997. News: Revolut’s UAE licence, Pipe’s partnership with Uber, and Accion Ventures’ inclusion fund

25:31And you cannot monetize. You cannot make the unit economics work if you're only doing debit interchange. It just does not work, right? You have to actually take some risk and deploy the capital to get the ROI you need on the capital, right? So it blows my mind what Nick's doing. He deserves every penny of the incentive package he has because the numbers are enormous. It blows my mind what they're doing. I'm super impressed, actually. It is indeed an astonishing achievement. What do you think about this ambition to be top three in every country they operate in? I mean, that's a lot of countries.

26:02I mean, when your competition is like a bank in the U.S., the experiences are awful. And so it's actually not that hard to beat them if you can execute on experience and on the regulatory and risk part at the same time. They're one of the first that has been able to do the regulatory and risk stuff the right way and have the experience on top of it at the same time. And with product-led growth, they just take market share once they come in. They don't have to pay tons and tons of money to actually acquire customers the way banks in the U.S. do. They just, by word of mouth, they start to grow. Like Square did initially in the U.S., like they would see someone accepting a card at the farmer's market, and then boom, everyone in that farmer's market needs one.

26:40And then they go to the next one, and then everybody sees it and it expands again. When somebody sees how easy it is to use the Revolut app, we finally downloaded it when my son did a trip to Europe, right? And it like just made it super easy for me to like click, click, money in and go. Like when I was a kid and I did like a backpacking trip, I took traveler's checks, right? And you have to go figure it all out when you got there. but he could text me and say, hey, I need 20 bucks for this XYZ, right? I'm out of money, can I have more? It's like, doom, there it is. And you can do that cross-border in whatever country he wants to travel in.

27:09That's pretty amazing. Like from an experience perspective, there's nothing like it, right? I imagine there's a couple of younger listeners scratching their head and what on earth is a traveler's check? Anyway, look it up. Ami, do you think, does Revolut help to drive financial inclusion? Do you think, you know, there's a lot of expat workers and so on in the UAE? Is Revolut helping with financial inclusion around the world, do you think? That's a good question. And that's, I think, one of my, of course, with my lens and the way I look at the world, you know, I'm curious to see how they deliver on that in the UAE in particular.

27:42And you said you probably have a much better perspective on this. But I totally agree. I think they've succeeded so much around the world because they have, you know, focused on getting that compliance right. They focused on the customer experience. But I think part of that customer experience is tailoring the right set of products for the population in that local market. And our experience in the UAE is, yeah, a lot of those expats are migrant workers and their needs are around, you know, lower ticket remittances, access to maybe earned wage advance, you know, credit in a very different offering than if you're offering travel perks and, you know, a different set of products for an expat in Dubai.

28:22So I'm kind of curious to see if they even try and move down market and reach those customers who have a very different need, I would expect, from a customer experience point of view. You know, if they start to offer Sharia compliant products. So, you know, I'll defer more to Anissa. I'm curious to hear your point of view. But, you know, they clearly have a perspective of how they do that and have been successful to date across markets. Yeah, absolutely. I really think it's going to be a really interesting time for Revolut, considering the nature, the vastness of the population here and the expat communities needing sort of different demands.

28:57I mean, it's not a homogenous market by any means. You will definitely find pockets of different communities from all over the globe here, most of whom will require different kinds of services. So whether that be in the remittance sort of ballpark or whether that be in terms of investing, I think something that's going to be really interesting to see is whether they offer Sharia compliant financial products here specifically and what that might look like as well. But I would say, as I mentioned earlier, I don't think this is a case of rinse and repeat and being able to copy and paste the exact same model or product offerings as well.

