287. Meet the Fintech Founder Who Has Tokenized $850M of Assets w/ Matt Ong | Ctrl Alt

0:00Amardeep Parmar:Startups Inside Out. We've got Matt here today. So I'm actually an investor at the early stage. And you came on here three years ago now. So it's been a little while. Yeah, I think so. So tell us, what does ControlLaw do today and how things changed? So fundamentally, we do a lot of the same thing, which is using tokenization to try and solve problems. Whether that's an asset owner looking to raise capital or whether you're an investor looking to deploy capital, we try and solve those problems. I think the biggest shift has been more on the institutional and the government side. So instead of facing those customers directly ourselves, we work with banks, asset managers that often face these customers or governments as well.

0:45So I think that's been the biggest shift for us. And ultimately, we believe in a future of digital capital markets. So everything that transacts happening on the blockchain, and that's the vision that we have that we're pushing towards. The reason why we work with these big institutions and governments is because they're the ones that really need to adopt this infrastructure first. So it made a lot of sense for us to reposition and focus on these counterparties. It's also been very helpful that, you know, there's a lot of appetite from them to embrace this technology. So it made sense for us all around.

1:22Amardeep Parmar:And when you last came on too, it was a very small team and that team's been expanding massively, right? Yeah. I can't remember how many we were back then. We were like four. Yeah, probably like, yeah, definitely less than 10 people back then. Yeah, we're now a team of, you know, 50 plus people continuing to hire across those regions. So it's nice to kind of have a little bit more manpower, but as your business grows and your people grow, so do your client demands, right? So we're always kind of still feeling that strain, but we're continuing to hire and, yeah, very excited to be able to continue to bring fresh blood into the business.

2:01Amardeep Parmar:Because it's a weird coincidence that in the last couple of days, two different people messaged me being like, oh, I can see you're in investment control. Like I'm looking for a job at the moment. Yeah. And you've always got so many jobs available because you keep growing and growing. Yeah. And I know a big part of that, too, is because when we were, I think when you came on last time, you were just kind of UK, London focus. whereas now you have that regional footprint too so why did you expand into those regions? Yeah hopefully that hopefully that continues right and it's always nice to get recommendations through.

2:30We have an office here in London also an office in in Northern Ireland, Ireland and then I guess our most recent office is in Dubai. Our business requires you to get regulatory licenses in the regions that you operate in and so we make very deliberate decisions around around where we want to go. A lot of our technology teams, they're based in Northern Ireland. There's a great pool of talent for us to be there, but also our team in Ireland is there to support European customers. So we've got a European base. So that was always the core of our business. As I said, most recently, although it's coming up to two years since we've had that Dubai office now, we saw what was happening in Dubai in the digital asset space.

3:15They set up a dedicated regulator for it, VARA, and they were clearly pushing in this direction and that was the same direction that we were looking towards. So it made sense for us to set up an office there and that's continued to go from strength to strength and we're looking to continue our expansion in that region, opening offices elsewhere in the UAE and elsewhere in the GCC. So yeah, a lot of those roles are related to some of our office expansion as well.

3:40Amardeep Parmar:And obviously what I see from the MSR updates is that, as you said, there's so much regulation involved in what you're doing. So those talks can take place over months and months and months how's that experience been because when you first came on it was like you started out we hadn't quite been through some of the trenches you have now been like how yeah has that yeah you know when you're dealing with our kind of customers right the big institutions and governments it takes a long time to integrate and it takes a long time to get the projects off the ground and so um you know we spend a lot of time you know building products and working with clients and then they don't end up materializing but that's why we you know have to cover quite quite a few different things at any one point in time so that when they do go live like what we did with the Dubai Land Department um last year and is continuing to grow um we've kind of been able to to capitalize on on that opportunity so um yeah it's definitely not an easy experience dealing with um uh big institutions and governments but sort of quite rewarding because once that's up and live and running these are like really material really big projects um and ultimately if we want to to to push this infrastructure and push digital assets uh more broadly it starts with a lot of these counterparties so you know they're really important to the ecosystem of that sales cycle as you say must be very difficult how have you learned to like improve on that process and make it yeah kind of each experience to get better and better I think there's also, I think for us, it's being very realistic about those sales cycles.

5:11So I think one of the most important things that we've learned, and it might sound really obvious, is that everything takes longer than you expect, right? I had that in my previous, you know, career and previous jobs, everything always takes longer. But particularly when you're dealing with, you know, brand new piece of technology, you know, big, big, big counterparties, and you're a newer business on the scene, it takes even longer to get these things done, whether that's them getting comfortable with you and what kind of controls that you have in place, whether that's getting the licenses that you need for those regions.

