens of millions of pounds need to be dispersed into the hands of tens of thousands of consumers, that's an extremely complex and risk laden undertaking that we absolutely have the expertise to fulfill, and do so with leading law firms such as Pogos Goodhead, who we've recently published some really interesting case studies around the success of those projects.
• 7:23
  Speaker 2: And increasingly we're getting involved in conveyancing as a use case as well.
• 7:26
  Speaker 2: It's again a very large industry illegal services and real estate industry combined runs into the trillions of US dollars annually and we've recently announced a partnership with the Landmark Information Group, who are trying to transform conveyancing.
• 7:41
  Speaker 2: They already have a very developed proposition in that space, but some of your your listens might be surprised to hear that on average it takes in the region of 130 days from instruction to completion when somebody is buying or selling a house here in the UK, and that's a shocking length of time that's growing year on year.
• 8:00
  Speaker 2: We're getting involved in being the payment rails for those conveyancing projects to try and bring that time down.
• 8:07
  Speaker 2: And bringing the time down has all sorts of benefits that we think are worthwhile striving for.
• 8:11
  Speaker 2: So that's kind of what we do.
• 8:13
  Speaker 2: Let me just tell you a little bit more about who we are.
• 8:15
  Speaker 2: So we're a small but perfectly formed group of 100 people.
• 8:19
  Speaker 2: We're a surprisingly small company.
• 8:21
  Speaker 2: We're very much in a scale up phase at the moment.
• 8:24
  Speaker 2: We've got a enviable share of the top 100 law firms that we are very pleased to have amongst our customers, and we process billions of pounds of US dollars of transactions in each year.
• 8:35
  Speaker 2: We really are, despite the economic backdrop that we all find ourselves in, on the ascendancy.
• 8:41
  Speaker 2: We're currently in what looks to be the third record quarter for the company in a row.
• 8:46
  Speaker 2: We're on track to achieve our profitability within the envelope of our current funding round, which is a very comforting line to be able to see in the near future, and we've got considerable ambition as a company.
• 8:58
  Speaker 2: We're not going to stand still.
• 8:59
  Speaker 2: We're going to keep growing and keep progressing and have some really exciting partnerships that we're going to be able to announce soon that are an indicator of that ambition and just where we want to take this thing.
• 9:10
  Speaker 3: What would you say?
• 9:11
  Speaker 3: Differentiate your company from your competitors out there.
• 9:15
  Speaker 2: Really we do three relatively superficially simple things to do.
• 9:21
  Speaker 2: In practice are a lot more complex than the sounds, but there's an elegance in this simplicity.
• 9:25
  Speaker 2: So we do three things.
• 9:27
  Speaker 2: We verify the parties in a transaction.
• 9:29
  Speaker 2: So on the pay or in the pay side of the transaction, we make sure that everybody involved is trustworthy.
• 9:36
  Speaker 2: They are who they say, they are People that we want to do business with and we can be confident that nothing untoward is happening.
• 9:44
  Speaker 2: We then receive and hold those funds on behalf of the parties and we might hold those funds for minutes through two years and, depending on the nature of the transaction, it's somewhere in between those those extremes and then, when the appropriate conditions have been met, we disperse those funds to the relevant party.
• 10:05
  Speaker 2: So we do those three things we verify, we hold and we disperse and we're pretty confident that in legal services, within what you would describe as being a fintech, we are the only provider of that triumvirate of capabilities you can imitate that.
• 10:22
  Speaker 2: It's not easy.
• 10:23
  Speaker 2: It's taken as many years to get here and we have the controls and the regulatory oversight to make sure that we're doing that responsibly.
• 10:28
  Speaker 2: So it's not easy to imitate.
• 10:29
  Speaker 2: But really, where our differentiators is in our approach and our culture.
• 10:34
  Speaker 2: We pride ourselves on being trustworthy, and that's expressed through bringing the experts together.
• 10:42
  Speaker 2: We have people in the organization who are proud self proclaimed payments geeks that introduced themselves as such and it's all they think about all day, every day.