29:34I think because of the nature of the population here, having something localized that feels organic is incredibly important to the general public here. And so I think only time will tell, certainly, about what Revolut will offer and how that will be well received. But I do also believe it shows great promise in terms of the way in which they engage with consumers and have done to date. And I can only imagine it can only be onwards and upwards. I mean, I saw actually Nick in a co-working space very recently. So I imagine he's working hard. And, you know, if Amreen, who's the CEO, you know, is listening in, you know, and there are local partners that you're thinking about, give me a call.

30:21Wonderful. Thank you very much. So on that note, we're just going to take a quick pause here and we will be back very shortly.

30:32Before we get back to the news, we've got a quick announcement. The panel for our After Dark is live, and we've pulled together a proper old guard crew. From 11FS, we've got David Breer and Ross Gallagher, joined by Marcin Glogowski from Marketa, plus fan favourites Sarah Kachansky and Charlotte Crosswell. They'll be breaking down the week's news live at Village Underground in London on Wednesday the 24th of September. You can grab your tickets now at 11fs.com slash aftertark. The link is in the show notes. And now, back to the news. Our next story is that Uber has partnered with fintech firm Pipe to offer loans to small businesses.

31:11Pipe and Uber Eats have announced an integration that gives hundreds of thousands of American restaurants access to working capital directly within the Uber Eats manager app. Offers are based on restaurant revenue and cash flow. not credit scores or personal guarantees, with pre-approved capital, flexible repayment terms, and transparent pricing. This aims to address the long-standing pain point of SMBs, especially restaurants, struggling to access fast and fair financing through traditional banks. And we've got the perfect person to tell us more about this. Luke, many congratulations to you and your team on the partnership.

31:49Can you tell our listeners a little bit about how it all works? Yeah, happy to. Like we're incredibly excited to be working with Uber. Like they've, it's just a tech company that's changed how we all live, right? Like you can go click a button and get a car to take you places. You can click a button to have food delivered to your house. It's just, it's pretty magical. So super excited about working with such a meaningful company that has kind of changed how we all, how we all live. my passion for the last decade has been helping small businesses succeed right I was at Intuit for five years like watching and like watching Scott Cook like train the entire company to just focus on the mission like we're here to help these small businesses succeed and then going to square and doing the same thing like the the roadmap really has been very similar that whole time like is the underlying small business pain points are the same access to capital is the number one pain point for small business.

32:41Every survey I've seen on small business, that one pops to the top every single time. It's especially acute in restaurant because the failure rate is pretty high. If they can't get the capital to get over that hump of like getting the initial kind of word of mouth and like getting the clientele in, the restaurant won't make it. And so we're super excited to help more restaurants succeed. The way it works is really focused on the best possible frictionless customer experience you can imagine, right? So you don't have to go to the bank anymore. Like we get an anonymized data dump from Uber. We use that like just the credit card transaction history to create pre-approved offers in an anonymous way.

33:21Uber is able to put those pre-approved offers in front of the customer via email or a banner inside the Uber Eats Manager app. When the customer clicks on it, they land on a white label page that Pipe is hosting within the Uber Eats Manager that says Uber Capital powered by Pi. it explains how it all works. When the customer sees it, they click. And when they click to apply, they're also agreeing for the first time to explicitly consent to have their data shared with Pipe. And so we get the full PII business information. We already have the credit underwrite done. And once that application is submitted, there's a 98 % approval rate because these are true pre-approvals.

34:02Only less than 2 % get declined. And it's usually because we can't, it's usually for a compliance reason where we can't match the business owner to the business or something like that, or an AUP may pop up, or we just ask for an EIN and they just never respond, for example, right? So very few drop out. And so like, that's, that's part of the magical experience. If you're declining, if you're pre-qualifying and declining 30 % of the population, that 30 % got their hopes up and then their hopes dashed. And it's a horrible experience. And so like everything we've done at Pipe is to like dial a perfect experience that has no friction, no disappointment and then you you get the money the next day right so it's like click like the first time it's just a few clicks the second time you draw it's just one click and it's a multi-draw offering so if a restaurant is pre-approved for a hundred thousand in capital they can borrow 10 today they can borrow 10 tomorrow they can borrow 10 the next day like it feels like a security blanket that follows you around like the other surveys you see on these businesses is that they don't want capital they just want a security blanket they want to know that they can draw the capital down whenever they need, more like an insurance policy, right?