5:47Yeah, everything just takes longer. So I think we very much go into these conversations eyes wide open now and say, caveated with licensing and some of these other requirements that most of the time, the speed of execution um it's not slowed down by us um you know we like to be that quick nimble moving fintech it's slowed down by the counterparty so we like to caveat um quite heavily now and

6:16Amardeep Parmar:often you're going against like much larger established players right but you're winning these contracts of like huge players and like huge institutions what is it about what you're doing that makes you stand out compared to those incumbents i think it's two things i think one our product is quite unique and when we think about our product it's not just the technology side it's the fact that we're also able to provide the structures and we also have the licenses to do things so we like to develop an end-to-end experience so if you think about a government we don't just provide you with the tech we'll go in and run it for you as well so that's quite unique because a lot of parties aren't maybe willing to do that and roll their all their sleeves up to do that, we go in and say, you know, we're happy to take that burden on.

7:00We want that. And I think our approach is maybe slightly different as well. We always start with what's the problem that we're trying to solve. So we don't just deploy this technology for the sake of doing it. We're what problem am I trying to solve? We start there. And I think that's quite a unique approach. So it means that we're not just, you know, trying to sell to everyone and for every use case and try and solve every um you know start very broadly we're trying to be very deliberate and focused with who we're who we're going after and i think that comes across with our clients they appreciate that slightly more tailored approach that slightly more thoughtful

7:38Amardeep Parmar:approach and with the different regions as well like how is your time being split now like are you and you said you were in dubai recently but are you having to flip around or yeah i mean um so now we have an office there and we're expanding the team there. I don't need to be in Dubai as frequently. And it's a similar situation in our island and Northern Ireland offices with more people on the ground running those offices. I don't really need to be there as much. But that said, you know, Dubai is such an interesting place. The UAE more generally is such an interesting place for digital assets.

8:10So there's always a lot of business to do there. And I still go fairly regularly. I'm London based but yeah maybe over the last 18 months maybe two years have probably been in Dubai for 16 16 17 times so yeah you do rack up the own miles particularly when you're getting that business up and running there but increasingly less in in the Middle East at the moment and

8:39Amardeep Parmar:however you find those like right people to trust to lead these different areas right because yes It's a food part, right? Yeah, really tough. So it's helpful that, you know, we've had some people move over from other offices. So that's been super helpful. I mean, Robert, who runs our Middle East region, you know, worked with him originally first. And so we understood how each other think and we work very well together. And so it felt like quite a natural progression. So a lot of the people that we have in our business in those leadership functions, senior functions, we've kind of either worked with before.

9:17They've come in like on a trial basis first. We've been able to test how the relationship looks. And then, you know, what's quite interesting about our business now being global is we can move people around as well. So, you know, trusted heads in London or Ireland can move over to the Middle East. And we'll probably see that going forward as well. Maybe we'll see someone from our Dubai office move to one of our offices in the GCC. It's all about, yeah, bringing that culture as well that we've spent so long developing and making sure all of our offices reflect that.

9:48Amardeep Parmar:And when it comes to hiring as well, what did you look for in those people who went on to become this leaders? Yeah, we found the most successful hires in our business have come through warm introductions, right? So you're already able to validate that, you know, this person kind of meets what you're looking for. we definitely have a high performance culture in in the business um and that does take a certain kind of person to to work in that environment you know we've all spent so long building this business we've put you know our whole lives into this business and so we really care about it and so you want people in your business that not only care about it but then you know driven to to to try and um push the business forward in the same way that you would hope as well so we've been really focused on trying to find those kinds of individuals and so you know often in interviews it's understanding who are you as a person rather than necessarily spending too much time on what's your what's your what's your professional career and all of the above it's like you know what's your ability to think critically to solve problems to drive this business forward some of those softer skills that may be a little bit harder to teach what kind of attributes do you have there but it is a mix right we're dealing in regulated financial services complex products and so you do also need that balance of experience as well um and even better if you're kind of a combination of those two worlds i remember when we first met one of those early days it was interesting within that blockchain community in london people who didn't realize i knew you already they kind of mentioned you as the person who's like doing big things and when you look back at it three years ago you probably say it yourself it's like you was very early on right you had a few employees very high team but you already had that kind of reputation amongst that community and like as time has gone on since like have you found that people generally in blockchain and digital assets has there been that kind of camaraderie and has there been a big impact on you yeah i'd like to think so i'd like to think people um view us in the same in the same vein and i think a lot of that comes from our approach where we try and solve problems right so we've built that reputation in the market.

