1223: Scaling Sokin: Beyond the First $100 Million | with Tom Steer, CFO, Sokin

0:00Support for CFO Thought Leader comes from OneStream, Trusted Data, Faster Decisions, and Salesforce. Explore new research on the future of finance and AI at Salesforce.com slash CFO Report.

0:16Tom Steer: Hello, this is Ryan Rakan, CFO of Zapier, and you are listening to the CFO Thought Leader podcast. This is episode 1223.

0:29I did have the privilege of actually getting to know the business probably better than most CFOs coming into a seat. So, you know, I was spending, speaking to the company every day, seeing the real insides of the business from running the process on their capital raise from the sales side. So I felt like I came in with a lot more knowledge on the business than maybe most coming in. I knew what I was walking into both in terms of the team and knew I gelled well with them, but also on the financials and how the business runs. So it was all kind of, okay, I saw this from the outside in advising you.

1:01Right, now I'm in the seat. How can I now take this to the next level? Because I'll tell you what, they did a great job at, when we were advising them back in the day in 2023, they pretty much hit exactly what the plan was during that time. So I knew something was working and it's like, okay, now how do we do that at scale? Because it becomes a different game when you're getting close to the 100 million run rate revenue. So it's what worked at getting you from 10 to 100 is not necessarily what's going to work from getting you from 100 to a billion. Hi, it's Jack. On today's show, we speak with Tom Steer, CFO of Silken.

1:40There comes a point in a company's growth when success creates a new set of problems. The systems that worked, the people who got things done, even the assumptions behind investment decisions can suddenly need rethinking. At Sokin, an international payments business approaching$100 million in revenue, CFO Tom Steer is confronting precisely that challenge. And what's interesting is that the question isn't simply how to grow. It's how to decide which opportunities deserve attention, which investments can wait, and what needs to change before the next wave of growth arrives. Because scaling isn't just about doing more.

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3:45Hello, CFO Tom Steer is with us. Tom's career has taken him from audit and M &A advisory at Deloitte to commercial finance and corporate development at World Remit. He later moved into investment banking at FT Partners, advising companies across the fintech sector. Today, as CFO of Sokin, he brings that unusual mix of operating and dealmaking experience to a fast-growing international payments business where scaling operations and navigating growth are central priorities. Tom, welcome. Thank you for having me, Jack. Looking forward to discussing further. Yeah, we look forward to it as well. And we always kick things off by asking you, though, to look back.

4:33And we'd like you to try to identify some of those experiences you feel actually prepared you for finance leadership. What comes to mind? Yeah, happy to do that. So yeah, first of all, thanks again for having me. I think when I take this moment to look back at my career to date, it's certainly been a nonlinear journey. And I think actually, when I was making each of my career decisions along the way, I can't sit here and tell you now that I was thinking the CFO was the end goal. I didn't know that candidly. And I think maybe that almost helped me. I think when I started my career journey and going down the order and getting my accountancy qualifications, it was to keep options open.

5:14I knew I wanted to be in finance. I had a passion to kind of learn about that space. I didn't know exactly what area of finance that would take me down. And for me, starting that career journey with those foundations on the accountancy qualification was a great way to start that. And then from there on, each decision was aimed at keeping optionality as broad as possible, because I wanted to find out which areas of finance gave me the most passion and got the most energy from. And hence why I kind of moved into that corporate finance side, because I quite like the fast paced nature of work and that more strategic element on the finance side is something that gives me passion.

5:51So that was what took me into that area. And from there, it's kind of been looking at wanting to understand, okay, how does a business actually operate? So that's ultimately what took me into World Remit. After I finished my qualifications at Deloitte, I knew I wanted to get my hands dirty in a business and see how things operate on the inside. With that kind of commercial finance lens, looking forward, seeing what drives a business, see what can actually bring the growth to the fore for a business. And then as things started to develop with that business at World Remitting, we got to a certain scale where inorganic activity increased.

6:29It was an area where I enjoyed during my time at Deloitte. I said, look, put me in, keep me involved in that area. and as it became more prevalent, kind of launched and started that function on the corporate development and strategy side. And we'll go into a little bit more of some of the interesting projects that we worked on during that time, but I learned a lot in a short space of time that a lot was going on. And it's a space that I've just increasingly kind of fell in love with on the fintech side. And so when I was enjoying some of the deal experience there, again, I wasn't thinking I'm going to become a CFO necessarily was almost thinking about how can I just increase the level of exposure and experience I'm getting on the deal-making side and the strategic finance side and just throwing myself into all the kind of exciting, interesting projects that were going on there.

