Fintech Insider Podcast by 11:FS
00:11:03 · Pranav Sood
[00:11:03] S3: Yeah. I... So I'm a historian by background. So I was actually a classicist at university. I I did Latin and Greek, and spent probably more time than was economically sensible writing about, you know, stuff like financial crisis in the Roman world. And the reason I tell you that is because I really love to put the work that we are doing into historical context. And so when I think about, you know, what is it that we're really doing, fundamentally, we're trying to solve a problem that everybody who's done business across borders has experienced going all the way back to the Egyptians, to the Romans, to the Medicis, to whoever, which is exactly what we were talking about a minute ago, which is in different countries, there are different regulatory regimes, different compliance regimes that you have to be able to navigate. Customers prefer to pay in different ways. So, you you look at Europe, for example, there are a bunch of bank to bank mechanisms that are prevalent in in in Benelux that just don't exist elsewhere. So ideal, so forth, etcetera. People aren't using those in France or in The UK, for example. People use different currencies. They acquire or they collect money in different currencies. They want to pay money in different currencies. So the combination of all of those things means that it is incredibly difficult for nonspecialists to navigate that environment. And the reality for for most businesses is that their core business is selling, you know, sneakers, for example, or or, you know, selling advertising or whatever it may well be. And the the whole managing their money bit of it is a kind of ancillary part that is more of a pain than than an area of, you know, joy for them as as business owners, operators, or executives. And so I think, you know, the interesting thing for us as a as a business coming out of APAC into into EMEA, into The US, is that we've been born in a region which is incredibly heterogeneous. And so, you know, you look at APAC as a region, it's not APAC as a kind of mean... Meaningless acronym because in reality, you've got all the different countries which all have their own local preferences, local currencies, you know, different super apps, whether you're looking at Grab or or WeChat or whatever with, you know, different behaviors that consumers and businesses are adopting around them.
00:13:13 · Pranav Sood, David Barton-Grimley
And so for us, our our kind of key thing is we've come out of an environment where we recognize and understand how important it is to be local, which means when we come to somewhere like EMEA, which is my patch, we're not thinking about, you know, EMEA as a region. We're thinking about The UK or Israel or The Netherlands and trying to to develop solutions and products for our customers that reflect their more local requirements rather than some kind of a generic view of of what customers in Europe may need. [00:13:42] S2: And it feels like that gives you a unique perspective, you know, going from a part of the world that is extremely complex to a part of the world that would you say, EMEA, I mean, as a... As an individual market or as a homogenous whole is more complex than APAC or simpler in some ways?
00:13:58 · Pranav Sood
[00:13:58] S3: I think it's I think it's very different. So there are a couple of things. One is from a regulatory perspective. There's probably a little bit more harmonization across The UK and Europe certainly than there is across the Asian, you know, sphere of of operations. Clearly, language, you know, we have a number of different languages across Europe, but English is kind of a lingua franca that you can generally do business in, particularly in the startup world, most people will be able to do business in English quite well. In Asia, there are really some quite significant variations. Of course, you know, you can do English in Australia, Singapore, Hong Kong, but if you want to start doing business in China or Japan or elsewhere, actually need to be able to do things in in Mandarin or Japanese or or Thai or or whatever. I think, you know, we don't really have the the super apps that that Asia does in The UK and Europe to the same extent. So, of course, you know, you have some of the neo banks that the Revolut and so on to the world trying to create those ecosystems, but they are an order of magnitude less, all encompassing than what you see with Grab or WeChat or or Ali or whatever, where everything has kind of come into that ecosystem, and you can do everything from booking taxis to buying cinema tickets to managing your money in in a single, you know, single experience. So I think I wouldn't stretch the similarities too far. But I would say definitely the key point is that if you've come from a place where it's really important to be local and to recognize the specificities, helps you to perhaps take a slightly more nuanced approach to entering the European markets than someone who's come from America where it's, you know, one big domestic domestic market, albeit with state by state differences, then coming across to Europe and thinking about it as rest of world, you know, and just assuming that that you can do the same thing and and it'll work just as well.
00:15:47 · David Barton-Grimley
[00:15:47] S2: It'd be good to talk a little bit about the pandemic. And the the reason why I'm raising this is because if you look at your meteoric growth over the last few years, I mean, you know, at least two of those years have been during a pandemic, a global pandemic. And I I think as we all know that some of the harshest lockdowns and restrictions were happening in various countries across APAC. You look at places like Hong Kong, Singapore. I mean, for goodness sakes, Australia was completely isolated and and locked down for a very, very long time. You know, with you sitting in EMEA and as a global business, did you feel any impact in The UK and Europe because of what was happening in APAC? And did you see maybe some of those restrictions as a stress test of growth in the twenty twenties?
00:16:33 · Pranav Sood
[00:16:33] S3: Well, you know what? We actually grew exponentially during those two years. And so to the extent we saw an impact in The UK and and Europe during that period, it was actually here's a business that's growing, you know, massively in the Asian region. That gives us the ability to invest, it gives us brilliant investors that have come on board during that period. And it gives us a whole bunch of customers who are looking to, you know, expand their businesses around the world and use our infrastructure everywhere. And so I don't think we saw a negative impact at all. I do think part of that is because the book of business that we have is actually quite broad, and covers a number of sectors, some of whom were more negatively impacted and others of whom were more positively impacted during that period. So for example, we do a lot in ecommerce. So as I mentioned, we work with businesses like Shein, know, GOAT, the sneakers marketplace, you know, plus plus plus. And everybody, I think, will know that during that couple of years, e comm businesses were massively benefited, because people moved to shopping online, people, you know, didn't have necessarily the ability to go and go in store and do things. And so that part of our book grew massively, Perhaps you during that time, some of the more travel businesses were a little bit slower. So you look at AQantas, for example, of course, during that period, they were doing a little bit less business than they are now. So you get that balancing effect across an entire portfolio of businesses where some benefit from a particular moment in the macroeconomic situation and others have a countervailing impact. So I think net net, it was a period of huge growth for us. And actually coming out of it, you know, even where we have seen perhaps a slightly slower growth in the e comm sector globally, we've seen a whole bunch of other sectors who have picked up and, you know, continue to power our our growth and expansion.
00:18:26 · David Barton-Grimley
[00:18:26] S2: And is there anything you you would say that, you know, fintechs or financial institutions in the European market can almost learn from some of the challenges and growth that you have faced in in APAC amidst the extremely strict lockdowns, remote teams, etcetera, etcetera?