MoneyNeverSleeps

MoneyNeverSleeps

By Eoin Fitzgerald | Pete TownsendBusinessEntrepreneurship
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MoneyNeverSleeps episodes

  • 096: The Trilogy: Elaine Deehan, Starling Bank and EWPN

    This week, we welcome Elaine Deehan from Starling Bank back to the show with a session recorded as part of a Virtual Meetup organised by FSCom for the European Women’s Payment Network last month.  Elaine was originally on episode 23 when she was the founder of Pocketwire, and we remastered that for episode 76 as it’s one of our most popular episodes.

    This episode is kindly sponsored by Ireland’s fintech and financial services recruitment specialists, Top Tier Recruitment.  If you would like an intro to the team at Top Tier Recruitment, please click here.  

    For insights delivered to your inbox beyond the spoken word, subscribe to our MoneyNeverSleeps newsletter right here on Substack.

    Top soundbites include:

    • Pete's description of "the Trilogy" in the context of Elaine's career:  "Your experience with the innovation lab at Citi, then onto Currency Fair, and then starting PocketWire I likened to someone going from Cadbury, then onto Butler's and then Godiva on the path to a chocolate addiction - you’re spending more of your own money but it just tastes so good."
    • On Elaine's past experience working in an innovation lab: "One thing we did a lot of in the innovation lab was look at startups and the startup ecosystem and the startup mentality and how you can replicate that in a large company, which is really hard to do.  There’s much more to startups and being agile than just saying I’m going to put a scrum or an agile framework around how we do things." 
    • On her move into Starling Bank:  "The trilogy - everything I had built upon with Citi, CurrencyFair and Pocketwire - is what opened the door into Starling for me."
    • On her experience so far with Starling Bank:  "It’s been an absolute baptism by fire.  We’ve gone from writing policy and procedure and designing what the bank would look like in Ireland to just doing it by answering customer queries at two in the morning for the UK business.  This is really helpful to us when we go live because I’m dealing with customers on the front line and getting real issues that are even more compounded by the pandemic. "
    • On her analogy between the London Underground and big bank technology: " The rest of the world above the ground is modernising and the tube is trying to serve passengers and run on this old network of tunnels, and while they’re upgrading it’s hard to make that complete change because it’s just so far down underground and so complex."

      • Random links include:

      • Pete's opening reference to Lloyd Dobler and a clip from Say Anything as an analogy to the circuitous startup conundrum of product, customers and funding.  

        • Please visit https://www.moneyneversleeps.ie/ for all of our other episodes.  Also, follow us on Twitter @MNSShow, @PeteTownsendNV and @EoinFitzgerald9 for updates and more information.

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        32 min
      • 095: Money Talks #19: Twitter Hacked | Ant Goes Marching | Instagram Goes Shopping | Robinhood Goes Home
        In this week's Money Talks segment, Pete Townsend and Eoin Fitzgerald dig into the recent Twitter Hack and how it might have been much worse, the Ant Group IPO and their status as the 'online mall for everything', Instagram's opportunity to become America's favorite shopping mall and Robinhood dropping out of the UK before launching.
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        36 min
      • 094: Natural Born Starter: Gene Murphy and Startup Boost
        Gene Murphy, co-founder of Startup Boost joins our first video edition of the podcast to talk about his earliest entreprenurial experiences, the overnight evolution of Startup Boost to the virtual world, the art of mentorship...and his short-lived reign as Ireland's number one Male Health and Beauty reporter!
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        51 min
      • 093: Be Direct | Zac Liew and Curlec

        Zac Liew, co-founder and CEO of Curlec joins the show to talk about the societal influences of what works well in fintech, how Curlec is enabling the subscription economy in Southeast Asia and getting comfortable being uncomfortable.

        This episode is kindly sponsored by Ireland’s fintech and financial services recruitment specialists, Top Tier Recruitment.  If you would like an intro to the team at Top Tier Recruitment, please click here.


        For insights delivered to your inbox beyond the spoken word, subscribe to our MoneyNeverSleeps newsletter right here on Substack.