7:16And, you know, got to a point where the fintech bubble kind of somewhat burst in 2022 and a lot of the exciting things that we were looking to do were somewhat going to be put on pause so it's at that point that i looked and said okay how can i diversify knowing that i'm not going to be getting as much exposure in in world remit necessarily because we're going to be things are going to maybe slow down for a period of time where can i get that deal making and strategic exposure that i really enjoyed from my my time at deloitte and then also at world remit and actually ft partners is a is an investment bank that just focuses 100 on on fintech deals They do amazing work with amazing businesses across the landscape from, you know, the likes of Revolut, Monzo and all of the big names that you would have heard of.

8:03And for me, it was a great way to to kind of carry on my carry on that journey of learning more about the fintech space, but across multiple different clients. So, you know, they go very deep with their clients, advising them in quite early stage, but taking them through to later stage IPO and exit. So I spent three great years there and actually was lucky enough to work with a business called Soken. um during my time there and got to know the team very well during that time it's it's a bit of a it's an interesting role when you're on the investment banking side because you're working so closely with uh a team um but you're not actually obviously you know employed and part of that but you get to know them intimately at that senior level and they also get to know you intimately on that senior level is how you operate and how you work and how you think and and you're obviously working with them in a pretty intense environment of you know getting them getting a capital raise done in a in what was actually quite challenging times back in 2023 and 2024 um post the kind of tech and fintech bubble um bursting in 2022 and um and then ultimately i was looking at this is the point where i first started to think about that cfo moment in my brain and saying okay you know is this a pathway i want to go down to become a managing director and on the banking side and really push here um it was something i was i was really enjoying the role working with some amazing companies or did i want to get you know take this experience and apply it in a real company that it's like you know doing the day-to-day and again getting that kind of hands-on exposure and uh after like a lot of back and forth i kind of decided on the latter i got a lot of enjoyment during my time at world remit um on that kind of commercial finance journey and corporate development journey there and kind of wanted to go in at that more senior level at a business that's going through a similar growth journey to what world room it was.

9:49And so we then kept in touch with the Sokin team and Vroom, the founder at Sokin, and a role came up at the CFO seat for me to come in and bring in that fintech experience, that strategic finance experience, M &A and dealmaking experience as well, kind of backed by that accountancy foundation. So without really realizing through my career, I'd kind of ticked off a few boxes that a CFO ideally has in their repertoire. But it wasn't a conscious decision. I think that's something, it was more just keeping optionality open and then trying to keep building good relationships. And I found that's been the best way to get new roles.

10:26I'm lucky enough, I've never had to really go through a recruiter for any role. It's always come from building good relationships with folks along the way. And those relationships, by the way, that I thought maybe would come to nothing three, four years later, they've been really helpful to have built back when I did. So yeah, Hopefully that helps give a bit of color as to where I've got to today. Just as far as fintech is concerned, it was probably opportunities that you became involved with that attracted you to fintech originally. But what's sort of kept you there or made your focus all the more?

11:03What's unique about these companies that appeals to you? Yeah, look, it's a good question, Jack. I think, firstly, I think it helps that the fintech space is so broad. So I think it covers so many different areas from payments to lending to insurance tech to spending management. You've got some amazing companies lighting up this space now when you look at the likes of Ramp, Revolut, Nubank that are maybe like some of the shining lights right now in this space. And for me, it's the fast pace that the industry changes. You never have a dull day. I think there's always some innovation that's coming through or a competitor that's releasing something that, you know, if you're not on your game and improving as a business, you're quickly getting left behind.

11:46And for me, it kind of blended quite a lot of the challenges that I really enjoyed on the investment banking side where things move at pace. You have that deal urgency and that high velocity nature of your role. It's kind of echoed in the industry itself where it's moving at breakneck speed. is super competitive. And it gives you that energy to get up every day and try to make sure that you're at the forefront of that rather than being left behind. So I get a lot of, that's how I get my energy every day. And certainly FinTech kind of embodies that as well, I found. Where do you think you might have been challenged the most on this journey where you moved from finance to strategy to investment?

12:26Where were you maybe challenged to learn? accelerated learning was required. Yeah. Yeah. Look, I mean, I feel like my journey has been pretty accelerated just generally. And I think part of that is because I've always tried to like throw myself out of my comfort zone. And as soon as I feel like I'm getting to a bit of a cap on my learning journey, it's okay, what can I do now to add to my repertoire so that I can be better in a year's time, two years time. So always being really mindful of that, being very communicative with my CEOs or CFOs back in the day as to the areas of exposure I wanted to get to improve my learning and make sure that I didn't cap out on that learning journey.