• 10:53
  Speaker 2: But similarly, we've been able to assemble some wonderful and very talented technologists, and being able to bring the experts in payments, the experts in technology, together is a fundamental Principal for trustworthiness, because we can demonstrate that we can do what we can say we can do.
• 11:11
  Speaker 2: We have those proof points.
• 11:12
  Speaker 2: We've processed billions of pounds of transactions across a myriad of use cases and can absolutely point to the successes.
• 11:19
  Speaker 2: We can continue to deliver and we're regulated, which is an important part of being trustworthy.
• 11:25
  Speaker 2: We are up to the very high standards that the likes of the financial conduct authority, the hrc, the tax authority, here in the UK you oversee Trust providers with the solicitors regulation authority.
• 11:37
  Speaker 2: We're compliant with all of their guidelines so we are experts and can demonstrate that we can do safely what our customers need of us.
• 11:45
  Speaker 2: That trustworthiness is really important.
• 11:48
  Speaker 2: But I think really having spent my career in technology and financial services laterally, but my career in technology we really do consider ourselves a fintech and what we mean by that is we're using technology to disrupt, and disrupt is a word that's used probably too frequently.
• 12:05
  Speaker 2: It's thrown around a little bit too freely, I would say.
• 12:08
  Speaker 2: But we really do have the ambition to Transform the way that these complex payments are fulfilled, taking them away from being highly manual, being laden with risk, being something that is very visible and part of the challenge of fulfilling a matter, and deploying technology to take that to the next epoch, into the next generation, to really push things forwards, which I think is where is a qualifying characteristic for a fintech and we're also in.
• 12:39
  Speaker 2: This is something I believe is part of the fintech mindset is we are very much customer centric.
• 12:44
  Speaker 2: So we don't come at this from the technology perspective.
• 12:48
  Speaker 2: We have the expertise to do technology well, but that's a means to an end.
• 12:52
  Speaker 2: The end is we're solving problems for our customers.
• 12:55
  Speaker 2: I will say with almost absolute certainty that there are about 100 people at shill pay and probably 90 of those speak to a customer at some point within a month.
• 13:06
  Speaker 2: I don't know that to be absolutely true.
• 13:09
  Speaker 2: Orders of magnitude is everybody talks to and hears and feels the pain of our customers and what it is that they're trying to do, what their business is about and how we can solve their problems for them.
• 13:19
  Speaker 2: So we've got a simple proposition we verify, we hold and disperse.
• 13:24
  Speaker 2: We are absolutely trustworthy and can really demonstrate that at a number of levels and have that fintech mindset of using technology to disrupt and being customer centric, and I think that really does make shill pay something quite unique.
• 13:39
  Speaker 3: We've all heard the terms embedded payments or integrated payments and of course, it's a huge trend in our industry, but the truth is there's so much more to the story.
• 13:46
  Speaker 3: So, in collaboration with NMI, the fully integrated payment solution built to scale, we've launched the be solid campaign, where we're exploring embedded finance with guests from leading companies like Keybank, bain, capital, ventures and more.
• 14:03
  Speaker 3: To listen to the latest episodes, visit leaders and payments dot com or NMI dot com, slash resources, slash podcast.
• 14:11
  Speaker 3: In a world full of squares and stripes, be solid.
• 14:14
  Speaker 3: So let's talk about the payment industry more holistically, and you can answer this from the context of your specific business or payments at a broader scale or fintech.
• 14:23
  Speaker 3: But where do you see the industry headed, say, in the next two to three years?
• 14:28
  Speaker 2: Y​ I think payments kind of simultaneously moves quickly and it moves slowly and you kind of need to really pay attention and reflect and think often about where it's going.
• 14:39
  Speaker 2: And we've done this recently.
• 14:40
  Speaker 2: We're kind of looking forward to our next three to five-year strategy at Shield Pay and I've come to the conclusion that there are a few things coming.
