Andy Willmot is a software engineer and digital technology specialist that works for OneBanx as Chief Technology Officer. He is here to tell us all about the emergence of OneBanx through the rise of Open Banking. In this episode, we look at the future of Banking as well as the technology that should be implemented for the benefit of the customers.
Episode Summary
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OneBanx’s approach to optimising user accessibility has meant that they have adapted to modern technology and user interfaces that breed familiarity with its customers. In this episode, Andy walks us through what open banking is and the endless possibilities it holds throughout the U.K, while providing insights on the landscape of banking across the world.
Throughout this episode, We talk about bank branches and all the challenges that come with them. Should you switch from legacy to modern technology? Are there regulations for being the last branch in town? Are brands going to use one location worldwide? Andy is here to answer and dispel myths that customers may have.
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Partnerships
Andy also talks to us about OneBanx’s collaborative efforts with Newcastle Building Society and Glory. We dive into the implementations of Glory’s systems and hardware to enable cloud-based cash deposits and withdrawals.
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Previous Episode
This isn’t the first time the CX Insider team has a conversation with OneBanx… If you want to find out more about the OneBanx model and the future of retail banking, check out our throwback episode now! (Spotify) (Google Podcasts) (Apple)
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“In the next 25 years I’ll look back and I’ll think Open Banking is the most revolutionary moment in banking of my (life) time” Duncan Cockburn, OneBanx CEO & Founder.
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To find out more about Andy, check out our full episode – available on all your favourite channels. Now including YouTube!
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This article summarises podcast episode 98 “Open Banking: The Shared Branch Model of the Future” recorded by CX Insider.
Written by Octavian Iotu
Full Episode Transcript
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Andy: A card is something you have, A physical card, a chip on it, and it’s a four digit Pin. Even now, I think we could all look at each other and go, is four digits enough? It doesn’t feel like enough. Really, does it? For any password / When we built an ATM, we decided that the screen would be an iPad, which is unique across the whole industry. I haven’t seen it anywhere else.
Octavian: On today’s episode of The CX Insider Podcast, we sit down and talk to Chief Technology Officer of OneBanx, Andy Willmot. We’ll be talking about OneBanx’s unique model, the future of traditional branches, and the change in technologies that Banking’s use. Enjoy the episode and if you do subscribe to our channel for CX Insider’s best content. This episode is brought to you by ACF technologies global leaders in customer experience management solutions. Let’s get into the episode. Welcome back to CX Insider Podcast. I’m your host, Octavian, and I’m joined by my co-host Greg. And today we’re with Andy. So can you tell us a bit about yourself, your career?
Andy: Andy Wilmott, so I’m currently the the CTO at OneBanx, a shared banking start-up. My background is depressingly long now, but it’s been in technology for the whole of my life. I did computer science at university and then I went into programming. Did that for quite a long time, and then I started moving into more consulting type careers. So I worked for both PwC and KPMG in different sort of industries KPMG, finance and and Telcos actually. So did quite a bit of work with Vodafone around the world in different places, but largely around the technology engineering. So how do you deliver really big, large projects, either migrations but also sort of new new capabilities and putting those into enterprises. And then eventually I moved more focused into digital consulting. So I worked with a couple of companies, Detica, who had a small area around digital consulting quite a while back and then and then a company called Django, which surprisingly some people go, oh, I’ve heard of Django. They don’t exist anymore. But they were a digital agency. They were one of the big digital agencies quite a few years back, and they were a brilliant company for teaching me really what was about digital experience and multi-channel architectures and things like that. And it was in the sort of the not the early days of web, but in the days where it really started to sort of become probably one of the primary channels for most companies.