13:04I mean, certainly when I moved from WorldDreament to FT Partners, a lot of the questions was, can you cut it going from a corporate job to that investment banking nature? It's an ex-Golman Sachs team. It comes with that kind of ethos and hardworking nature. And I think I did a good job, hopefully, convincing them that, yeah, look, this is basically what I've been doing day to day on my role at World Remit the last three, four years has basically mirrored some of the roles that you guys will be doing on the banking side, but on the corporate side with some of the projects we're working on, working with some very demanding leaders, which I've learned a hell of a lot from during that time.

13:45But I was able to kind of convince them that I could make that transition. And don't get me wrong. It was a bit of a baptism of fire on some of the deals I was thrown into in the first couple of months, but I don't regret it at all. It was an amazing learning journey. And I think just being open to the challenge has been definitely something that's helped me during my career to date. As you moved into an operator's role, leadership role, maybe your approach to leading people versus the investment banking world, you'd have to become much more of a leader in a sense in the CFO seat, no question.

14:23But can you tell us a little bit about your approach to leading people and how maybe that's been accelerated? Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I think you're right. On the investment banking world, you have a kind of set structure where you have your analysts, associates, VPs. It's all very formulaic. And I think when I joined Sokin, it was actually a team of one plus a shared service center that we used in India who have been great. But it was about building out that function. That was almost day one role beyond some of the other exciting BAU initiatives we have was building out the team. And it was then trying to set what is the culture and expectations that I have as a leader that I want to kind of embody in the team.

15:05So for me, 100 percent is setting that by example, because especially when you're growing a team from scratch, you've got a really great opportunity to build that culture and build that leadership style from the ground up and not have too much resistance to change because you're bringing people in who hopefully can embody that. So certainly leading by example. Then it was wanting to empower people. So giving them the resources that they needed to get the job done. That's certainly been important. So hiring really good people that I could find. So taking time, saying no a bunch of times where you have that, maybe that person could be good enough.

15:39But if you have any doubt, I think it's in my mind, my experience has been, okay, there's probably a reason why you have that doubt. Back your instinct and find that person who fits that role. So definitely giving them the tools and resources that they need to go and do that. And then the autonomy that they go and actually own their products, I think, or own their work stream. That's been something that's, if I hire the right people, give them the autonomy to go and do the things they need to do. And to your point about why the fintech space and it being such a, things are moving so fast in the industry in general.

16:12In Sokin as well, we're moving at breakneck speed as a business. being that calming influence at the top I found has also been helpful. So being that almost that dam that there's so much coming down the pipes of things we could do and things we need to do, just being that filter to make sure that you're allocating things to the team members in the right way. So you're setting them up for success, not overwhelming them with things. And then you just, that efficiency level starts to get diluted as people kind of are spread too thin. That's another area that I take quite seriously in my leadership role.

16:41So we'll probably have a few more career related questions for you a little later. But for listeners new to Sokin, tell us what does the company do today? And where do you see the opportunities coming? Yeah, look, so I'm happy to go into that. I mean, taking a step back, our mission as a business is to help global enterprises scale without friction around the world. So that can mean they're either global and feeling the pain of that friction already, or they're going global and starting to feel the pain of that friction. And so what do I mean by that friction? It means from actually facilitating payments around the world to setting up bank accounts around the world and managing and reconciling things in the office of the office of the CFO suite has become increasingly fragmented.

17:35Typically, the mid-market enterprise level customers that we focus, and I'll come on to why we focus on them specifically, have five or six different banks that they work with, 70, 80 different bank accounts, four different payment providers, two ERPs. And they probably have a team of 30 or 40 finance folks logging in and out of these platforms every day, trying to reconcile across these different systems. And in the AI era where getting that data homogenization to make smart decisions is so important, you still have that challenge of trying to reconcile many different things across these different systems.

18:08So what Soken has come in to do is be that financial layer that helps those businesses run and operate their payments and offices of the CFO suite. at a global level. So we do that through our global licensing and banking partner coverage. We build out a product suite that helps to unify what was previously a very fragmented system and just take the pain out of what finance professionals are having to do every single day when it relates to managing their treasury systems. So we've got, as I mentioned, we purposely go after mid-market and enterprise level customers because those are the ones that are feeling the pain enough to probably warrant making a change.

18:46maybe they have you know 15 16 different entities around the world and they have just that inherent complexity that their finance professionals are yearning for a better solution to what they have so you know despite all of the um progress that's being made on on automation and on the software side when it when software starts to work with regulated businesses there is just that inherent um inherent friction and drag that we've tried to to um simplify for those businesses. And we do that in two ways. We go direct to customers. So this might be manufacturing, logistics, shipping businesses that we rely on cross-border payments to function.

