 So ten years ago a bank was a bank branch where I went to see and chat with them and if I had said ten years ago that in the future you're gonna have a robot talking back to you over text message and having attitude added people who would have called me crazy so have we kind of arrived in the future now tell me about Clio and yeah so Clio is a digital assistant that sits on top of all of your bank accounts we've always focused on building a better banking experience than rebuilding a bank and so far it's really work it's been two years we've grown to 750,000 users we operate in the UK the States and Canada and we really focused on making money simple easy effortless which is something not the retail banks have never done or never really focused on. So tell me how does it work like why why should I be chatting to a robot. Yeah it's a little weird I always say we want to get to a hundred million daily active users that have a habitual relationship with Clio and it's an odd thing to say to have a relationship with an AI but there's hundreds of thousands of people talking to Clio every single day if you connect your bank accounts to Clio she'll categorize your spending to be proactive help you save money the big thing for us is being really intelligent and proactive which no banking app has ever done before every banking app you go to it's just your balance your transactions and not a lot else for Clio we're trying to be intelligent personable we have a tone of voice and a personality with this AI and that's really resonated with the market it's grown kind of incredibly quickly in such a short space of time which is which is pretty fun and who are the kind of people who are using Clio like should I tell my mom to use Clio or should I tell my daughter to use Clio yeah or both about two years ago I tried to get my mom to sign up to Clio she wouldn't even sign up so it's definitely not your mom our average audience average kind of users 27 median salaries 26k yeah mid-month balance is like 44 pounds which is kind of incredible to say and 42% of our users have overdraft fees every single month which is which is insane this is very much a millennial kind of mainstream product and yeah that's been our focus ever since we started okay cool so kind of covered the basics of Clio let's let's focus a talk to talk about kind of gross yeah fundraising you know two topics which probably are close to heart for every for every founder you know I know from my experiences have been the things which have been keeping me up at night for for many many years but before we go into that let's kind of zoom out why why are you building Clio like you know you could you could have a great job at a bank you know you could work for another company like you know why goes through all this pain of building a business yeah I was really lucky to study machine learning and computer science I came out of uni and worked at Wonga of FinTech as data scientist and it was really there that I was like it wasn't longer though it's broken but it was retail bank is a whole if you look at all the data in retail banking there's so many customers getting screwed with overdraft fees FX charges credit card after credit card and the bank is there not to help them but to push more product onto them so I thought they had to be someone that did something better and secondly it was personal experience probably a lot like transfer wise I was going to my overdraft every month earning a good salary that was really annoying me and pissing me off so I built I just built a script that would log into my banking and push proactive advice to me that helped me manage my money and it changed how I thought and as soon as I got out there I knew that there was a product that would serve the market so for me it's always been a mission to help people not get ripped off by the bank which I think plays very similarly to transfer wise as well what was it from you that why did you go from Skype where you're doing a lot of money you did really well you're directed strategy to doing it all again like you must have I was I mean for for me and for my co-founder crystal it was really seeing seeing ourselves at you know the way banks are doing it is incredibly screwed up and yeah a very bad experience and in parallel thinking of like after Skype I felt that would be really hard to go and get a job you know kind of yeah I spent seven years of my life building Skype from an idea on the back of an appkin an appkin until few hundred million customers and you know at one point I felt okay like it's been a great journey at Skype but if I don't leave now I'm probably gonna be stuck here forever you know life was good I left Skype without having a plan of what to do and then we were kind of started chatting about this money transfer issues that we've seen and it fit very well with what I wanted to do as in you know we made the world smaller with Skype but and after that you really want to work on something which has impact so things that we can do something which helps hundreds of millions of people I was pretty pretty cool for me and seeing kind of learning how broken the financial system was yeah it was in a way then it was kind of a no-brainer to get started yet you know once you get started it's pretty damn hard like I remember the moment that was when I left Skype we were signing up like few hundred thousand people every day yeah and then launching transfer wise in the first months we had maybe I remember we had 96 users after a month I was kind of depressing okay so kind of let's talk about the growth