        This week we talk to Zac Liew from Curlec, a fintech startup helping SMEs overlooked by traditional banks collect recurring payments with their automated platform, replacing manual methods like cash, checks and credit cards.  Zac and Pete connected through their respective networks recently from one of those conversations that Pete had that went like “based on what you just said, you need to meet Zac Liew.”  Being a trusting soul, Pete did just that, and this episode is the result of that decision.

        In this conversation, Zac and Pete connected on a more universal level with their respective interests in societal influences, how people spend money, a cross-over reference to Islamic finance and the impact of family lineage on an individual's tendencies to build.  Zac and Pete also got into how first time entrepreneurs need to get comfortable being uncomfortable, and the network effect of Zac being named to the Forbes 30 Under 30 for Finance and Venture Capital.  See below for some of the key takeaways:

        • On Zac's upbringing "I’ve always had a desire to      build something and pursue a career in entrepreneurship - that stems from      my family, and growing up with parents who were both entrepreneurs."
        • On one of the triggers to launch Curlec: "Living      in the UK three to four years ago, I'd go back to KL (Kuala Lumpur) for      holidays, and every time I came back it felt like the country was moving      quicker in terms of fintech, and there was a big wave coming and the      timing was right."
        • On the view on Southeast Asia from the West:       "A lot of people loop this region into one, but when you go into the      details, not only culturally is it different from country to country but      also in terms of infrastructure."
        • On the big question for scaling:  "Do you      wait for the banking rails to homogenize across Southeast Asia, or do you      homogenize your product to sit on top of multiple rails?  To hedge      our bets, we're adding new products as well."
        • On the learning curve as a first time founder:       "Just keep pushing yourself, throwing yourself into uncomfortable      situations and you’ll eventually become comfortable.  That was a big      learning curve for me.  As a first time entrepreneur, get comfortable      being uncomfortable."

          • Please visit https://www.moneyneversleeps.ie/ for all of our other episodes.

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          43 min
        • 092: Money Talks #18: Wirecard & BaaS | Circit as a Panacea | Diffuse & Overseas Startup Investors

          In this week's Money Talks segment, Pete Townsend and Eoin Fitzgerald look ahead to the impact of Wirecard on Banking-as-a-Service, how the Irish tech startup Circit could have prevented the Wirecard audit mess, and Diffuse's take on startups looking overseas for venture capital investors.


          This episode of MoneyNeverSleeps is kindly sponsored by Ireland’s fintech and financial services recruitment specialists, Top Tier Recruitment.  If you would like an intro to the team at Top Tier Recruitment, please click here.


          For insights delivered to your inbox beyond the spoken word, subscribe to our MoneyNeverSleeps newsletter right here on Substack.

          In this episode, Eoin and Pete dig into pieces of content from this week that are relevant to the cosmic cloud of startups, tech, venture deals and enterprise in which they live.

          The main stories stories covered in this week's episode include:

          · BaaS Works, it's the Regulations That Don't (Chris Skinner's blog, 30th June)

          · A special segment from David Heath, founder and CEO of Irish tech startup Circit, on how Circit could have prevented the Wirecard audit mess where Wirecard's purported cash balances were not being properly confirmed by auditors.

          · The Problem with Raising Money Overseas(Diffuse blog, 1st July)

          · Japan's SBI to Launch Crypto Fund with 50% in XRP(iHodl, 26th June)

          · Unilever and Verizon are the latest companies to pull their advertising from Facebook (TechCrunch, 26th June)

          · Deutsche Bank Taps Symphony & WhatsApp for Messaging Platforms (MarketsMedia, 25th June)

          · ‘Flying Blind Into a Credit Storm’: Widespread Deferrals Mean Banks Can’t Tell Who’s Creditworthy (WSJ (paywall) 29th June)

          Books we're reading this week:

          • On Pete's Kindle this week is My Trip to the Startup World: the Voice of Fintech by      Rudi Falat who was on episode      74
          • Eoin is reading only news and blogs this week as he's      been drafting the MoneyNeverSleeps newsletter!

            • Please visit https://www.moneyneversleeps.ie/for all of our other episodes.