19:23Or it might be on the embedded side now, which is a new product that we've launched where we now give our infrastructure. So our licensing footprint, our banking partner network, our product that they can white label and sell onto their end customers. So that will be for ERP providers. That might be for fintechs that don't have the license and license coverage and payment offering that we do, but they want to offer it to their customers as well. So that new product is taking off quite dramatically right now because people are realizing that they want to go global quicker. They're realizing that getting the payment licenses around the world and the banking partner coverage around the world is really painful.

19:59And they're looking for someone to partner with. And we've done the hard work over the last seven years to go and get that. And now we can start to provide that to our end customers and if they want to sell that on, we have that capability as well. So that's in a nutshell what we do. Our service, I think, 70 different currencies where you can open accounts around the world, you can pay out to 170 different countries. So that's taken a lot of work in the background to build it and now really starting to see the benefits of that as we serve our customers. As Sokin has expanded, we'd like to know how have investment and capital decisions shape the business?

20:40And, you know, which investment perhaps has been most consequential? Yeah, look, I think, you know, as we've grown at the speed we have, those decisions have become, you know, have had bigger and bigger stakes associated with it. So we do take our time to make sure we're putting our capital where we're seeing the demand. And ultimately, we're a very customer-led business. So when we see the customer demand for our product, we want to make sure we're getting 6-12 months ahead of that to ensure that we're ready for the demand that we can see coming through the pipeline because what we don't want is our onboarding journey or our compliance set up to be the blocker to the demand that we're seeing with our customers so for us that mean we started to see that roots with that embedded product so we've spent a lot of time building that out on our end to make sure we're ready to scale with some of the biggest businesses in the world that have thousands of end customers that they want to provide our offering to that's amazing for us a lot of work has to go in the background to make sure we're we're ready to handle that extra volume that comes of that so my role as CFO and obviously working with our CEO as well is to look at what's what's coming down the pipeline what's going to be the thing that gives us a headache in 12 months time when I first asked Varun our founder what that would be um when i joined he thought it would be tech resource he's like i'm not sure i can get enough engineers in to handle the volume that's coming then ai started to become more and more of a he started to see the returns on that um increasingly and actually you know that we can do so much more with the engineers that we have today so now that hasn't that that has flipped to be now it's been like can i get the the sales and partnerships people in to you know bring in the opportunities into the funnel that I need to make sure we capture all of the market share that we can.

22:28So now it's about where we do that on a regional basis. So we see a lot of demand in North America at the moment. And so then it's like, okay, how do you juggle the capital allocation between Europe where we have a really solid base versus North America, which is now our fastest growing market and has some of the largest potential. So we go into a lot of detail as to how we're going to allocate that. But ultimately, it's always with that view of, okay, looking 12 months down the line, how do I make sure that our capital allocation has been a problem and meaning that we've potentially restricted our growth?

22:57So it's something that we're thinking about constantly on our end. We'd like to better understand the company's revenue model. Can you help us understand how Sokin makes money today? I mean, is the bigger story payment volumes? is it customer relationships or is it something else yeah so ultimately the core is of our revenue model is an fx engine so everything we do you know you're processing a payment if there's a currency involved a transfer involved uh we will have a take a take rate on that volume as a percentage of it we'll make a margin on that on the fx side so that's plus or minus 90 of our make up today.

23:42Then you kind of supplement that with platform fees for platform access to on the embedded side, which is smaller, but growing, which is more of that kind of common recurring revenue and increasingly a little bit on the float side. So when I say floats, I mean interest income where customers keeping revenue on the platform and earning interest on it. For us, that's not a key driver of growth, but it does help drive usage for that FX engine. People are keeping money on the platform and we're incentivizing them to do so. The main reason we want them to do that is because we want them to hold more money on our platform, more volume on our platform, so that they are moving that across borders with us.

24:19Ultimately, it means that they can make smarter decisions if they have everything on our platform. It means that for us, they can make smarter decisions with some of the tools that we can offer. When it comes to your lines of sight into the business, when you're tracking, let's say, payment activity, how clearly can finance connect transaction volumes to billing and revenue? you know yeah so like we're in the privileged position maybe like a couple of years ago we it would have been a different story but now you know you can see things so much more in real time than what you could before and therefore you can give smarter insights back to the business as what's working what's not working so you know we've got live access to you know a lot of things now in terms of the volume the currency pairs the customer behavior and how that's evolving as we we scale and we increase marketing spend we increase our sales and partnerships previously you know you might be seeing that at the end of the following month you know now that's the kind of thing we're seeing almost real time you know there was an interesting um a16z article recently about the role of cfo is changing and it's going from the you know being a banker previously or having that accountancy background previously or fpna background to being a builder and and i kind of resonated with that because now we're looking at all of this information that we've got and at our fingertips like how do you build the tools to service decisions that are going to empower the business to make smarter decisions on their end in more real time so things that we would previously be making um you know quarterly reports on things like un economics by channel by geography by customer type we could only really have the resource to get quarterly now with the data that we have in you know being able to leverage ai you can do that almost real time and really start to see how things are are changing uh as we kind of implement them which is such an exciting place to be.

