The Fintech Marketers and Leaders Podcast
00:21:19 · Shameer Sachdev
[00:21:19] S1: I will never build a process, but I'm a big fan of process. And that's why I have an ops manager to do that for me. And we kind of use that in order to create consistency between the work that we're carrying out for our clients. Do you guys take a similar approach for Airwallex? I mean, because obviously, if you're growing at a rapid pace even, the biggest concern that I would perceive would be dropped balls and I suppose information that exists in people's heads and not in shared drives, for example.
00:21:46 · Pranav Sood
[00:21:46] S2: The theory is always that you should do as much as you can to put processes in place. The reality is that sometimes it's really hard to find the space to do that when you're all hands to the pump trying to get the customer on board or support them or whatever. And so for us, it's actually one of the big focuses over the next couple of years, which is really systematizing some of what we've done. And I think we started that in places. So we have started to bring more repositories of knowledge and more centralized views of what works and what doesn't. Some of the alignment that we've done functionally over the course of last year or so has really helped in that regard as well. But I think still, one of the downsides of growing as fast as we have is that you don't necessarily always have the time to sit and write down how does it work and how should it work. And as a consequence of that, there is always, you do carry risk as a business and as a leader because there are people and there are bits in the business where pockets of knowledge exist. And sometimes you don't even know that the knowledge is there because you've never needed to use it. But for sure, I think if I have my way, I'm the kind of guy, I'm probably the opposite to you. I'm the kind of guy who writes to do lists of things that he's already done so that I can cross them out and feel good about my completion.
00:22:59 · Shameer Sachdev
[00:22:59] S1: I see that as well. There's that saying, isn't it? If you wanna write, you know, it's not about rising to your goals because otherwise you'll fall to your level of processes. And it's a big piece for us as well. And I think any business that's sort of growing rapidly. And then I just wanted to backtrack a little bit as well, which is you talked about the onboarding pieces from the moment that you kind of conduct the first interview all the way to the end of the probation period. But almost kinda like before that, bearing in mind how distributed you are, and I suppose how specific you need knowledge to be, You know, not having a centralized HQ, how have you found that in terms of finding and hiring talent? Has it kind of worked to your advantage being really distributed? Or is that that worked against you?
00:23:46 · Pranav Sood
[00:23:46] S2: It works to your advantage in the sense that you're no longer constrained by having to hire in a particular place. And we're by no means a super, super distributed company. I know lots of companies where they'll hire engineers in Croatia or in Canada or wherever and just expect them all to find ways to work together on Slack or whatever. But it does mean that if you think about global roles, you have the opportunity to put them in a whole bunch of different places. And so the talent pools that you can reach into are just that much deeper. So going back to the marketing side, for example, when you think about some of the global aspects of marketing, so for example, performance and paid, you probably want a center of excellence to do that stuff. I mean, almost everyone does. Now, most people would be constrained on where that center of excellence needs to be by where their HQ is. So, you're a Melbourne company, you put it in Melbourne. If you're a Singapore company, you put it there. We're really lucky because we have the choice to be able to put those kinds of roles in the places where we think the right talent sits. And so, our new global head of growth marketing who's joining to lead all that performance stuff is joining in London. But equally, we're going to be building out other aspects of our marketing org in Singapore or in Melbourne. And so I think actually that really helps. Clearly, there are some constraints. So if you're doing product marketing, you probably want to be in the time zone as the kinds of people who are building the products. Otherwise, it gets quite hard to collaborate with them. But there's actually a lot of value in being flexible and being receptive and responsive to where the talent exists in the marketplace.
00:25:18 · Shameer Sachdev
[00:25:18] S1: Yeah, it's fascinating. There's a tremendous amount of nuance there. That kind of then leads back into the point that you mentioned around having respective GMs in the different locations. I suppose the benefit would be there, and correct me if I'm wrong, that having that structure of having those GMs allows you to obviously collectively speak together and make those decisions. Or is it a case where you tend to operate more sort of in silo? Or is it a hell of a lot more collaborative?
00:25:49 · Pranav Sood
[00:25:49] S2: It's very collaborative, but it's a collaboration that allows us to be quite autonomous in the way that we go to market. And clearly, we don't want to be all cooking up different jobs and different job titles in a commercial organization. Equally, there's a real recognition that the go to market tactics that I might use in EMEA may not necessarily translate elsewhere. So take an example. We're a business that helps remove a lot of the hassle and the admin involved with doing business cross border. And so one of the areas where we've been really successful is in helping businesses that have just incorporated and are default global in nature. So historically, they'd have to go and apply for bank accounts in different currencies and countries and probably face a ton of overhead and challenge in doing so because they don't have the they're not as established in those places. So in places like Hong Kong, we've been really successful at partnering with company formation type businesses, people who are helping those kinds of early stage companies come to market and scale. That hasn't been as successful for us here in EMEA. That's not really a niche that exists so much in The UK. And so it's things like that where you have quite different tactics that you don't necessarily want to just drag and drop to different parts of the world where think it's important to have that level of autonomy. But then equally, I don't want to be going around having different comp plans for the same types of roles between countries because that creates unfairness and dislocation in the team. And so I think it's about having that you know, probably loosely coupled, but tightly aligned way of working that resonates.