#267 Navigating the Open Banking Landscape & Entrepreneurship with Kieron James

0:00:01 - Mehmet
Hello and welcome back to a new episode of the CTO Show with Mehmet. Today I'm very pleased to have with me Kieron Kieron, thank you very much for coming on the podcast today. The way I love to do it is I keep it to my guests to introduce themselves, so the floor is yours. 

0:00:17 - Kieron
My pleasure, mehmet, really, really my pleasure to be here and thanks for having me on the show. Yeah, so quick background to me being involved in a number of technology businesses. I was actually thinking early today it's last century when I started, which makes me feel incredibly old. Yeah, first one, back in 1998, was a web development business when, I think, being probably the rest of the world, we're trying to handle doing some web development. So that's how I got kicked off. And since then, being through a variety of different technology businesses, from web development through to domain name registration, online company formations, telecoms and, most recently, payments. So that's a bit of background to me. 

0:01:03 - Mehmet
That's great, and thank you again for being on the show here today, Kieron. Now, you know, actually, when I was preparing. There's a lot of things that we can talk about today, but let's start from the concept of open banking, right? So it's something on the rise, you know, and this is maybe I will leave it to you to explain to us more, but it's one branch of you know what's called now fintech, right? Exactly? Tell us a little bit more about the open banking. 

0:01:37 - Kieron
Absolutely. Again, I'll kind of start with a bit of a story, if it helps, but we got into open banking via a really securitist route. So back in 2016, I was running a telecoms business IP telephony providing services to all sorts of organizations, from call centers through to small businesses, and one of the things that I also like to do in my spare time. I will get to a point with this honestly, but it will seem like a long journey to that point. But my spare time I enjoyed doing running and I've done some running for charity over the years. 

2016 I was doing the New York marathon, decided to raise some money for a charity called Mind in the UK, and rather than some of that money that was being donated leaking from that donation flow from my supporters through to the charity, I was keen to see if we could find a way of doing that where all the money reaps the charity. So it was a pet project at the time. We set up an online giving platform and it was developed by the all of the engineers in the business and myself and we said right, we're not going to take a penny out of this flow. We'll figure a way of covering the costs and actually the principal cost of operating that platform by far and away was the cost of processing the donations, which were all made via debit and credit card. So the platform emerged and we started running it and we said, well, we'll commit to the first million pounds that goes through the platform in terms of meeting those costs and in the background we'll start to look for a corporate sponsor to pick them up as we grow. And we found a corporate sponsor in the cooperative bank in the UK. It was a good ethical fit because that kind of met with their particular requirements and customer base. So they got on board and supported us and essentially there was a moment when that platform really really started to take off and we were going back to the cooperative bank and saying we just need more money to take our processing. So we were doing no development of the platform, no marketing. It was just kind of every single penny was going to meet those costs and we thought we've got to find a solution to this because this means we've got this really kind of low impact on our ceiling and reach that we'd like to remove. 

And that's where open banking came along. I did tell you get to the point in the end. So open banking really opened our eyes in many ways to is there an alternative to cards, which were introduced six decades ago for a very different world? And open banking seemed to fit the bill. We could suddenly move money from the donors account to the charities a in real time, so pretty near instant transactions, and using a third party open banking provider. In the first instance it was 95% cheaper than cards. Really simple process, fast and very secure. So that's how we got started with open banking, through that kind of necessity. Really it was. It was born out of necessity, we had to solve a problem and open banking came to the rescue. 

0:04:37 - Mehmet
Cool and, of course, like I love when I hear you know the the story behind starting something, because always what I tell you know, we tell. I would say with my guests on the show that special, if you are an entrepreneur, you need to find the problem. And you need to find the problem that is big enough and then you need to find the solution that make it relevant to be used. So it's a spot on. Now if we want like to dig a little bit more into the open banking part, now, of course, you know the whole fintech. You know it revolution actually in the way we do payments, in the way we buy things, in the way we. So at some stage, you know the banks, you know traditional banks they said, hey, hold on one second, we're losing customers, we need to do something about it. So how are you seeing, you know traditional banking in general, trying to catch up with something like you know open banking and trying to offer the same, I would say, services from their side to the public? 

0:05:51 - Kieron
I think that's very good question. 