Andy: So it was a really good time to sort of be involved in digital transformation. I worked quite a lot of big companies, retailers, finance companies as well doing that. And then I got an opportunity to work at Lloyds Banking Group as their chief digital architect. That was the previous job to OneBanx. And that was a really interesting piece of work in a very large company, having to look at both strategy at the very top and going right up to the C level there. They were all interested in digital transformation is where most of the budget was going in the bank in the IT. But also about how we actually engineer, because engineering and software engineering has transformed massively over the last 20 years. And the way that we do it, and that was a big part of the role as well. And then open banking came and I got heavily involved in open banking at Lloyds Banking Group. Hard hard piece of work. Yeah. Building integrations to quite old systems that they’ve got at the banks now. But that set me up to work at OneBanx, which is, which is largely based on open banking technologies as well. So it’s been very exciting last few years at OneBanx and long may it continue.
Greg: What does CTO’ing look like at a start up then at the moment?
Andy: Yeah, So a CTO is not a very well defined role because it’s different in every single company.
Greg: Yeah. I thought that yeah
Andy: And I don’t think- you’re very lucky to find a CTO that actually do the same, same piece of work in a start up in particular OneBanx, it’s a very small start up. So so you’re, you’re pretty much at the coalface for all the technology that the whole company uses. Not only have I, you know, looking at talking to our CEO about strategy, but I’m also ordering the laptops for employees. You know, it’s a real kind of wow start-up mentality. But that’s actually quite fascinating because it allows you to get involved in problems that you wouldn’t normally get involved in from an IT perspective, and work out sort of clever ways to actually solve those so that you’re not having to build massive teams to manage complex processes. For me, it’s actually been fascinating to do that, but probably the most interesting piece is building the solutions that are going to be sold by OneBanx to support customers.
Octavian: Can you tell us a bit about your background in engineering and consulting?
Andy: Yes. So I’ve been an engineer my whole life and I still do it. In fact, it’s one of the things I have as interview questions is what do you do in your spare time? Do you code or something else? Because if you find somebody that does still code for fun, then they’re likely to be a very, very good engineer. And it’s something I do all the time. I absolutely love it. In my career that’s changed. I’ve gone from very deep engineering roles through to sort of quite high level C-level consulting roles doing strategy, and it’s been one of the fortunate things in IT. You have a place at the table wherever you land. If you want to talk about high level strategy, about where the money should be spent in a big, large corporation, it is a board level agenda. They’re all interested in it because they want to know when are we going to get our mobile app is a question, you know, things like that. People are interested in. The mobile apps are not good enough because the chairman is looking at it and wants it to be better, you know that sort of- So the conversation is there, but at the same time, you can go into a really deep, low level conversations with your infrastructure engineer about networking and cost of networking and how we can reduce that or optimize costs and things like that. And that’s fascinating as well. And they’re all both very technical subjects. But you’ve got an opportunity to work from very different ends of the organizational domain. So that’s quite fascinating. So that’s why I’ve enjoyed it. But I’ve been an engineer my whole life, and I think I’ll stay like that because I think even as I grow, the knowledge is changing so much. You have to keep up to speed with, with everything that’s going on as much as you possibly can. Otherwise you won’t be able to lead the next generation of engineers coming through.
Greg: Yeah, it must be crucial as well, because as a start up with deep technical knowledge and engineering knowledge, you’re trying to see where is this technology need to be three, five years from now maybe. So without that knowledge and depth of engineering understanding etcetera, you could easily come up on a roadblock two years from now where that could have been seen, maybe like in the first few months or few years of build.
Andy: Well, there is a bit of a debate about this, because you could argue a start up doesn’t have a lot of money. So if you spend lots of money on something that’s highly scalable, are you just throwing that money away? Because if you haven’t sold the business, you haven’t sold the products for the business yet? Well, you know, revenue’s got to come first. So really you should probably you should be looking at ways to deliver quickly. However, we all know that if you had a sudden slew of customers come through and we’ve seen this in in launches of websites, you know, yearly it happens, website launch comes out and the website goes down because too many people have subscribed or too many people are logging into it. And that’s the scalability question. And it’s always going to be there. And I think for me, it’s just it’s a balance. It’s trying to figure out how much do you need to invest to be able to get something. That’s enough for the next few years, but that can also be improved over time. And for us, actually, cloud technologies have been the savior for a lot of this. You know, we can we can build API services, IT services that are highly scalable very, very quickly now and that you could trust if you wanted to scale them from 1000 to 1 million. You could do that with a few clicks of the button. And it’s a cost question more than it is necessarily an IT question so much anymore. There are still challenges with the code architecture. What do you use? You get into sort of microservices and Kubernetes clusters and all this sort of stuff. And very quickly you get actually, you get a very complicated, highly scalable, a very complicated system. And so there is a bit of a debate about how much do you really build out of those types of complex technologies, where actually really the main purpose in life of a new startup is to gain revenue?
