European fintech has a culture problem

0:02Damisola Sulaiman:Hello and welcome to the Sifted podcast. I'm Freya Prattie, Sifted's Associate Editor. Joining me today is Damisola Sulaiman, our fintech reporter. Hello, everyone. Damisola, you've been with us for quite a few months now, but this is your first pod appearance. Give our listeners a bit of an intro on you and what you did before Sifted.

0:23Jeppe Rindom:I'm very excited to be making my podcast debut. It feels like it's been a really long time coming as the name fintech reporter implies i cover all things fintech startups scale-ups and investment at sifted i also write our weekly fintech newsletter which gives our subscribers a round up of all our fintech coverage each week and is sent out on a tuesday before i joined sifted i had mainly worked at financial journalism trade titles most recently i was a senior reporter at a uk insurance publication called insurance post and my beat there was in sharetex hence the link to fintech now but so happy to be on the podcast finally and for our listeners dami is recording

0:58Damisola Sulaiman:live from our London office, so there might be a bit of an echo in the recording. Dami's mentioned our fintech newsletter, which she writes, if you want to sign up to that, we'll put a link in the show notes. So today we're going to be chatting about a story you published on Danish fintech Plio, its internal culture, the exodus of executives from the company and speculation about a potential sale. Before we get into it, tell us a bit about the history of Plio.

1:24Jeppe Rindom:So Plio was founded back in 2015 in Copenhagen by co-founders Yeppe Rindam and Nicolo Perra and their idea was basically to get rid of the process of company expense reports and paper receipt tracking and their idea was to give employees smart company cards that have spending limits that have been set by the companies themselves. They raised 150 million Series C in 2021 and that made them Denmark's eighth unicorn and it said that at the time it was the fastest Danish company to hit the milestone and doing it in just six years. A few months later, then raised an additional$200 million at a$4.7 billion valuation.

2:00Jeppe Rindom:And they've been backed by names like Bank Capital, Creandum and Speed Invest. But over the years, there's been reports of them going through rounds of layoffs. So there were 15 % of staff in 2022, about 100 people from its commercial team in late 2025, and then another 50 roles cut this June, mostly in engineering and data. So that's a bit of a rundown.

2:18Damisola Sulaiman:We are Plio users at Sifted and I always find the product quite good. So that's my two cents on Plio. You've been talking to former employees at the company. Let's start on the culture piece. What have you learned about what it's like to work at the company?

2:32Jeppe Rindom:So I spoke to seven former employees for this story. And the starting point was that last year, Plio basically lost several members of its executive team in rather quick succession, including its chief people officer, Mette Kade. its chief revenue officer Aaron Mani and its chief technology officer Mary Williams and funny enough all three of those people had been praised in a blog post by their chairman so it was quite an interesting coincidence and so those former employees told me that the executive team departures were part of a decision to replace the entire leadership team to try and boost Plio's performance and scale the company to the next stage of growth.

3:07Jeppe Rindom:Funny enough Plio actually caught wind that I was working on the story while I was doing some outreach to some employees and offered an interview with Yappe, the CEO and co-founder, where he basically confirmed that they needed something new to go to the next level. And he wanted the leadership who had seen the next part of the journey and could basically lead Pliot there. But the former employees I spoke to said that new leadership that came in to replace the people who left are the reason for the decline in Pliot's culture. And it's showing up differently in different parts of the business. So in the commercial teams, people say they've been subjected to a much more confrontational leadership style.

3:39Jeppe Rindom:The new chief revenue officer, Adrian Gormley, came in with a much higher performance expectations that have kind of coincided with a wave of departures of commercial managers, repeated restructuring and redundancies, and then also high sickness rates. And then on the product and tech side, they say there's been a lot of internal disagreements among leadership with them sometimes having these confrontations in front of staff. Gloucester Reviews also mentioned infighting among executives and multiple CTO and CPO changes. Then on the people side, two former employees had said that employee resource groups championing neurodiversity and LGBTQ plus identity have been deprioritized after team members leading them.

4:19Jeppe Rindom:Those groups, I mean, were let go and that well-being days were reduced and the company's overall people policies became a bit more performance focused.

