Julian: Hey everyone. Thankyou so much for joining the Behind Company Lines podcast. Today we have NigelVerdon, CEO and co-founder of Railsr, the world's leading embedded financeexperiences platform. Nigel, thank you so much for making time today. I'mreally excited to learn about what you're doing at Railsr.

Is it Rails or Railsr? Are I I I was Iwas towing around Cause it was Railsr Bank at one point, right?  

Nigel: Sure. Yeah. Thanks tothe invitation, June it is Railsr. And we actually have a video if you go toour Twitter feed or LinkedIn, that that gives an explanation of how topronounce it because when we launch money 2020 in Europe back in June peopleare asking, how do you pronounce it? So we had to make a video just .

Julian: I I love that. And,and I'm really excited about, you know, kind of what, what you're working onand how the, the, the conception of idea came. But before we get into all that,I, I noticed your background. You were. This is not your first FinTech startup.This is one of, one of many that you've that you've been working on so far and,and kind of you have a deep background in finance and in FinTech especially.

But what was the conception, what wasbehind the idea and, and what led up to building something like realtor?  

Nigel: Sure. The the previouscompany I founded was called Currency Cloud. and we, we are in that wave of endof 2011. We, I found it in 2007, but around 2011, 2012 they sort of FinTechscene or the moniker was made up in Q 1012.

And pretty much all of us ourselves,revolut, trans wise, Cedars all Bonzo and others, all had to build the sameinfrastructure. For about nine to 15, 18 months before we started really doingany customer business. And that infrastructure was basically plumbing financialplumbing, so connecting up payments, cards bank accounts, all that sort ofstuff and getting it to work.

So we thought there must be a betterway. The same way again, we started County Cloud. We had to go to data center.Hire like racks go and rent computers, stick them in the racks, rent routes orrouters as you call them. And it was, AWS changed that with the credit card andfive minutes. You've got your data center online.

So we thought, let's do that forfinancial services infrastructure. And that's what we went out and built tohelp accelerate initially FinTech companies launching so they can literallyforget the infrastructure, nine to nine to sort of 15, 18 months and gostraight into product. And one of our early customers wage stream, which is awage advancing.

They came to us and said, as well asevery two of them, there's two co-founders, Portman and Pete asked could they,could the use, they use case be run on us? I said, Yeah, sure could be use ourAPIs. This sandbox with real money is available. You don't need to even talk tous. Those, the documentations online, they built their prototyping four daysand they launched their business in two months.

And so that was the shown of theacceleration that you can get by. Having built the infrastructure before theythought they're gonna have to take 12 plus months to, to build theinfrastructure. Yeah. So it us what AWS did, the, to the data center market ormachine run markets, and we're to do the same for, we have done the same forthe financial infrastructure market.

Julian: Yeah. What, what doyou think in, in regards to companies like Railsr and, and kind of helpingcompanies come up online and, and do, you know, building infrastructure,financial infrastructure so quickly what does that do in terms of like themacro scale in, in getting customers and accelerating, you know, revenue and,and every kind of metric.

That you see traditionally, you know,would take longer and longer to build and, and get things upline. How doesthat, how does that change the landscape today with, with companies, you know,not having to go through such long hurdles to, to get upline and active?  

Nigel: Sure. They the keything is it's allowing let's say FinTech companies to pretty much immediatelystart experimenting with their value prop and their experience and theirproduct market fit and customer acquisition rather than buildinginfrastructure. So you got immediate acceleration into. Getting your ownconsumers or SMEs, depending which, which market you serve, so that, thatacceleration has enabled companies to grow super fast.

That's in the, the launch country andbecause we're live in, in different countries, it's the same thing. Instead ofspending another 12 to 18 months launching a new country, it's you can launchin the the same space of time and have a new region. Wage students done. Thatis a, as an example. So that is the same. I keep coming back to AWS is afantastic business. Amazon built out of their own need of buildinginfrastructure. I can launch servers in Frankfurt, in Dublin, in differentparts and states and all over the world to balance everything out. And I don'thave to worry about where the, where the physical location naturally is or thephysical device.

They handle all that for us and I can launcha new business super quick and anybody's not in finance just launching abusiness on, on Amazon or Google Cloud and, and, and equivalent of reallyjumpstart being able to get a tech company into market super quick. So it's allabout acceleration and speed and doing the most important thing, which isfiguring out do customers buy your value.