Greg: Yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah.
Octavian: Can you tell us more about OneBanx, its history, mission, purpose.
Andy: So OneBanx is a shared banking start-up. The purpose of OneBanx is to allow customers really to still transact in person with their bank. Currently, there is a big challenge that banks are facing around the cost of their branches. A single branch is going to cost a certain amount of money to run. It’s going to have people they need to hire. It’s going to have costs for the property itself. It’s going to cost maintaining that property. And the reality is, right now we’re only getting 1 or 2 people turning up to bank branches every single day. The cost? That doesn’t make sense for many banks. We see that the challenge there is not something that’s necessarily fixable by a single bank, and OneBanx is there to build the technology to make one of those sort of shared facilities happen. And that’s what we’ve been doing for the last couple of years. We now have some pilot sites that we’re running at the moment that are going very well. Hopefully we’ll be more successful in the years to come.
Greg: What makes the OneBanx customer experience really work?
Andy: So it’s really important customer experience to us. Banks themselves have transformed in the last five years or so to being very focused on customer. It’s all been learned from other organizations like Apple’s and Google’s of the world, but the focus on customer has changed massively, and it also changes the way you think. That’s something that we’ve done at OneBanx from the very, very beginning. Really good example is that when we built an ATM, we decided that the screen would be an iPad, which is unique across the whole industry. I haven’t seen it anywhere else. And you could argue, why would you do that? Well, it’s big, bigger than an ATM screen, this sort of size, for a start. People are familiar with it. They see an iPad, they go, well, I know how to use that. You know, even my parents who they have iPads and they know how to use an iPad. Yeah. So it breeds a certain amount of familiarity. But actually from a technical perspective, they’re really easy to manage because it’s just another mobile app. So in the end of the day, we get mobile app developers good ones, and we can get them to build a mobile app to work on there. And that’s our user interface. And it comes with all the security that we already have as part of Apple products. And so it provides a massive benefit for us. But probably the most important thing is that you get a really strong user experience with it. If you’re building a screen on a windows device, there’s a whole load of things that don’t come with that, whether it’s the touch sensitivity or the swiping or that kind of stuff. We get that as part of the product. So for us, that’s been a big thing and that’s quite a unique experience. We’ve also tried to keep it really simple when I go to- and I’ve been to a few conferences recently, and you see the new ATM cash machine that’s there at the moment, it’s very difficult to come up with a modern version to of a cash machine without adding extra holes or lights. Yeah, LEDs and flashes and things like that. I mean, how do you do it really? And that’s generally what happens. Some machines you kind of look at and go, oh wow, that’s a scary, big flashy machine. We’ve done the opposite of that. And I think, you know, our view is that whatever the experience is going to be, it’s a very practical thing going and getting money. I’m not sure people are going to be that swayed by bells and whistles. We’ve gone for simplicity, and that’s the reason why we’ve gone for what we’ve gone for. So we’ve actually used very basic cash handling machines that just take money in and give money out. And there’s no user interface on there. That’s all provided by our iPad. So it’s a very modern experience. It’s quite different to what you’d what you’d normally use in a in a standard ATM environment.
Octavian: Minimalistic
Andy: Absolutely. Yeah.
Greg: And that carries through I guess online as well. Because the OneBanx offering is also an online piece too. And I guess you’ve carried those principles.
