00:11:02 · Adam, Vlad Yatsenko
[00:11:02] S0: What have you found is, like, the hardest part of your business to scale? So, like, you guys obviously don't have a problem acquiring users, launching in new markets, but, like, a function or something in your business that's hard to keep up with? [00:11:13] S1: The usual bottleneck in... For for growth is human factor. Yeah. Right? And it's pretty much every human, including myself, becomes a bottleneck at some point. Right? For us, that's why it's important to focus on how we can choose the human power, not the human weaknesses. Right? Reduce the human weaknesses as much as possible by automating things. So this is the challenge, I would say, for growth in general, right? To scale the organization in some way so that it's still efficient, but we don't have some ridiculous bureaucracy hierarchies just because that's why we may be where we are because we didn't go that path trying to create these rigid structures that eventually block your scaling. And when people start thinking about workarounds more around this environment versus focusing on say customer problems. For us, it's important to to eliminate that as much as possible. At the same time, to scale, you need to have certain things that just work. Right? Like standard processes, understanding where is what, who is responsible for what, etcetera. [00:12:31] S0: How do you handle that? Like, do you actually have, like, pretty rigid processes or do you guys have, like, sets of principles that are pretty, like, more or less set in stone that'll let you like handle new contacts.
00:12:31 · Adam, Vlad Yatsenko
[00:12:31] S0: How do you handle that? Like, do you actually have, like, pretty rigid processes or do you guys have, like, sets of principles that are pretty, like, more or less set in stone that'll let you like handle new contacts. [00:12:40] S1: Is it principle based? But we have in the last year, maybe a bit more, we built up our governance and risk structures and frameworks. So we call them frameworks initially because they define some principles around, but with time it gets improved, it gets better, it adapts to our scale. Important part of it is things that are worth standardizing. We do standardize where we can take the experiences that we gained and just replicate it in another place. It's like, I don't know, in in programming, there's, like, this concept of code reuse. Sometimes it's taking too far outside, but... So you should have balance not to say over standardized Mhmm. Where, like, it starts blocking you.
00:13:32 · Adam
[00:13:32] S0: Yeah. So not start from scratch every time you do it, actually. Exactly. Kind of like resource concept to where, like, you can pull some kind of, like, heuristic or something that actually has worked in a couple... Finance is like an industry, though, that's, like, of everything blocking you from doing that in different areas. Like if I were to try and pick a market that would be super difficult to expand jurisdictionally and barriers and everything, like it would be finance. So like, how do you guys handle trying to scale a more or less similar product across boundaries when you have, like, completely different data sets that you're dealing with, completely different sets of legislation, like different ideas of, like, data practices, everything else. Like, is that a challenge for you guys? Like, not necessarily just scaling users, but actually, like, understanding local context, local governance, local, like Red tape. Legislation and red tape. Yeah.
00:14:26 · Vlad Yatsenko, Adam
[00:14:26] S1: It is a challenge. It's it's always a challenge, but it it kind of gets better with every experience you get with every markets where you start looking into it. You start from the point where, okay, based on what we know now, like, you know, we we have playbooks for everything for all these expansion markets, but those playbooks also, are not, you know, set in stone. After we try to play booking next market, okay, what worked? What didn't work? What we learned from this experience? Can we integrate into this playbook or is just specific for this market only? So there's a lot of this thinking goes in in this process. And this complexity is kind of... It will be always there, right? Because I mean, the world is diverse, the markets are different. You just have to count for that and expect that. [00:15:19] S0: What would, like, either stop you or, like, really attract you to a particular market?
00:15:19 · Adam, Vlad Yatsenko
[00:15:19] S0: What would, like, either stop you or, like, really attract you to a particular market? [00:15:23] S1: One of the things that we've done to be able to prioritize, because there's certain common sense, us being headquartered in The UK, it's very natural to look into the whole Commonwealth that is quite wide and diverse. From Canada to India, it's huge difference there. There are different types of problems involved in those markets. The Western companies probably have a lot more similarities, and this is where we have simpler entrance. But plus what we did is we introduced waiting lists for all countries. So basically when people sign up, we don't block downloading the app in in specific countries. Maybe it's just a few countries which are legal boundaries. Yeah. We just based on that we see where people come from. All traction. Yeah. Yeah. Where there is traction as well, there is demand. [00:16:19] S0: How much do care about like competition in a particular market? When you look at a market like Canada, what are you looking at? Are you looking at the consumers? Are you looking at how much they're spending on banking fees? The structure of the banking system? Does that fall into your equation when you're looking at a market?
00:16:19 · Adam, Vlad Yatsenko, Fred
[00:16:19] S0: How much do care about like competition in a particular market? When you look at a market like Canada, what are you looking at? Are you looking at the consumers? Are you looking at how much they're spending on banking fees? The structure of the banking system? Does that fall into your equation when you're looking at a market? [00:16:35] S1: Yeah, it absolutely does. The reality is such that most of financial traditional world is very similar, except few exceptions. Like I mentioned, India is probably very different. Maybe South America, some countries have special cases there. But generally problems stem from the traditional financial system being too old. Now the whole world is kind of start looking, even old traditional banks, they start looking at the changes that are happening and try to adapt, but it's very hard for them to change, right? In terms of competition, the whole FinTech is very new and there are some companies trying to address different problems, but looking at it holistically as we do from the perspective of global financial platform. If you're looking to [00:17:24] S2: do everything right when entering new markets, you're probably gonna be at like your third market or maybe fourth market by this time of your journey. Now you're in more than 30 markets. So what does that balance between let's say risk and reward or however you wanna slice it look like as a starter? It's not something that other companies have been able to do from what we see.