4:26Damisola Sulaiman:Interesting that Plio got in touch when they realized you were reporting. I feel like that can often happen. What did they have to say on the culture claims that you put in the article?

4:37Jeppe Rindom:So they had specific rebuttals for the people policies that I just mentioned. And they said that the employee resource groups were basically still in existence in the same way that they were in 2024. And that the wellbeing days were replaced with additional annual leave and expanded parental leave benefits. And their broader statement was also pretty interesting in that they said that they didn't deny that the culture had changed, but they'd said anyone who's scaled a business knows that growth inevitably brings changes in structure, culture and approach, and sometimes require tough decisions and they maintain that they are a people-focused business and are really proud of the talent and commitment of their high-performing team.

5:13Damisola Sulaiman:The other thing your article touches on is Plio's effort to keep pace with international rivals. Who are those rivals and what's the struggle?

5:22Jeppe Rindom:So this is a really interesting place to zoom out a little because spend management has become a really competitive space in Europe. We have European companies like Spendesk, Payhawk, Moss, Soldo and Plyant who do similar things that Plio does but are be in different ways and maybe with different distribution styles and then we also have really big American players called Brex and Ramp also doing very similar things and both recently made acquisitions to enter Europe. So in the context of wider competitive pressure former employees felt like Plio's product hasn't kept pace and that they were mounting underlying issues with the platform.

5:57Jeppe Rindom:These issues stem from something called technical debt, which has lots of different definitions. I was on a Reddit thread and there were a lot of different arguments over what technically constitutes technical debt. But my understanding is that it refers to gaps in the code of a platform as startups grow and things need to change and they have new needs and their clients have new needs. So in Plio's case, as the company grew quite quickly, those challenges kept popping up and made it a bit harder to service larger clients, according to my sources. they generally target small to medium businesses but they have a couple of bigger clients who have basically grown with them and the people who I spoke to refer to instances where some of those larger customers were promised upgraded features that were never delivered they say that all of these challenges with the platform have led to something called a platforming where they're basically working on rebuilding the products from scratch and their goal with this is to make it more AI native and also better for servicing the mid-market two people also said that engineers have been outsourced from Poland to complete the bulk of this work.

6:53Jeppe Rindom:But Plio actually denied this characterization, saying that it had always used third-party engineers and 80 % of his engineers were internal. When I spoke to Jeppe in that interview, I asked him about their strategic priorities and he basically confirmed that they were targeting mid and upper market, small to medium enterprises, developing agentic capabilities and trying to make sure the products can be used with LLMs, with those MCP things that link those sorts of products into maybe a Claude or a chat GBT or whichever other frontier model is being used.

7:24Damisola Sulaiman:The other thing your article touched on was employee speculation over the company's long-term future and perhaps a potential sale. Tell us about that and who might potentially look to buy a company like Plio.

7:37Jeppe Rindom:Yes, so with the redundancies, the moves to cut costs and those leadership changes I mentioned and the new style that's really focused on keeping things as tight as possible, there's a lot of speculation amongst the employees that their intention is to make Plio attractive to potential buyers. I had about four people tell me that. But those same sources said that it's a really hard market for a large fintech acquisition at the moment because the sentiment on fintech is genuinely not as positive when it comes to investors and valuations as it was in maybe 2021 or 2022 when Plio raised last. And, you know, they wouldn't be able to get the same amount as they would have at fintech's peak.

8:14Jeppe Rindom:And so those people said that they've been discussing the possibility in the business for well over a year. There's also a lot of internal speculation over who those buyers could potentially be. Mastercard and Perk have been discussed among staff because they have similar card offerings as issuers. So there's kind of room for them to have use for an offering like Plio's. While others believe those companies I mentioned earlier, US spend management companies, Brex and Ramp could have been a more natural fit because they do the exact same thing but they've also both made their own moves into Europe and made their own acquisitions.