Andy: Yeah. So when we decided that we’d use open banking, that meant that we weren’t actually using cards. So we didn’t we don’t use cards for any part of the process. And that means we still needed some form of strong identity. But we did that using digital identities. And therefore that’s the reason why people have a mobile app, a OneBanx mobile app to log in to the kiosk securely, but it’s all off the shelf technologies to a certain degree. There’s a bit of work we’ve needed to do and invest in to actually ensure that we can log people in across, you know, your mobile phone to the branch. But, you know, this is stuff that is pretty well thought out in the digital space and it’s quite strong. A card is something you have in a physical card, a chip on it, and it’s a four digit Pin. Now, even now, I think we could all look at each other and go, is four digits enough? It doesn’t feel like enough really doesn’t it, for any password. So a digital identity in that respect can feel a bit stronger as well. So we do feel that we’ve got quite a strong solution using digital identity. And that’s what we’ve implemented in our kiosks.
Octavian: So Andy has told us all about OneBanx. But let’s dive further into open banking. Why does open banking exist and what actually is it?
Andy: Open banking came about largely due to complaints that were made to the CMA around the lack of access to banking information from third parties, and this was about around about things like account switching. So a new start up bank starts up. But all of the banking details and information and data are available at a different bank for that customer. How do they get access so that they can then leverage that to support a customer and enhance their services? That’s kind of how it started. It evolved over time and combined a little bit with with a European wide initiative, PSD2, which is about payments. And what we ended up with in the UK is a is a CMA led initiative to open up banks data for customers, and that’s called account information service providers, and then also payments to allow third parties to make payments on behalf of users. So payment information service providers PISP, AISP and PISP and those both now turned into quite technical pieces of work where the banks got together and figured out how to actually enable this for third parties and then built. That took a few years to happen, but what we now have available is APIs that have been set up by the banks that allow third parties, such as OneBanx, to be able to go and make payments with the consent of a customer on their behalf, and also to get their information for a period of time and use that information to provide services. And that’s what OneBanx is using to be able to provide cash deposit and cash withdrawal services at our branches.
Greg: So then to the everyday person who does like to use a branch, what does that look like in the future? Does it look like where multiple brands are using one location? So someone who might have an account with X, Y and Z bank and 2 or 3 banks, maybe they could in the future, maybe use that one location. Is that what it could look like?
Andy: Absolutely. Yeah. So so if you think about logically, what’s the simplest way of saving money. Well, it’s to combine all of the banks core branch services into a single facility that supports all, all banks. And so the aim of OneBanx is to provide the technology to do that. And, as much as we can, the branch infrastructure to do that as well. So within a OneBanx kiosk, you can go in and you can look at your account details that you’ve connected through open banking. You can look at transactions on the kiosk that you’ve got there. In our world, it’s an iPad. On that iPad, you can look at your account details and then you can make deposits and withdrawals. So in particular a deposit, it’s simply a case of clicking on the account that you want to deposit into putting money into the ATM. And that money then gets transferred directly to your account instantly. Yeah.
Octavian: The world of banking is constantly changing and so is the technology that comes with it. But is it better to upgrade or to stick to legacy technologies? And what are the Challenges that come with this decision.