• 14:48
  Speaker 2: The first one is that we're already on a trajectory of payments becoming less and less visible.
• 14:55
  Speaker 2: To put it more positively, more and more invisible.
• 14:58
  Speaker 2: People don't set out typically to make a payment.
• 15:01
  Speaker 2: They set out to do a thing.
• 15:03
  Speaker 2: Maybe it's going out for a meal, maybe it's putting fuel in the car, maybe it's buying a house, whatever it is.
• 15:09
  Speaker 2: They're not actually setting out to make a payment.
• 15:12
  Speaker 2: Payments just part of the fulfillment of the need and increasingly we're seeing payments get out of the way.
• 15:18
  Speaker 2: Really good example EV, electronic vehicle car charging.
• 15:22
  Speaker 2: There's some great use cases now where you just drive your car right into a charger, you plug it in, it charges.
• 15:30
  Speaker 2: You don't plug it, you drive away.
• 15:32
  Speaker 2: You don't have to announce yourself, you don't have to make a payment.
• 15:35
  Speaker 2: There's no walking into the little retail outlet and being enticed by all sorts of things you don't want.
• 15:40
  Speaker 2: You just literally I charge my car, I go, the payment happens in the background and with some providers it gets charged to your utility bill at home Maybe, but anyway, the point is the payment gets out of the way and seeing things like Apple tap to pay, which has just been released here in the UK I know there are lots of other kind of precedents for this, but tap to pay means that any two individuals or an individual in an organisation who carry an Apple device around can transact with one another absolutely seamlessly.
• 16:10
  Speaker 2: If the banking rails don't exist, it's just a tap to pay, as simple as and as elegant.
• 16:16
  Speaker 2: I'm not a spokesperson for Apple, by the way, but just part of that trajectory towards payments just becoming invisible.
• 16:24
  Speaker 2: And I think in the business that we're in currently, we're focused on illegal services profession there are a number of practice management platforms that a legal firm will use to manage their cases, for document collection, for project managing a case, and they get to the point where perhaps they've successfully prosecuted the matter and they need the monies to move between one party and another party and it becomes expensive at that point from a time and risk perspective and it's not seamless.
• 16:54
  Speaker 2: They do have to call down to the person who's got access to the banking app and make it happen.
• 16:58
  Speaker 2: So part of our contribution to that payments becoming invisible, as it just becomes a simple, natural extension of that workflow that a lawyer will go through whilst they're prosecuting a case to then just settle the monies at the end.
• 17:12
  Speaker 2: So it ranges from EV car charging all the way through to what we do and what a professional services organization like a law firm might do to settle a matter, but payments will get out of the way.
• 17:24
  Speaker 2: The next thing, which there's been a lot of discussion about recently, sometimes for good reasons, sometimes for bad reasons, but is the decentralization and the disaggregation of the financial services, and we've seen things like open banking start that movement of removing the silos, breaking down the silos, making financial services more of an ecosystem rather than a provider that you choose to work with.
• 17:49
  Speaker 2: And there are technologies that are here, but, importantly, I think we'll play a bigger and bigger part going forward around the tokenization of things, around digital identity, being able to express a person's authenticate, that a human being is who they say they are, and for them to be able to assert claims about themselves that they are this or that or they aren't that that smart contracts will be a means to, in a very secure and codified manner, capture the terms of an interaction between different parties.
• 18:22
  Speaker 2: So I can see a big step forward away from just the evolution of traditional financial services which is where I think we have been and today's open banking represents into something kind of post transformation where we are truly digitally native and we can tokenize a house and have a smart contract, express the exchange of ownership of that house and have the monies that pass through that process be part of that transaction atomically.
• 18:50
  Speaker 2: So, at the moment that the ownership moves between parties, so does the money and the surface area for fraud and attack is eliminated.
• 18:58
  Speaker 2: So that kind of decentralized, disaggregated next generation of financial services that our technology enabled but are no longer just an evolution of the way we did things, they are something truly new.