11:56We definitely want to keep that. It becomes more difficult because loads of people come into you and you start having to say no to business rather than do a crappy job for someone. So you want to keep that reputation. I think the way it's maybe developed is that as we become more and more institutional, we're looking to build that relationship, not just amongst the startup community and the investor community, but also with those institutional clients. So I think that's something that we've worked hard on over the last year, year and a half in particular. But I think as well, these people will view you based on the projects that you actually bring to life and your track record.

12:35And I think some of the deals that we've done and some of the projects that we've worked on, we've proven that capability. So yeah, these people are very smart, right? So they'll look for what have you actually done. So yeah, I hope we've built up that reputation, that that means a lot to us um and yeah hopefully that continues and people outside of the blockchain

12:54Amardeep Parmar:world or people will say like for example you're working with the governments and people like that who maybe don't know too much about blockchain yet have you found like the attitudes of this initial conversations are different or is it kind of a similar kind of mindset i mean it's certainly different now to it was like three years ago when we first started this um the shift has been like monumental so previously like we used to hide that tokenization was part of our technology stack it It was just like, don't worry about that. That's kind of just behind the scenes, a bit like Google Cloud or whatever.

13:24Whereas now it's like they want to know how is tokenization being used. You know, they've got mandates from the very top to say we want to deploy this technology. So, you know, there's definitely a trend to embracing this. And that's very helpful for us when we're going into these clients. But as you point out, there's a big education piece then that we have to do as part of this. So, yeah, a lot of our time is explaining what's a wallet, you know, what are the controls in place or what's the difference between public and private blockchains and how can you get comfortable with using this technology?

13:59And it's, you know, kind of walking them on that journey.

14:04Amardeep Parmar:Hello, hello. I hope you've enjoyed the show so far. I'm Amrit Parma, co-founder of BayHQ and the host of this show. For those of you who don't know, BayHQ is the community for high growth Asian heritage founders and investors in the UK. Over 7 ,500 people have attended our events. 200 people have been for our impact programs. And obviously, there's been over 250 episodes of this podcast. If you want to join us and take part in the program and come to the events, go to bayhq.com forward slash join. We also just released our first ever book called Startups for Outsiders, which you can get on Amazon now.

14:43Amardeep Parmar:And the link is in the bio. Hope to see you soon at our event. Hope you enjoy the rest of the episode. So I guess from the outside, right, is that with like the AI boom and all those kind of things, and the fact that maybe that's led to some of the people who are kind of chasing trends, they're kind of all shifting those AI products, has almost benefited you because it gets rid of some of the noise in your face. Yeah, we started maybe like in the first cycle of the blockchain, well, not the first cycle, but one of the cycles of blockchain technology, you know, 2020, 2021. And it did feel like anything based on blockchain technology was going to get backed.

15:25And I think that was a helpful stage because it meant a lot of investment went into the underlying rails, which we use today, which was super helpful. but it was also unhelpful because it kind of maybe left a bit of a bad taste in the mouth of some some investors as well that this is just a hype product um and that's definitely what we see with ai today where um it's obviously this incredibly powerful tool but everyone's just putting ai powered um and it's probably not properly ai powered it's just using ai in a very light touch way uh and that definitely creates a bit of a bit of a problem in in the market and i think that's a challenge for investors to try and like weed through is this really an AI product and is AI really really helpful here so yeah I definitely think there is a benefit that the kind of hype is somewhere else that's not to say that blockchain isn't really having a moment at the moment it definitely is but I think what we're seeing now versus what we saw in 2020 2021 where as I said everyone was putting blockchain on their decks is that people are really now focused on the use cases so they've kind of gone through that initial initial hype and it's now like okay we know what tokenization is we've done tokenization pilots but how do we actually use this to generate alpha in our businesses and that's that's great for us because it's like that's where you're going to make money you're not really going to make money on a one-off pilot of trying something you're going to make money where you're adding value to your clients so they're incentivized to use you more and do this you know in BAE and you

16:56Amardeep Parmar:mentioned that about like some of the big projects you've won because of that relationship you've had as well and i'm not sure how much you can get into detail of this but obviously the business itself is actually doing well it's not just a funded business you're just burning through money yeah and it's like a never-ending black hole yeah and on that side has that how has that relationship changed within your role right because there's maybe founders who are several years into the business who just completely depend on external capital yeah which you don't have that same issue yeah um that was a very deliberate decision by us as well because you know you could also take the view that you know as soon as you've got that money coming in you then just you know keep keep on spending it very aggressively um and that is typically what the venture world is there to reward i think we've been fortunate that um our business model is um is quite profitable given the the efficiencies that you can get from this technology and given the space in which we operate in um you know we're not like going out and acquiring customers at a loss and having to do that so our business model is is is healthy um and that's allowed us to grow quickly but but also without the need for a lot of external capital.

