December 3, 2025 • 45 mins
In the creaky world of financial advising, where compliance paperwork devours hours and clunky software feels like a relic from the dial-up era, a New Zealand startup is deploying AI to free advisers from the drudgery.
Marloo, co-founded by Hardy Michel, who cut his teeth as head of operations at Wellington-based share trading platform Sharesies, isn't building robo-advisers to supplant humans.
Instead, he is using artificial intelligence to free up advisors so they can focus on the trust-building conversations that truly matter to their clients. In the latest episode of The Business of Tech podcast, Michel shares how his London-based venture is already winning paying customers across four countries, proving New Zealand fintech can scale globally from day one.
Relocating to London in 2022, Michel joined Estonian-founded investing platform Lightyear, helping it launch across 22 European countries amid regulatory mazes far more complex than New Zealand's.
"I felt like I'd really rounded out probably the missing piece of my knowledge and learning, which was kind of how do you build the machine at scale?" Michel told me.
Freeing advisors from low-value admin
That experience, combined with angel investing via Blackbird Ventures, convinced him to co-found Marloo with fellow Sharesies alum Shakeel Lala.
Marloo’s mission? Financial advice is potentially transformational but inaccessible, the founders realised. Advisers spend 70% of their time on low-value admin, from anti-money laundering checks to 50-page suitability reports that gather dust.
Existing tools are clunky, with Michel describing the "Windows 95-esque" systems financial advisors had to choose from before Marloo arrived on the scene. Marloo offers a hyper-specialised AI note-taker for client meetings. Unlike transcription tools, it sifts through hours of chit-chat to extract the 5% that counts – goals, risk tolerance, fees – and structures it for compliance or client follow-ups.
From there, the AI evolves into a full operating system, turning advisors into "reviewers, not doers", Michel said.
Finish a meeting, and Marloo drafts an annual review letter in two minutes, 95% ready for a quick edit.
"You no longer have to take notes after the meeting, have a second person in the meeting taking notes for them, or rely on anything else other than our product," Michel explained.
The result? Advisors onboard more clients without burnout, firms cut outsourcing costs, and the human element, crucial for navigating life's emotional money milestones like retirement or inheritance, stays front and centre.
Giving robo-advice a wide berth
This augmentation ethos sets Marloo apart from robo-advice hype. "If robo-advice was kind of as good as it was cracked up to be, we'd all be using it right now. And the reality is we're not," Michel told me.
He predicts regulators will be reluctant to green-light fully AI-driven advice, given the trust factor. Instead, Marloo aims to overhaul unit economics: lower fees, drop minimum balances (now often $500,000+), and make quality guidance available to more than just the wealthy.
"The mission is [to] transform the underlying [profit and loss] in the unit economics of what it means to deliver advice to a customer so that we can actually reverse that," he said
Marloo recently raised NZ$4.6 million in pre-seed funding to accelerate development.
"We're going to raise a little bit of money to answer a true false question in 12 months... that we are confident we can spend the next 10 years working on this and it's going to be a massive business," he recounts of the Blackbird pitch.
As AI bubbles inflate, Michel warns against shiny tech without substance.
"It's never been easier to build... [but] also... to deliver a really shitty product experience," he said.
Marloo, he added, prioritises delight – a consumer-grade user experience in a B2B world. For an industry pricing out everyday clients amid rising fees (up 6% in the UK last year), this could be the reset financial advice needs.
Tune into episode 129 of The Business of Tech, powered by 2degrees, for the full conversation, where Michel dives deeper into Estonia's entrepreneurial edge, Sharesies' early battles, and why financial advice must stay human-powered. Available now on all major podcast platforms.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:02):
Welcome to the Business of Tech powered by two Degrees.
I'm Peter Griffin with my second interview from London. This
time I'm talking to Hardy Michelle, co founder alongside Shaquill
Lala and Ben Robertson of the AI powered fintech startup Marlou.
Hardy's a veteran of the New Zealand startup scene, having
(00:23):
helped build Chare's Eads from the ground up. He's now
in London building Marlou, an AI powered operating system for
wealth managers and advisors. The core idea is simple strip
out the soul crushing admin compliance paperwork and manual note
taking that can eat up around seventy percent of an
advisor's day and let them focus on what they actually
(00:44):
signed up for, real human quality advice. We talk a
lot about the rise of AI in the financial sector,
but Hardy isn't any big advocate of so called robo
advice or automating the entire process seeds an essential ongoing
role for humans in the loop when it comes to
(01:04):
dispensing financial advice. Marlou is a type of hyper specialized
smart assistant that listens to client meetings structures. The key
advice points and auto generates drafts of advice documents in
minutes instead of days. Hardy also talks about why this
isn't just about efficiency, but transforming the economics of advice
(01:26):
so more people can actually afford it. Marlo, which was
founded in August twenty twenty four, recently raised four point
six million New Zealand in a seed funding round led
by Blackbir Adventures, with a host of successful founders also contributing,
which is always a good sign. Hardy recounts his Estonian
adventure working for light Chair, which is like the robin
(01:47):
Hood of Europe, and what it's like growing a key
we start up in multiple countries simultaneously while it still
has its roots back here in Wellington. Here's Hardy Michelle,
co founder of marlu Hearty Welcome to the business of tech.
Speaker 2 (02:06):
How are you doing fantastic?
Speaker 1 (02:08):
Thank you for having me, Well, thank you for having me.
I'm back in the tech space after meeting Matt Herbert
from track Suit yesterday. This wonderful place. You just had
a big gathering of New Zealand Australian founders and investors
a couple of nights ago. Rowan Simpson trade Me co
founder was in town, so it definitely seems like this
(02:29):
is a bit of a gathering point for antipathy and entrepreneurs.
Speaker 2 (02:33):
Yeah, it's becoming a second home. So if you're visiting
or in town, drop on by, you'll definitely run into
a few familiar faces.
Speaker 1 (02:40):
Yeah, it's called the tech space in Farringdon and a
lot of businesses here, big, big buzz and yeah, and
how long have you been in London? Now?
Speaker 2 (02:51):
I've been here for just over three years. So I
was previously at Chasia's in Wellington where I was there
for kind of six or seven years and actually got
headhunted for a roll over here kind of just as
the kind of pandemic and travel was starting to become
a thing again. In kind of mid twenty twenty two,
I received a LinkedIn DM from, funnily enough, some Estonians.
(03:15):
And you would think when Estonians are sliding into your
LinkedIn dms that you may not want to respond, but
they looked really interesting and so kind of the long
story short was there were two Estonian founders who were
previously at wise the money kind of transferred company that
you might have come across that as a phenomenal Estonian
(03:35):
founded business, and that actually kind of spun out of Skype,
another very well known company. So Estonia Punch was massively
above its weight. And these two had been very early
at wise, they'd been responsible for building a huge amount
of the product and that business kind of across operations,
product and engineering, and they decided to build a retail
investing platform very similar to Chaz's. And they had gone
(03:59):
all around the world looking for people who had actually
built these companies from scratch. And really what that meant
was the infrastructure that was required to kind of run
the you know, the systems, the money flows, the share trading.
There's a lot of infrastructure that's required to do that,
and not many people have actually built it. And they
looked all around the world and they found me.
Speaker 1 (04:21):
Wow, So light Year. I think it's been described as
like the robin Hood of Europe. So another shared trading platform.
So what was that like? Sort of coming to London
but a very different environment to obviously what you were
dealing with in New Zealand one country, were much smaller country,
(04:42):
much closer access to all the regulators, and had to
figure out what you needed to do to suddenly being
in London working for Estonians with the European focus.
Speaker 2 (04:51):
Yeah, yeah, it was a massive shift, I would say.
So for like contacts, there was a between that LinkedIn
DM me having spent a couple of days interviewing and
receiving a full offer to relocate that included my now
wife as well and visa sponsorship, and we moved six
weeks to the day after that. So it was very
(05:12):
clear from the outset that there was no messing around here.
It's like we were doing this and we landed in London,
and so the business was set up between Talent and
Estonia and London. We're building teams in both places. And yeah,
we ended up launching twenty two European countries at once
straight off the bat. We you know, were licensed both
in Europe and in the UK, and then eventually became
(05:34):
directly licensed in the UK. So you're just dealing with
this kind of just phenomenal scale, but also a huge
amount of local nuance and context that you don't necessarily
get in New Zealand because you're only dealing with one market, right.