35:05And that's what this does, like this pre-approval that follows them around with a line of credit-like experience that they can draw any bit of they want. And the future will be to put it in all the pain points, right? So we used to have access points into it that were pay your payroll with capital, pay your bills with capital. Same thing at Square, right? Like pay bill, pay payroll with capital. Like when you're thinking about needing money, you send an invoice. Normally you have to wait 60 days to get paid. Well, click here to draw now, right? Like you just, you basically make it super seamless for the customer to get the capital faster if they need it.

35:37And like, that's amazing. And we get like our net promoter score is in the eighties, right? Like it's, you can't get an experience like that at a bank. So like that, that's the difference here. The future is verticalized, like every task you need to complete as a, as a business will be happening in one spot. and all of the money in, money out banking is gonna come hopefully from Pipe for those SaaS verticals to solve the problems. They're solving all the daily tasks that need to be completed to run the business. Pipe will solve all the money in, money out tasks and make it completely frictionless and almost invisible, right?

36:11Banking features are not the product. Like they're just the enabler. The product is a SaaS vertical, right? And our SaaS vertical partners solve these problems better than anybody can. Like we couldn't possibly serve a hundred different industries and Square can't even do it. Like they're getting beat by toast. on Square Restaurants. Intuit is a horizontal. And so when Uber Eats is able to solve that pain point for these restaurants of just getting more orders done and delivering food for them, like it's pretty magical. And like, we just want to be there in the background, white labeled, and just help them help their customers.

36:41And so that's the basis of how it works. It's just a seamless experience. Are you doing anything sort of different or clever on the sort of credit scoring side? Because you talked about getting data from Uber. I mean, is that down to sort of food level. You know, you can see who's selling burgers and who's selling chicken, who's selling Asian food or whatever. I mean, you know, is there any trends in terms of certain types of foods and locations? Are you using any data about what those restaurants actually do to do some of your credit scoring? So with all of our big partners, we get a three to five year history of every credit card transaction on every customer.

37:16That lets you train a bespoke model that sees seasonality, like sees differences. And so because we're, and it's pretty awesome because they're industry specific verticals. So we have a plumber and electrician model for our house call pro partners. We have the nail salon, hair salon, med spa model for our boulevard partner, right? But we have a massive restaurant population now and model that works fantastically for restaurants. It's possible that machine learning is taking some of those factors into account, but we don't actually plug those variables in. It really is just a credit card transaction history.

37:48So I was a distressed credit investor for a decade, right, before I switched to tech. And so I've seen every which way lending can go wrong, right, from a regulatory perspective, all types of consumer stuff, all types of small business stuff. When I got to Square, it blew my mind. I said, where is the FICO score? Where is the bank data? Where is the Consumer and Commercial Bureau data? You're doing$5 billion a year and you don't have any of that? And the answer was, we don't need it. Like, we serve 120 ,000 customers,$7 ,000 average size. Remember that 93 % of Square's customers process less than$125 ,000 a year.

38:21It was 70 % sole prop. None of the banks can serve that population from a business perspective. They try to do it from a consumer perspective. But when you narrow the risk problem to just the cash flows coming through that Square terminal, it may only be half or may only be 40 % of the overall revenue. But you've narrowed the data. You have perfect data on that cash flow stream. You advance capital against that cash flow stream. You get paid back first in line. When you take risk like that, it allows you to serve populations that have never been served before because you've narrowed the risk problem to that single data set.

