UKTN | The Podcast

Sho Sugihara recounts his experiences that inspired and led him to start Pave. He talks on the importance of passion in addition to having a great product and audience. Sugihara emphasises the necessity of listening to your customers and how he went one step further by living their experiences. This commitment to understanding his audience allowed Sugihara to grow his business to over half a million monthly customers. He opens up on what it means to have a team as passionate as yourself and how their combined ideas helped in the use of Tiktok that led to explosive growth for their brand.Sugihara is Pave’s co-founder and CEO. Born in Kyoto he studied politics, psychology and sociology at the University of Cambridge. He received a BA from King’s College, where he focussed on informal economies and economic exclusion. Sugihara began his career working with NGOs across Latin America, implementing socially responsible economic solutions to reduce poverty. He then joined McKinsey & Company where he consulted global clients across the financial and healthcare service sectors on strategy and business. His experience in consulting and reading on economic exclusion led him to leave McKinsey in 2017 and co-found fintech firm Pave.

Gerald Chappell and Dr. Michelle He launched Fintern at the start of the pandemic, they get into how they had to take down advertising a few months before launch as too many people were signing up. With the intention to disrupt the consumer lending market, Chappell and He explain why their concept puts the customer at the heart of the company by catering loans to individual spending and not just based off a generic credit score. They talk about timing the launch of Fintern and their experiences in securing a licence and what they did to scale and secure funds during the pandemic and thereafter. Chappell, CEO and Co-founder: Previously Partner at McKinsey & EY; Led McKinsey’s Digital Lending and Credit Analytics solutions globally. Led 200+ quants developing Artificial Intelligence models He, COO and Co-founder: Previously Director at EY. Global delivery lead for C-suite at top European banks (team size up to 1500); FinTech advisor; Ph.D in machine leaning

Mathew Prior gets candid on the concept of TrustedHouseSitters and why they’re different in more than one way to Airbnb. Making sure they weren’t just another travel app, Prior talks about how they actively built a likeminded community passionate about pets, travel and being environmentally conscious. He gets into the bones of the business and how they ended up with an immensely large American user base. Prior highlights what it means to engage your community and how that, for them, massively contributed to the success of their business. Recently closing a $10m Series A round, Prior shares future plans for TrustedHouseSitters and what a US expansion will look like. Prior is a successful and highly respected global travel and leisure leader with significant experience across multiple industry sectors, business models and geographies. He has led and grown some of the most iconic experiential leisure brands across the globe, ranging from Crystal Ski, the UK’s largest ski tour operator, Le Boat, the European leader in self-drive boating vacations and Sunsail & The Moorings, the worldwide leader in yacht charter vacations based in the USA. As a portfolio Managing Director at Travelopia, Prior also co-led the buyout of TUI Group’s niche leisure businesses. Prior balances clear strategic thinking and decision-making with a robust approach to strategy execution in international organisations. He has led both high growth businesses and those requiring the strong leadership of a performance turnaround, harnessing the power of digital technology to deliver new and innovative customer experiences to drive growth. His focus now is on scaling TrustedHousesitters globally to fulfil its potential to disrupt the vacation pet care market.

Yorick Naeff delves on taking over as CEO of BUX from co-founder, Nick Bortot, to how he’s implementing expansion and bringing Bortot’s vision to life. As a neobroker that operates across Europe, Naeff gets into how culture and regulation have shaped their strategies in other countries and found having people on the ground helped immensely with getting to know their audience. He talks about education and support being at the foundation of their company, especially with more people turning to trading as a second means of income, and how that has helped build community groups within their user base. Naeff speaks on the value of acquiring Blockport to build out their crypto offering as well as venturing into NFTs. He shares his perspective of coming into a market early versus late and what the value of competition is in regard to market share. Naeff also discusses where they have spent funding after closing their recent round at £80m bringing Bux to a grand total of £115.8 in funding. Naeff is the CEO and co-founder of BUX, Europe’s fastest growing neobroker. After starting his career in investment banking, he made his way to neobrokerage as one of the first hires at BUX. From day one, Naeff was responsible for the mobile broker’s operations and during this time he designed a business made to scale. Naeff believes that to shape the future of investing, fintechs need to understand the motivations of future generations. As a millennial, he personally understands the changing relationship that younger generations have with money and is applying this next gen mindset to tailor BUX products and services to a generation that is looking for better ways to build future wealth. His vision for BUX is to not only build the tools that people need to start investing, but to ensure that customers are also empowered with the knowledge to build up wealth for later. Having successfully contributed to growing BUX from pre-live start-up to an insanely growing scale-up, Naeff is very connected to the start-up community. Naeff is also an angel investor and has helped multiple early-stage companies.