• 19:12
  Speaker 2: In order for those things to be possible that kind of payments becoming invisible, the decentralization of the infrastructure and the organizations around it there's going to be a need for governance and we can see regulators grappling with the part that they play and the argument between market forces and government intervention.
• 19:31
  Speaker 2: And how do we make sure that the next generation of financial services are inclusive?
• 19:36
  Speaker 2: Do we trust market forces to drive inclusion?
• 19:39
  Speaker 2: And there's even, as recently as a few weeks ago, the PST3 regulations in Europe the ink is still wet on them are kind of showing the direction that we're going in, and I'm delighted to see that they're advocating for yet more opportunities for fintech, the open finance movement, kind of doubling down on that disaggregation and the decentralization, which I hope is a good thing.
• 20:05
  Speaker 2: I can't know and we'll do our bit to make sure it is a good thing, but flowing through all of that, clearly data is going to be more important than ownership or access to the rails.
• 20:16
  Speaker 2: In time, with that disaggregation, it's going to be a lot easier to move money around.
• 20:21
  Speaker 2: The data that allows you to do that effectively and safely and your ability to understand and derive insight from and use that data is the skill that separates the winners from the losers in the next generation.
• 20:36
  Speaker 2: I mean, this is something that we're working very hard to develop as a capability ourselves and understand what it really means to us.
• 20:43
  Speaker 2: How can machine learning improve?
• 20:46
  Speaker 2: And we already have models that we use for fraud detection and customer verification, but what is the next generation of that look like?
• 20:53
  Speaker 2: How can we take this to the next level?
• 20:56
  Speaker 3: Let's switch gears a little bit and talk about you.
• 20:58
  Speaker 3: Earlier in your career you said you've been in technology.
• 21:01
  Speaker 3: Maybe walk us through your career journey and tell us a little bit about why you're at Shield Pay and what was attractive about that opportunity.
• 21:09
  Speaker 2: Fundamentally I'm an engineer.
• 21:11
  Speaker 2: That's my training, my background with technologists and engineer.
• 21:14
  Speaker 2: I can't left the thread earlier studying engineering university.
• 21:19
  Speaker 2: And soon after I left university I found myself at microsoft, spent seven years there earlier in my career at the late nineties and early noughties, in deeply technical role.
• 21:31
  Speaker 2: So I joined as a consultant in consulting services, so in front of customers.
• 21:35
  Speaker 2: But I'm very much a technologist and engineer and develop quickly and I think that's where I really saw the value in applying technology to a customers problem.
• 21:46
  Speaker 2: Because I was a technologist, I was in front of customers and it was so satisfying to Turn up with a toolbox of skills and to solve a problem for a customer was incredibly satisfying.
• 21:57
  Speaker 2: I left microsoft with two guys called paul in two thousand six when I realized that the next step in my career had a state of microsoft to be to move to seattle and that wasn't the right time for me and my family to move overseas, so Decided it was a good time to move, began my ten year start up career.
• 22:13
  Speaker 2: Was either employee number one or a co-founder in a series of startups that range from the Moderately successful to somewhat successful.
• 22:24
  Speaker 2: But there were no failures and there were no Put it up in lights and retire on the back of.
• 22:31
  Speaker 2: But it was a ten year education that I wouldn't change the world.
• 22:34
  Speaker 2: It's the latter end of that period in my career where I really discovered payments.
• 22:39
  Speaker 2: I joined two co-founders of a company called pepper provided Mobile payments and loyalty software as a service the hospitality industry and they're still going strong today.
• 22:51
  Speaker 2: The elevator pitch was if you want that starbucks type experience but don't have starbucks, budgets will do it for you on a sad basis.
• 22:58
  Speaker 2: That was fantastic.
• 23:00
  Speaker 2: I really enjoyed that.
• 23:01
  Speaker 2: It was my first for a payments.
• 23:03
  Speaker 2: I then moved and this is going to sound like one of the most unusual transitions in anybody's career from Tiny little start up doing mobile payments for restaurants to being responsible for mobile technology at hsbc globally.