So it was a really amazing experience and kind of
taught me one how to think about kind of building
(05:55):
at scale and being in big markets and then two,
the team there was exceptional, So it was early robinhood wise,
you know, Revolute Skype, kind of all of the big
global kind of fintech success stories that kind of cherry
picked some of the best people from those companies. So
it was amazing for me to kind of place myself
into that environment, really test and challenge myself and take
(06:18):
away a huge amount of kind of personal learning and
knowledge in addition to you know, the day to day.
Speaker 1 (06:24):
What insights did you get into working with colleagues and
founders from Estonia's there's some similarities smaller advanced nation like
New Zealand, but just what they've managed to achieve on
the digital economy front, both as a nation but in
terms of some of the companies that they've created, and
that serial entrepreneurship where people are investing in the next generation.
(06:48):
Is a bit of that going on in New Zealand.
But they really have cracked it in Estonia, haven't they.
Speaker 2 (06:51):
Yeah. I would really encourage people to travel and go
to Talent if you have the opportunity, you can kind
of do Helsinki and Talent in one weekend because you
can varry between the two. But I was basically building
a team in talent. I was there a week a
month for kind of eighteen months, spent a huge amount
of time, and they're an amazing group of people for
a few reasons. One, they're kind of essentially first generation,
(07:16):
you know, like business owners as how it would frame it.
So you know, they were part of the Soviet Union.
Most people there over the age of thirty, you know,
grew up with a huge amount of hardship. And so
you know, through the founding of Skyte and Wise and
now several other companies that have spun out, they've seen that,
you know, being entrepreneurial, working really hard, getting equity and
(07:39):
upside is a real and concrete way to generate wealth.
You know. So I think the said I saw was
like Wise employees one percent of Estonians as an example. Yeah,
and they're able to earn you know, like really well.
Wise is now ipo, Skyte was acquired by Microsoft, I think,
and it's just been a real way to realize wealth
(08:01):
in that country. And so everyone is just so driven
and on board with the mentality of we're going to
work incredibly hard and we're going to do it in
this like incredibly productive way. And then kind of the
overarching pieces that the you know, Estonian government is incredibly
forward thinking and tech first and so you know, for example,
I have like an Estonian like e residency for example,
(08:25):
so you know, you go through an application process, you
pay one hundred euros and you actually have the ability
to start a business in Estonia. And they have you know,
a very fair tax system. Basically everyone holds their assets
within a business. They have a flat twenty percent tax rate.
You can you know extract or kind of pay out
(08:45):
a certain amount tax free every year. It's really interesting,
but anyone in the world can come and build a
business in Estonia. There is a key concept. So it's
really really interesting.
Speaker 1 (08:55):
Yeah, they're really yeah, setting out putting all the ingredients
in there for to encourage that sort of entrepreneurship. So
hopefully we are we're part of this group called I
think the D seven or something, which we do talk
to Estonia and Ireland and Denmark and that quite a bit.
So hopefully we're we're taking on board some of those lessons.
(09:15):
But just going back that, yeah, quite an extensive startup
experience all the way back to a really cool startup
book track, which as someone who've been publishing and that
really loved. You know, we're basically an audio soundscape for
a book that you would buy. That would have been
a really interesting project to work on.
Speaker 2 (09:35):
Yeah, it was fascinating. That was my yeah, kind of
first foray into working for a startup. And yeah, we
built amazing technology and worked with you know, incredible companies
Audible for example, and the US. You know, probably unfortunate
market timing. I would say, like had that company been
(09:56):
founded a few years later or with the technology that
we have now, I think it would have been you know,
really well changing. But there was a timing element that
that wasn't quite right. But you know, I was able
to work kind of alongside the founders to really kind
of drive and understand kind of everything that they were doing,
how they were operating, how they were raising capital, and
(10:16):
so yeah, it was just the perfect kind of early
learning experience in the way that I would probably phrase
my time in New Zealand was just trying to learn
from the best possible people who ahead of me, who
I could absorb knowledge off with the goal of one
day starting my own company.
Speaker 1 (10:31):
Yeah, and then obviously that that was a great experience
at Shears's. You had those you know that founding team
is one of the strongest founding teams to have a
three CEO relationship that after all these years, are still
going strong with you sign your Brooke and Leyton and
seems to work really well where they have, you know,
(10:51):
complementary strengths, but they will make decisions collectively to care
there and just proliferating in terms of the the service offerings,
you know, going into credit cards and all sorts of things, loans,
So helping set that up. Being head of operations, you know,
back in the early days, that must have been quite
(11:14):
a job, you know, trying to figure out how do
we put this all together in a way that is compliant,
is trustworthy, get people out of these stodgy brokerages, and
you know, tens hundreds of thousands of people are investing
every week now as a result of the groundwork that
you helped lay.
Speaker 2 (11:32):
Yeah, it was such a cool experience on reflection, incredibly
hard work at the time, And I think the interesting
thing for me is I was kind of the first
person to join the business who wasn't one of the
founders and didn't actually know anyone, so I was introduced
through some mutual friends. I was moving from Auckland to
Wellington at the time. It was kind of all very
serendipitous and kind of my decision making process was I
(11:55):
actually grew up doing a bunch of cycling, so I
wrote and track Cycling, I representing New Zealand. I won
national titles kind of through the age group, so it
was super fun. And one of the people I cycled
a bit with was Elliott Crowther from push Pay, and
I didn't know too much about what he was doing
other than you know, he was like selling home ventilation
(12:16):
units with HIV and then he started this kind of business,
push pay, and it was around you know, egiving and anyway,
they tibsequently ended up ipoing right, and I wanted to
buy push pay shares because I knew Elliott, and I
got halfway through the sign up process with ASP Securities,
I think it was, and I pulled the pen and
I only had, you know, maybe five hundred dollars to invest.
(12:36):
Even if I paid the brokerage, it still would have
been a phenomenal investment in that point of time. But
I'd actually never invested before and I really wanted to,
and I knew that there were a bunch of other
people that I knew that were in the same position
and kind of having come from a few startups beforehand,
like they had enough capital to pay me for at
least twelve months, and like that was a pretty good bet.
(12:58):
And I was moving from Auckland to Wellington anyway, So
to be honest, that was the extent of my thinking.
It wasn't necessarily that we were going to go on
to be the company that Shares is now known at.
It was like the ingredients were correct in terms of
the team was seriously impressive even in those early days.
You know, everyone I talked to said the same things
(13:19):
about having worked with them and who they were, which
meant a lot. And I was open to taking some
risk and making the show from Auckland to Wellington and
kind of figuring out what had happened. Like to be fair,
I'd only done like an accounting you know, one oh
one paper in it. I had no idea about this world.
But it really comes down to backing yourself to be
up for the learning curve, to be ambitious enough to
(13:41):
know that you can figure it out eventually. Over time,
you'll make some mistakes, but generally if your course great,
that's fine. And so The journey for me was I
was essentially kind of a one person team or basically
taking a bunch of Layton's work off him. That was
doing everything from reconciling deposits. I was texting people for
withdrawal confirmations off my personal mobile phone to begin with.
(14:04):
Like all of that was manual. It's just me being like, hey,
you've got a withdrawal for you know, five hundred dollars
to an account ending in this number, Please confirm yes
or no. And so we essentially built out this operations
function to span everything from customer support to financial crime
and compliance, clearing and settlement, tax custody, investment, on boarding,
(14:25):
you know, like all of the above. It was an
incredible machine. But that kind of started from a position
of kind of one person doing all these things manually
off spreadsheets and then figuring out how to productize that,
how to bring people on board to build the team.
So that kind of eventually after five years, that operations
function was kind of sixty or seventy people. It was
(14:47):
across eight teams, and you know, we built everything ourselves
in house. We had the licenses and we were seamlessly
processing you know, huge volumes hundreds of millions or billions
worth of train it's on a very regular basis.