26:08Now, even the finance, you're kind of that guiding the business way and giving them that insight much quicker than you would have been able to do a couple of years ago. So it's a really exciting time to be in the seat as a result. As you're looking at these different inputs, operating inputs, where does forecasting become less predictable? ball look we're pretty lucky in that um all of our customers actually contract to to do a certain amount of volume with us on especially on the direct side so they'll contract to do a certain minimum of volume for us you know for us on the finance see that's great because i can i can tell you now if we don't onboard a single extra customer we're going to have this minimum revenue in 12 months time so that's amazingly helpful customers like it because they then lock in an agreed rate with us as well.

26:56So there's that kind of symbiotic relationship there. It gets harder. The embedded product is a slightly different beast because you're relying on not only signing up your customers, but then they have to roll out to their end customers. So that one is a trickier one to understand and predict because you're relying on what comes next from your end customers as well. So it's something that we're constantly evolving and refining, and you can start to kind of pick up trends sooner and then project them out, especially with some of the smart tools that we have available now. But certainly that, you know, the embedded product where you have to, you have some more reliance on what your customer's behavior is going to be, that one is a little bit trickier.

27:33And as a result, we tend to be a bit more prudent on that one. Since your arrival, I guess it's been about 12 months now in the CFO office. We wonder what assumptions you may have challenged as you arrived. You saw the world maybe a little differently. Are there any? Well, look, I did have the privilege of actually getting to know the business probably better than most CFOs coming into a seat. So, you know, I was spending, speaking to the company every day, seeing the real insides of the business from, you know, running the process on their capital raise from the sales side. So, I felt like I came in with a lot more knowledge on the business than maybe most coming in.

28:13So, I felt, you know, that was lucky from my side of things in terms of I knew what I was walking into, both in terms of the team and knew I gelled well with them, but also on the, you know, the financials and how the business runs. So I didn't come in and maybe it's almost a good thing that it wasn't any, say like skeletons in the closet was like, okay, I didn't realize that was going to be there. And how do we sell for that? It was all kind of, okay, I saw this from the outside in advising you right now I'm in the seat. How can I now take this to the next level? Because I'll tell you what, they did a great job at, you know, when I was, we were advising them back in the day in 2023 looking at their you know projections back in the packet and how that involved um to to when i joined you know they pretty much hit exactly what the plan was during that time so i i knew something was working and it's like okay now how do we do that at scale because it becomes a different game when you're getting close to you know to the 100 million run rate revenue it's what worked it can you from 10 to 100 is not necessarily what's going to work from getting you from 100 to to a billion so um that's the kind of uh challenges i'm now putting in places to like seeing what what is working now isn't necessarily a thing that's going to work in in six to four months time as we scale it's going through that tradition from um late stage startup to scale up to later stage scale up we're going through that at breakneck speed and it's uh pushing the business to to get themselves ready for what's coming where is ai beginning to create value at soaking yeah so i think um so we have like a bit of a thesis on this that And so the payment rails that we are able to offer our customers are getting faster.

29:47So you can see that through just even in fiat transactions, but also with stablecoin coming in. There's a lot of initiatives and things that are happening there that's speeding up payment rails around the world. But it's the follow-up work around the payment for the CFOs and the treasurers that is still very painful and time consuming. So internally at Soken, we've got three layers that try and take that into mind. And so we have the way AI is running at Sokin. So that's just how we use it. So 95 % of the business is using it day in, day out for all of their operations. And I know that in the finance team, it certainly enabled me to keep the team leaner.

30:22And I found it actually helpful to keep the team leaner because you can make decisions quicker, implement things on leveraging AI and recycle and cycle decisions back to the business quicker as well. We've got AI now built inside the product. So again, very lucky to be able to be able to be building a business at this time of the way where things are on the technology side with being able to build an AI native tech stack so that we can flex very quickly to the changes that are coming in AI. So agentic treasury is something that is coming. So that's starting to give more power to agents to be able to surface smart decisions, suggestions to treasurers to make smarter decisions quicker.