• 23:17
  Speaker 2: I don't really know how to describe that transition other than it was a shock to the system.
• 23:23
  Speaker 2: I found myself suddenly overnight responsible for the mobile proposition of the world's largest retail bank in 26 countries, and I can see quite quickly why the recruitment process that I went through ended up with me in the job, because there was something wonderfully Renegade about that digital capability at hsbc at the time that kind of worked with me, worked with my values, it worked with how I like to get things done.
• 23:50
  Speaker 2: It was just at a different scale.
• 23:52
  Speaker 2: I was at hsbc for three years.
• 23:54
  Speaker 2: I led a team of seven hundred people in nine locations in seven countries and I'm very proud to say that we absolutely delivered probably the career defining transformation for me.
• 24:06
  Speaker 2: We went from a highly fragmented, disconnected group of technologists that we're building 26 countries in about 10 different places.
• 24:19
  Speaker 2: There was no joined up strategy.
• 24:21
  Speaker 2: We didn't have a coherent technology platform.
• 24:23
  Speaker 2: It was very much in the early days of mobile banking.
• 24:26
  Speaker 2: When I left three years later, we had built a single platform on which all 26 markets were based and I'm proud to say now, if you're a hsbc customer in Hong Kong, uk, canada or any other digital market, you're using the same underlying technology that that team that I led built over that time and it was a wonderful experience and Some of the people that I met and I'm proud to say I still friends.
• 24:52
  Speaker 2: It was quite a special experience and one that I will always look back on as being transformative and contributed substantially to where I am and who I am today.
• 25:01
  Speaker 2: I had the most senior job that I was going to be comfortable with.
• 25:04
  Speaker 2: If I continued to progress in the organization, I would get further and further away from the technology and I wasn't ready to do that.
• 25:10
  Speaker 2: So Look for an opportunity to join a challenger bank actually ended up joining.
• 25:14
  Speaker 2: So far there are unicorn soft bank.
• 25:17
  Speaker 2: Back to fin tech based here in the UK.
• 25:19
  Speaker 2: Keep having up rounds, profitable, focus on the lending side of the balance sheet, so have a very good business model and a and attention to the customer, which I think is really important characteristic of a fin tech.
• 25:31
  Speaker 2: Decided to join the leadership team of so far as the cto and Very much enjoyed being amongst senior leaders that were not technologists.
• 25:41
  Speaker 2: In my previous roles I had peers rule technologists, let's open.
• 25:45
  Speaker 2: My peers were commercial finance and it was an education of a different type because I was suddenly having to think about things that I knew nothing about so I could contribute and that was really exciting.
• 25:57
  Speaker 2: I now find myself a shield pay.
• 25:58
  Speaker 2: I met with Pete, the founder and still group CEO.
• 26:01
  Speaker 2: He's a very passionate, enthusiastic individual with a really great idea.
• 26:07
  Speaker 2: I met the rest of the team and understood the ambition that she'll pay have and where they want to go and Join the chief product and technology officer almost a year ago.
• 26:16
  Speaker 2: Realize quite quickly working with Pete and getting to know Jim Coles, the chairman, that I had a lot to offer.
• 26:23
  Speaker 2: My skills are very much complimentary to Pete's.
• 26:26
  Speaker 2: I was flatten, was absolutely hold over.
• 26:29
  Speaker 2: When they approach me and ask if I would be willing to step up to the CEO of the UK in Europe which I didn't even think about it I just bit their arm off and said yes, please.
• 26:39
  Speaker 2: What I realized was the technology is not really a technology problem, it's people the ones, and zeros.
• 26:46
  Speaker 2: Typically.
• 26:47
  Speaker 2: If you're knowledgeable, quite easy to get in the right order, but the people is the difference between success and failure, or the people determine your level of success.
• 26:57
  Speaker 2: And, having been a cto in a number of complex environments, now it's all about contact, switching leadership, impact, being able to solve problems and environments where you're not necessary the subject matter expert.