Speaker 1 (15:01):
It's billions a year now. It's incredible and a beautiful
experience as well. That's the thing, like a laser focus
on the user experience and making it really simple. That
was the real breakthrough. And I think the great thing
about Cheersy's you know, it didn't come up against some
of the barriers that others in our fintech sect to do,
where that you come up against the bank basically in
(15:23):
the middle of it, where you have to try and
get the customer's data. It's changing now open banking, but sharebroking,
and that avoided that problem, which was nice, which was
able to allow Cheersy to grow really quickly.
Speaker 2 (15:37):
And I think it was also the founding team had
such a clear vision and belief and they were unwavering
in that where I think most people in that scenario
probably would have wavered, and it wasn't obvious for the
first two years the number of no's that you would
receive from people like I was part of the first meeting.
I was in there with the NSID acts when we
first went and said we're going to become a market participant.
(16:00):
We were laughed out of that room. The rhetoric was no, no, no,
you should not become a participant. I'm being using on
stock Exchange. But the thought process from our perspective was one,
we absolutely are, two you don't know who you're dealing
with here, and then three just continuing to ask questions
to understand the rationale and the thought process. So it
(16:23):
was just like okay, tell me why, Okay, tell me
why again until you get all the way back and really,
like you know, the thought process or the belief that
we couldn't become a participant wasn't grounded in any truth.
Speaker 1 (16:35):
That says a lot about management and the insine egxs
and some respects with a lot of our companies that
are going going oh sure.
Speaker 2 (16:43):
To their credit, they came to the party once they
realized that we were not going to go away at
that stage. And you know, clearly like Chares, he's brought
like fantastic tail winds too Exchange as well, like it
was super cool to the point where when we became
a credit and did the first trades, that particular person
in the war a pink suit. Yeah, so you know,
(17:04):
it was their way of saying like, okay, eat my
hat here.
Speaker 1 (17:08):
Yeah, I think it's probably been the single biggest thing
to encourage participation in investing in New Zealand companies. You know,
ever probably I mean the ASP security is they're still
going and all of that, but what a clunky experience
that was, and that's forced them to improve their game
and Hatch and others have come into the market as well.
(17:28):
So yeah, it's just one of those moments, that sort
of uber moment really that that happened. So what great
experience is there? And I guess that brings us up
to Malu. So you come to London, you're working with
the Estonians. That was like a blistering couple of years,
and I guess that gave you the confidence to go, right,
(17:48):
I understand the fintech world really well. Now I've had
many years of experience, it's time to do my own thing.
Speaker 2 (17:53):
Yeah. There were kind of two trains of thought. One
was I felt like I'd really round it out probably
the most seeing piece of my knowledge and learning, which
was kind of how do you build the machine at scale?
What does that actually look like? Which you know, kind
of just by operating New Zealand or Australia, you kind
of like limited and your understanding of and so that
(18:14):
was really evident to just learning from you know, operators
and people who had done that too was massive. And
then probably the second piece was I'd done a bunch
of early stage investing actually with Blackbird. Yeah, so when
they got set up in New Zealand kind of around
twenty twenty twenty twenty one with Samantha Wong, the kind
of Australian partner who came over to New Zealand and
(18:35):
set up Blackbird in New Zealand, they established a scout program.
I don't know if too many people kind of know
about it, but it was the likes of myself kind
of archbolve from track to kind of like three or
four others, and their goal was to see every early
stage you know, pre seed or seed deal in New Zealand.
And like sam couldn't do it by herself having just arrived,
(18:58):
and so kind of the exchange change was, hey will
teach you the world of venture investing as we see it,
and Blackbird are some of the best in the world,
like objectively at this and so we were able to
write small checks into companies on their behalf and subject
to kind of an expertite due diligence process, but also
take part in kind of a very structured set of
(19:20):
sessions and series with not only other investors at Blackbird,
but other funds around the world. Got to be part
of investment committees for all kinds of companies and deals
that they were looking at, like really kind of open
our eyes as to what venture investing looks like. And
so that complemented kind of both sides to the table
for me, which is, on one hand, how successful companies
(19:41):
actually built, which is a lot of hard work, blood,
sweat and tears, and then how kind of investors actually
evaluate companies, and then it can be a disconnection between
those two things, right, And so I felt like I'd
seen both sides of the table, and we took a
pretty unusual approach, which was most people go and work
on the wrong thing in a market that doesn't matter,
(20:02):
or it's not materially growing, or there aren't strong tailwinds
to act as a force multiplier for your work. And
kind of the role of venture capital is to fund experiments,
and so bear with me here, but basically venture capital
is to fund experiments where you're trying to answer a
true false question and if you can answer it true,
(20:22):
then you unlock huge upside and another set of true
false questions you need to answer. And so we took
a completely new approach which as far as I'm aware,
no one in New Zealand or Australia has ever done before,
where we said we are going to raise a little
bit of money to answer a true false question in
twelve months, which is can we land on an idea,
(20:44):
can we validate it, can we get a product and
market with paying customers within twelve months? But that we
are absolutely convinced of that, We have conviction about where
we've applied rigor and the foundation is just like so
solid that we are confident we can spend the next
ten years working on this and it's going to be
a massive business. So we were able to raise from Blackbird,
(21:07):
and we actually had twenty angels on top of that.
It was a relatively small amount of money, about six
hundred thousand Ye Zealand dollars. That was enough for myself
and my co founder Shack, who was also at Chazeas
to basically go through the search process. It was extremely
uncomfortable at times, I wouldn't necessarily recommend it for people.
But kind of the key insight that we landed on
was we've built investing products from millions of people around
(21:30):
the world, we never gave any financial advice, and that
was super frustrating. Right Like, you know, I'd done probably
tens of thousands of support tickets at Chaze's in a
light year, and the question that would always come through
is what should I do with my money? How should
I invest? Should I buy? Should I sell? You know,
also phone calls with kind of larger customers who had
(21:51):
made deposits that are triggered enhance due diligence or a
source of fun, source of wealth, and you would always
ring them up to have a chat and it would
always come back to hate, what should I do with
my money? And so it was incredibly frustrating because we
could never help anyone.
Speaker 1 (22:06):
Right now, Why is that, like with Shars, he still
hasn't gone into financial advice. Is that just the regulatory
threshold you have to reach to do that just is
so much more complicated.
Speaker 2 (22:17):
I think it's just a question of resource and focus,
and I think it's something that every retail investing platform
globally is moving into. I think it makes most sense
probably to build a wealth management business, to be honest.
So you'll see Revolutes building one now, Robin Hood's building
their own wealth management business. And so at the time
this was kind of a few years ago, we looked at,
(22:37):
you know, do we do robo advice? If robo advice
was kind of as good as it was cracked up
to be, we'd all be using it right now, And
the reality is we're not. Do we bring human advisors
onto the platform, which I think is like a really
positive good thing to do, or you know, do in
house your own kind of wealth management business where you
can have like a high touch service. Obviously like would
(22:59):
cost more, but kind of you can figure out a
way to deliver that experience in a way that aligns
with kind of the ethos and the values of your company.
And so, like Check had actually written kind of the
board papers at Shares is evaluating all of these things.
We'd both spend a lot of time talking to advisors
all around the world, and it's something that we really
believed in and felt was important because in my view,
(23:21):
the importance of financial advice at the right time and
some of its life can be transformational and it's not
just what should I invest in, it's you know, scenarios
every day, Like, you know, can I afford to retire?
Can I support my parents as they become older and
stop working. I've got this inheritance because of you know, X,
(23:42):
Y Z and family tragedy or event, or I'm separating
or I'm growing my family, or I need to have
a bigger hat. Like all of these things a massive
problems to kind of navigate in life, and they're fraught,
they're very emotionally complex, and we're typically not set up
to deal with them very well. And so that's the
(24:03):
value of an advisor, right Like if you were to
ask an advisor, hey, what am I actually paying you for?
It's not necessarily the differentiated you know, portfolio strategy or
asset allocation, because no matter who you go to buy
and large, you're getting a very similar kind of product.
But what you're really paying someone for is the relationship
(24:24):
and the trust for me to understand you, your motivations,
your goals and to be there to guide you through
these moments and to make the best possible decision for
you kind of given everything that we know, Like, that's
what you're paying for. And the human element is the
key there because it comes down to trust and understanding
(24:45):
and that's exceptionally hard to replicate, and I think it
will continue to be an exceptionally hard thing to replicate.