38:52Square Capital, Stripe Capital, PayPal Working Capital, Toast Capital, Shopify Capital, they're all the same model, right? It is a fee-based product in the flow of money getting paid back by those cash flows. And then you can narrow to only looking at that. So you don't have the bias of FICO. You can have female immigrant nail salon owner or female immigrant restaurant owner that has never even thought to try to go get capital and they get a$60 ,000 pre-approved offer in their product and then go open a second location and double their business, right? We're seeing 12 % month over month growth, month over month, which means they're more than doubling their revenue when they take the offers.

39:27This is like offer taken versus offer available, right? It's pretty amazing, right? And it is because you've narrowed that risk problem. That's the difference. And there's more than 10 billion of this happening now. And it's just, I think, I really believe this is the future of small business lending. Square already does more than JP Morgan. I think I said that before. Like there's so many like high tech companies that are figuring this out and Pipe's going to enable any SaaS vertical to do this without taking the regulatory risk, without taking the credit risk, right? Like that's, I'm passionate about this.

39:56We're going to help millions of businesses. I mean, I'd love to bring you in. I mean, Luke snuck in a bit of a financial inclusion angle in there just for a moment, didn't he? Oh, yeah. Do you think, I mean, is there a financial inclusion angle to this? I mean, actually just helping more Americans initially set up businesses or rather succeed with their businesses? Oh, yeah. No, I'm the choir that Luke is preaching to. Like, you know, this is exactly what we do. I mean, we talk as a team about verticalized embedded finance. You know, we as a team have invested in companies either that are providing this kind of like the pipes, the infrastructure layer for embedding for all kinds of verticals or, you know, are just focused on construction or logistics or, you know, agri retail and providing, you know, the marketplace, the software, and then the embedded financial solution.

40:41So completely agree, this is the future. I mean, I think what's exciting, and I've been working in SME credit for a long time, we've always treated a small business and traditional institutions, we've always treated small businesses as monoliths. You know, they are just a small business that makes up under this level of revenue. And generally, we've offered one kind of standardized product. And that does such an, you know, that doesn't do a service to the complexity of a small business. It doesn't meet them where they are. You know, and so the power of embedded lending and what Luke and Pipe are building is that you are creating something that meets a customer.

41:17It's just completely contextualized to their needs. You know, it's helping them kind of really, again, not even realize they're taking on a financial product. There's no loan application here. There's no kind of having to deal with a bank and fill in. You kind of are clicking a button and you're getting it and you're thinking about it in the context of your own cash flows, which I think is the power of embedded finance. a lot of the value that we see as well. So congrats. That's really exciting. I don't want to miss the repayment mechanism here. This is the part that is so important, right? We're holding 10 % of whatever the revenue is.

41:53If you think a restaurant's going to have$100 ,000 in revenue and we advance$10 ,000, if you're holding 10 % every single day, you end up getting paid back in a year. If that business has only$50 ,000 in revenue for the next two years, it will take them two years to pay us back. And that's just a built-in relief valve, just how the product works. We're buying 10 % of the future cash flows. If the future cash flows are lower, it takes way longer to pay us back. So like way better than a term loan then, where a term loan is like 12 equal monthly installments. And if your revenue gets cut in half, you still have to make those 12 installments.

42:28And it's tough. So like for the slow payers, this is the most friendly product you can imagine for these businesses. And I think particularly for this segment, for restaurants, which we know, seasonal businesses. I mean, I live in Washington, D.C. You know, there's there's a lot of data around just like the drop in restaurant. Restaurants are closing every day. There's real challenges to be able to have something that still allows them to grow and kind of do their business. But without that pressure, you know, it's just it's a much better design product. Anissa, what's your take on this? I was going to say, excitingly, what it makes me think is it's sort of like innovation meets the American dream to some extent because it's investing into smaller businesses, ultimately speaking, as Ami correctly said.