Andy: I’ve worked in big organizations. I’ve worked in small organizations, and in particular at the large organizations, the discussion on legacy architecture is constant. So if anybody were ever to say that banks aren’t thinking about it is just completely wrong. Everyone’s very concerned about it and wants to transform the bank to using modern technology. But there are challenges with that, not least the cost. These systems are old enough and complex enough. They’ve evolved a huge complexity that actually to try and create a new system that matches that complexity would cost millions, if not billions, across the banks to do. And actually, what it means is that the systems that they need to replace have to actually be net new systems and the the business needs to adapt to those new systems. And that’s a that’s a big transformation inside any bank to do so. So it’s a very costly and time consuming thing for banks to be able to do. But the answer to should we be using modern technology? Absolutely. Yes, we should be. Banks do have a secondary need that is a little bit overlooked by certainly by smaller companies. And that is the risk associated to the data storage and the security of the fact that they’re storing huge amounts of people’s money. If you take Lloyds Bank into account, 1 in 4 people, I think, probably have a bank account at Lloyds, I mean, in the UK is big. So if you were to break the bank by introducing the wrong technology, that would be a big problem, not just for the customers but for the UK economy. It’s a serious it’s a serious thing to get it wrong. So it has to be done carefully and it has to be done with, the highest security in mind. And that’s also caused some, some challenges for the banks to move forward as well, not least moving into cloud technologies, which the regulators will want to know is implemented in a highly secure and resilient way as well. So I think for the big banks, it’s difficult. Smaller companies like OneBanx must use the latest technologies, and the key reason for using that is actually around speed and actually the cost to deliver. So just as an example, we use Google Workspace for all of our IT systems, like word documents, that sort of thing. You know, because it’s an all encompassing end to end system. It sets up very quickly, and it means that we can actually deploy very little support infrastructure to actually support users in using it. It’s just a very simple way. It’s modern technology. I have no doubt there will be competitors that would say exactly the same thing for others, right? But we don’t have the classic old fashioned laptops sit there. We’re all in the cloud. Similarly, with all the technology that we built for OneBanx very similar. We build it all in a cloud based environment. We use the latest native technologies in, in those cloud environments, supporting us in building those. And it means that we can build them far quicker than we would do if you were using a sort of legacy technologies as well. So it’s actually without those modern technologies, OneBanx wouldn’t exist. We just could not afford to build what we’ve built using legacy technologies.
Greg: It’s probably also worth addressing that in this space with all this new, faster paced, modern technology. There’s the the common misconception that it means increase risk. But actually nowadays technology is designed almost in the opposite, isn’t it, whereby the newest tech is quite often the safest? Is that fair to say? In some respects.
Andy: Yes and you’re kind of referring to the should I update my windows machine every night or should I leave it? And that’s an interesting philosophy that has changed. There was a time when you delivered something and you kept it at the same version, because who knows what could be changed if you updated? The whole thing could collapse. If you updated, it would be the thinking. But now that has completely changed. We trust implicitly these core providers Apple for iPads, Microsoft for PCs. We implicitly trust them to make sure that any updates they provide are done without any impact on on the system. And that is really the philosophy now. So you now spend a lot of time making sure that everything is updated to the latest versions and tested and working well with the latest versions, because then you know, you’ve got the latest security patches in as much as you possibly can.
Octavian: A big driver behind the OneBanx model is the need to process and manage cash in our society, but let’s look further into banking as a whole and what is going on in the current landscape of banking. Why are branches closing and how does the UK market differ to the rest of the world in this matter?
Andy: So yeah, so cash is a fundamental driver for branch usage. All right. So one of the key reasons people go into a branch is to transact in cash. Whether it’s taking money out, putting money in. It’s not the only reason but it’s a big one. So in the UK there’s been a rapid decline in the use of cash. Now that’s not worldwide. That’s in the UK. So in the UK I think we’re down to something like 20% usage or even less now with cash transactions. If you were to go to Spain, it’s almost the opposite way around. It’s around 70 to 80%. Yeah. So it’s not worldwide like that, but there are countries that are similar to the UK. In the Netherlands, for example, is a very similar situation. But that has created a problem. That means that the banks don’t have people turning up to their branches. Now, in any business that needs to maintain a cost basis. And we’ve just talked about legacy technologies costing. An awful lot to transform. The banks need that money to be able to spend it on digital technologies. So they are looking at ways to reduce costs in their branch channel.
Andy: And the simplest way to do that is to remove branches, because they are no longer necessary to serve the vast majority of customers. However, there are obviously customers that still use them, people who still use cash as well. And I think it’s important to realise that just because there’s a low percentage of people using cash doesn’t mean that there isn’t a lot of cash use. So a small percentage of a very large number is still a large number. And that’s kind of where we sit now across the UK. There’s a lot of cash use happening. It’s just that if you were to go into any one particular area, the number of transactions is quite low. To me, what that means is we need to change the model. No longer do you want five bank branches sitting in a small village just to transact in cash. Well, you need one facility that can support all those banks and allow people to transact. And then there you get a more cost effective way of supporting customers that still want to use cash.
Octavian: Some people are led to believe that the reason banks think it’s unsustainable to have branches in high volume is due to regulations and limitations set in place for the last branch in town. Andy is here to set the record straight and discuss these rumours.