And so we went and actually spent six months last
year in house. We didn't write a line of code.
We went to kind of firms all around the world,
from your individual advisor up to you know, like your
enterpriser and New Zealand like keep we Saber firms for example,
(25:07):
and we spent time, you know, days at a time
with manager directors, CEOs, heads of compliance, general managers, practice managers, advisors,
lead advisors, power planner support stuff, call centers. Because we're
not advisors ourselves. Our superpower is building great products and technology,
definitely with a consumer lens and focus. And we went
(25:29):
in house. And this was part of our approach and
our thesis that we laid out for Blackbird. It's like
you need to go so to go fast to build
a generational company, and that means having done the work
and find insights that compound over time. So like what
can we learn or where can we form a view
that other people haven't found or as a result of
(25:51):
them not having done the work will never reach and
that gives you a big advantage in the early days.
And so we went ahead and we did this work.
And kind of the overarching takeaway would be the wealth
management and advice industry is a very, very challenged at
the moment, and there's a kind of variety of forces
that are acting and kind of driving that. One massive
(26:14):
increase in reggatary and compliance burden, and so that's resulting
in seventy percent of advisor's time not being client facing,
doing kind of menial like low value paperwork, which doesn't
necessarily improve the advisor experience. It definitely doesn't improve the
client experience. It doesn't necessarily lead to better outcomes in
(26:34):
a lot of the cases.
Speaker 1 (26:35):
It's just like anti money laundering sort of checks, and.
Speaker 2 (26:39):
It's evidencing the suitability of the advice that you've given.
I agree with this in principle, it's more just the
mechanism that it has to be delivered in. So, given
everything that I know about you, Peter, here's why the
advice I'm giving you is suitable for purpose, good value
for money. But the result is that you know, like
a fifty page document which no one reads, so it's
not particularly digestible. It becomes much more of a tick
(27:01):
box exercise and you know, we'll file that in the
cabinet and like that's all good, but when it pulls
away from the core purpose or you know, your service delivery.
What we've seen is limiting the pool of one advisors,
So the number of advisors has been shrinking, and two,
the number of clients they're able to serve as also shrinking.
(27:22):
So we came across firms that have completely shut off
onboarding or advisors who have one hundred and twenty clients.
They haven't onboarded a new client in two years. They
would love to, but they're at capacity with the amount
of work that's associated with each incremental client that comes
after that point. And so the opportunity for us is
they're dealing with heavy manual paperwork. Generally it's like very
(27:46):
low value and their existing software I would describe as
Windows ninety five esque. It's very clunky and it really
fights them and so it's not loved. And I've never
met a group of customers that has had a more
visca reaction when you ask them, hey, can you tell
me about the software you use? Your CRM. Do you
enjoy using it? What's your experience been? Like like crazy
(28:10):
crazy responses that we've had. We've had, you know, people
going red in the face, swearing, like all just the
most unimaginable things. And so that presents a huge opportunity
for us when you kind of put this confluence of
things together, it's like what we believe in is that
there should be more advice, that the advisor needs to
(28:30):
be turbocharged. Essentially, the human in the loop remains incredibly
important for the actual advice delivery, and the best thing
that you kind of are equipped to do is to
build relationships with your client. It's not to do everything else.
And so the opportunity for MALU is to basically be
the operating system or the piece of software that wealth
(28:51):
managers and advisors live in on a daily basis to
get the work done that they actually need to do
and uplift them kind of above the paper the menual
tasks so that they become I would describe as like reviewers,
not doers. So you finished a meeting with your client,
you know that you need to put together an annual
review later. For example, that could take you a week
(29:11):
or you might need to outsource it to someone else
to do, whereas we can now deliver a draft in
two minutes and it's ninety five percent there, and you
can spend thirty minutes doing a once over and a
check off to tweak and edit and understand you know,
how that document has essentially rived at that place.
Speaker 1 (29:35):
So you're using a lot of artificial intelligence here. But
this isn't a robo advice player or anything like that.
This is taking all the admin and burden off financial advisors,
so they've actually got more time to focus on understanding
what their clients need.
Speaker 2 (29:49):
Yeah, and the way that we're described as like, you know,
clients not paperwork, or you know, your your purpose is advice,
not admin. Like if you were to ask any advisor,
you did not get into this profession for the admin.
You've got in it for, you know, the reason of
helping clients, building trust, delivering advice. And so the way
we delivered the product was one as a wedge with
(30:13):
a note taker that it's hyper specialized to financial advice.
That might seem counterintuitive to people, but it's extremely powerful
for a couple of reasons. One, there's a huge amount
of nuance in the advice space. So if you were
to use a generic transcription tool as part of a meeting,
you just get a chronological A to Z of that
exact conversation, And an advice conversation could be ninety five
(30:34):
percent relationship building and there could be five percent kind
of smattered throughout that conversation that's actually relevant to advice
your goals, your motivations, your rest tolerance capacity, fees, all
of the above. And so we can use templates to
extract and structure the most relevant pieces of the advice
conversation for your internal facing compliance purposes. But then also
(30:56):
like an external facing follow up to a client for example,
so an advisor no longer has to take notes after
the meeting, have second person in the meeting taking notes
for them, rely on anything else other than our products,
and because where so will hyper specialized to advice, we
become an incredibly powerful tool and product and part of
their day. And the feedback that we've had is incredible,
like unsolicited on a daily basis, This is changing my life.
(31:19):
This is the best thing that's happened to me in
twenty five years of the industry. Hey, I can onboard
more clients already and we're only just getting started. And
now what we're able to do is move into the
post meeting workflows. So you have the context for a meeting,
you have an incredible kind of set of information, and
now we can begin to action and undertake work on
the behalf of the advisor, for example, generating advice documents. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (31:41):
It's incredible, isn't it. And there are other companies in
this building I think that are doing a similar thing,
for instance in healthcare for GPS. So it starts with
transcription and having a conversation, as you say, feeding it
into a general transcription service. It's powered by AI. Like
an offer or something like that isn't going to get
you the results. It's all the work that you do
to fine tune that for a particular use case such
(32:04):
as financial advice. That's the real power of it.
Speaker 2 (32:07):
Yeah. Yeah, and it's really resonated. So you know, we
have been live in market for seven months now. We
have paying customers in the UK, South Africa, Australia and
New Zealand. We're doing Singapore shortly as well. I'm there
next week. So this is like globally applicable. We are
seeing like a huge amount of kind of pool and
demand for the product. And yeah, it's a super exciting time.
Speaker 1 (32:30):
You've just raised some preceed money, what four point six
million dollars? Yes, yeah, correct, so's the what's the plan
for what runway will that allow you to use?
Speaker 2 (32:39):
It mainly allows us to accelerate product development and so
that's kind of twofold one. It's resource the team up
more to make the most of the opportunities that we
see in front of us, so go faster and as
a result of having more people, you know, within reason,
actually be able to ship the product faster as well.
So it's to grow our teams you know in London
and Sydney and in Wellington, and then also look at
(33:01):
opportunities in other markets too.
Speaker 1 (33:03):
Yeah. And I've just been reading great book nineteen twenty
nine Andrew Ross Sauken, getting really inside what happened with
the Great Crash of nineteen twenty nine and drawing parallels
to today. Are we in a bubble? Yeah, an AI bubble.
So I think there's a lot of people who invest
are looking for better quality advice to navigate, not just
(33:26):
be sheep that are jumping in the latest thing. That's
what happened in nineteen twenty nine, although back then it
was all margins. You know, people were borrowing to buy shares,
which is never really a good thing, and then the
margin calls came in and they're all bankrupt, you know,
so interesting your views on what the future of financial
advice is. Obviously in the background is artificial intelligence and
(33:47):
robo advice, and it stands the sense that this is
a very data driven industry. There's huge amounts of data.
If you can get hold of that data, there is
incredible value that may augment or even replace some of
the functions that that advisors play just looking at it
screens of data coming into them.