I think what's been really key in the UK and other countries is the open banking implementation entity. 

Now open banking limited as it's moved on beyond the implementation stage, but that really was the catalyst for the growth, because what the OBIE had, or the way it developed, was that there were the CMA nine first banks were essentially mandated to open up their API is to allow fintechs like ours to access the kind of information we need to do to be able to process the payments or do other things like account information services. 

So I think that Mandate really helped galvanize things and give us a way to accelerate that, because the banks essentially have no option other than to do it. That got the fintech community moving and innovating, as fintechs always will, and I think that's imperative moving forward, that there's some kind of you know, authority in the middle of this thing, that this needs to happen in the interest of competition or whether it's improved efficiencies in terms of moving money around or whatever it might be. I think that's been really really critical and the banks are certainly you know a lot of the banks are really involved in leading this and sitting in the groups and in technology forums and whatever else to help this technology work. 

0:07:12 - Mehmet
Cool. Now a question, also out of curiosity, like how, how difficult it was from regulations perspective, because when it comes to this kind of sectors, especially like something like fintech, you have regulations. In health tech, you have regulations. So what were the challenges, I would ask you, and how did you overcome that? 

0:07:39 - Kieron
It's another excellent question. I mean, a lot of people see there's almost the tension between regulation and innovation. Oddly, I come at that the other way around and see the regulations presenting the opportunity, because in some ways it creates the barriers to entry for organisations that are probably not quite so rigorous. So the authorisation process was very involved and we came out of it feeling like we'd been through a proper authorisation. There was no quick wins or quick, easy rides through that process. 

It took the best part of a year from start to finish and I think, I'll be very honest, when we finished that I felt like A we'd really achieved something, but I felt that we were perfectly equipped to go and do what we needed to do. And that's what good regulation is about. It's about providing the confidence in the users, to have the confidence in the organisations that are effectively handling money. I mean, what gets much more important than that? There are very few things, potentially health and so on, but it's a significant responsibility that we have in handling people's money and I think the authorisation process is key. So yeah, it wasn't easy, but I'm glad it wasn't. 

0:08:53 - Mehmet
Nice. I like this. Now, another aspect is and you've done this over the years during your career Kieron, which also I know you love to talk about it, but let's focus about this venture. When you start something new, you have an ambition to scale it and you are in kind of again because you are regulated. It's something quite new, quite new right. So how did you manage to have a growth plan and succeed in executing this growth plan for this business? 

0:09:42 - Kieron
This business is in the very early stages, so the growth that we've seen in the scaling has been in other businesses. But we plan to adopt exactly the same kind of approach as we've done previously in a lot of technology businesses In terms of where we are currently and again it's kind of quite interesting. But it gave us a genuine proof of concept because if you think about how I explain how we started in that online charity giving platform, I don't think anyone necessarily and the charities will probably be the first to say this associates the third sector with kind of payments innovation or any kind of really strong innovation Potentially. You know they're more followers than leaders, largely because they're very, very time poor and don't have the bandwidth to be doing the kinds of things that commercial organisations often do. So for us it was a necessary step. It was enforced in order to keep the platform alive, but it's proved to be a really, really useful one in understanding what the requirements of the market are, what that consumer journey will look like as opposed to a donor's journey. I mean, they're very similar in many ways. 

But I guess you're you know, you're going into that sector and thinking I'm going to do something fairly radical with payments. 

I'm going to present people with a brand new way of making a payment, which involves in them in giving consent to us largely an unknown operation, a brand new fintech that's been approved, giving consent for us to essentially move money from their account into another account. So, as I say, you wouldn't necessarily target charities as being your first market for that to do your beta testing with. So it's been fantastic because our view is that if we can get good adoption, good traction within that charity sector, then that bodes extremely well for moving this into the commercial space. So we're just doing that. We've literally just looked at commercial products very, very recently. We have a thousand charities on the platform using it and processing donations all day long, every day, so we've got loads of real world experience out there, but we never charge the charities. We never will charge the charities. So we're now at that point of seeing what the market will bear in terms of the cost for this service. 

0:11:58 - Mehmet
So if I want to compare this, kieron, to the concept of crowd raising or crowd funding, so how do I compare that In? 

0:12:10 - Kieron
terms of what we do in the charity space to me Manit. 