Andy: It’s a myth, I’d say. I’d say it’s a myth. So does it have an impact on the decision? Yes, it does actually. So, yeah. So there is a new process, reasonably new process that’s been implemented that the government have asked link to make the determination about whether a facility needs to be put in place if a bank branch is closed. And that’s not just for the last bank in town. That’s for any big bank that closes its branches. But obviously, if there’s no other bank there, then there’s going to be a little bit more of a thinking, well, we do need something there, but you’ve got to remember that. Look, if HSBC close and there’s still a Lloyds Bank branch in there, that means HSBC customers can’t bank because there’s another bank that doesn’t necessarily help them. Maybe for withdrawals, not so much for deposits. And actually that bank doesn’t necessarily want them to be there because that’s an additional cost. Right now. I don’t think last banking town is the big thing. At the end of the day, when a bank closes, there needs to be a decision made about what to do about that. So that that process certainly now is pretty well embedded in the UK and is happening right now.
Octavian: We’ve talked a lot about OneBanx and their approach to the UK market, but how does the world of banking look like outside of the UK? Would a model that OneBanx offer play a role in all countries across the world?
Andy: If you believe that cash use across the whole world will reduce, then yes, it would make sense. But you’ve got to believe that first. Yeah, that’s true. And if you look at some countries, you kind of think, well, it hasn’t reduced as much as you think. I mean, even in Germany, you know, cash use is still quite high, which almost feels surprising. You know, if you think of UK and Germany being similar, you’d think as terms of types of economies. And actually there’s nothing to be said for why cash use wouldn’t increase at some point. The reason it’s not being used much, you could argue, is because it’s a cost driver. Businesses are stopping to accept cash. The easiest way to make a payment or the only way to make a payment in some cases is using a card. And that’s going to drive cash use down. So it may less be about preference actually, than more just the fact that the services that we want to use are restricting the use of cash. But nevertheless, I think around the world you will see more of these. There’s another factor, and that is the number of banks that are being used by individuals in those countries. So in the UK we are blessed with this huge quantity of different types of banks that you can go to. We’ve got fintech start ups, we’ve got our legacy banks, we’ve got our building societies- Outside of the UK, that’s not always the same. So in the Netherlands there’s predominantly four banks. You bank with that 90 odd percent of the people bank with. And in the Netherlands they’ve come up with, as a consequence, a different solution where those four banks have got together and created their own joint venture and they are building out their own ATM infrastructure together to do that. And it’s much easier to do with if you’ve only got four of you, if you’ve got an environment where you’ve got 100 banks that need to try and work together, it’s almost an impossible ask to do. And, you know, we managed to do open banking, but that was probably a slightly different initiative because once you set down the specification, people could just go and build it on their own. It’s just, you know, it was a technical thing to do. Whereas I think if you’re actually dealing with 100 banks, trying to come up with and agree with a particular approach, I think that’s going to be very challenging indeed. So so companies like OneBanx who are leveraging this capability that’s been set up, open banking to be able to deliver a shared banking environment, I think actually is certainly going to be a trend. We’re going to be seeing more and more.
Octavian: Before we continue with the episode. We have a few words from our sponsor, ACF technologies. Optimising your customer flow is crucial to elevating your customer experiences. But where do you start? Through ACF solutions, your customer journey can reach new heights of success by implementing tailored, industry leading software that can handle all needs, from appointment bookings to virtual queuing and even event management. If you want to find out more, check the link in the description or check out w-w-w dot ACF technologies dot com.
Greg: I know that you work with Newcastle and also with glory. How does that relationship all work.
Andy: So Newcastle Building Society, they are a big building society around the Newcastle area. Then glory, who are a global based ATM cash automation provider. So glory are an investor in OneBanx and as a consequence we use some of their technologies and we’ve been deploying Glory’s technologies at Newcastle Building Society, in addition to the OneBanx hardware and our cloud based software, to enable a solution that allows cash deposits and cash withdrawals to any bank at a Newcastle Building Society branch. Now, that’s that’s a relationship that’s been going on for for a while, and there’s been quite a bit of media coverage already on it as well. And I mean, we’re really chuffed with it and it’s been a really successful implementation of our technologies.