Speaker 2 (34:06):
My view on the future of advice is that it
will be hyper personalized. It will be available to anyone
at scale, and this is probably more of the kind
of tenure of you. I still believe in the value
of the human in the loop. I think the main
constraint there is regulation. Regulators will not move to, at
least in my opinion, you know, open up huge swaths
(34:26):
of the advice market to a complete kind of software
driven experience that maybe possible. Who knows, like a lot
will play out in that space. But I still very
much believe in the value of the human and the loop,
and ultimately our goal is to transform the underlying unit
economics of what it means to deliver advice. So at
the moment, it's very much if I wish to grow
(34:48):
my advice firm or offer advice to more people, I
need to make a set investment in terms of growing
headcount or ability to resource all the admin that is
associated with each new client, and I don't necessarily have
a set return for that. So it's changing that equation
saying that you can grow your firm without having to
make these big bets or take on additional risk, and
(35:10):
ultimately bring down the minimums which are now existing and
actually are going up at a lot of these firms
either you know, liquid assets of five hundred thousand or
a million dollars for example, and start to move that
equation in the other direction. So, for example, I think
the average advice fee in the UK has increased like
six percent in the last twelve months, and so really
it just continues to price consumers and people who need
(35:33):
access to advice out of the market. And so for us,
the mission is transform the underlying P and L and
the unit economics of what it means to deliver advice
to a customer so that we can actually reverse that,
and I think that to me is the more pressing problem.
Then we're just going to have an AI you know,
driven advisor that's going to deliver advice to everyone, Like
that could well happen in the future, but you have
(35:55):
to understand like the fundamental drivers of what it means
to one be an advisor to deliver advice, and then ultimately,
like why you will doing this? It's to deliver a
better experience for the end consumer. Yeah, And I think
that's probably the second piece that gets lost in all
of this. It's a lot of software. I think in
the AI space at the moment, it's never been easier
to build. That is true, but it's also been never
(36:17):
been easy to deliver a really shitty product experience. And
I think if you look at adoption of many many companies,
they have very high churn. It gets you know, forced
from management and a business setting down upon teams, and
a lot of the individuals won't adopt it. And so
our goal is to build a product that is delightful,
(36:37):
is loved, so you know very much the shares is framing,
but for business setting like is truly valuable and allows
the end user to realize value very very quickly. And
then from there it's about how do you actually elevate
and uplift the experience for the client. So a lot
of people right now will say, hey, there's this manual
piece of paperwork. There's steps one, two, three, four, five.
(36:58):
We're just going to understand what they're steps are, and
we're just going to use AI to like, you know,
write the paperwork or kind of take that down to
steps one or two. Whereas our view is you need
to understand the outcome that you're trying to achieve, what
the customer and client experience is at the end of that,
and then just design with that in mind, forget everything else.
And so it means that you can kind of fundamentally
(37:19):
re architect how a lot of this work actually gets
done in the background. And I think that's part of
this kind of Shares is a light year and consumer
late approach which we're bringing to this kind of antiquated
when those ninety five esque like industry, when it comes
to software, it's build for the consumer, build something that
they love that you know, stacks up against any other
(37:39):
kind of social or social media either that they might
use in terms of experience and force adoption. So I'll
give you like a really concrete example. It doesn't matter
whether you're an individual advisor or whether you're the managing director.
You get the same experience when you come to our product.
It's self serve onboarding, sign up in two minutes and
you know we've got a test or a demo meeting
(38:01):
for you, or you can upload your own or you
can add Marlow to a meeting straight away. So the
time to value is very very quick, but it results
in like a bottom's up, like sales motion. So I
did a demo on Friday with a pretty large UK firm.
We already had two of their advisors and customers of ours.
And so what that means for the first time ever
is that the advisor in this situation as a product
that they love, they can turn around to their management team.
(38:23):
They can bang their fist on the table and say
this is changing my life. I love it. We need
to roll this out across the whole firm. So it's
a very different kind of sales process and cycle, and
in a lot of cases is resulting in way way
higher adoption. Of the product and durability. So to give
you some numbers, we have had almost zero churn after
(38:48):
seven months with hundreds and hundreds of paid seats globally,
all on monthly contracts. You can leave us at any
point in time. But it's because we are starting to
get that kind of ingredient in that next in terms
of B two C to B which is built for
the consumer and the individual and have them kind of
advocate on your behalf to roll out the product. We
(39:10):
have advisors who are running training sessions for their colleagues.
We have firms who are talking to their competitors about us,
and like the anecdote that comes back is, I can't
believe I'm doing this, but I'm talking to one of
our beggest competitors and I've given them a demo of
your product, which is an incredible piece of feedback to
have it. But it's because the focus is on the
(39:31):
user experience and the value that you're delivering opposed to
in a lot of cases just automating steps one to
five and then trying to extract as much money out
of someone as you possibly can.
Speaker 1 (39:40):
Yeah, it's pushing up the price of giving that advice
as well making it inaccessible. So yeah, that's great. You've
got a team back in New Zealand of small team
and Wellington of engineers working on the coding and then.
Speaker 2 (39:52):
Yeah, yeah, so we're kind of building engineering and product
across Sydney and Wellington. We kind of have a go
to market function now for Asia Pacific out of Sydney
and are doing the same in London as well, so
kind of go to market for UK, Europe and other
countries in that time zone. So South Africa for example,
or East Coast US works pretty well for us. And
(40:13):
then also building kind of like marketing and growth function
in the UK as well. So our view is like
New Zealand companies should be building global from day one.
You need to be in big markets, and it just
makes sense to front foot a lot of the pain
that most companies experience and go through, which is we
spend a year or two in New Zealand maybe Australia,
(40:34):
we kind of do okay or reasonably well, and then
we decide or raise our level of ambition and then
go offshore. And you could have just kind of chalked
up all those learnings made the mistakes earlier in the
piece and be so much better off for it. So
a lot of people ask, oh, how do you work
a cross time zones or and the answer is we
(40:54):
figure it out as we go. We have the opportunity
to build cultural infrastructure, is what I call it in
terms of how we run the company, how we work
together onboard people allow people to kind of do great
work or get their best out of themselves, and it
results in a really high level of autonomy, but very
kind of clear guidelines for how we operate, and as
we grow, the onuses on the whole team to provide
(41:16):
feedback and input into how we shape that because we
don't have all the answers. But in my opinion, you're
way better off to being big markets because it's a
force multiplier for everything that you do from day one
and you can just back solve all of these problems.
It's not to say it's easy, but it's much better
off in the long run. And the reality is, like
we run a twenty four to seven operation, Like we
(41:37):
work pretty big hours, but it's incredibly rewarding and we
spend a lot of time on planes going back and forth.
But we're kind of at the age and stage where
you know, we're up for that. We're making this choice.
We're fully opted into this. Yeah, and it's for people
to kind of like be up for that, to join
the mission or not. And it's a great filter.
Speaker 1 (41:57):
And like this is the norm now for there are
more people employed by New Zealand tech companies offshore than
in New Zealand by a rapidly growing margin. So this
is the reality global from day one for tech companies
and we've seen incredible success s. That's where the high
growth comes for AURA first, AML, all these other companies
(42:20):
that often have a co founder that has moved to
the US or the UK to build that bridgehead. That's
the recipe now.
Speaker 2 (42:28):
Yeah, and there's a great community of people who have
kind of gone before and done that. Now, it's still
really important to me that we, you know, operate out
of New Zealand or have a presence there, you know,
to transfer learning's economic value like everything else back. And
we're seeing more and more successful companies be able to
keep their entity there for example, not have to flip
(42:49):
it to the US or the UK or another country.
It kind of like it can depend depending on what
age and stage and tiples dictated by investors or certain
other factors down the line, but the New Zealand connection
for us is super important and we think that we
have like a really really good talent pool there and
kind of one of my personal goals is like, how
(43:10):
can we find, you know, super bright, young, ambitious people
and how can we kind of share our worldview with them?
How can we get them over to the UK. It's
super easy to move here. Yes, it's a long way away,
but like I want to be exporting as much talent
as possible or signing people up and saying like, hey,
you've got to do your first six or twelve months
in New Zealand, like learn the business, get across the
(43:31):
New Zealand Australian context, and then move over to London
with us. Like we just have kind of this talent
pipeline and machine that you can't get anywhere else, and
we get on really well. We've shared cultural context and
understanding and it's just a great way of building like
a global business in my opinion. So that's something that
I'm keen to kind of keep pushing alongside everything else
that we have going on, and it's important to us.
