The Fintech Marketers and Leaders Podcast
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.
00:27:32 · Shameer Sachdev
[00:27:32] S1: Yeah, I imagine this problem is faced by the organizations such as yourself that are operating multiple territories that are global by nature. And just by the way of your product, kind of have to be. I want to take a little bit of a side step and kind of lean in and talk a little bit more about, I suppose, airworks effectively going global. We work with a number of brands and help them grow into new territories. We kind of get bought in at the point where the organization has decided what territory that they wanna go live or they wanna grow in. What was the process for AirWallax in kind of like deciding what territories to launch in, what countries to venture into? Love to learn more about that process. Was it structured market research? Or how was that decision made?
00:28:22 · Pranav Sood
[00:28:22] S2: Yeah, I think it's important to separate it into two components. One component is about our infrastructure and the work that we've done to build the infrastructure layer that we now built our product on. The other is the go to market side, which is where do you try and commercialize and where do you try and actually grow usage of your product. On the infrastructure side, I actually think it's a little bit counterintuitive, but you need to have a blueprint and a vision which is above and beyond the immediate demand that you can see. And so if you think about Airwallex's infrastructure, we've got, I don't know, maybe 60 odd licenses around the world, and we cover all those different operations, so issuing, acquiring, creating different wallets, local rails, in and out, etcetera, etcetera. And so we've actually built something to a blueprint which was beyond the immediate commercial demand that we saw and we're able to see in the near term. And that's actually really important because when you talk to the global customers that we're working with, what they care about is that they can work with providers and suppliers who can serve them in all the places that they need to be served. And that includes the long tail of places that maybe it doesn't necessarily make short term economic sense to be able to operate in. And so I think AirWallet is actually really lucky in the sense that we were born in a period where capital was pretty cheap and where investors were very patient. And as a consequence of that, the infrastructure side and also, obviously, should say we had in Jack and in our co founders a bunch of leaders who had a very long term vision that they were building towards. And so, a consequence of all of those three things, we have had the ability to build to a blueprint on the infrastructure side that is much beyond what you would have done if you were being purely economically rational. If you're being purely economic rational, you'd have said, okay, well, let's just build Australia and then we'll do a little bit in Australia. And once you've done that, we'll do New Zealand and then we'll do da da da da da. So, on infra piece, I think it's a little bit different to what you mentioned, which is you've got to think big and you've got to think in terms of blueprints and in terms of five, ten year visions.