0:12:13 - Mehmet
Yes. 

0:12:14 - Kieron
Yeah, so we operate the platform. We're not in crowd funding at all. We only serve registered UK charities and for us that was a conscious decision in the early days because we felt the diligence required to onboard those charities would be easier for us to manage because they have to be registered with the charity commissions and so on. They publish accounts rather than doing diligence on individual kind of crowd funding, which we felt might be slightly more challenging, particularly at the time when we launched with the telecoms team. So that was the strategic reason to go into the charity space and that's where we've continued to operate. So that's the key difference I would say in terms of the onboarding and the work that we've got to do around, that we have access to lots of information, indeed through APIs now, so we can do a lot of those checks on during onboarding a charity just automatically through API. 

0:13:04 - Mehmet
That's cool, great. And when it comes to, you know, in general, like I mean, when it comes to this space, the open banking space, what are like? Because you're focusing on charities currently. You're planning to take it also maybe to some commercial entities later, but what are the possibilities? I would ask, like payment, like instant payment. Lower, you know, commissions is the direct benefit, but what else? You know, we can take this further. 

0:13:40 - Kieron
I mean, those are the key things, Bear in mind. We have launched. Now we are actually operating in that commercial space, but it's about. I think the four key drivers are simplicity, speed, the security and hand security and above all, for the commercial space, is the cost saving. So, to give you some example, if you look at the typical cost of processing a car payment and these will vary, you know, bearing in mind volumes and so on and the particular deals that merchants are cutting with their suppliers but probably somewhere in the 1% to 2.5% range per transaction, plus again in the UK, probably somewhere in the range of 10 to 20 pm more. So headline rates, if you look at some of the car providers, can be more than that 1.4% 20 pm is typical. Where we're at in the commercial space is no percentage. So literally we take nothing as a percentage of the payment and for each transaction we charge one p. So it's incredibly aggressive. We describe them as market crushing fees. That's going to be the driver for retail adoption, without a doubt. 

But if you add to that the fact that I can be through checkout with less friction we're no longer entering 16 digit card numbers, cvvs, expiry dates of cars, card holder names, potentially zip codes. All of that information is not required at all. This is simply tap, authorize that payment in your mobile banking or your online banking account and you're done. And again, I think the what we've seen in the UK and beyond through strong customer authentication is, ironically, if you go through all that process of entering all the car details, you may well end up in your mobile bank authorizing the payment that you've just made on a debit card anyway. So we're removing a lot of friction at checkout and getting people through checkout much, much faster. The speed also relates to settlement time. So, again, typically if you're waiting for settlement from a car provider, that's on average between one and three days, can even be longer. And we've seen some horror stories in the charity sector where you know charities are waiting 30 days and beyond to get the money, and if that's an urgent charity appeal, they need the money in the account straight away to operate. So the settlement times are really, really important too In terms of security. 

You're not sharing car details. You're not sharing any personal financial information. Therefore, there's nothing that can be reached or lost. So again, a huge advantage over cards. And imagine now with contactless if you know, if I steal the card, I can wander around London and do quite a lot of damage with contactless payments in 30 minutes and okay, I've got recourse through my bank to claim those back. But just as a hassle factor of having to go through that pain point, it's not a great great scenario. So, again, with an open banking transaction, if you're using an open banking payments app, for example, then a lot of those will be based on biometrics data in order to authorize that payment, so Face ID, whatever it might be. So I'd say those are the real key benefits and the key drivers for retail adoption. 

0:16:57 - Mehmet
Yeah, and I know for a fact and correct me if I'm wrong, kieran because you know when you rely on these systems, you get the because of exactly what you mentioned at the end authentication, and you know the KYC and other stuff. So all the anti-money laundering or the you know these things that actually delays the traditional payment approach. I think you get them sorted out right. 

0:17:24 - Kieron
Yeah. So one of the things that you won't see in an open banking payment flow is something that you often see is called confirmation of payee. If you're making a payment and so you were making a bank transfer you enter the details and I've broadly got your name right as it appears on your account, but it might not be quite right and you get a you know, a confirmation challenge question from the bank to say you know it's close matched. You want to check the details again and re-enter them? Did you mean this? Because we've already verified that recipient and onboarded them to our system? Then you will never get that challenge question because you don't need to be asked the question. 