As many start-ups grow at a rapid pace so do their teams - Asha Haji highlights the vast differences of a company of ten to a company of 30 and the missing parts that usually end up in a disconnect in relationships. She puts importance on implementing learning and development elements, and providing support and training for employees growing with the business. Giving insight into the advice and learnings from mentors of Framework, she explains how they help shape the curriculum and why it is important for users to have founders from different size companies as well as from all around the world. Talking funding, Haji explains why crowdfunding is not for them and after closing a seed round of £2m, she shares on her experience on the way investors view women versus their counterparts. Haji is a WashU computer scientist turned Harvard MBA who has spent her career developing transformative experiences at the intersection of people, technology and education. After her first chapter as a developer, she spent nearly seven years in a variety of leadership roles at EF Education First, the world's leading international education company, before joining start-ups in 2017. Haji loves fostering cultures that are inclusive and highly collaborative, where everyone is empowered to do their very best work. In her spare time, you can find her sneaking in early morning HIIT workouts and listening to NPR podcasts.

Ricky Knox gives a behind the scenes look into what it took to launch a challenger bank during a time where people laughed at the idea of trying to disrupt the banking sector and the giant banks that dominated it. He gets honest on the difficulties of raising money and the challenges faced in getting past the gatekeepers in acquiring a banking license. As a serial entrepreneur and investor, Knox takes from his wealth of experience and knowledge to give a brutally honest perspective on what founders should and shouldn’t be doing, from knowing when to sell to accepting defeat and letting go of a failing business. Life after Tandem bank, Knox talks investment and the two industries he has his eye on outside of fintech that are sure to bring about what he calls, the internet 2.0. Ricky Knox is a serial entrepreneur and investor. Ricky is Chairman of ForMore, an ethical wealth management platform. Ricky is the Founder of Tandem Bank (and CEO from inception to July 2021), an app-based bank that aims to revolutionise banking to save people and planet. App-operated bank Tandem was conceived after Ricky and his co-founder Matt Cooper saw the opportunity for a purpose driven bank. Tandem is currently focused on helping the UK reach Net Zero 2050 by leveraging customers savings to help customers to finance environmental improvements to their home, transport and lives. Ricky has helped to create a series of technology disruptors in Fintech and telecoms before founding Tandem Bank. He co-founded GSM Systems (a global mobile telephony network services provider) in 2003 to recycle mobile networks into the developing world and is a founder of Small World Financial Services Group, a global money transfer business with over £5bn of transfers and one of the world’s largest international money transfer operators. In 2012, he co-founded Azimo, a social digital payments platform that enables simple, fast and secure remittances to 198 countries around the world and remained as Non-Executive Director until 2018. Ricky has been investing in Fintech businesses since 2003, and has backed other notable Fintech businesses such as Curve, Comply Advantage, Vitesse, Liberis and Modulr. He holds an MBA from INSEAD and a first class honors in Economics from Bristol University.