Speaker 1 (43:51):
Well good luck for the future. I'm sure you'll be
raising more capital before too long at the growth rate
that you're experiencing at the moment. And congratulations on that
international expansion South Africa, Singapore coming online as well, so
plenty of upward momentum. So congratulations and thanks so much
for coming on a Business of Tech.
Speaker 2 (44:11):
Yeah, I love the chat. Thank you.
Speaker 1 (44:22):
Thanks so much to Hardy Michelle, co founder of Marlou,
explaining how AI can finally free financial advisors from the
mountain of admin so they can spend more time doing
what matters given quality, human centered advice. I think Marlou's
approach is a really great case study in using AI
to augment people, not replace them. If they can help
(44:43):
financial advisors reduce the admin associated with dispensing their advice,
that will hopefully mean more affordable advice, lower fees, but
more importantly, better advice as these advisors are freed up
to focus exactly on what their clients need. So thanksfull
listening to the Business of Tech powered by two Degrees.
If you enjoyed this episode, please rate, review, and subscribe
(45:05):
wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Peter Griffin and I'll
be back next Thursday with more on the Business of Tech.
Catch you then
Welcome to the Business of Tech powered by two Degrees.
I'm Peter Griffin with my second interview from London. This
time I'm talking to Hardy Michelle, co founder alongside Shaquill
Lala and Ben Robertson of the AI powered fintech startup Marlou.
Hardy's a veteran of the New Zealand startup scene, having
(00:23):
helped build Chare's Eads from the ground up. He's now
in London building Marlou, an AI powered operating system for
wealth managers and advisors. The core idea is simple strip
out the soul crushing admin compliance paperwork and manual note
taking that can eat up around seventy percent of an
advisor's day and let them focus on what they actually
(00:44):
signed up for, real human quality advice. We talk a
lot about the rise of AI in the financial sector,
but Hardy isn't any big advocate of so called robo
advice or automating the entire process seeds an essential ongoing
role for humans in the loop when it comes to
(01:04):
dispensing financial advice. Marlou is a type of hyper specialized
smart assistant that listens to client meetings structures. The key
advice points and auto generates drafts of advice documents in
minutes instead of days. Hardy also talks about why this
isn't just about efficiency, but transforming the economics of advice
(01:26):
so more people can actually afford it. Marlo, which was
founded in August twenty twenty four, recently raised four point
six million New Zealand in a seed funding round led
by Blackbir Adventures, with a host of successful founders also contributing,
which is always a good sign. Hardy recounts his Estonian
adventure working for light Chair, which is like the robin
(01:47):
Hood of Europe, and what it's like growing a key
we start up in multiple countries simultaneously while it still
has its roots back here in Wellington. Here's Hardy Michelle,
co founder of marlu Hearty Welcome to the business of tech.
Speaker 2 (02:06):
How are you doing fantastic?
Speaker 1 (02:08):
Thank you for having me, Well, thank you for having me.
I'm back in the tech space after meeting Matt Herbert
from track Suit yesterday. This wonderful place. You just had
a big gathering of New Zealand Australian founders and investors
a couple of nights ago. Rowan Simpson trade Me co
founder was in town, so it definitely seems like this
(02:29):
is a bit of a gathering point for antipathy and entrepreneurs.
Speaker 2 (02:33):
Yeah, it's becoming a second home. So if you're visiting
or in town, drop on by, you'll definitely run into
a few familiar faces.
Speaker 1 (02:40):
Yeah, it's called the tech space in Farringdon and a
lot of businesses here, big, big buzz and yeah, and
how long have you been in London? Now?
Speaker 2 (02:51):
I've been here for just over three years. So I
was previously at Chasia's in Wellington where I was there
for kind of six or seven years and actually got
headhunted for a roll over here kind of just as
the kind of pandemic and travel was starting to become
a thing again. In kind of mid twenty twenty two,
I received a LinkedIn DM from, funnily enough, some Estonians.
(03:15):
And you would think when Estonians are sliding into your
LinkedIn dms that you may not want to respond, but
they looked really interesting and so kind of the long
story short was there were two Estonian founders who were
previously at wise the money kind of transferred company that
you might have come across that as a phenomenal Estonian
(03:35):
founded business, and that actually kind of spun out of Skype,
another very well known company. So Estonia Punch was massively
above its weight. And these two had been very early
at wise, they'd been responsible for building a huge amount
of the product and that business kind of across operations,
product and engineering, and they decided to build a retail
investing platform very similar to Chaz's. And they had gone
(03:59):
all around the world looking for people who had actually
built these companies from scratch. And really what that meant
was the infrastructure that was required to kind of run
the you know, the systems, the money flows, the share trading.
There's a lot of infrastructure that's required to do that,
and not many people have actually built it. And they
looked all around the world and they found me.
Speaker 1 (04:21):
Wow, So light Year. I think it's been described as
like the robin Hood of Europe. So another shared trading platform.
So what was that like? Sort of coming to London
but a very different environment to obviously what you were
dealing with in New Zealand one country, were much smaller country,
(04:42):
much closer access to all the regulators, and had to
figure out what you needed to do to suddenly being
in London working for Estonians with the European focus.
Speaker 2 (04:51):
Yeah, yeah, it was a massive shift, I would say.
So for like contacts, there was a between that LinkedIn
DM me having spent a couple of days interviewing and
receiving a full offer to relocate that included my now
wife as well and visa sponsorship, and we moved six
weeks to the day after that. So it was very
(05:12):
clear from the outset that there was no messing around here.
It's like we were doing this and we landed in London,
and so the business was set up between Talent and
Estonia and London. We're building teams in both places. And yeah,
we ended up launching twenty two European countries at once
straight off the bat. We you know, were licensed both
in Europe and in the UK, and then eventually became
(05:34):
directly licensed in the UK. So you're just dealing with
this kind of just phenomenal scale, but also a huge
amount of local nuance and context that you don't necessarily
get in New Zealand because you're only dealing with one market, right.
So it was a really amazing experience and kind of
taught me one how to think about kind of building
(05:55):
at scale and being in big markets and then two,
the team there was exceptional, So it was early robinhood wise,
you know, Revolute Skype, kind of all of the big
global kind of fintech success stories that kind of cherry
picked some of the best people from those companies. So
it was amazing for me to kind of place myself
into that environment, really test and challenge myself and take
(06:18):
away a huge amount of kind of personal learning and
knowledge in addition to you know, the day to day.
Speaker 1 (06:24):
What insights did you get into working with colleagues and
founders from Estonia's there's some similarities smaller advanced nation like
New Zealand, but just what they've managed to achieve on
the digital economy front, both as a nation but in
terms of some of the companies that they've created, and
that serial entrepreneurship where people are investing in the next generation.
(06:48):
Is a bit of that going on in New Zealand.
But they really have cracked it in Estonia, haven't they.
Speaker 2 (06:51):
Yeah. I would really encourage people to travel and go
to Talent if you have the opportunity, you can kind
of do Helsinki and Talent in one weekend because you
can varry between the two. But I was basically building
a team in talent. I was there a week a
month for kind of eighteen months, spent a huge amount
of time, and they're an amazing group of people for
a few reasons. One, they're kind of essentially first generation,
(07:16):
you know, like business owners as how it would frame it.
So you know, they were part of the Soviet Union.
Most people there over the age of thirty, you know,
grew up with a huge amount of hardship. And so
you know, through the founding of Skyte and Wise and
now several other companies that have spun out, they've seen that,
you know, being entrepreneurial, working really hard, getting equity and
(07:39):
upside is a real and concrete way to generate wealth.
You know. So I think the said I saw was
like Wise employees one percent of Estonians as an example. Yeah,
and they're able to earn you know, like really well.