side you've mentioned that today Clio has 750,000 users that's a pretty cool number yeah can you help me put it in context yeah we're signing up a hundred thousand new customers you connects a bank every single month now which going back two years when I was just starting out in Clio was a far cry from that comparing to our competitors will probably be beating Monzo the next couple of months where we're growing I think faster than any other FinTech which is pretty cool to say after such a short period of time I think the reason we've been able to do that is because we've not focused on building the financial infrastructure the hard stuff the regulation we've really focused on being the interface for financial services and doing that globally like from day one we always had a global mindset and that was much influenced by you and Nicholas who came in very early that ambition to be a global platform is always been there and launching in the US spurred a massive amount of growth for us which was great you know and I think the only reason we've had success so far is we've been incredibly focused on the products and we've really worked hard on it every single day we've not got distracted which is pretty easy to do being a startup founder I mean it is it is pretty amazing 750,000 users in two years it's definitely head over transfer wise was back then so I do think you might you might have the rights to claim the fastest growing FinTech company ever that's that's pretty cool and let's go from you know when you built a script for yourself yeah how did that become what Cleo is now kind of a product market fit then and all of that stuff which is that's a hard part you know I can I can tell from my experience it kind of in a way it feels it was easy it was never easy like we we launched a very scrappy product the classic MVP and then it took us a while to learn from that you know we we called it peer-to-peer foreign exchange I don't even know what that means you know kind of after launching we were looking at how customers talk about it and then we started realizing that you know we're talking about money transfer sending money our competition is banks like in UK you have many brokers doing doing similar things you know we kind of in the beginning didn't quite know what we're competing with them but then we kind of realized that banks is a competition talking to customers we realize what our product pillars are it's really simple it's about being cheap it's about being fast easy to use and then we've been prioritizing everything we do kind of around these pillars yeah so tell me how has it been for for you yeah it was interesting actually talking about it last night and how you kind of knew from day one that saving people money and make it simple and fast was there for as it was a little bit more kind of round about I spent the first three months of clear building an app that absolutely no one wanted had loads of graphs as a data scientist I really liked it no one else did so I eventually got to this idea that has to be simple has to be super simple has to be fun has to be friendly and I got to this idea of what if I could just you know text clear what if I could just send an emoji get my balance back and it started there was a emoji banking which sounds pretty lame but that had real product market fit and I got a video demo on the landing page and as soon as I got that out there to people there was thousands of people signing up to the waiting list and every month after it's just grown 20 30% and it's been one of these it's been it's been hard to build it but it's been easy because there's been demand and there's been like it's just resonated the market and it's always the cliched VC thing of you know you kind of know it when you see it and I think you really do once you like hit on that problem you almost feel it as a company which which is cool but yeah a lot of hard work as well if we look at the metrics a kind of fully agree months and months gross beats everything else but yeah what else have you been measuring so we were big believers in that NPS a transfer wise like we've actually never taken a look at retention you know maybe because you know we're we believe in our product and we know is that people really say have nowhere to turn so we've never paid attention to retention to cohort curves look incredibly similar since the beginning yeah but NPS has been our northern star and you know we've been using NPS to measure different markets you know we kind of know things are well if NPS hits 50 60 you know we were again I was incredibly proud last week when there was a study from you gov and say say had done an independent study on most recommended brands in UK and transfer wise came out on top of it was an NPS of 83 you know we we haven't even shared our NPS numbers a lot publicly you know having having you gov say the transfer wise NPS is 83 which is the highest in UK is pretty cool and kind of a testament to what we've been doing but what's what's it been for you that's incredible like an 83 NPS I think that's like Apple Tesla kind of numbers which is insane we're definitely not quite there yet or about 60 for us we've always focused on engagement and retention it's been if you look at the space no one has ever been able to crack that by building the interface so people have tried savings apps and they've tried tried to build banks and cards for us we really focused on retention and engagement for day one and I'll say for any startups in the audience that is the most important thing to get right there's no point thinking