And once we raise money, and I think ofthe customers on our platform, they've raised roughly about 2 billion of, ofequity financing which is a testament that if you sort of one of males up, youa good chance of raising capital as well.

Julian: Yeah. When, when youthink about getting a company or getting a customer to, you know pay for yourvalue prop and, and kind of adopt your, your platform or service or productwhat are the questions you ask or, or what's the process like from yourexperience now that this is.

I think your, it says your third FinTechstartup, but you've been advising startups and, and investing as well and, andyou know, so involved in, in building companies. What's that process like? Youknow, how do you, how do you get somebody to adopt your value prop?

Nigel: Sure. The first thingis, is you get a value prop out there. And don't worry about features. Featuresare something for delivering a value prop. And I think probably the bestexample of it was Dropbox as case book study now where they, they sort of valuefrom a landing page and a video and subscribe now to, to the launch. Theysuddenly realize, God, there's a lot of people who actually want.

Online data storage and, and availableto them. Super easy. And that is that's my advice is to, people don't gobuilding this massive product and everything. Yeah. Test the value proposition.And then the product is essentially the, the realization and delivery mechanismfor the value. So it's don't build and they will come, go and test whetherpeople buy.

Then there's the free thing. I'm, I'mquite sort of anti-free. It's it's a good, it has its positives cause it canbe, you can test whether people use it itself or not. But the biggest thingthat test whether their customer is gonna be a customers, do they. Yeah. And ifthey, they value your product.

Yeah. And they keep paying. Yes. Thensolving a clear pain point. The value prop is solving a, a usefulness orsolving a pain point, or align to do something they couldn't do to, and hence,they will be an exchange of value. They will pay for that. Yeah. And that's thebest way. Rather than just build and sell lots of features.

Cause it's, you may get some customers,but you're not gonna get a massive growth of them.  

Julian: Yeah. When, when youthink about when founder was discussing this idea of push and pull, that a lotof companies, you know, push their product out and get people to adopt it andespecially on, on their their journey to getting funding, almost likeconvincing that the market is, is now pulling their product and that it's aneed of necessity.

How much of what, what you've seen inregards to companies, how much of them are pushing products. Trying to figureout the way their customers can adopt and how many of them are, are, have a,have a genuine pull. Something that's, that's so valuable to them that, youknow, the, the degree of demand is, is so big that they have to, you know, keepup with it. What do you see?  

Nigel: So the you really dowant your product to be pulled. That's cuz it's, if it's, if it's a necessitiesof people's. And they, they live their life through it or whatever. So likeInstagram and others, the that is that's a wonderful thing to have. The, the,and that's a, a portion.

It's it's the, the, the holy grailalmost. If there's also, you can make very successful businesses by push. Andexperimenting, and it's almost the, you see the companies that have got intothe pool scenario, they've probably experimented with a ton of different valueplots, marketing message, target models, target audience, et cetera.

And a colleague of mine he's McKenzieguy. He had this business to help people fund their, their travel tickets inLondon. So it's a season ticket, which costs fair amounts of money, and they'reable to get discounts by funding the ticket. And you get an automatic at say,two month discount, and they took one month of it.

So it's they saw digital channels.Everybody would've digital channels. It wasn't till they actually hit. Good oldpaper advertising in the, in the metro in Tube that they, they become poorbecause it was placed at a relevant point as marketed a relevant point. Andthat came back to the, the, the, the sort of tenants of marketing, the pricing,positioning, product and promotion, get those rights in the marketing mix.

It's old, old, old theory. Yeah. But youbalance that, right. And you will get that sort of,  

Julian: Yeah. And, and, andyou say that's through testing?  

Nigel: Yeah. Another one withbusiness, I was, I was involved with just my advising them. Cause the guy wasa, a good friend of mine, he just asked me, Can you help him with his business?

So I said yes. And then it kinda,whether it's stupidly says yes or not, but it was, is good. And it ended upbeing sold to Santa. , but it, it started off as a business issuing invoicescalled HQ app. And and it's all about selling invoices. And then it just lookedonline, looked online, looked in the app store, how many invoicing businessesare.

There and there were just tons of them.So went to the founder, said, Look, let's see how you can make invoicesappealing to people, because they're a really boring thing. People don't wakeup in the morning, say, I'm gonna buy an invoice. And played with some ideas asa couple glasses of wine. He came up with the idea of this sort of, what areyou trying to actually, what's your business trying, what's your app trying toactually do for your customers?