Wise is now ipo, Skyte was acquired by Microsoft, I think,
and it's just been a real way to realize wealth
(08:01):
in that country. And so everyone is just so driven
and on board with the mentality of we're going to
work incredibly hard and we're going to do it in
this like incredibly productive way. And then kind of the
overarching pieces that the you know, Estonian government is incredibly
forward thinking and tech first and so you know, for example,
I have like an Estonian like e residency for example,
(08:25):
so you know, you go through an application process, you
pay one hundred euros and you actually have the ability
to start a business in Estonia. And they have you know,
a very fair tax system. Basically everyone holds their assets
within a business. They have a flat twenty percent tax rate.
You can you know extract or kind of pay out
(08:45):
a certain amount tax free every year. It's really interesting,
but anyone in the world can come and build a
business in Estonia. There is a key concept. So it's
really really interesting.
Speaker 1 (08:55):
Yeah, they're really yeah, setting out putting all the ingredients
in there for to encourage that sort of entrepreneurship. So
hopefully we are we're part of this group called I
think the D seven or something, which we do talk
to Estonia and Ireland and Denmark and that quite a bit.
So hopefully we're we're taking on board some of those lessons.
(09:15):
But just going back that, yeah, quite an extensive startup
experience all the way back to a really cool startup
book track, which as someone who've been publishing and that
really loved. You know, we're basically an audio soundscape for
a book that you would buy. That would have been
a really interesting project to work on.
Speaker 2 (09:35):
Yeah, it was fascinating. That was my yeah, kind of
first foray into working for a startup. And yeah, we
built amazing technology and worked with you know, incredible companies
Audible for example, and the US. You know, probably unfortunate
market timing. I would say, like had that company been
(09:56):
founded a few years later or with the technology that
we have now, I think it would have been you know,
really well changing. But there was a timing element that
that wasn't quite right. But you know, I was able
to work kind of alongside the founders to really kind
of drive and understand kind of everything that they were doing,
how they were operating, how they were raising capital, and
(10:16):
so yeah, it was just the perfect kind of early
learning experience in the way that I would probably phrase
my time in New Zealand was just trying to learn
from the best possible people who ahead of me, who
I could absorb knowledge off with the goal of one
day starting my own company.
Speaker 1 (10:31):
Yeah, and then obviously that that was a great experience
at Shears's. You had those you know that founding team
is one of the strongest founding teams to have a
three CEO relationship that after all these years, are still
going strong with you sign your Brooke and Leyton and
seems to work really well where they have, you know,
(10:51):
complementary strengths, but they will make decisions collectively to care
there and just proliferating in terms of the the service offerings,
you know, going into credit cards and all sorts of things, loans,
So helping set that up. Being head of operations, you know,
back in the early days, that must have been quite
(11:14):
a job, you know, trying to figure out how do
we put this all together in a way that is compliant,
is trustworthy, get people out of these stodgy brokerages, and
you know, tens hundreds of thousands of people are investing
every week now as a result of the groundwork that
you helped lay.
Speaker 2 (11:32):
Yeah, it was such a cool experience on reflection, incredibly
hard work at the time, And I think the interesting
thing for me is I was kind of the first
person to join the business who wasn't one of the
founders and didn't actually know anyone, so I was introduced
through some mutual friends. I was moving from Auckland to
Wellington at the time. It was kind of all very
serendipitous and kind of my decision making process was I
(11:55):
actually grew up doing a bunch of cycling, so I
wrote and track Cycling, I representing New Zealand. I won
national titles kind of through the age group, so it
was super fun. And one of the people I cycled
a bit with was Elliott Crowther from push Pay, and
I didn't know too much about what he was doing
other than you know, he was like selling home ventilation
(12:16):
units with HIV and then he started this kind of business,
push pay, and it was around you know, egiving and anyway,
they tibsequently ended up ipoing right, and I wanted to
buy push pay shares because I knew Elliott, and I
got halfway through the sign up process with ASP Securities,
I think it was, and I pulled the pen and
I only had, you know, maybe five hundred dollars to invest.
(12:36):
Even if I paid the brokerage, it still would have
been a phenomenal investment in that point of time. But
I'd actually never invested before and I really wanted to,
and I knew that there were a bunch of other
people that I knew that were in the same position
and kind of having come from a few startups beforehand,
like they had enough capital to pay me for at
least twelve months, and like that was a pretty good bet.
(12:58):
And I was moving from Auckland to Wellington anyway, So
to be honest, that was the extent of my thinking.
It wasn't necessarily that we were going to go on
to be the company that Shares is now known at.
It was like the ingredients were correct in terms of
the team was seriously impressive even in those early days.
You know, everyone I talked to said the same things
(13:19):
about having worked with them and who they were, which
meant a lot. And I was open to taking some
risk and making the show from Auckland to Wellington and
kind of figuring out what had happened. Like to be fair,
I'd only done like an accounting you know, one oh
one paper in it. I had no idea about this world.
But it really comes down to backing yourself to be
up for the learning curve, to be ambitious enough to
(13:41):
know that you can figure it out eventually. Over time,
you'll make some mistakes, but generally if your course great,
that's fine. And so The journey for me was I
was essentially kind of a one person team or basically
taking a bunch of Layton's work off him. That was
doing everything from reconciling deposits. I was texting people for
withdrawal confirmations off my personal mobile phone to begin with.
(14:04):
Like all of that was manual. It's just me being like, hey,
you've got a withdrawal for you know, five hundred dollars
to an account ending in this number, Please confirm yes
or no. And so we essentially built out this operations
function to span everything from customer support to financial crime
and compliance, clearing and settlement, tax custody, investment, on boarding,
(14:25):
you know, like all of the above. It was an
incredible machine. But that kind of started from a position
of kind of one person doing all these things manually
off spreadsheets and then figuring out how to productize that,
how to bring people on board to build the team.
So that kind of eventually after five years, that operations
function was kind of sixty or seventy people. It was
(14:47):
across eight teams, and you know, we built everything ourselves
in house. We had the licenses and we were seamlessly
processing you know, huge volumes hundreds of millions or billions
worth of train it's on a very regular basis.
Speaker 1 (15:01):
It's billions a year now. It's incredible and a beautiful
experience as well. That's the thing, like a laser focus
on the user experience and making it really simple. That
was the real breakthrough. And I think the great thing
about Cheersy's you know, it didn't come up against some
of the barriers that others in our fintech sect to do,
where that you come up against the bank basically in
(15:23):
the middle of it, where you have to try and
get the customer's data. It's changing now open banking, but sharebroking,
and that avoided that problem, which was nice, which was
able to allow Cheersy to grow really quickly.
Speaker 2 (15:37):
And I think it was also the founding team had
such a clear vision and belief and they were unwavering
in that where I think most people in that scenario
probably would have wavered, and it wasn't obvious for the
first two years the number of no's that you would
receive from people like I was part of the first meeting.
I was in there with the NSID acts when we
first went and said we're going to become a market participant.
(16:00):
We were laughed out of that room. The rhetoric was no, no, no,
you should not become a participant. I'm being using on
stock Exchange. But the thought process from our perspective was one,
we absolutely are, two you don't know who you're dealing
with here, and then three just continuing to ask questions
to understand the rationale and the thought process. So it
(16:23):
was just like okay, tell me why, Okay, tell me
why again until you get all the way back and really,
like you know, the thought process or the belief that
we couldn't become a participant wasn't grounded in any truth.
Speaker 1 (16:35):
That says a lot about management and the insine egxs
and some respects with a lot of our companies that
are going going oh sure.
Speaker 2 (16:43):
To their credit, they came to the party once they
realized that we were not going to go away at
that stage. And you know, clearly like Chares, he's brought
like fantastic tail winds too Exchange as well, like it
was super cool to the point where when we became
a credit and did the first trades, that particular person
in the war a pink suit. Yeah, so you know,
(17:04):
it was their way of saying like, okay, eat my
hat here.
Speaker 1 (17:08):
Yeah, I think it's probably been the single biggest thing
to encourage participation in investing in New Zealand companies. You know,
ever probably I mean the ASP security is they're still
going and all of that, but what a clunky experience
that was, and that's forced them to improve their game
and Hatch and others have come into the market as well.
(17:28):
So yeah, it's just one of those moments, that sort
of uber moment really that that happened. So what great
experience is there? And I guess that brings us up
to Malu. So you come to London, you're working with
the Estonians. That was like a blistering couple of years,
and I guess that gave you the confidence to go, right,
(17:48):
I understand the fintech world really well. Now I've had
many years of experience, it's time to do my own thing.