18:02So it's kind of like a consequence of the nature of our product, but also by design, you know, the kind of product that we decided to build, we knew that this was how it operates. So it's nice to not be able to be, you know, solely reliant on external capital. And that means that I think it's been to our advantage that we've been able to be heads down, executing on the business and pushing things forward without being needing to be distracted. So, yeah, I think we're very fortunate to be in that position and still be able to grow quickly at the same time.

18:37Amardeep Parmar:When you did the initial round, so when you did your seed round, this is 2023, 2024, it must be 2023. 23, yeah, 23. And obviously in that thing you have your projections and where things are going to go. What do you think has changed the most since how you thought back then? I think the projects that we work on are bigger than we anticipate. And I think that's, again, a consequence of just the magnitude of interest in tokenization. It's starting from, as I said, governments and banks and asset managers. They all want to do it. And so the biggest players in capital markets, they all want to do it.

19:20And I don't even think back in 23, we would have predicted that there would be such a momentum shift in the market. So I probably don't think we would have had such clients and revenue in our forecasts. So it's nice when the market turns in your direction. But this was always the space that we wanted to go after. We said that we wanted to target institutional. But yeah, I don't think we would ever have thought that the scale of it back then. That's a nice surprise, right? It's a nice surprise, yeah. And it's funny, we were talking to an investor that rejected us and they were saying that they didn't have high conviction in tokenization, but now they are very deeply in tokenization.

20:09And also looking at what we presented to them before from a revenues perspective and we actually 6x the revenue that they saw in our forecast. So it's quite nice to be able to go back to them and be like, well, we've actually proved that tokenization is a real use case. and on top of that we've you know when you questioned our commercials we've actually 6x versus versus what we thought so it's nice to be in that position rather than being in the other position but we know what it's like right um it's just a bit of fun having a look back at moments

20:38Amardeep Parmar:like that has anything went harder on the other side than you expected would you mean the other side so it's like it's a good side that where things have been the revenue of the project's been larger than you expected yeah was there any negative surprises or things have been harder that you've had to overcome i think hiring and and you'll probably get a lot of founders say that um but hiring is really difficult um you know when you're trying to grow the business really quickly you know everyone hire makes a real big difference but it's like how do you as you grow really quickly maintain your culture how do you make sure that you know everyone feels included and you know a big one for us is that we've got you know four different offices so how do you make sure that you'll feel like you're in one business at the same time so these are all things that's like yeah absolutely we need to have a dubai office because we've got local clients and we need local licenses but you probably skip past the the part where it's like how do you also then try and make sure that you've got the same culture so we spend a lot of time um on that and it's quite helpful why we've got people from other offices kind of move to other offices um but i think yeah that's definitely been harder than than i expected and obviously anybody on linkedin right now sees all the hype about how you just use ai you don't need to hire anybody right how are you using ai internally and has it been something which is helping you or is it something which maybe actually you find the people itself has been more helpful?

21:58Yeah it really depends on the team right so you know I know our engineers use AI tools as most engineers will now do so that's quite an obvious use case. In our business again it's quite given how solution orientated we are there is a very relationship and personal touch that is still really valuable. But I think AI has definitely been helpful for being able to consume complex regulatory challenges or legal challenges and being able to kind of help us scan through legislation and understand a lot of the challenges in some of the regions that we go to are around the regulation and the legislation.

22:46So being able to use AI tools to help us simplify and understand some of those problems helps us be more prepared as we go into clients it's not there to replace your legal opinions and and the external support that we get but it it helps us understand the context as we're going in to solve problems with those clients um so i'd say yeah it's it's a helpful tool for us but it definitely doesn't replace um you know being face to face with

23:09Amardeep Parmar:clients and and workshopping live and what do you enjoy yourself now doing the most in the company um again good good question look I I'm really enjoying um the moment that we're currently in and I think you know when you start a business um it's not an easy thing to do and you definitely go through the challenges um early doors um you know fighting fighting for um for everything and I think that doesn't stop you continue to fight through that through that life cycle but what's really enjoyable is to see everything that we hoped would happen is kind of starting to happen and um we we say internally you know we've got all the ingredients here to make this a massive success and it's now up to us to execute on that so um it's nice that it's not down to external factors now it's all up to us to be able to deliver on this so yeah i'm just i'm really enjoying being in the moment that we all hoped for um when we first started this you said it could they get a massive success for some day?