8:50Jeppe Rindom:It is important to note that none of those companies is known to have been involved in any formal acquisition talks with Plio and beyond the testimony of the employees we talked to we could not independently verify any discussions. The three former employees I spoke to also described Yappé as increasingly hands-off when it comes to the day-to-day operations with one person saying he's kind of sick of it and would like to get out. But Yeppe actually rejected the suggestion that Plio is being managed with a sale in mind. Instead, the company is focused on becoming IPO ready and already has a roadmap to it.

9:24Jeppe Rindom:But he did flag that it will ultimately be up to the shareholders what kind of exit Plio takes.

9:29Damisola Sulaiman:Did he respond to the specific claims about his leadership style and becoming more hands-off?

9:34Jeppe Rindom:No. So we didn't put that to him in the interview, but we did put it in our formal right to apply. and Clio didn't address that at all. The main points of concern for them were more on the culture side of things, funny enough.

9:47Damisola Sulaiman:Okay, interesting. Yeah, it's always, I feel like companies, it's interesting which bits they choose to reply to in those processes. This isn't the first time you've reported on the culture of a fintech company under your beat. You previously wrote about the culture at Clio. We always joke that you're going through companies that rhyme. Your Clio piece was really well read and it was great reporting. So we've talked about Clio, but let's give a nod to Clio, which was now a couple of weeks ago. First off, tell us who are Clio and then we can go into what you found in your reporting.

10:20Jeppe Rindom:Yes, thank you. I find it so funny that they do have the same name, but one letter. And it made it really confusing when writing both stories with one in the back of my mind. But Clio is an AI powered money management app that offers budgeting tools, automated saving products, credit building services and cash advances through a chatbot interview a face they were quite early on to AI powered money management because they launched in 2016 yes that was a really interesting story to work on and I'm glad people were curious about it and it was well read I got a tip about cultural issues there from someone who was working there at the time and then I started outreach to former employees aided by the glass door reviews kind of using that to cross-reference roles or areas in the business where people were particularly unhappy.

11:04Jeppe Rindom:And a lot of the people I spoke to said that the founder and CEO, Barney Haseyo, had belittled and intimidated colleagues. There were Slack screenshots of him using the word retard, which is widely considered a slur for people with intellectual disabilities in response to employee suggestions and to refer to them more generally. There was also an incident with a former employee whose voice was being considered for use in Plio's chatbot as the company explored adding voice functionality to its AI products. According to the sources, her CEO asked colleagues in our public Slack channel what they believed the employee's voice was worth after discussions came up about compensation.

11:41Jeppe Rindom:So it was a bit of a spat where the person wanted to be paid for their voice and they were getting into it with Barney privately. And then he kind of brought that into a more public forum and people found that really inappropriate and felt that that was an illustration of I guess his wider leadership style. The employees also said the strategy was always changing with teams regularly abandoning projects to pursue new priorities and that I guess strategy chaos of sorts was stemming from this disagreement on what Clio fundamentally is. So the way it's marketed and the way Barney talks about it is very much as an AI powered financial assistant that can really help people manage their money more broadly, but the employees felt that they are just ultimately a provider of short-term cash advances, which basically let people borrow money from their own wages, but they're less predatory than payday loans and a bit less expensive than credit cards, for example.

12:37Jeppe Rindom:And despite that public emphasis that is made on AI, a lot of companies felt that they are ultimately a cash advance company. They also flagged AI performance management as another issue and an illustration of Barney's experimental leadership style. And he talked about it himself at a Stripe event in London where he talked about them using AI systems trained on internal company information to evaluate employee output by looking at Slack messages, Notion documents and engineering activity. And people felt like it made the culture toxic and encouraged unhealthy competition and just illustrated an approach that wasn't really rooted in, I guess, reaching a goal and more in kind of productivity metrics.

13:17Jeppe Rindom:What did Barney say when you put these claims to him? He basically said that Clio doesn't shy away from it being a high performance culture with a level of intensity that doesn't suit everyone who joins. He added that they regularly evaluate team performance and make hard choices when needed. So when they have to reallocate teams or part with individuals, they do so with transparency and compassion and also offer a generous exit package.