• 27:12
  Speaker 2: In fact, if you are the subject matter expert, something's probably wrong.
• 27:15
  Speaker 2: So when I was asked to step up to the CEO role, it occurred to me that that's just an extrapolation of what I was already doing in the cto role.
• 27:23
  Speaker 2: So even at the age of fifty, on a challenge myself and learn and do new things and see if I've got new levels to reach, and I said yes, please, and here I am.
• 27:34
  Speaker 3: What are some things that you're passionate about?
• 27:36
  Speaker 2: You can probably tell from my tone, I'm passionate about a lot of things.
• 27:39
  Speaker 2: I think the two key things and actually one's an extension of the other, as I was just sort of talking about on my journey is the team and the human aspect of delivering technology.
• 27:52
  Speaker 2: Technology is my trade, but the people and the team that they are a part of is really the passion and the difference between success and failure.
• 28:00
  Speaker 2: You'll hear my team saying we're not a collection of individuals, we're a group that are here to achieve a goal.
• 28:05
  Speaker 2: The philosophy is really quite simple If you hire great people, get their buy-in, enable them and get out of the way, good things will happen.
• 28:12
  Speaker 2: I get really passionate about enabling the people in the team to be the very best version of themselves that they can possibly be.
• 28:21
  Speaker 2: An extension of that is to make sure that the environment that we're in is conducive to that performance and that we have a broad range of voices in the room.
• 28:32
  Speaker 2: Importantly, that those voices feel able to speak up and when they do, they're heard.
• 28:37
  Speaker 2: When they're heard and the idea is a good one, it gets taken forwards.
• 28:42
  Speaker 2: I'm very proud to say that Shield Pay is a very diverse group of people.
• 28:46
  Speaker 2: For a fintech in financial services.
• 28:48
  Speaker 2: We're an odd bunch really.
• 28:49
  Speaker 2: Only just over half of the people at Shield Pay identify as male.
• 28:54
  Speaker 2: 40% of the organization are from ethnic minority groups.
• 28:58
  Speaker 2: We have 15 different nationalities amongst the 100 of us.
• 29:01
  Speaker 2: We've got about half of the organization parents or carers.
• 29:04
  Speaker 2: About a third of the company are under 28 years old.
• 29:07
  Speaker 2: We're really a very diverse group of individuals.
• 29:09
  Speaker 2: But that's just the beginning.
• 29:11
  Speaker 2: Really, it's quite easy to get people in the room that have different lived experiences and come from different backgrounds.
• 29:17
  Speaker 2: The skill is in giving those voices the space to be heard and having everybody in the organization feel able to contribute.
• 29:25
  Speaker 2: That's something I'm very passionate about.
• 29:28
  Speaker 2: It's the team, but the team is 100 people.
• 29:31
  Speaker 2: We all work for Shield Pay.
• 29:33
  Speaker 2: It's not one team against another team, one team with another team.
• 29:36
  Speaker 2: We are just big, one team and we're populated with people that have a very diverse set of lived experiences and I'm passionate about every one of those people feeling able to contribute and having a voice, being somebody flourished, somebody coming to Shield Pay that perhaps has had a bad experience somewhere else and doesn't have the confidence to speak up and to contribute.
• 30:00
  Speaker 2: And you ask them their opinion and they're surprised the first time, and the second time they gently offer their opinion, and the third time they flourish and come to life and feel like they're valued.
• 30:10
  Speaker 2: And having a building full of people with that mindset is so heartwarming and motivating, and it's probably the thing that brings a spiral to my face more than anything else.
• 30:22
  Speaker 3: Final question If someone is coming right out of university and they pick Fintech or financial services or payments whatever industry you want to call it and they say, hey, I want to build a career in this industry.
• 30:32
  Speaker 3: And they come to you and they're looking for advice and they say, andrew, what do I need to do to be successful in the payments slash Fintech industry?
• 30:41
  Speaker 3: What would you tell them to do?
• 30:43
  Speaker 2: Oh, that's a great question.