31:10So relying less on analysts that you wouldn't otherwise have to back in the day and now starting to leverage agents to be able to do that. So we built that into our tech stack. And finally, getting AI to actually act on Sokin. So we're fleshing out decisions when you're talking to our MCP now. So we built out a new product, which is an MCP connector, which means you can interact with Claude, OpenAI, whatever tool you're using to basically talk to and say, okay, what are my balances saying currently on my Sokin account? uh what are your suggestions based on my current history of how i've transacted that how i can right size my my book in terms of where i hold currency today so we're starting to see it as another area where you can take friction out of the system for the finance teams previously maybe they were hiring analysts to to be able to make some of the decisions now you can just talk as you would to to your analysts but you can talk to um your your mcp on soaking and then that can sort of surface those smarter decisions.

32:11And it's all real time as well. Previously, you'd be, I think I've heard some of your guests in the past talk about the pain of trying to find their cash balance around the world. And they're downloading CSV files, uploading them. And by the time they work out actually what their cash position is, it's two days moved on and the world has changed since then. So that is not a reality now in terms of how we see things at Soken. You should be able to get that visibility real time. And AI is certainly driving that. Yeah. But within finance, where do you see the strongest opportunity for maybe AI to improve visibility and then on to decision making?

32:47Yeah, look, I touched on it somewhat. I would say it's you obviously have your different functions. So I think within the reporting team, it's certainly bringing the reality of, you know, work day zero, work day one closed to reality. I think, you know, when we're on that journey, certainly, and AI is the only way we've been able to even get close to that. And again, that just leads itself into that's one that's giving us the state of the business at that particular time, and being able to share that with a business much quicker than we would have done 12 months ago, we would have been sharing that, say, like, you know, towards the end of the month, the following month, and again, business has moved on since then.

33:26And now we're reacting real time, able to surface things that we're seeing in the numbers quicker back to the business to say, OK, did you notice that this is happening in terms of marketing and tech spend, for example, is anything we can do to right size that? And then if you think about moving that on to the more the FP &A and strategic finance side, it's OK, how is that unieconomics evolving as we're scaling in different regions? And before, again, that would be a larger piece of work if you're going to do that across multi-region, multi-products, across all the different channels that where we operate on the market sales and marketing side.

34:01Now, once you build up the infrastructure on the AI side, and that comes back to the point of increasingly finance teams being builders, I think that's a common theme that I've noticed in my 12 months here. it's you can service again that's you set up the infrastructure and that is easy to replicate and and um uh kind of get insights back almost real time so across each function it's certainly helping um to to basically increase the speed that we're able to give um helpful information back to the business and make them help them make smarter decisions as these uh as we do our interviews with different cfos we always try to identify some of the trade-offs maybe that the business has to make along the way.

34:44And by trade-offs, we mean there are friction points or what have you. And in discussing this company with you, so as it scales its international payments business, we wonder what's harder to manage. The operating complexity that's got to increase along the way or your revenue predictability. I mean, you have to manage both of those. How am I doing? Am I close to one of the trade-offs that you wrestle with? Yeah, I think, as I said, we're lucky enough that the revenue predictability is something that is easier for us because of the way we've structured our business from day one. I think that's evolving as we grow.

35:29But certainly, I wouldn't say that's the thing that would keep me up at night. And luckily, there's actually nothing tangible that will keep me up at night. But I would say in terms of the trade-offs that we're having to make now, it goes back a little bit to why I enjoy the space so much. There's so many opportunities. So we're very lucky enough that there's six, seven, eight different levers that we can pull at any one time to drive growth. And it's like, which of those are the bets that we should go after? Because to your point, we can't do all of them at the same time effectively. So which are going to be our bets that we're going to go after?

36:00So for now, it's, certainly like I mentioned, our embedded product. It's our North America rollout. It's our push on the MCP solution, which is our big AI play into making treasury a lot more seamless for our customers. There's a long list below that that would be as it could also be a real game changer for the business as well. And that's some of the tradeoffs where you have to have those kind of difficult discussions with your tech product sales and marketing team as to, OK, we're not going to go after that right now because this is the opportunity we're seeing. and it could deliver something pretty exponentially.

36:36So we need to give it a go. And that might mean putting on pause some other parts of the business or somewhat deprioritizing them. But that ultimately is the role of the CFO is to help make sure we're allocating capital in the most effective way. So it's something that we definitely take seriously. And the other element I would mention is, the other element in this industry is the regulated side. And that comes with capital that has to be tied down with the different jurisdictions as you get licenses in them as well. So we can't go and get every single license around the world at any one time.

37:10One, it would take a lot of time to be able to do that. But two, there's a regulatory capital implication for doing that. And that ties capital down that you can't then use to go and expand into North America, expand into the new products that we're looking to roll out as well. Well, thank you for answering our questions there. We are up to one of our favorite questions, our finance strategic moment question. We're just asking you to go back in time and share a moment of insight along the way. What comes to mind when you're asked for a finance strategic moment? Yeah, thanks. It's a good question.