Matthew Hodgson and Amandine Le Pape detail the thought process of creating a product that isn’t just another blueprint of messaging services like Slack and WhatsApp. With a clear goal and audience in mind, it took them by surprise the sudden pivot they made before even launching Element and how this has defined their niche in the messaging matrix market. Hodgson and Le Pape talk about the importance of funding when you don’t need money, as they found out the hard way when they became very near to calling bankruptcy on their business. On the flip side, Hodgson and Le Pape open up on the expansion of Element and why they chose to hire talent across 23 different countries, doubling the team from 60 to 120. They also explain how they came to acquire Gitter, a messaging service, through their associations with GitLab’s founder and how Element has gone on to raise over $48m in funding. Hodgson is also technical co-founder (and a Guardian) of The Matrix.org Foundation. Hodgson has been building communication solutions for well over a decade and has a BA in Computer Science and Physics from the University of Cambridge. He came up with the idea of Matrix with Le Pape in 2013 while they were running Amdocs’ Unified Communication unit. Together they created a new secure ecosystem that makes real-time-communication as universal and interoperable as email. Le Pape is also co-founder (and a Guardian) of The Matrix.org Foundation, the open source project that publishes the Matrix open standard for secure, decentralised, real-time communication. Le Pape leads operations across the entire company. With over 10 years’ experience in mobile services and telecommunications, Le Pape is an engineer that previously set up and led product management for the Unified Communications line of business within global communications company Amdocs. She has a degree in telecommunications engineering from Ecole Supérieure de Chimie, Physique et Electronique de Lyon as well as an EMBA from ESC Rennes.

Emilie Vanpoperinghe speaks candidly on marketing and branding as well as the growth of Oddbox pre Covid and during Covid. From a point of not seeing the desired growth she wanted, to having a surge of subscriptions that resulted in Vanpoperinghe having to take down the company website for two months during the pandemic. Oddbox has become a staple name in a climate where sustainability is at the forefront and Vanpoperinghe talks about how their learnings in marketing, branding and growth led them to where they are. Vanpoperinghe has over 15 years' project and team management experience in Fortune 500 companies (3M and BT) across the globe. She was previously Director of Finance & Operations for an international NGO set up by the Nike Foundation and working in developing countries to empower adolescent girls to reach their potential. Before that, she worked close to 10 years in finance in the corporate sector in France, India and the UK. Vanpoperinghe is originally from northern France and has been in the UK for the past 10 years. Her grandparents were potato farmers and so she knows what it takes to grow fresh produce.

Richard Mabey gives an honest account of learning through the process of pitching for funding and how his bullish take on competition has led Juro to recently close a series B round of £23m. Detailing his own experience, Mabey talks at length on the importance of choosing the right VCs and explains how it was his own customers that introduced investors in the United States to Juro. Mabey is a former corporate lawyer with Freshfields and spent time with LegalZoom before founding Juro in 2016. He holds an MBA from INSEAD and is a fellow of the RSA, and adviser to The Entrepreneurs' Network and an alum of the Georgetown Leadership Seminar. As co-founder and CEO of Juro, Mabey has expanded the business to over 85 countries and grown its customer base to well over 6,000 users.

Alex Latham talks about the amazing growth Chip has experienced, especially during lockdown and through 2021. From raising an extraordinary £30m from crowdfunding alone, to how engaging with their investors and complete transparency on strategy and risks has led them to having the second largest fintech shareholders community in the UK and one of the largest in Europe. Chip’s investment into marketing has allowed them to utilise their investment community as a second channel of awareness as well us seeing considerable growth in their users from their referral program. Before Chip, Latham held Head of Marketing roles within tech and the music industry. He specialises in the art of viral, and outside of work he can be found covered in paint, decorating, or sitting on a rowing machine.

Radha Vyas shares how she was able to grow her business in just three years to have a turnover of over £20m. She had four offers on the table with a £10m Series A round going into lockdown - Covid hit and the offers were pulled, she lost 95% of her business overnight. Five months later the company went into administration. Vyas remortgaged her house and bought back the assets to relaunch the business in 2021. She's recently closed a multimillion-pound funding round and is on target to hit £20m turnover once again in year one. Vyas has both travel and entrepreneurship running through her veins – so much so it was almost inevitable that she’d end up founding Flash Pack, an adventure travel platform that connects like-minded solo travellers. Bootstrapping the company from back bedroom startup to a £20m turnover in four years with no external investment, Flash Pack has transformed the tired and outdated image of group tours with an aspirational travel and lifestyle brand.