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            44 min
          • 091: Money Talks #17: Speeding up the Enterprise Sales Cycle with David Vatchev from R3

            This week we talk to David Vatchev, Venture Development Lead at R3, on what it takes to survive uncertainty, stay relevant to investors while the venture capital cycle slows down, and also understand, measure and speed up the enterprise sales cycle...a big ask for anyone!

            This episode is kindly sponsored by Ireland’s fintech and financial services recruitment specialists, Top Tier Recruitment.  If you would like an intro to the team at Top Tier Recruitment, please click here.  Also, watch for the first edition of the MoneyNeverSleeps newsletter that we're sending out before the end of this month!


            This week we talk to David Vatchev from R3 about his role as Venture Development Lead and we did a deep dive into how startups can come to grip with the enterprise sales cycle, which is so relevant right now with how much harder enterprise sales have become with the pandemic, especially for startups embracing newer technologies.  R3 is “an enterprise blockchain software firm working with a broad ecosystem of more than 300 participants across multiple industries from both the private and public sectors to develop blockchain applications on Corda, an open-source blockchain platform, and Corda Enterprise, a commercial version of Corda for enterprise usage.”  At R3, David helps “CorDapps” or startups leveraging Corda at the core of their business, to build, grow and scale.  Before joining R3, David spent 15 years in the capital markets, so he has first-hand experience with that industry's inefficiencies, which is one of the big problems R3 set out to solve.

            Given David's role with R3 and Pete Townsend's approach with helping distributed ledger technology (DLT) enabled startups find their first customers, get funded, and get their products to market, this conversation was just waiting to happen.

            Helpful resources shared by David produced by R3:

            • A Startup’s Guide to Speeding Up the Enterprise Sales Cycle
            • Enterprise Startups: Actionable Fundraising Tips From R3’s Investor Community
            • R3's Venture Development Program - A Gateway Into Our Ecosystem

              • To listen to more, please visit https://www.moneyneversleeps.ie/ for all of our other episodes.  Also, follow us on Twitter @MNSShow, @PeteTownsendNV and @EoinFitzgerald9 for updates and more information.

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              50 min
            • 090: Money Talks #16: WhatsApp | Backstage | Revolut | Olivia

              On this week's episode, Pete and Eoin dive into payments on WhatsApp, the paradox between investing in underrepresented founders and the current demographics of venture capital, and getting digitally closer to your spending through Revolut and Olivia.

              This episode is kindly sponsored by Ireland’s fintech and financial services recruitment specialists, Top Tier Recruitment.  If you would like an intro to the team at Top Tier Recruitment, please click here.


              In this episode, Eoin and Pete dig into pieces of content from this week that are relevant to the cosmic cloud of startups, tech, venture deals and enterprise in which they live and work. At the end of this episode, Eoin announced the big news on the first edition of the MoneyNeverSleeps newsletter on SubStack, more news to come!

              The stories covered in this week's episode include:

              Visa, Facebook Link Up For P2P Payments, eCommerce On WhatsApp (PYMNTS.com, 15th June 2020)

              -Beginning this week, Brazilian users will be able to pay for things through WhatsApp and can establish an account by adding their card card details to WhatsApp.

              -Businesses can receive funds by opening a WhatsApp business account with a 3.99 percent fee applied on top of payments they receive.   Finally, WhatsApp making money!

              Arlan Hamilton from Backstage Capital on Backstage Crowd (no news available, older story on Arlan)

              -“Invest alongside Arlan Hamilton and Backstage to get access to the best diverse deal flow in VC.”  Backstage Capital focuses on underrepresented founders and now the deal flow is open to all accredited investors through Backstage Crowd.

              -Cross-over connection with Beezer Clarkson from Sapphire Ventures on The Full Ratchet with Nick Moran - in this episode, Beezer and Nick had a short exchange on the the impact of the pandemic on how people get to know each other in the VC/founder context.

              Revolut launches open banking feature in Ireland - (Silicon Republic, 17th June 2020)

              -Revolut launches an open banking feature that enables your transactions and balances data from Bank of Ireland, AIB, UlsterBank and PTSB to be viewable in the Revolut app.

              Olivia’s AI assistant encourages mindful spending and saving - (Silicon Republic, 15th June 2020)

              -Olivia AI launches in Ireland and Bank of Ireland, AIB, UlsterBank, PTSB and Revolut are enabled to share your transactions and balances data with -Olivia.