43:12When we're thinking about restaurants, when we're thinking about mom and pop shops, et cetera, it's really providing them a lifeline, particularly considering the way in which sort of small businesses are going, the high street is going. It's sort of providing another lifeline and particularly looking at it from a financial inclusion lens, we can really provide sort of that additional access to finance in a way that not only feels sort of tangible or accessible, but also is ultimately something that can really help spur and grow the economy as well. So I think it's really exciting and congratulations.

43:48Indeed. Thank you. I think like just on the inclusivity piece, like Square has the stats to back it up. I was so proud to be able to share them all the time, which is more than 60 % of the advances went to women-owned business. More than 33%, I think, or 35 % now went to minority-owned business. When you're not pulling FICO, when you don't get stuck in that world where you have to have a loan to get a score and you have to have a score to get a loan and people are just left out, when you're only using the results of having 10 seats in a nail salon and seeing those seats filled 10 times a day each and see dead consistency for six months, that risk is so easy to take.

44:25Like, you don't need to know what the FICO score is. You don't need to know what the expenses are. You're just, like, looking at the quality of that business's revenue coming in and advancing capital against it. Like, it just magically opens up whole populations that have never been served before. I am curious, Luke, how you think about the affordability of the product with time. You know, I think merchant cash advances have been a huge value creator, huge innovation, but still are fairly expensive for merchants. How do you think about bringing down that cost with time? particularly given all of the risk mitigation that's kind of built into the product.

44:59Our average portfolio cost is in line with personal credit card, right? It's actually not that high. The one thing that some people mess up is when people do pay back super fast, the annual cost can go too high. And that's the unfriendly version of MCA, right? Pipe actually forgives the fee when people pay back too fast, right? So you keep it, you get rid of that negative component by forgiving fee on fast payers. And you never go to a rate that's off the charts, right? You could just cap it wherever you want. This is why I love fintech so much, right? We talked about slow payer, like way better than term loan for slow payers.

45:36We talked about line of credit like, like the way Max Levchin talks about buying like buy now, pay later. I love it because you don't get stuck with revolving and like a revolving consumer card forever. You have this like discipline of having to pay these things down because they amortize. Ours is the same. It's line of credit like. You can use whatever you want whenever you want, but every draw is a fully amortizing thing attached to some of the cash flows. So it's better than term loan, better than line of credit, better than any of Square, Stripe, Toast, Shopify's products because we're the only one that caps the fee, right?

46:08And so Pipe is the first to do multi-draw capped in many geos at once, right? It's just a new thing. And that's why FinTech is so awesome because you can just dial it to solve the problems of the underlying small business, handle risk in a way that makes sense so you can actually have the money from capital markets because each draw is a separate thing that the capital markets can buy at the end of each day. You have to solve for all these constituents and the partners are so happy because you're making their customers so happy, right? Like this is the first truly friendly version. I think the problem with MCA back in the day was like a whole layer of bad guy brokers that would like double the fees and like that just doesn't exist here because we're talking direct, we're interfacing directly with the small businesses, right?

46:46FinTech is indeed awesome. I think you've composed a new tagline for us, Luke. We must go on to our next story. I'm loving this. Many, many congratulations to you and your team again. It's fantastic. Okay, we'll do our next story a little bit faster than we would have done, which is that digital bank Snappy has launched in Greece. So Snappy, which is a Greek digital bank, has gone live to consumers after securing a universal banking license from the European Central Bank last year. Built through a joint venture between Piraeus Bank, core banking software vendor Natek, and its partner Kodras Capital, Snappy is positioning itself as Greece's first fully digital bank.

47:23The digital bank offers Greek IBAN accounts, virtual and physical bank cards, and a competitive 3 % interest rate, as well as SEPA transfers, utility bill payment, and cross-border transactions. In a departure from many digital firms, Snappy emphasizes its no bot reliance, no scripts, no outsourcing policy, claiming to be among the few European digital banks to offer such direct human-led service. So, was anyone else disappointed that Snappy's logo was not a turtle? Just us? What about this point about, I mean, it's fantastic to see more digital banks and so on, but do customers care about this sort of human support?