And it's not invoicing. Okay. And whathe figured out is he's saving customers time. So it was for freelancers. Sofreelancers could get their weekends back free. Freelancers got their eveningsback. They're not doing accounting stuff. They're not issuing invoices. It'sall done for you and it's giving you free time.

And so as we then conversation went towhat's giving you free time. Mm-hmm. And then we sort of worked around the ideathat if you, if you make it personal, and you personalize the app. And the appchange was made to a couple of names. They, they settled on Albert was the nameAlbert gives you time back.

And, and that just changed rapidly.Changed it. It wasn't about invoices, it was just happened to do invoices. Andand they that grew that they ended up selling it to Cent after about three. Soit's a nice story of, of a great sort of fan and CEO who really tried tounderstand and listen to the fact that a bit of advice invoices are boring andnobody buys them , if you see what I mean.

Julian: Yeah. Now, now thatyou've kind of, well, obviously you know, you've been involved in, in helpingyour friend and, and you've been involved in Railsr and so many companies. Whatare the different levels or, or stages, that company that you've seen companiesgo through? And, and of course, I think we think about it a lot in terms offunding rounds, you know, and that's kind of the degree to which a company'ssuccessful.

It goes to the Seed series a, Series B,vc, maybe private equity, whatever. But what, what, what do you, what's underthe hood? What do you see as, as the successful milestones or, or levels, orstages, whatever you wanna categorize it as. And how are they very distinctfrom themselves as you think about scaling and growing a company?

Nigel: Sure. The, the avaluable company is anybody as valuable as the. . costumers Yeah. And sofunding rounds are, are just a, a sort of a, a milestone that just happensalong a path. But if, if you really work on just like understanding customer.What what pain point you're solving for them. Do you emotionally, do theyemotionally by, do you get the pull those customers build great companies And,and if you, if you hook into your customers while servicing, while solve thething that they need solving eliminate something they, they couldn't do before,like sort of the embedded finance market.

We sitting that, that all. Together endsup in financing ground. It ends up in floating because you created value whichis generally revenue that customers are paid. And so it's really everythingcenters around the customer and solving for them, and great products solved forthe customer.

Julian: Yeah. You know, I hearthis time and time again, founders talk about understanding your customer andasking questions and identifying their pain points. And I think when we discussit, we think a lot about it. As, you know, individually, you can control that,but how do you create maybe a culture around that within your organization?

Because it, it's gonna take a lot ofdifferent interactions with customers and, and a. Different employees who aredoing those interactions, but how do you build either a system or culture thatyou know, creates that, that kind of feedback loop that helps you understandyour customer more?

Nigel: Sure. It's, it's it,it's really depends on the, the type of product or, or actually you have directto consumer, it's really seeing what do they use playing with changing colorschanging the, the value prop. And then again, the data on, on is cause andeffect changing the way you market it, changing your your sort of like spend onthe marketing and different channels tho those will eventually come to like,that's the one that's gonna grow and we're gonna invest in.

And part of the why UA CAT is alwaysable to discover. With, with wells, it's say the same thing is if you got high,people are, start to use it, understanding why they're using it. So pick up thephone to them and say why you suddenly growing with your, your volumes had goneup. They just had a marketing campaign, or we found this feature of yours issuper useful in our product and hence that's growing.

Or what's stopping you growing? Causethe usage isn't going. Oh, because your product sucks at this. And so, okay, ifwe fix that, let's see what can help you grow. And it's all back down to the,the theory that came out of Salesforce essentially of customer success is reallylistening and data and understanding.

Another great source of data is isservice tickets and bug fix of bug reports. And so I think TransferWise, ourCOO was six and a half years at TransferWise. So he runs in , runs operations,products and engineering. And he turned the, the service function ofTransferWise runs one of the main things he did.

Then he ended up running theTransferWise business product. Was if you analyze all the service tickets, thethings that cause po that makes your products up, basically. Yeah. And there'senough of those tickets, fix that bit and you get rid of the tickets and youget a happier customer. Yeah. And, and you just iterate through that as well.

So you don't have to have all the newfeatures. You have to have features, which the customers don't get frustratedand raise tickets. So there's those feedback and trans wise are exceptional atthat to E as well exception at, but trans wise really have it down to a realart of understanding. Okay.