              To listen to more, please visit https://www.moneyneversleeps.ie/ for all of our other episodes.  Also, follow us on Twitter @MNSShow, @PeteTownsendNV and @EoinFitzgerald9 for updates and more information.



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              50 min
            • 089: All In a Day's Work | Garrett Cassidy and Trezeo

              Garrett Cassidy, co-founder and CEO of Trezeo, joins the show to talk about making financial services accessible to independent workers, the snowball effect of impacting people's lives, mental health perspectives in the startup community....and the impact of scuba diving on his ability to communicate!

              This episode is kindly sponsored by Ireland’s fintech and financial services recruitment specialists, Top Tier Recruitment.  If you would like an intro to the team at Top Tier Recruitment, please click here.


              This week we talk to Garrett Cassidy from Trezeo, a fintech on a mission to help independent workers with their financial lives by providing them with a comprehensive safety net delivered 100% digitally. As Garrett said recently on a Future of Work interview series for Aperture, “Trezeo is not a social enterprise, it is a for-profit investor-backed enterprise. But that doesn’t mean that you can’t make money from doing the right thing, and that’s where technology changes things fundamentally.”  Pete Townsend met Garrett back in 2014 when he came into Pete's office talking excitedly about startups and pre-accelerators, and Pete looks back at that meeting as one of the reasons that he's doing what he does.  See below for some of the soundbite highlights, and the link here for the Techstars video series on mental health in the startup community and separately for Garrett's pitch at the Barclay's Accelerator powered by Techstars.

              • “Just because you work a different way, why should you have such radically different access to financial services?  It’s a simple idea, but a really gnarly set of problems to solve.”
              • “We actually started by looking at better banking and financial services for micro-businesses, but with our early customer research and some independent research at the time, we dug into the gig economy, the sharing economy and the self-employed, and we realized there was a much bigger and more important problem to solve.”
              • “When we dug into the problem of broken bank accounts for the people we were trying to solve it for, we realized that bank accounts weren’t as broken for them because they didn’t really care - most self-employed and independent workers don’t have a separate bank account for their business.”
              • “Keeping a broad mindset of trying to validate the problem actually brought us to “we’re actually looking at the wrong thing here.’"
              • “Startups are tough, but if they weren’t, the problems wouldn't be there, someone would have solved them already”
              • “One of our customers came to us and said “You know what, I just got my first mainstream credit and I’ve never been able to get it before.  Although that’s just one person, it creates the drive to do this again and again and again.”
              • “The typical qualities of startup founders - curiosity and persistence are both a double-edged sword of becoming unfocused and pigheaded.”
              • “What we’ve become better on is articulating our purpose and vision - what are we trying to do, what’s our guiding light and what will help towards that, and push hard towards it."

                • To listen to more, please visit https://www.moneyneversleeps.ie/ for all of our other episodes.  Also, follow us on Twitter @MNSShow, @PeteTownsendNV and @EoinFitzgerald9 for updates and more information.

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                52 min
              • 088: Money Talks #15: Digital VC | Jack Dorsey | Mark Zuckerberg | Elon Musk

                In this week's Money Talks segment, Pete Townsend and Eoin Fitzgerald dive into the difference between video and live interactions between startups and their investors, the role of Twitter and Facebook as arbiters of the truth, a look back at the demographics from the first two years of this podcast and the monumental inspiration from spaceflight.

                This episode is kindly sponsored by Ireland’s fintech and financial services recruitment specialists, Top Tier Recruitment.  If you would like an intro to the team at Top Tier Recruitment, please click here.


                In this episode, Eoin and Pete dig into pieces of content from this week that are relevant to the cosmic cloud of startups, tech, venture deals and enterprise in which they live. The stories covered in this week's episode include:

                ‘Video is fine’: venture capitalists find the benefits in digital due diligence (FT, 3rd June 2020, paywall)

                What is it about human nature that makes VCs want to meet someone face to face? Facial gestures?  The cut of their jibe? What they say to their colleagues (or not say) when passing them in the hallway on the way to the meeting room?