48:08Anissa, what do you think? I mean, is that a winner? I actually think in an AI first world, this is actually turning things on its head. And I think it's actually probably sort of like an innovation backwards sort of thing where we're providing an innovative product that's existed since yesteryear. But I think when we even sort of chart back to looking at Monzo from its very inception, it was very much human first, building that contact, building that clientele and that rapport with whom you're serving. And that was really the trigger for the success of apps like Monzo, Revolut, etc. right from the beginning.

48:48I think as naturally as things evolve, we tend to look at how we can provide the most quickest, the most efficient way in which we can serve customers makes total sense. Getting as many numbers through the door also makes sense. Serving them quality also makes sense. But I think if we're, you know, charting to looking at Greece and the sort of fintech landscape there comparatively to some of their sort of European country neighbours, I think this definitely is an approach that seems to be something that could potentially be a winning card for them, certainly. Ami, what do you think of this? I mean, do you think customers care about banks being national?

49:29Do you think that sort of being a national player cuts much ice with customers? Do customers just want the best solution? Or do you think there are people who are like, well, actually, I'll go for this one because it's from my country rather than being, let's say, a revolution? Yeah, I can't speak to the context in Greece specifically, but I mean, I just, I would believe eventually people care about the product that's meeting their needs the best, right? And the customer service and the customer engagement that's serving them best. So it's a little puzzling to me to have like a fully human-driven kind of strategy here when we're living in a world where AI is clearly providing so much efficiency in so many different ways.

50:10I will say, I mean, we've always been a believer, especially in our markets, where human support is critical to building trust. It's critical, especially for the customers we serve, to be involved in some part of that onboarding journey. But there are so many other things we're seeing that does not have to be, you know, human support driven, whether it's collections or it's certain elements of cross-selling and upselling. So I'll be curious to see how this evolves and if they truly do stick with like, you know, humans, no outsourcing for every part of it. Or I think it's inevitable that you'll start to see kind of parts of the journey that do not need to be really human driven be automated.

50:51Despite the lack of a turtle, I'm loving the branding of Snappy and they're going to introduce Snappy Paylator. Luke, you were talking about credit earlier when we were talking about Revolut. Do you think that's a smart strategy starting with or leading with a sort of pay later, buy now, pay later proposition? It's interesting. The access points matter on buy now, pay later, right? The reason why a firm grew so fast and Klarna grew so fast is because a firm partnered with someone like a Shopify, right? B to B to C. They landed millions of consumers in one go with one partnership and have done$9 billion of buy now, pay later to Shopify shoppers.

51:26So I think that's the only access point for Buy Now, Pay Later that actually works. Like to then flip it. So there is the Affirm Plus card, whatever they call it now, where once you have a customer, then you can actually put the Buy Now, Pay Later on a card. But it's just really hard to get the conversion. I think the other piece of this, like it's just an affinity bank. If you want to be a nationalistic affinity bank, I don't know any affinity banks that ever worked. Most of them have shut down by now because they all tried to, again, monetize with debit interchange. I like that Snappy's trying to use credit in a form of like buy now, pay later, but like to acquire a customer in a cheap enough way and then get them to use your card with buy now, pay later, it's almost a bridge too far from my perspective.

52:07And so, but like back to the human point though, there are absolutely moments where there's uncertainty and doubt. And if you have, and you can talk to a human to just hold your hand at a certain point to explain something or talk about something, then that's enough to actually like get them across the line. So we have like 25 people in Atlanta when folks get into the application for this capital product and they don't really understand how maybe the payments work or like it's too easy and they think it could be fraud because it's only a couple of clicks. Like this is too easy. This doesn't make sense.