37:45And one moment definitely sticks out. It was during my time at World Remit where I had been pushing to get more involved in some of these strategic finance projects. I could see we're coming. I could see the business was going in an exciting direction. and uh and i could see some of the opportunities and projects that were working and we're getting bigger and bigger so i said look if there's corporate development or big strategic inifs we're going to be um looking at i'd love to be involved and didn't hear anything on that for quite a few months and was going about my business as usual on you know more on the commercial finance pricing side of things and then in may 2020 i got a call on a friday night from my my cfo at the time and he said uh what are you up to this weekend and it's quite unusual call for me to get from my CFO.

38:30And if you remember May 2020, the world was pretty much in lockdown then. You almost weren't allowed to leave the house. So there was no excuse I could make about, oh, I've got lots of plans because you literally were not allowed to do anything. And maybe he knew that. But anyway, he said, look, you need to help me look at this opportunity because I think it's a really exciting one, but we need to move fast on it. So are you prepared to put in some hours over the weekend and probably a lot longer than that? And for me, it was one, there was nothing else going on but more importantly it was actually a really exciting is exactly the kind of thing that i've been hoping to get involved in so uh yeah look over that weekend we we analyzed this business that we were looking at from an acquisitions standpoint um it's a business called send wave and you know the the business was uh a quick for a quick look at it we could tell this would be transformative for the for the broader group if we were to acquire it in terms of what it could bring on FX synergies to underline performance of the business.

39:29So that was a long weekend of short-term pain and work to get that over the line to then present something to the board to say, okay, look, if we think this is a bit of a game changer, we have a chance to get this off the market, but we need to move quickly and effectively. But it could transform what the broader group would look like in a year's time. We managed to put together something that convinced investors. there was the likes of tcb and excel who were looking at this as well with us and they were saying okay we can see the potential here and and then it was like okay let's get this done quickly keep it in a very small group because if this was to get out of this uh you know assets on the market we might find ourselves in a bit of a competitive process so we kind of optimized for speed there and and then what came over the next six months was uh yeah working every day every night i was working up in my it was a work from home obviously at that time i didn't really have a work from home set up before so i was in in my loft basically uh 18 hours a day for the next three next six months um whilst we got this deal done and uh that was that was uh i learned so much during that period and it was exposed to you know a first proper exposure of like a large-scale transaction end to end um really kind of uh seeing every different nook and cranny of it and seeing how the board dynamics evolve on that seeing how um doing it all remotely as well also came with challenges and how you manage that but how you it's a 500 million dollar transaction how you kind of uh get comfort on a on a business without you know getting to meet all the team and seeing all the operations you know in in person and so it was a really amazing experience but it taught me so much in a short space of time because not only did we do the acquisition we put we raised some debt alongside it at the same time because we needed to we didn't have the cash on hand to go and do all this so we had to go and find the debt to come to supplement that so we then went into an equity raise just after that as well so that sign of six nine months really transformed my um transformed my like uh one well i guess my learning journey and but it was so much experience in such a short space of time and i would say you know what do i think going looking back on it it was just making sure you're putting your hand up to be the first one that someone thinks about when they when when this kind of opportunity comes along because you know there were there's a lot of other people in our team that my cfo could have called and you know i have to thank um it's a man called andrew who gave me the opportunity on that transaction and um you know definitely it was kind of definitely my foot in the right way it's been my foot in the right direction for for what came next in my career so yeah that's uh that's something that came to mind when you when you you asked me about my strategic finance moment.

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43:42We touched upon your entry there 12 months back and how you were already very familiar with the business. Still, it's an appointment. It's different. What is it that maybe if you could have been whispered in your ear 12 months ago, maybe you would have shared this piece of information? or lectured you in some way yourself. Yeah. Look, I think I came from a role that was, I had a strategic element to it because that's just the nature of an investment banking role, but it was quite execution focused. And I think for me, I came in and we had a very lean team and I was rolling up my sleeves and getting my hands dirty just to get things done and that need to get done in that short space of time.

44:28And what I ended up doing after three months when I realized, look, this isn't sustainable. we need to find a way to keep up with the rate of change in the business is I took me and my finance director out we went out for a little off-site and we just turn off our phones and computers and we just said look let's go through everything that needs to get done and what we need to do in the next 12 months is write it down let's map it out and we looked at the list and we were like we can't get this done like on our own like we need to we need to find a way to you know obviously grow the team and bring in the right people that can help us get this done because there's so much that we want to do and can do um which was really exciting but we needed help and i think before then you know we had a lot of kind of i would say doers on in the team who were just getting their hands dirty and and and rolling up their sleeves but what it really took was for us to take a step back and i wish i had done that a bit sooner was take a step back and saying okay what's actually what where's this business going what's the going to be the requirement for for the finance function and therefore what's the team that we um need to to put in place and and look honestly now that i've thought about that and it's something i would take forward going to you know into my career going up going into whatever comes next is you know that you're only as good as your team 100 and i think that's like a well well trodden saying but it certainly is true in terms of like bringing in the right people who have been able that have enabled us to go and uh to go and execute on on those things so i'm glad i did it in the end but it should have done it should have done it in the first week is to work out what's coming so tom we always like to ask our guests to reflect on the personal side for us.