The money, we know exactly where it's going. It's going into that bank account. So, because you're not entering any data whatsoever, essentially all you're doing is giving us basically a token, an approval token, to say I want to pay £25 from my account to whoever it might be Amnesty International. Here's an authority for you to take £25 out of my account, pay into Amnesty International. We know Amnesty International's account because they're registered with us on our platform and we just make that payment. 

0:18:33 - Mehmet
Cool Anything that makes the user journey easier. It's more appealing all the time. 

0:18:42 - Kieron
You're right, Amnesty is very time poor, aren't they these days? So anything that's allowing you to go through but go through quickly and with confidence I think, is really, really key. 

0:18:53 - Mehmet
Yeah, 100%. So these types of solutions that personally I love, because whenever you can remove friction, reduce time to do things and remove the hassle, I would say, because you just mentioned something which happened to a lot of people I know they get phone ratings or another scammed and their debit card or credit card gets used and then they need to call the bank and then the bank. I'm not sure how much it takes in the UK, but for example, here in Dubai, to reclaim the money. Sometimes it can take up to 90 days, sometimes 180 days, it depends. If it happened inside the country, it's good, because less time probably. 

But if something happened while you're traveling, for example, and you used your card and someone used your card or scammed you, basically, so it can take six months until you can get your money back and all the frustration calling the banks, sending emails and all this. So yeah, it's a lot of things Now. Maybe it's a kind of generic question, I know, but because now you're inside this business here on other trends that you are seeing in FinTech, what are the hottest trends you're seeing now from FinTech? 

0:20:15 - Kieron
We're quite focused on the payment side of FinTech, the opportunities we have because we've got both permissions from the FCA, so we have the AIS, the Account Information Service Provision that would allow us to do things. I'll give you an example in the charity space to give you an example of Account Information Services, how we might use them. If you're making a donation through a charity platform with a lot of the things you'll see or what you'll see very often is oh, you're about to pay 10 pounds, would you like to pay 10 pounds, 25 pounds or 50 pounds? And there are three options presented and you choose one of them and often people will just go for the middle one and the charities will understand this. They'll have done lots of research on what's an appropriate level of donation in their sector. So, again, when we look at the charities on our platform, those 10, 25 and 50 might vary considerably from one charity set to another. However, there still, we would describe that almost as a monologue from the charities. It's based on their research, but it's not really got a great deal of input from you as the donor. You're presented with three numbers. Yes, you can enter another amount. What we could do with Account Information Services using our consents from the FCA or, sorry, our permissions from the FCA and our consents from you, as the donor is to actually say what's the affordability level here, what's an appropriate amount for you to give rather than what's an appropriate amount for the charity to receive. So we're quite focused now on having done a lot of the payment initiation services, to start to explore that and how we make more of a dialogue between the charities and its supporters rather than that being a one direction conversation. So I think AIS, particularly in our spaces and speaking as our business, that's an area that we want to start looking at in much more detail. 

Going forward, in terms of the payment side, I think there's a lot of interest now about variable recurring payments. So that's essentially your direct debit equivalent for want of a simple explanation in the open banking space. So I can take a varying amount from your account, again with the consent of the person making the payment, and you can see how that would work and reduce costs in areas like utilities bills, where I might pay once a month or once a quarter, but the amount might vary each time. So, again, what we're doing there is reducing the settlement time to instant and reducing the cost significantly on processing those payments. I would say, certainly in the areas that I'm most familiar with, they will be the kind of hottest areas. But what we've seen generally in this whole space is a move from open banking into open finance and then into open data. So you're starting to look at broader and broader areas of where this data sharing and information sharing with consents can be put to really great use. 

0:23:07 - Mehmet
Cool, yeah, a lot of innovation still under eyes. I would say Absolutely. But what you just mentioned now is also fantastic because again back to the thing we were just discussing removing the friction so if I have something that, on my behalf, can go and pay my bills, decide the amount, and I don't have to do it, it's fantastic because you don't even need to get some reminders about that. You don't need to be distracted actually to get the reminder about that. So this is also something very cool and I think sorry, just to go in there. 