52:38If they can talk to a human for five minutes, 50 % more of them will actually take the offer because they understand it and they want to go on. We're just holding people's hands. And so if you have a human holding their hand at the moment of uncertainty, that's huge. If you're just like using AI to sell and do whatever, like we will always have humans to do that most important piece. We have AI agent bots, like voice agents that can call and say, hey, we need your EIN. Can I text you the link to upload your EIN? Like that specific task is easy for AI. But if you need to actually like hold somebody's hand and explain to them how a product works, like humans are still required, right?

53:12On that note, we're just going to take a quick pause here. We'll be back shortly.

53:21Okay, now for a quick look at one more newsworthy story this week that we don't have time to cover in full, but we think you'll find just as interesting. Which is that? The UK's Lloyds Bank is closing on a£120 million takeover of fintech Curve. Lloyds Banking Group could announce as soon as this week that its takeover of Curve is complete. Curve enables users to combine multiple cards into one digital wallet, positioning itself as a rival to Apple Pay and other payment services. The purchase is a strategic move by Lloyd's to enhance its digital payments capabilities. Curve has raised more than£200 million, including a£133 million Series C round in 2023, but recently paused US expansion and reduced staff to cut costs.

54:09Once predicted to IPO for billions, some may find the sale price a little disappointing. And so indeed Curve is something of a classic case of a fintech that ran out of road because it didn't manage to get to profitability fast enough. There's always that trade-off between growth and profitability, and Curve didn't quite make it to profitability despite the promises of profitability, and that's made it vulnerable. What's interesting to see is Lloyd's deciding, actually, there's a bunch of great people and some great tech there to pick up, and the potential for Lloyd's to put that at the heart of a new digital wallet proposition from Lloyds.

54:50So the question is, can Lloyds actually really turn Curve into an asset for its business? Can it lure and persuade many of its millions of customers to use Curve? And could Lloyds give Curve the scale that Curve needs to get to profitability? And finally, now for something a little bit different from the world of business to finish this week's news show. And this involves a word I wasn't expecting to say a tribunal in the UK has ruled that it is okay to call your boss a dickhead, which is quite rude. Apparently, this is not a sackable offence, according to the tribunal. Kerry Herbert has won almost£30 ,000 in compensation after she was found to have been unfairly dismissed for throwing the insult at her manager and another director.

55:38While the employment judge called the insults inappropriate and regrettable, she concluded that they don't necessarily amount to gross misconduct, especially if said in the heat of the moment. So, Anissa, what does this, I mean, what does this sort of tell us about a culture of somebody's throwing, you know, extremely rude words around? Does that mean that employees under a huge amount of stress? Does it mean there's something potentially off with the culture? What does it tell us about the environment where that's happening. I just miss Britain a lot when I hear stories like this. I think on a good day, it's a comical story that you might find in the metro.

56:20On a bad day, it's like opening Pandora's box. So to what end is it okay to call your boss a dickhead? I'm not sure. I would say perhaps that to this story, it kind of, I guess, depends on your relationship as well. There's probably nuance to this as well, what your relationship is like with your boss or with your team and what that may be. But I would, you know, hazard to say that maybe calling your boss a dickhead is just generally not the best idea. Probably not going to get you that far up the promotion line either, I imagine. But it's really interesting that she received a payout for this and what was, I guess, judged as, I guess, unfair dismissal.

57:03So I think I think it's really interesting. I think it's not necessarily telling of the culture, but I think it's more so telling of maybe what workplace environments can be like, perhaps, for some people. Luke, let me throw it over to you. What do you think? And I realize as a chief executive, this is a little bit of a troublesome story because obviously you can't say, oh yeah, I think this is great because then all of your team are going to be rude to you tomorrow. But do you think people can make mistakes and be forgiven? I mean, certainly is the answer. Like, I'm sure I've thought this about bosses I've had and I'm sure people have thought this about me, like when we're trying to get stuff done.