46:01We wonder if there's something most people don't know about you, something from your past. You've only been there a year, so there might be something from your past, a feat, an interest that you have, anything? Yeah. So I guess a thing that comes to mind is, so I actually got close to launching my own travel tech platform. I did a lot of work, built out an MVP application that was ready to roll out. But that was actually in the beginning of 2020. So I was doing it in the evenings and mornings before work. But February 2020 was not a good time to launch travel business. So maybe it's a great idea, still back the idea, but it was the wrong time.

46:44And then things progressed in my career in ways I couldn't have envisaged and I wouldn't wouldn't change anything now but that was it my it was a bit of a sliding doors moment where things could have gone there could have gone different I could have gone down that founder route yeah that's great a great share for us thank you for that what about a is there a book or a resource that's something that you enjoyed reading or something you've used as a reference over time or a resource maybe something streaming mean i don't know anything you can recommend to us yeah look i i um i really i get a lot of joy from from reading and i as i've gone through my career i've used it for different purposes i haven't always been able to read as much as i would like but whenever i do i i really enjoy and i've used it for a few things so i think a few books that come to mind i wouldn't say necessarily like favorite ones but things that have come to mind i found very helpful recently is um a book by Claire Johnson, who's an ex-Stripe executive called Scaling People.

47:40It's just super relevant for the stage of business where we're at now in terms of giving you insights, tidbits, or best practices to scale businesses globally. So she takes a lot of the learnings from Stripe. I think she was also at Google as well. But certainly I found that a really helpful reference point because they've gone through a lot of the things that we are starting to go through now and how they navigated them at Stripe has certainly been helpful. Then just a couple of others I would just mentioning briefly so there's a uh a book in terms uh one book that i read just in terms of like broader i guess um giving me perspective of what's important in work life how you manage things was a book called five types of wealth by sahil bloom again that's just talking about you know you have your financial wealth of course but then you have other types of wealth so you have time social your mental wealth physical wealth and you can't be putting on all five of those at any one time so it's working out okay what's going to give because if you're really pushing on your career and your financial side, maybe you need to sacrifice on something because you can't do the social, you can't have all the time, you can't have the physical wealth whilst doing pushing as well on your career.

48:45So what do you pull on and when and how you operate that with your partner as well? Because again, you can't all be pushing on all cylinders at the same time. That was helpful. And then I do read just for more of a bit of a history bum. And so yeah, A really good book I read recently, which I can recommend, is The Wager by David Gran, which was like a really good walk back on what actually happened. An epic story of a journey from the UK going all the way around the bottom of Argentina and to Brazil back in, I think it was in the 1800s. And some of the stuff they had to go through then, it makes me feel privileged to live in what we do now.

49:26But yeah, it sounded pretty brutal. So those are some great selections for us. I don't think all three, I don't think we've had before. So thank you for those. We're up to our final question. This is where we're going to ask you to look forward finally. And we'd like to know what your priorities are as a CFO for the coming 12 months. What would those be? Yeah, I think it's the theme I kind of, I guess, has come through this conversation is making sure we're now implementing systems that are going to work not only today but in 12 months because you know when i see some of my team you know they work with a high performance culture in the business and in a team where you know they put in the hours but if they're putting the hours and it's and starting to struggle in terms of the capacity of work for me it's showing that things aren't quite right in the system so what can we do to automate add processes in place so that when the volume, you know, two X's in work in 12 months time, how we make sure that the systems are in place.

50:25And then also just, I guess, ensuring from the external side of things, and obviously they take this from my experience on the banking side, was ensuring we're investing, you know, the capital in the most effective way and to capture the market opportunity that we're seeing and also ensuring that we've got the capital on the hand to go and do that. So you have that internal, making sure that the BAU side is working, but also you're always thinking about what comes next from a capital standpoint as well. So that's what I enjoy. No day is the same. And that variety certainly means that I'm really happy where this all ended up in my quite non-linear journey to date.

51:02But yeah, that's what's coming up in the next 12 months, I would say. Well, Tom Steer, thank you for joining us on CFO Thought Leader. Thanks a lot, Jack. Appreciate it.

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