                Facebook, Twitter and Trump: The terrifying war on truth (Decrypt, 2nd June 2020)

                What’s Jack Dorsey from Twitter thinking? Following his moral compass or making a commercial move?
                What’s Mark Zuckerberg from Facebook thinking?  Deal with the devil or an ideological resistance to warning labels?

                A look back at the first 2 years of the MoneyNeverSleeps podcast:

                -Guest demographics: 60% Startup Founders - 26% Startup ‘Ecosystem’ - 12% Venture Capitalists - 3% Intrapreneurs
                -Topics covered:  39% Fintech - 32% Tech - 17% Blockchain & Crypto - 10% Human Interest
                -Where we need to get better:  70/30 Male/Female split of guests - room to improve!
                -Listeners from 80 countries, but 46% of trackable downloads from Ireland
                -Chartable stats: Top 20 in Ireland (covering global podcasts) for Business & Entrepreneurship

                Soundbites include:

                Eoin on virtual due diligence with startup investing: "You're missing a lot of those cues on personality traits and human behavior by doing your due diligence over Zoom."

                Pete on how founders interact with their team: "It's always a good judge of a person to see how a founder interacts with their colleagues when they pass them in the hallway on the walk to the meeting room with a VC.  Does the founder stop and say hello, or do they glare at the team like, 'Look, I'm having a very important discussion with an investor and I can't talk to anybody!'".

                Multiple viewpoints on the massive achievement of SpaceX and Elon Musk this week with the advent of commercial spaceflight and the 'mission of a mission' to deliver Earthlings to Mars.

                To listen to more, please visit https://www.moneyneversleeps.ie/ for all of our other episodes.  Also, follow us on Twitter @MNSShow, @PeteTownsendNV and @EoinFitzgerald9 for updates and more information.

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                40 min
              • 087: Ultra Violet | Conor McGinn and Akara Robotics

                Conor McGinn from Akara joins the show to talk about the human side of robotics, drawing motivation from skeptics, having all of the ingredients to scale a robotics and artificial intelligence business in Ireland....and how Akara are like a prize fighter in the best shape of their life just waiting to take on the world!

                This episode is kindly sponsored by Ireland’s fintech and financial services recruitment specialists, Top Tier Recruitment.  If you would like an intro to the team at Top Tier Recruitment, please click here.


                This week we talk to Conor McGinn from Akara Robotics, an Ireland based startup building robots that care.  Akara are currently engaged in their seed round to raise capital from investors to bring their innovations to market quicker, and Pete was introduced to Conor through Eamonn Carey's 'Sharing Dealflow' newsletter.  Given the direction that this podcast has gone in the past two years from its fintech roots into a few tech-driven human interest stories but then an exploratory dive into crypto, blockchain and venture capital, it's about time we took a look at robotics.  Conor really got Pete Townsend thinking on this one, especially with Akara’s sense of purpose and making an impact through deep expertise in robotics and artificial intelligence combined with first-hand experience with the problems they’re solving. 

                Akara is a spin-out company from Trinity College Dublin, and builds on over a decade of pioneering scientific research in robotics and artificial intelligence. This research goes all the way back to 2010 when Conor was a PhD student, and then an Assistant Professor at Trinity from 2014 onwards.  After years and years of researching, designing, building, researching, designing, building, let's fastforward to today - Akara’s social robot designed to help keep seniors socially connected, whose name is Stevie, recently made the cover of Time magazine with the headline, “The robot that could change the senior care industry.”  A few months after Time's coverage of Stevie, Akara's second robot, Violet, was also covered by Time magazine as "the robot that could kill the COVID19 virus".  

                At his core, Conor is an engineer who just wants to develop technology that has a positive impact.

                To listen to more, please visit https://www.moneyneversleeps.ie/ for all of our other episodes.  Also, follow us on Twitter @MNSShow, @PeteTownsendNV and @EoinFitzgerald9 for updates and more information.

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                46 min

              About MoneyNeverSleeps

              From the publisher's feed

              A weekly podcast that looks inside the minds of entrepreneurs and at the crossover of startups, enterprise, finance, technology and life as we know it. Co-hosts Pete Townsend and Eoin Fitzgerald.…