57:36But like the thing that bothers me more is like what, it's the free speech implications. Like in the US, you can actually flip off a police officer and it's a-okay. Like people have flipped off like all kinds of people. So, but that's allowed, it's okay. It's interesting to see, I don't know, I don't understand free speech in the UK because some of the public stuff is arrestable and some of the private stuff is not and protected. And in the US, we're very much pro-free speech. and if you curse out your boss, it's probably okay, but there's other remedies from a legal perspective, right, and for folks.

58:09And so, like, this one, it's kind of a sideshow of a story. I'm sure there was other stuff going on where, like, the person, like, they wanted to fire anyways. It was just a weird fact that, like, that one thing went to the tribunal to get solved, and it came out in a different way. So I wouldn't really read too much into it, honestly. It's just kind of a weird case that made national news. I'm sure people get cursed out at work all the time. I mean, it's usually the other way around, I guess. But people should stand up for themselves, right? And I'm glad they did, right? Yeah, it could indeed be that she won the case because they used her rudeness as a reason to claim gross misconduct, perhaps because they did want to fire her.

58:46But actually, that wasn't sufficient cause to fire someone. I think that's one of the differences between obviously the States and the UK and other European countries. There's more employment protection for employees. It's a little bit harder for managers to... If they don't like an employee, well, tough, you hire them. They have to do something badly wrong. It's interesting where employee protection sits from a free speech perspective, from a who trumps what perspective. I'm licensed to practice law in Texas. I never practiced, but it's a fascinating legal argument. What's more important? I don't know.

59:20Are there any other faux pas that we think people can do at work where they do the wrong thing and they get rewarded for it? Or they say the wrong thing. But, you know, I mean, do you think there are any sort of outbursts at work that may be unjustified? Gosh, I'd have to think about that. I'm not sure. There's a famous like Elon Musk email about like when it is OK to curse. Right. And it's like when you're passionate or excited about something, it's OK. If you're saying something derogatory about someone else, it's not. Yeah. Right. Like so there are guardrails you can put in place where like the passion and excitement is fine, but like never do it in a way that's negative to some other human, right?

59:59Yeah. That actually resonates. But you can find it on the internet. It's very interesting. I think I've always, I've just always worked in very global teams and environments where, you know, what may be completely, you know, not a sensitivity for me as an American may very well be a sensitivity for someone in a different part of the world. And so I think it's just like, I don't know, being thoughtful and understanding who might be responding to what you're saying. That's the kind of culture I think all of us would want to work in. I'm also married to a Canadian, and they're the nicest people on the planet, but they curse on average 10 times more than anybody else, like hockey players, right?

1:00:39So it's like there's a balance, right? Fantastic. All right. Well, on that note, let's wrap up FinTech Insider News, although I'm tempted to recast it as FinTech is awesome news. Thank you so much to our three guests. Where can people find out a little bit more about you and your companies? Luke, where can people find out a little bit more about you and Pipe? I'm pretty active on LinkedIn. So just reach out, connect with me or follow me on LinkedIn, but also Pipe.com. We just redid our website again, framing Pipe as the financial OS for small businesses. So I'm excited about the future there. Onisa, where can people find out a bit more about you and Ida Invest?

1:01:20Well, you can find out a little bit more about myself on LinkedIn, but also at IDA Invest on social channels and IDAinvest.com as well. And Ami, where can people find out more about you and about Action Ventures? Yeah, LinkedIn is where to be. Yeah, also on LinkedIn, fairly active. And then our fund, Action Ventures, is also on LinkedIn as well as you can look for us online where we have all of our portfolio, all of our latest research as well. And as for me, Benjamin Ensor, you can also find me on LinkedIn. So thank you all so much for joining me. Thank you to our listeners for listening to today's Fintech Insider.

1:01:59If you liked what you've heard, please do follow us, recommend us to your friends. Please do share the podcast. If you want to join the conversation, please seek us out on social media. Just search for 11FS or Fintech Insider or email us at podcasts at 11fs.com. Thank you all so much again and goodbye.