about distribution or growth until you have retention curves that asymptote above zero at some point that is the you know the classical definition of part of market fair so I think what we did really well from the early days was being maniacal on pushing that up every single cohort thinking what do we do next what's next asking our customers focusing on that it's the it's the most important thing for any consumer startup fix your attention fix your engagement the distribution can come later you can raise a lot of VC capital and do a lot of marketing but it's really got them hard to build a great product that people love and you know I think that's what drives us a clear every single day and has that kind of led you to prioritize certain features deep priority like what's the most engaging message that clear can send you know yeah I personally still like Cleo telling me that I got I got my paycheck but you know what's it what's it for as a population at large yeah it's been a it's been very different from other services it's a very proactive service most apps you go into kind of passively Cleo comes to you she talks to you she helps you and we do some really interesting and odd experimentation with it we have a game on a Saturday where people can win 200 quid if they answer questions about their money and you'd probably very surprised in sort into anyone would do that but we have a hundred and fifty thousand people playing that game every single week it's a little bit odd it's a little bit bizarre but we just constantly experimented and done what I used to told us to it's never been any kind of visionary product genius it's always been what are all customers telling us what are we gonna build next how do we do that as quick as possible and if you focus on that and you keep that cycle time really low you'll end up building a great product do you see any difference between geographic markets so I mean I know that US gross is going kind of gangbusters but the kind of is there anything you can generalize that UK is different to US I thought they would be when we launched in the US I thought it'd be radically different different tone of voice different everything it's surprising that if you go to every single kind of Western market retail banking is very much the same and broken in all the same ways as well so it's the same problems that we're serving for customers in America as a Canada and now France Germany Spain Australia we're going to Singapore Hong Kong next they're the same fundamental issues that the big four banks each these geographies push onto their customers and for us that's helping people save money giving them control giving them backs in power into their back on you like have you found any differences or has it been I mean surprisingly not that much you know wherever we go we're in more than 40 countries it's it's the same story of banks overcharging customers underserving some yeah kind of surprising that there is not that much difference like I was last week I was in Sydney and in Australia there are four banks that's like a stranglehold of the market by four banks who are amongst the most profitable of anywhere in the world and there's no innovation coming from these people it's amazingly ridiculous you go to Japan very similar you know we we launched in Brazil a couple years ago yeah you know surprisingly the product as we had it in the beginning like we weren't proud of it I would say it was an MVP but the growth in Brazil was absolutely ridiculous and what it came down to was that the banks were even worse yeah even a product which in the UK probably wouldn't have moved much was incredibly successful in Brazil just because the competition was so so poor it's really there's so much opportunity in retail banking there is such a big market to address and there's he's basically untapped opportunity to build multi hundred billion dollar companies like I really do think in five years there'll be multi hundred billion dollar companies transfer wise will definitely be one it's the growth is insane but you know what I get really excited about is building a new kind of financial services one that works for the customer that doesn't rip them off is actually there to be helpful and maybe they'll be a trillion dollar company in the next five years I really hope they will be but there's a yeah there's just a huge opportunity which is exciting what are what are some of the other things you've done for growth so a transfer wise we we we spent quite a lot of effort on PR in the beginning just kind of talking about the problem educating the market and I think it's probably somewhat special to us because people did not quite know they're being screwed so badly by the bank so yeah we had to do and we're continuing to lots of education like you know at times I was doing one press interview a day which was quite a big chunk of my time so it went for it you know I and maybe say it's a one geographical difference here is that when we launched in 2011 you know bank bashing was a really hot topic and we had tons of fun yeah actually surprisingly seemed to be quite the UK centric like when we moved to US couple years later the bank bashing topics actually did not resonate that much like what what's any anything are you doing much on press like what are the gross channels yeah we've I've been so focused on I think most people should do this as well it's a little bit of a different story I've been incredibly focused on building the products and making that really work you know I think fundamentally press can be fleeting and in