This is a bit where everybody iscomplaining about it's bottom and wrong place. They put a lot of discovery intothat and then they experiments to see which ones get the best adoption. Arethere different customer profiles, adoption, and bingo sticking the one. Thenyou fully launch it. Yeah, so it's, it's a privilege to be able to interactwith a customer every day.

And I mean, our customers use our, we domillions and millions of dollars of transactions every day. And you can seewhat they do and what they use. And then it's basically good old fashionedpicking up the phone as well as data. Yeah. Yeah.  

Julian: In regards to, youknow, you in your day to day as, as you know, being the, you know, one of theco-founders, you know, the CEO of Railer, and now that it's becoming, you know,more of a, you know, larger company what are some responsibilities that, thatyou have on in your day to day that we might not know of or that founders mightKind of have in their experience that they, they don't, at a smaller scale,but, but maybe have to be more responsible of and adjust to as, as they growand as their company grows.

Nigel: I think the, the thesort of role of the ceo depending on where, where your background is, is itdoes change in myself. I'm primarily focused on investors and the market andgetting the messaging out. So very much the public facing side of what thebrand is around the company. That's what I do in my, in my day job.

In primarily that's, that's what you dothen, then you've got to also deal with and make sure your team are okay andsure they're focused and they're looked after all the care and feeding piecesthat need to be done. Yeah. And what I'm, I'm lucky with, I've got a good agood COO who, who then basically runs the business with with the team.

With the team around him. So, and andhe's a very product led person being trained in prior to that Visa prior tothat Pay Safe, and originally in the early days of e-com, at tesco.com. Soit's, that's for me occasionally. I have to even I have to get out and edit thewebsite as a, Actually we've got a request that's just coming on Slack.

Cuz the person normally does it is, ison holiday. So I've got even edit the website.

Julian: Yeah. What's what'shard about your job?  

Nigel: Hard is keepingkeeping everything motivated at sit and just dealing with, you get thrown curveballs all the time. And just just being able to deal with the curve balls.

That's the hardest thing of the job isthey think it's playing sailing for a while and suddenly something has comesoutta nowhere. That's, that's difficult to deal with.  

Julian: Yeah. Yeah. You know,in regards to railer and, and the success you've had, and I think you recentlyclosed you a recent round of funding, so congrats on that.

What is on the agenda coming coming inthe near future, what are you most excited about in terms of either thepartnerships or the advance. The technology, the platform that you're buildingwhere, where is the company at and what are you excited about in, in the nextchapter? After, after the recent milestone,

Nigel: I think, I think the,what's super interesting, this current market is probably the most sort ofhardest market and depressed markets I've, I think I've ever seen in mylifetime.

And I've had friends of mine who stilltrade in the institutional credit markets and they're seeing. Many, many of themajor banks writing down credit books and selling credit off of 80, 70 cents ina dollar. So, and the utters of it's worse than a credit crunch. And, and sowe're in a, a pretty poor state.

Now, where that gives is opportunitybecause greater capital is just not really available at the moment. Pretty mucheverybody's looking after their portfolio. Allocating capital to existingbusinesses to get 'em through this, this this, this time and this area. Equityisn't being priced.

Growth equity. You look at barta,PayPal, and revenues going up, Current share price going down. And it's dropped75% since sort of December last year, October, November, December, last year.Grab has dropped 80% out of rotation, for example. So it's not a great marketequity. Growth equity has not been priced prices than near zero.

Yeah. So in that side market growthequity is a hard to come by. B doesn't add you any value into your own equityvalue. But it is a good time to look at m and a and different types ofacquisition. Different types of merger situations and all that is a marketwhere you can bring people together to create value to creating a biggerwhether product edition, whether it's country addition business, if you can getlike-minded people, cuz that's how you can take growth out green two companiesrather than funding by growth equity.

So it's quite exciting at the moment to.Working in, in the market and looking at multiple m and a opportunities.  

Julian: Yeah. What's ifeverything goes well, what's the long term vision for browser?  

Nigel: We'd love to, likeAWS's and the data center market that be the financial or the internet or the,the financial infrastructure business that anybody running finance in any usecase, whether it's banking, wallets, cards, credit.

Rewards all, all runs and males up.  