0:23:48 - Kieron
One other thing I think that's really important is you can even still get the notifications, but they can be much more informative to you, so it can be an informed notification. An example might be I might not want to set up a regular donation to a charity, but I might want to be prompted that. Do you want to make a donation again? By the way, you gave them £25 last month. This month it might be more appropriate to give 15, or it might be more appropriate to give 50. So again, I think it's the enhancement of things like that, where we can make things much more relevant to the recipient of the notification, that become really, really exciting. 

0:24:22 - Mehmet
Yeah cool Now shifting a little bit gears. Kieron One of the reasons why, also, I get excited to talk to you today. When I was reading the bio, you mentioned that you have started, scaled and exited nine businesses. This is a record. I would say so by now you must have, as they say you have now. I mean maybe the the sexist formula for doing this over and over again, but this didn't come in one day. This didn't come in one year. Also, it took you quite a long time to reach here what I'm interested on Kieron in the first place, like what attracted you actually to do this whole startup thing. 

0:25:11 - Kieron
I'm going to have to think back to that last century again, but I started funny enough. 

0:25:17 - Mehmet
No, no, no, it's all. It's all got funny, I've started out in the in the Middle East. 

0:25:21 - Kieron
I was working, I'd started life as a my professional life actually Second job was teaching teaching business studies and economics in a high school and I fancy the move and ended up in Oman running a training institute for vocational training out in Oman back in 98. So this is how the journey started and I really love doing kind of creative stuff. So I was also tasked with producing some of the marketing material for the training institute and they'd asked me to put together a PDF document and I thought that's that's all very well and good, but it's 1998. Should we not be thinking about the internet? And so I think that was my first ever kind of thought about can we do something online and finish working with the training institute went back to the UK and that's when we started the web development business. So it was again. 

It was kind of initially born out of necessity. I wasn't entirely sure what I wanted to do and I knew I didn't want to teach anymore. I kind of done that for four or five years and was ready for a move and then since then I think there's been always a passion for stuff in the IT sector. For sure I've never sold anything that isn't described as a zero or a one. So for me, it is all about data. It's all about things that can be done online. It's never for me and this is a personal preference about physical product, about storing things, warehousing things, shipping things. I want to be able to get a solution that I can have delivered now and there's no product to ship. So I think that's been key in a lot of the areas that that I've looked at. 

Moving into the other one that's been really, really important in terms of how we've made this work, is is really starting with again, you talked about this earlier on what's the problem we need to solve and how do we do that? How do we make ourselves visible? And then how do we make that experience for the customer as friction free as we possibly can. So, again, turning back the clock many years that there was a lot large focus in the early days of anything web based for us on SEO, because it was a really cheap, cost effective way of getting yourself out there Much, much harder. These days, I'm fully aware of that because there's a lot, a lot more content for one and a lot more competition for eyes on websites, but certainly in the early days SEO and then making that experience once you found the website through to using the product as low touch as we possibly could. That was always the key. How do we automate this and streamline it and make it a really great experience for the customer? 

0:27:55 - Mehmet
Great, fantastic. I love this approach and because I think we share some at some stage similar, I would say, career. I don't like even when it comes to IT, for example, being in server business or selling laptop business, it was not attractive to me. Or storage systems, because these things becomes commodity after some time and actually they are now commodity and you don't feel the, I would say you know this moment where you're trying to prove to the customer that actually you are solving a really problem and for me, for example, if you give me now a laptop or give me to talk about, for example, a server or whatever I can describe it, it has this much CPU, this much RAM, the disk spins at this speed, but again, I'm talking about a commodity, right? So I love talking about things that change dramatically the customer journey. It saves them money and I think you've done all this properly, I would say. 

But there must be some skills also and I'm asking this question, if you know, sometimes part of my audience are first time founders, right? So there must be some skills you know when it comes to, because maybe you have a brilliant idea, you're really solving a real, genuine problem, but you get stuck, you know you're not able to grow. You're not even able. You mentioned the SEO stuff, but nowadays there are some other tools. So what are they? Let's say, let's call them I don't like this word, but it's what people know. It like soft skills and let's say things that you need really to master in order to scale the business. 