the very early days until you have revenue and you have growth I wouldn't you know I would actually advise not to spend a lot of time talking to the press I would advise spending a bunch of time making the product as good as possible and when it's working that's when you should probably come to slush and speak on stage with tablet but until you've got that just build a goddamn product and it's also what your strengths are right you were the director of strategy at Skype you literally built Skype from the first employee I was a computer scientist I was much better suited to building a product so I think you should definitely place your strength as well yeah I'm probably gonna have to a bit more press in the future but so far it's been word of mouth that has been really good experimentation and been good at paid it's distributions just a lot about experimentation there's no kind of silver bullet for getting a lot of users it's about trying a bunch of different things over and over and over again until you can drive down your CPA and hopefully your MPS gets so good that people will organically refer it and we're definitely at that tipping point now so we have a 60 MPS and it is growing every single month but yeah it's goddamn hard it's even when you have a product market fit is hard I mean word of mouth is by far the biggest channel for transfer wise now and yeah I remember it was I was a Swedish guy Henry who was working on our on our gross probably 2013 yeah and like getting to the seeing a graph that you know we looked at kind of how many people get referred by people the based on our based on their MPS score it was a very simple correlation you know kind of obvious but you know people who have an MPS give you an answer of 10 invite three times more people than the people who give you an MPS answer of five so pretty simple let's switch to to fundraising so you've I mean you've had a pretty easy time fundraising you've raised 13 million dollars so far kind of what's what's a what's a story behind the successful fundraiser yeah how do you create that FOMO and how do you get to storm going in a yeah I think you're the master of this so I'll let you talk more on it but I think the most fundamental thing for any fundraising there's no tricks or tips it is just put a good graph on the board if you put numbers on the board every single month and you keep delivering it comes very easy to fundraise comes very easy to hire the business moves faster if you can just focus on growth and focus on building a good product it makes everything much easier so for example our series a fundraiser I sent an email to two VCs and had a term sheet in two and a half weeks didn't have to waste time or energy fundraising which is probably the most precious thing as a startup founder I'd actually advise not to spend a lot of headspace thinking about fundraising but you know some of the some of the things I think we did quite well is we always had kind of engineered inflection points in the business as we went to raise so the last round we just launched in the US the numbers were going mental sent an email to some investors and it's like oh of course we'll put money in it's probably the easiest thing you do as a startup founder but I say you literally raised 200 300 million now maybe more what's been so actually it's surprisingly like you talk about inflection points forever around like I say for us the story has usually been more of the same like if I if I think back back you know okay seed is a little bit different I mean even actually we launched our seeds the product had been live for eight months so we could show some numbers you know we could show repeat usage but since then you know ABCD it's pretty much been more of the same like you know going into our series a we're showing you know we're growing probably 15 x year over year yeah it becomes a pretty easy story like you know good at our C round we're probably growing 4x a year or so that that really kind of helps you get gets a competitive tension happening in the market which allows you to to complete a successful fundraise you know it's I agree with you not to spend much time on it yet you know for us it kind of ended up being typically end of the year yearly process of fundraising which it still does take up you know probably more time than it should but I guess that's that's life 100% there I came from an accelerator entrepreneur first and it was it's interesting seeing the cohorts coming after and coming for advice you really notice who's going to fundraise very very quickly the ones that are successful at it are just so maniacal and so they're just going to get it done they're going to get it done that week they're going to push investors to make it happen and then the people that you see kind of yeah maybe we'll do this maybe we'll do that they'll kind of meander about a bit it put some deadlines on it get all those meetings in one week just just crank it out and force the yeah force the deal he and it's very easy to kind of spend six months fundraising and doing lots of pitching it's kind of fun to a degree but I would just like biggest bit of advice make it happen quickly don't spend too much headspace on it minimize the time that you fundraise so you can get back to talking to users and building a product which you know in the end it's the only thing that really matters excellent so I think with that we're done so cool thank you very much and hopefully in 10 years time we're all going to have an an angry AI powered assistant talking at us from our phone 100% thank you cool thanks