Julian: Yeah. Yeah. Is thereanything that I, I haven't asked you that I should have?  

Nigel: What you haven't, Youasked me things I do outside work. Yeah. Sorry. I mean, one thing say justadvice from founders is being a founder is actually pretty damn lonely. Becauseyou, you are the person who ultimately everything sits in your shouldersultimately and carry quite a lonely place.

And so sort of, and mentally it's candrain you and, and everything. I think one of the things that really focus onis eat well. Do your sport or exercise, whatever you do or your other hobbieslike reading and get away from the work. Cuz it doesn't have to be allconsuming and you can get, get into quite estate mentally to a time.

I think there's many, many founderstalking about that. Thankfully. .  

Julian: Yeah. Yeah. And yeah,that echos a lot of, of what I'm hearing in, in terms of just, it, it's such along journey. It's a marathon for a lot of companies and, and the growth issteady. But it's like you have to be conscious about your own personal statebecause it directly influences the day to day operations, how you motivate yourteam and, and everything that encompasses.

You know, long term because, you know,that's the short term sacrifice of working a 16 hour day might not lead to, tothe long-term sacrifice. And having that balance as is is super important. Nowthat we're coming at time, I always like to ask this question, one for selfresearch, but also for my audience as well.

What books or people have influenced youthe most?  

Nigel: I mean the I'm verymuch an outdoors person and there was a guy called Chris Bonnington who is a, aclimber and he's an old man there. He's chairman, I think of Birdhouse, youknow, the outdoor kit now. Yeah. He's, he was a massive influence as a kid.

Saw slide shows of him climbing upEverest and. and another chap, So Knox Johnson, who's the first guy, singlehanded solo sailor around the, around the world. Yeah. They quite impressive,impressive characters.  

Julian: Yeah. I heard you're,you're, you're familiar with climbing as well. You, you climbed, I think, what,17,000 feet in the Himalayas or something like that.

Is is that,  

Nigel: Yeah, that is, I wantthat. The the backside of Anna Anna's in, in Western Paul. There's LA andthat's about 17,000 feet. Yeah. But it does, does show that you think, Oh, itmust be easy. It's just put one foot in front of the other, but at heightwithout, Yeah. Painful. And I thought I was fit and no. Yeah, that'sthing.  

Julian: Is there any, is thereany other, like, milestone in, in terms of hikes or, or you know, kind ofenvironmental conquering that, that you're excited for, that you have on yourhorizon?  

Nigel: Yeah, there's a,there's a route across Corsica called the G 14 condo on accounts . And that isa two week like high mountain route, especially a rich, You walk around for twoweeks.

Yeah, absolutely. Start abuse. And theother one take some retirement or take a sabbatical is a cam. That goes out toSan, that's about three months walking across southern France, ese over to theocean. That's very spiritual. Wow. Was it Kirk Douglas or Michael Douglas wasin it. He lost his son in the mountains and went in a sort of like a, a voyageof discovery by walking the Camino.  

Julian: Wow. Yeah. Well, goodluck with that . I hope, I hope to hear that it's a, it's a fun and successfultrip. And before we end the conversation, I always like to give our founders achance to let us know where we can support the product, where we can look fornews and, and be a part of the vision, the mission.

But give us your LinkedIns, theTwitters, anything that we. We can know to, to be a part of the, the missionand, and the the product.  

Nigel: Sure. It's LinkedInjust greater it's R a I l s r. Search out the video. Tells you how to pronounceit. Yeah, and I'm the only I think on LinkedIn, so feel free to connect withme.

Say you've saw it on the podcast, youget feedback from, from the podcast. And also www wells.com. If you want to tryout the APIs there's a sandbox on there and a real money sandbox. Just click toget keys. You can be up and running, sending and receiving money, and your ownsort of like mini sort of banking app if you, if you're able to write one inunder two hours.

Well, and our intern test, if you canjust sort of create a, a very, very basic rank and air rank in two hours, then,then you've got an internship.  

Julian: Fantastic. Well, thankyou so much Nigel, for being on the show. I hope you enjoyed yourself. I lovelearning about your experience the different advice that you had and one, alsohow you think things philosophically, but also how you organize into making asuccessful business.

I'm excited to share this with ouraudience. But yeah, thank you again for being on the show. I hope you enjoyedyourself.  

Nigel: Nice. Thank you,Julian, for the invite. A pleasure question.

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