Greg: What are some of the challenges that you face building out this model? Because I can’t imagine it’s all upwards and there’s no hurdles.
Andy: Fintech is is a hard place to start. It’s a business start up. You’ve got challenges with the costs. You’ve got challenges with with talking to your investor when you’re going to get revenue coming in. And we’ve had challenges about that. And the biggest thing for us actually hasn’t been a lot about the fundamentals of the company or even the technology. It’s actually been about the fact that we are so dependent on big organisations. So the big banks, for example, to come up with an agreement about the way they’re going to manage cash in the future, that type of thing, that’s probably been our biggest challenge. And it means that as a business, the revenue targets and estimations that we’re getting keep getting pushed back. And this is probably something that a lot of businesses in this space, especially Fintechs, probably face as well. I can just imagine the whole regulatory hurdles that people are going through, and I’m sure people are thinking about that now, and it’s no different. It’s no different for us. So it’s a tricky one to deal with because you build up a really good team, and then at some point you suddenly find that, well, the business isn’t sustainable to be able to keep that team. So you then need to reduce the size such that you can keep going. And what’s slightly frustrating is the opportunity doesn’t change. The opportunity still stays there. It’s always still there. It just it’s just a little bit further out of reach. You know, as a business, it’s keeping going in those sort of times is hard. But for me it’s all about focus. You know, as long as you’ve got the focus and you understand the opportunity and the opportunity is still there, then there’s a viable reason for you to keep pushing and keep going. And we’ve had ups and downs like everybody has, but you keep pushing on. You look back at it and you go, actually, that was really exciting. That’s actually part of the reason I think that you do fintech work is because it’s a bit of a roller coaster.
Octavian: Thank you to everyone for listening. I’ve been Octavian and I hope you’ve enjoyed the discussion. Let us know what you think of this episode by carrying on the conversation on LinkedIn at CX Insider Podcast. This episode is brought to you by ACF technologies global leaders in customer experience management solutions. Let’s get into some quick fire questions. Summer or Winter?
Andy: Oh, Summer. Oh no… Yes. Summer. I’m thinking about skiing, but no summer.
Greg: Do you like music?
Andy: Yeah, absolutely.
Greg: Which artist or band that you haven’t seen in concert that you would like to see in concert?
Andy: The Rolling Stones. It’s not even my era. I mean, I think, you know, it’s my father’s era. I’ll be honest. I’d like to see them when they were young. I’d like to see the original. You know, that would be good. Yeah.
Greg: Them a few years ago, basically.
Andy: Yeah. And I suppose I’d say that there’s a lot of bands out there. The LED Zeppelin’s, you know of the world. That would be great to see them when they were in their prime.
Octavian: The atmosphere would be incredible.
Andy: Yeah, absolutely, yeah.
Octavian: Action or comedy films?
Andy: Action Comedy films? I don’t know. Probably. Go on. Action. Action.
Greg: Red or white wine?
Andy: Actually. White. I used to be red. For some reason. I’m more white now.
Greg: Toast or Cereal?
Andy: Cereal. Better for you.
Greg: Yeah. True. True. What about favourite thing to do just in your spare time?
Andy: I’ve recently acquired a bit of land, which is the first time we’ve always had a small house. Got a little bit, a little bit. I mean, this is not a lot of land. It’s far more land than IT guy needs, put it that way. And as a consequence, I’ve started trying to make hay. Okay, this is a new endeavor that nobody thinks I’m going to keep going. But anyway, that’s. That’s my new hobby. Making hay. Yeah. Properly. Literally making hay.
Greg: What’s the plan with the hay? To sell it?
Andy: No idea.
Greg: Okay. (Laughs)
Andy: Just want to do it.
Octavian: Hopefully you stick to that because…
Octavian: You can look back at this in a few months to be like, oh.
Andy: Why did I ever start making hay?