0:30:00 - Kieron
Another great question, and I think there are a couple of key ones that I've learned along the way. One is on the financial side, and it's a tip that I share. I think it was given to me many years ago. I remembered it and it was. It was be passionate and dispassionate in equal measure, and what I mean by that is that you need to have passion for what you're doing. 

I think if you're going into start a business on your own and the thing that you're selling or trying to deliver doesn't really interest you very much, then that's probably not a great place to start. But equally, the dispassionate bit is important too, because you may go into it because you love it, but actually you want to very few people who love it and therefore the audience that you thought or the market you thought existed isn't as big as you'd hoped it would be, and you've got the product slightly wrong or the service quite slightly wrong. So my dispassionate bit is in looking at the numbers, and that's the bit where you've got to sit down and not just convince yourself that it's all going to be all right because you love this thing, but it's actually been dispassionate on that, saying you know what we're going to have to pivot or worst case scenario. You know what? It was just a bad idea, let's move on. And the other been nine exits, but they've been things that we've started and finished quite quickly because of the former and not the latter. 

So I think that's really key and I think the other one again. You'll have heard this, but I suspect from numerous guests before, but it's always try and fill your boardroom and your meeting room and everywhere with people that are smarter than you are. And you're completely right. You know I started life doing a bit of web design and probably fun, way more and a pill script back in 1999 and 2000. But right now, now you know this is all moved on at a pace that left me behind 15 years ago. So it's finding really strong people that can deliver. Deliver those solutions, recognizing who they are, bringing them on board and getting great teams of people in place. 

0:31:55 - Mehmet
Great advice, Kieron, like, and I think what I understood from you and something also I've read a lot about it is maybe this is the deep passion part you mentioned is also not to be too much into the solution, in a sense, like having an ego, like this is my idea. It is to succeed, whatever it takes. Honestly, I did this mistakes, you know, multiple times. I have to make this succeed, and it was kind of an ego. And then you know it's time, of course, the more you lose here or it becomes white. I don't understand. 

Oh, no, like, actually I needed to pivot, you know, and I think the I would say the underrated reason why startups failed in general is because founders, they don't understand that they need to pivot at some stage. Like this is my own, that's what I have seen and they insist no, like, the market is not understanding me. You know, like people are not getting what I'm trying to say, which is not the case Now in this journey, Kieron, because again, you did it and even you had to do the listing on NASDAQ, right. So which way you prefer to do it? Have you done it using, you know, the bootstrapping approach? So you were using your own money, family, friends, or have you done it through investors, vcs and so on, or it was mixed of all, and of course, I want your opinion on which approach we should take. I know that the answer depends, but of course, with nine successful startups, I'm sure that you have some more insight than it depends. 

0:33:52 - Kieron
Yeah, a couple of points there and we'll just, before I move on to those, just go back to the point you were making on pivoting and so on and also understanding ego and when it gets in the way. So just touch on that Only because it's really timely. I had a developer meeting today with all of the team and they had a technology on that call, and often I will accuse myself as well as be accused of changing direction frequently, because it's typically in response to either pressure from potential investors that you're talking to, that want your product to go in a certain direction, or seeing opportunities in the market, and that's one of the real great things about being in startup is that you can make those changes quite quickly. However, what happened over the last week was our head of technology just came up with some really, really fantastic implementations for our public API and I said you do realize, as a result of those ideas that you've just come up with, we're probably gonna change the development roadmap for the next three months and move two or three things out of the way and advance this. So you know those ideas should be welcome. They should come from everybody in the team. It doesn't need to be a head of technology. It can be anybody and really be always listening to what they are and responding to them, not least because you get so much buy-in from everybody if they're coming not just from the top all of the time, but everyone feels like their product idea is getting a listening. So that's really important In terms of approaches. 

Yet nine exits that's between myself and my co-founder over these 30 years. So I've never before directly raised although we're in the process of doing that now. My co-founder's done it a number of times so different businesses that we've been involved in and we've exited together. It's cumulative nine or a combined nine rather. This is an interesting one because we this business so far is founded on the basis of the last exits we did from the telecoms business and we're just raising now. Prior to this, I don't think any of the businesses as a being it's not just revenue positive pretty much from day one, but actually made a profit pretty much from day one is the way that we've started them and they've grown fairly slowly and fairly organically in the overall scheme of things, based on things like SEO, so minimal spend on that and producing content 10, 15 years ago and just watch the organizations grow without spending huge amounts on marketing, without bringing in any external funding, and then moving on and selling fairly quickly or fairly quickly in the scheme of things, being like five years or so, but not fairly quickly in terms of bringing external funding and accelerating your market much more rapidly. So I can't give you an opinion on whether I prefer the latter to the former. 