• 30:44
  Speaker 2: The first question I would ask is why it's important, when you have any ambition, be it to go into financial services, fintech or any other walk of life, to have a really good understanding of what it is about your interests and you and your skills, and what drives you that payments is a good fit for.
• 31:04
  Speaker 2: Is it the technology?
• 31:05
  Speaker 2: Is it that you think payments is the place where technology has an opportunity to do something?
• 31:10
  Speaker 2: Is it a societal drive that money is at the centre of everything that we do?
• 31:15
  Speaker 2: You want to have a party making sure that that's a positive force in the world.
• 31:19
  Speaker 2: Mine, for example, is that every payment has a story behind it.
• 31:23
  Speaker 2: It's not convincing.
• 31:24
  Speaker 2: It's somebody buying a home.
• 31:26
  Speaker 2: It's not capital markets.
• 31:28
  Speaker 2: It's a company being given the fuel to grow.
• 31:32
  Speaker 2: Understanding why you want to go into, for example, fintech is a really helpful way of qualifying what you then go and do, which company you choose to join or what role you choose to play in that company.
• 31:46
  Speaker 2: That would be the first thing.
• 31:47
  Speaker 2: The second thing is to become and to stay informed, be curious, learn.
• 31:51
  Speaker 2: As I said earlier, payments is simultaneously moving quite slowly and moving at lightning speed, and you need to understand it, you need to be aware of its history.
• 32:01
  Speaker 2: You need to know where it's going.
• 32:02
  Speaker 2: Become and stay informed.
• 32:04
  Speaker 2: Spend your spare time researching a thing that you've heard about.
• 32:07
  Speaker 2: Use some podcasts.
• 32:09
  Speaker 2: Your podcast, for example, has had a very wide range of experiences and opinions.
• 32:15
  Speaker 2: Go listen to them.
• 32:16
  Speaker 2: There's going to be nuggets in there that might inspire you or move you in a particular direction.
• 32:21
  Speaker 2: Rather than worrying about the individual skills that can be acquired or the things that are not competitive for you entering the industry, know your why.
• 32:30
  Speaker 2: Why is payments interesting to you?
• 32:32
  Speaker 2: Become and stay informed.
• 32:34
  Speaker 2: Be curious, stay on top of things.
• 32:36
  Speaker 2: Then you can start reaching out to those companies applying for jobs, doing the things that are the obvious, tangible actions that you can take that will stand you well in an interview.
• 32:47
  Speaker 2: Whenever I interview somebody, I always ask if they don't have experience in payments.
• 32:50
  Speaker 2: I ask why payments interest them.
• 32:52
  Speaker 2: If they're in payments, I'll ask them why shield paid.
• 32:54
  Speaker 2: Having them be able to talk credibly about why they are making the choice they're making is a really useful way of determining somebody's passion for a topic.
• 33:06
  Speaker 3: I think that's some great advice.
• 33:08
  Speaker 3: Knowing your why is important for a lot of things in life.
• 33:11
  Speaker 3: For sure, andrew.
• 33:12
  Speaker 3: We've covered a lot of ground so far about the company and you and the industry, as always.
• 33:17
  Speaker 3: Is there anything else you'd like to add before we wrap up the show?
• 33:19
  Speaker 2: No other than to thank you for including me.
• 33:22
  Speaker 2: I've enjoyed listening to some of your other speakers and I'm very proud to be a part of that group.
• 33:26
  Speaker 2: Thank you.
• 33:27
  Speaker 3: Well, thank you so much.
• 33:28
  Speaker 3: I know your time is very valuable, so I really appreciate you being here.
• 33:31
  Speaker 3: Thank you To all you listeners out there.
• 33:34
  Speaker 3: I thank you for your time as well.
• 33:35
  Speaker 3: Tell the next story.
• 33:37
  Speaker 1: Thank you for joining us this week on the Leaders in Payments podcast.
• 33:41
  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.
• 33:48
  Speaker 1: If you enjoyed listening, please share on your social channels as well.