13:42Damisola Sulaiman:interesting I think you're covering fintech at such a interesting time as a reporter because we had the kind of up we've got the down I think these stories will um I mean we've gone through two of them they're different but there's a theme within them I think about where fintech is at the moment and these culture problems but also sale acquisition problems will come out during this period I think you've now been as I said with us for quite a few months what's your impression of the fintech industry as someone who's been reporting on it for a while now?

14:13Jeppe Rindom:I think more broadly, it is a really interesting place. I've been thinking about it like the black sheep of the tech world a little bit because it went from being, you know, how when people have children and whoever was the last child was the favorite, maybe you had two children and the last child is the favorite, they were the favorite their whole lives. And then a third child comes in and now they're suddenly the middle child and not as important. And there's a new baby, I feel like that's kind of what AI has done to fintech and it's gone from being the star of the show and Europe's darling and the thing that helps Europe compete with the US to just another sector really while other things have the potential to you know give Europe success that's entirely unprecedented and I think that that illustrates itself in the journey that a lot of these growth stage companies are on where you know they've got used to being really successful really early on and then now they're getting to a point where they're having to ask themselves really hard questions and it's not as easy to win as it once was it's not as easy to get funding as it once was there's a lot more competition because it became such a saturated industry in that time and culture wise that's also being illustrated as well growth stage is a really really tough time for every startup and with fintech there's special challenges because of regulation because of a lot of companies and so i think more companies are trying to have a harsher mindset when they get to that point because they can look at the most successful company in the space which is revolute And in 2019, there were a lot of reports of having like a quite a harsh culture and being super high performance.

15:38Jeppe Rindom:And that has really worked out for them. And they're doing incredibly well. And so I think they can see that and want to emulate that sort of success in their own organizations and maybe make decisions that aren't the best for their individual companies. at least in the case of Plia that's what my reading would be of that the reason why they were so successful for so long at least according to the chairman of their board was that they had a really good culture and they had this leadership that worked really well together and they were really all working together for the same goal of making this company do well and working well together and when it came to the next stage of growth rather than I guess doubling down on that they chose to turn away from that completely and I think it is important to look at a company within its context.

16:20Damisola Sulaiman:I love your sibling analogy. That's a really good one. And yeah, I've always found that, I mean, there's lots of culture stuff within tech in general, but fintech has always felt so particular because it's like that tech mindset jammed up against finance, which also has its own culture. The jamming of those two worlds has always struck me as making fintech a very particular part of the ecosystem culture-wise. That's all we've got time for on Clio and PLEO. but what else are you working on? Have you found another company that can rhyme? That's the question.

16:54Jeppe Rindom:No, unfortunately not. If there's any more Leos, please give me all the tips about their culture so we can make this a bit of a series. But I am working on potentially an op-ed on this existential crisis that I've talked about me and one of my editors, which you are one of, but one of the other editors was talking about this recently of kind of me just sharing my hot take about the sibling analogy perhaps and looking into that more specifically and then I'm also working on an analysis on this ARR fever that seems to be hitting fintech so we've written a lot about ARR and how it's a little bit of an unreliable metric according to investors anyways and we're seeing a lot more fintechs kind of adopt this approach of announcing their ARR milestones similar to some of the large AI companies that we have and so we're trying to look into I guess why that is and the way that they're going about it because finance is a regulated industry so some of the jumping through hoops perhaps that AI companies do to make those figures sound more impressive than they might actually be might not go as well in fintech and so that seems like a fun tension to explore within that context but those are the two big things on my plate at the minute.

18:02Damisola Sulaiman:Nice do you want to give our listeners your email in case people have thoughts on any of those topics?

18:08Jeppe Rindom:Yes, please. Anyone who has any thoughts should please reach out. My email is damissola at sifted.eu. That is just D-A-M-I-S-O-L-A.

18:18Damisola Sulaiman:Nice. And you can follow all of Dami's reporting by signing up to her newsletter, which we've already mentioned. It goes out every Tuesday. We'll put a link in the show notes along with a link to the Clio and the PLEO reporting. Thank you for joining the pod, your first Sifted pod. thank you for having me this is really fun hopefully more to come definitely more to come and listeners as always please rate review and share the pod this episode was produced by Aditi Meshra