I will say that trying to raise over the last couple of years in the fintech sector anyone who's been doing that will tell you it's not been much fun since 2021. So it's definitely a challenging environment out there, and, again, quite rightly so. It's a bit like the FCA piece. I'd rather someone was being super diligent about what they're investing in than just throwing money around willy-nilly. So it's probably a good thing, but, yeah, done it organically. Till now, we've raised in the past. 

The only other observation I'd make if it's helpful too in terms of that process for selling is be thinking about it from the very moment you start your business, if that's your intention is to sell at some point in the future. And what I mean by that is that if you get really well prepared and you've got your everything you place a bit like your data room. If you're raising money. You've almost got your similar files in Dropbox or where it might be preparing for the diligence that's gonna happen when you sell the business. So every contract that you're signing with everybody makes sure all the paperwork's in place and you always got one eye to that as you develop in the business. It will really help you when it comes to that that exit, that sale. 

0:37:50 - Mehmet
You touched base oh sorry, you touched base on something really key here and I had the chance to be not for me, but to be sitting with founders on investor's goals and the question that they get asked what is your exit strategy? Right, so? And I see a lot of times the founders like they start to look to each other Okay, we just started, right? Yeah, so, because when you go to an investor, they are need to understand what's your ambition in this business and are you going to sell it, as you mentioned? What's your plan? Are you going to an IPO? Are you going just to reach a certain I don't know, like maybe a target in your head? You said, okay, I want to do this amount of dollars, pounds, whatever, in a year, and then I'm going to go retire, sell it to someone, I'm going to merge it. 

So, yeah, I think it's a tricky question and I see a lot of first time founders. They, yeah, they are passionate. Back to the passion thing you mentioned you know they are passionate about what they're doing and actually they are pretty much doing something cool, but they don't have an answer to that question, because I think, right, You're absolutely right, you know you're completely right and I think you're also right. 

0:39:18 - Kieron
There is no right or wrong answer to the question, but there needs to be an answer and that's the. It's that kind of oh, I've not even thought about that, which is the thing that's probably not greeted very well by anybody who's looking to invest or so, and it's just that you must have some idea. So even if your idea is that that might emerge and evolve and could be a number of different routes it could be an acquisition by a competitor, it could be an IPO, it could be but do give it some thought and just you know, I don't think anyone's going to hold you to the answer that you give at the time of that meeting, but I think it's good that they're looking, that you've given some thought to that, and if people are investing, then they're probably are looking for you to have an exit idea at some point, or at least a strategy, rather than it be a lifestyle business that they're never going to see any significant return from or any return. 

0:40:02 - Mehmet
Right, I think, because also, the landscape of startups currently is very different than it was maybe a couple of decades, if I can be accurate where, yeah, you start a company and this company really you know it can have like it's like a hundred plus years company. Like we talk here about Microsoft, we talk about Apple, we talk about the big guys. Now we see, like actually these startups, they either get acquired even when they do IPO, they don't stay there for a long time. You see them like at some stage someone go and acquire them after some time. It's a crowded market. Kieron, right, do you agree with me? It's a crowded market out there. 

0:40:46 - Kieron
Yeah, absolutely Definitely kind of vying for attention. And in the FinTech space, I think there are a lot of payments providers out there. So doing something different from our point of view is really important. What's the uniqueness that we bring to this space? And, again, we're kind of lucky that we've got a genuine and a genuine tech for good heritage. 

And I say that because a lot of these phrases do get hijacked. I'll often joke that if you've not got ESG in your company profile or about page on your website at the moment, then who are you? So it's a shame that some of the phrases get hijacked and so on, but I think that's one of our genuine advantages. It is absolutely how we got started, so I think that can set us apart, and I think you've got to do that. When this space is crowded, how do you differentiate? These are all very obvious things that you'll read in any business book, but they're in any business book because they're important. You need to think about that and think about how you make yourself different 100%, and this is why I'm a little biased by the Blue Ocean strategy. 