24:10Amardeep Parmar:What do you think could count as a massive success? Like, where do you think this could one day go? As I said at the start, you know, we are building digital capital markets. So our belief is that every asset is going to exist on blockchain. And that's fundamentally going to change everything. You think about how you access public markets, how you're able to interact with the private markets, it all changes. And so So when you start thinking about how blockchain and tokenization can impact the world will generally, that's really exciting. And so there's no cap really on what we can ultimately be.

24:49You think about any of the biggest players in capital markets today, we're kind of coming after them, right? And we're here to disrupt that whole ecosystem, like one by one, whether that's how you buy real estate whether that's you know how you buy funds or you know being able to buy you know exposure to pre-ipo companies can we now do that in tokenized form which we've seen you know some counterparties do so we think this is like a fundamental shift um and that presents a lot

25:19Amardeep Parmar:of opportunity for businesses like ours so you came on in the last three years ago right so i think so if we get you on here again in two years time let's say this time so we were early 2028 okay yeah and we didn't do this last time because we didn't realize we're going to plan to do this we're going to get like a little tv back hit back here right and then we'll play back this question which is like where do you hope you'll be in two years time like what do you hope you've achieved well that's how i feel about that because if i feel like it puts a bit of the pressure on um uh where do i hope that we'll be in two years time that i think we're at the start of a big change it feels like we're like having that big bang moment in the industry um where as i said whether you're an asset manager or a bank, you're starting to turn these taps on.

26:06I think in two years' time, I would like to see those taps. Maybe it's optimistic to think they're going to be fully turned on, but definitely more open than what they are today. And what you're going to see as a consequence of that is this tokenization technology being a more embedded experience in more people's lives. So, you know, when you go and buy a house in Dubai, for example, that title deed being on blockchain, whether, you know, you're buying it fractionally or not, you know, that thing's starting to happen. Or, you know, when you're investing through your, you know, your investment apps and your wealth platforms, those instruments are actually being reflected on blockchain or you're transacting on blockchain, you might not really realize it.

26:52So in two years' time, I would like to see that transition into more BAU. You mentioned that as well, where people don't even notice it.

27:00Amardeep Parmar:Yeah. And so how do you think a lot of this stuff is going to go where it's because the institutions are doing it, that's underlying it's your technology. Yeah. But people don't need to know that necessarily. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. They don't need to know that. And for us, that's the perfect experience. Provided that we can do this, you know, with benefits, whether that's being quicker, cheaper, faster. we want to still maintain that the end user's experience is still superior so you know today it's really easy for you to be able to invest in you know different assets public markets whatever you can do it through your phone so the UX is already pretty good but can blockchain find a way for you to be able to do that cheaper and have broader access all within that same you know user experience that's kind of what we mean by that and is there anything where so obviously when you came up with this idea originally right so it was morgan stanley used to work at right yeah morgan stanley and obviously you've come on such a journey now right because even i can tell the difference in you from the last where i saw you it's been too long we've seen each other right or you've now gone from somebody's got an idea who's working on the side and then you put your job to do this to now running a company with like 50 employees like how has that journey been for you on the inside right like how has that growth journey been and where do you think as a person or as a leader you develop most um i think you don't really notice it if i'm honest because your head's down all the time and you're just focused on you know making the most of this opportunity that you don't really realize it i think me me and my my management team we're often quite guilty of that we don't take a step back to think about how we've developed or how we've changed um so it's only when someone like yourself like kind of puts the mirror up and says um you know this is uh you seem like quite a different personality and you feel quite different i think there's definitely a confidence in it right when you're when you're when you're first starting out you definitely have to back your own idea um but there is also something in the back of your head that's like was this the right move was it right for me to leave banking to do this or um is this is this going to land and so as the business continues to grow I feel like you get that confidence that confidence in your ability to execute as well you know you prove that you're able to do this at the highest level and so I think it's kind of almost like self-validating and it kind of just builds up inside without you really noticing awesome so we're going to do a quick final questions now and wrap up.

29:21Amardeep Parmar:First one, you have three Asians in Britain who think you're doing amazing work and you'd love to shut them up. Okay, I'm going to cheat with my first one again. I'll throw it back to you. I think as much as we've been on this journey over the last three years since we last spoke, it's been awesome to see the work that you've done and how that's continued to grow. I think you're a real great figure for our community here in the UK. So definitely want to continue to shout out to you. And also, side note, so many people come into our business, they talk about how they've listened to the first podcast.