0:41:50 - Mehmet
So I tell them if you are in a crowded market, maybe you will succeed, but your chances get lower, because if you don't have a real differentiator or I mean, let's call it, value add in the marketplace, who cares? Yeah, I know some people get upset of that, but this is the truth. 

0:42:14 - Kieron
No, it's completely true. But equally think about your market, because often what might be crowded in one marketplace might be not the case in another. And I think in the payments sector there's room for lots of business, because the scope, certainly around open banking, when you think about the volume of transactions that are happening daily around the globe, is just so enormous that a very tiny share of that massive market would still turn you into a unicorn. So markets are all different and some are much more limited in terms of the number of players in them than others. That's not to say that you won't see a lot of consolidation. I'm sure you will, even in this space. I'm sure it's gonna happen. But consolidation is good too. That can be your exit strategy for sure 100%, Kieron. 

0:43:02 - Mehmet
as we are coming almost to the end, if you want to leave the audience with some, I would say, advice, word of wisdom. What do you tell someone who, maybe he or she, they're just starting their journey in entrepreneurship? So what do you leave them with today? 

0:43:24 - Kieron
I think the advice is to be prepared for the journey, in the sense that there are a lot of times when you think it's gonna be really straightforward and you can't understand why people don't see the solution that's so plainly in front of your eyes, the solution to a problem that seems equally apparent. Keep battling on, listen to yourself in terms of that dispassionate piece that I mentioned earlier, because I think that's one of the things that I have lived by that it's okay. Failure isn't failure. Failure is just setting yourself up to do the next thing and learning from the experience. So if you are looking at the numbers and the tone, you are really clear. Storing it's not the one you want to listen to. Listen to it, you have to, and then the only other thing is, again, it's just try and get that balance. It's not easy. Startup life is inherently frenetic and fast-paced and so on. So give yourself genuine downtime. Find something that takes your mind off what you're doing and gives you a chance to rest the brain cells. 

0:44:25 - Mehmet
I 100% agree on the last advice. I need to give it to myself also as well, because sometimes, yeah, you get excited A lot of things, there's a lot of stress, there are also a lot of excitement moments, but, yeah, the brain cells need some rest. That's correct, Kieron. Any thing that I have missed? I should have asked today. 

0:44:51 - Kieron
I think it's been an incredibly comprehensive interview, at least from my point of view. I hope your listeners agree. But no fantastic questions and my pleasure really to be on the show. 

0:45:01 - Mehmet
My pleasure when we can find more about you, Kieron. 

0:45:05 - Kieron
Domain name's really straightforward. We started the fundraising platform at wonderfulorg and it's been there ever since. Again, going back to those domain name registration days, we registered wonderfulcouk, which is where the commercial service exists, back in 1998. So straight out nominate. So yeah, wonderful co-UK and wonderfulorg, the two sites you'll find me. 

0:45:27 - Mehmet
Great. I will make sure that they are in the show notes. Thank you very much, Kieron. I really also enjoyed the conversation. I learned something new about open banking systems and their use cases and especially, actually it's in a domain which is nice to talk about, which is, I think we didn't cover it even on the show Like we talk about charity, right. So this is really something that helps for a good reason also as well. So thank you for sharing that and I hope the audience I'm sure they will find it useful, but I hope to inspire them also to do something for the good dwelling of everyone also as well. It's not like just about being a business. So this is something really cool and I appreciate the time today. 

Kieron, and the way I end my episodes is just for the audience. If you are a first-time visitor here, thank you for passing by. I hope you become a loyal fan. So if you are listening to this podcast episode on your favorite podcasting platforms, make sure you subscribe. And if you are watching us on YouTube, so make sure also you subscribe. And if you are one of the loyal audience, thank you very much for all your emails, for all your messages that you keep sending to me. I really appreciate the feedback. Keep them coming. And also, if you have any suggestion idea for the show, also let me know. And if you're interested to be on the show as well, don't hesitate, reach out. We can find and range the time to record together. Time zone is not an issue. As I always say, we can always find a fit. I'm kind of in the middle of a time zone that can suit the whole world. So don't hesitate to reach out and thank you very much for tuning in. We'll meet again very soon, thank you, thank you.