Speaker 2 (17:53):
Yeah. There were kind of two trains of thought. One
was I felt like I'd really round it out probably
the most seeing piece of my knowledge and learning, which
was kind of how do you build the machine at scale?
What does that actually look like? Which you know, kind
of just by operating New Zealand or Australia, you kind
of like limited and your understanding of and so that
(18:14):
was really evident to just learning from you know, operators
and people who had done that too was massive. And
then probably the second piece was I'd done a bunch
of early stage investing actually with Blackbird. Yeah, so when
they got set up in New Zealand kind of around
twenty twenty twenty twenty one with Samantha Wong, the kind
of Australian partner who came over to New Zealand and
(18:35):
set up Blackbird in New Zealand, they established a scout program.
I don't know if too many people kind of know
about it, but it was the likes of myself kind
of archbolve from track to kind of like three or
four others, and their goal was to see every early
stage you know, pre seed or seed deal in New Zealand.
And like sam couldn't do it by herself having just arrived,
(18:58):
and so kind of the exchange change was, hey will
teach you the world of venture investing as we see it,
and Blackbird are some of the best in the world,
like objectively at this and so we were able to
write small checks into companies on their behalf and subject
to kind of an expertite due diligence process, but also
take part in kind of a very structured set of
(19:20):
sessions and series with not only other investors at Blackbird,
but other funds around the world. Got to be part
of investment committees for all kinds of companies and deals
that they were looking at, like really kind of open
our eyes as to what venture investing looks like. And
so that complemented kind of both sides to the table
for me, which is, on one hand, how successful companies
(19:41):
actually built, which is a lot of hard work, blood,
sweat and tears, and then how kind of investors actually
evaluate companies, and then it can be a disconnection between
those two things, right, And so I felt like I'd
seen both sides of the table, and we took a
pretty unusual approach, which was most people go and work
on the wrong thing in a market that doesn't matter,
(20:02):
or it's not materially growing, or there aren't strong tailwinds
to act as a force multiplier for your work. And
kind of the role of venture capital is to fund experiments,
and so bear with me here, but basically venture capital
is to fund experiments where you're trying to answer a
true false question and if you can answer it true,
(20:22):
then you unlock huge upside and another set of true
false questions you need to answer. And so we took
a completely new approach which as far as I'm aware,
no one in New Zealand or Australia has ever done before,
where we said we are going to raise a little
bit of money to answer a true false question in
twelve months, which is can we land on an idea,
(20:44):
can we validate it, can we get a product and
market with paying customers within twelve months? But that we
are absolutely convinced of that, We have conviction about where
we've applied rigor and the foundation is just like so
solid that we are confident we can spend the next
ten years working on this and it's going to be
a massive business. So we were able to raise from Blackbird,
(21:07):
and we actually had twenty angels on top of that.
It was a relatively small amount of money, about six
hundred thousand Ye Zealand dollars. That was enough for myself
and my co founder Shack, who was also at Chazeas
to basically go through the search process. It was extremely
uncomfortable at times, I wouldn't necessarily recommend it for people.
But kind of the key insight that we landed on
was we've built investing products from millions of people around
(21:30):
the world, we never gave any financial advice, and that
was super frustrating. Right Like, you know, I'd done probably
tens of thousands of support tickets at Chaze's in a
light year, and the question that would always come through
is what should I do with my money? How should
I invest? Should I buy? Should I sell? You know,
also phone calls with kind of larger customers who had
(21:51):
made deposits that are triggered enhance due diligence or a
source of fun, source of wealth, and you would always
ring them up to have a chat and it would
always come back to hate, what should I do with
my money? And so it was incredibly frustrating because we
could never help anyone.
Speaker 1 (22:06):
Right now, Why is that, like with Shars, he still
hasn't gone into financial advice. Is that just the regulatory
threshold you have to reach to do that just is
so much more complicated.
Speaker 2 (22:17):
I think it's just a question of resource and focus,
and I think it's something that every retail investing platform
globally is moving into. I think it makes most sense
probably to build a wealth management business, to be honest.
So you'll see Revolutes building one now, Robin Hood's building
their own wealth management business. And so at the time
this was kind of a few years ago, we looked at,
(22:37):
you know, do we do robo advice? If robo advice
was kind of as good as it was cracked up
to be, we'd all be using it right now, And
the reality is we're not. Do we bring human advisors
onto the platform, which I think is like a really
positive good thing to do, or you know, do in
house your own kind of wealth management business where you
can have like a high touch service. Obviously like would
(22:59):
cost more, but kind of you can figure out a
way to deliver that experience in a way that aligns
with kind of the ethos and the values of your company.
And so, like Check had actually written kind of the
board papers at Shares is evaluating all of these things.
We'd both spend a lot of time talking to advisors
all around the world, and it's something that we really
believed in and felt was important because in my view,
(23:21):
the importance of financial advice at the right time and
some of its life can be transformational and it's not
just what should I invest in, it's you know, scenarios
every day, Like, you know, can I afford to retire?
Can I support my parents as they become older and
stop working. I've got this inheritance because of you know, X,
(23:42):
Y Z and family tragedy or event, or I'm separating
or I'm growing my family, or I need to have
a bigger hat. Like all of these things a massive
problems to kind of navigate in life, and they're fraught,
they're very emotionally complex, and we're typically not set up
to deal with them very well. And so that's the
(24:03):
value of an advisor, right Like if you were to
ask an advisor, hey, what am I actually paying you for?
It's not necessarily the differentiated you know, portfolio strategy or
asset allocation, because no matter who you go to buy
and large, you're getting a very similar kind of product.
But what you're really paying someone for is the relationship
(24:24):
and the trust for me to understand you, your motivations,
your goals and to be there to guide you through
these moments and to make the best possible decision for
you kind of given everything that we know, Like, that's
what you're paying for. And the human element is the
key there because it comes down to trust and understanding
(24:45):
and that's exceptionally hard to replicate, and I think it
will continue to be an exceptionally hard thing to replicate.
And so we went and actually spent six months last
year in house. We didn't write a line of code.
We went to kind of firms all around the world,
from your individual advisor up to you know, like your
enterpriser and New Zealand like keep we Saber firms for example,
(25:07):
and we spent time, you know, days at a time
with manager directors, CEOs, heads of compliance, general managers, practice managers, advisors,
lead advisors, power planner support stuff, call centers. Because we're
not advisors ourselves. Our superpower is building great products and technology,
definitely with a consumer lens and focus. And we went
(25:29):
in house. And this was part of our approach and
our thesis that we laid out for Blackbird. It's like
you need to go so to go fast to build
a generational company, and that means having done the work
and find insights that compound over time. So like what
can we learn or where can we form a view
that other people haven't found or as a result of
(25:51):
them not having done the work will never reach and
that gives you a big advantage in the early days.
And so we went ahead and we did this work.
And kind of the overarching takeaway would be the wealth
management and advice industry is a very, very challenged at
the moment, and there's a kind of variety of forces
that are acting and kind of driving that. One massive
(26:14):
increase in reggatary and compliance burden, and so that's resulting
in seventy percent of advisor's time not being client facing,
doing kind of menial like low value paperwork, which doesn't
necessarily improve the advisor experience. It definitely doesn't improve the
client experience. It doesn't necessarily lead to better outcomes in
(26:34):
a lot of the cases.
Speaker 1 (26:35):
It's just like anti money laundering sort of checks, and.
Speaker 2 (26:39):
It's evidencing the suitability of the advice that you've given.
I agree with this in principle, it's more just the
mechanism that it has to be delivered in. So, given
everything that I know about you, Peter, here's why the
advice I'm giving you is suitable for purpose, good value
for money. But the result is that you know, like
a fifty page document which no one reads, so it's
not particularly digestible. It becomes much more of a tick
(27:01):
box exercise and you know, we'll file that in the
cabinet and like that's all good, but when it pulls
away from the core purpose or you know, your service delivery.
What we've seen is limiting the pool of one advisors,
So the number of advisors has been shrinking, and two,
the number of clients they're able to serve as also shrinking.
(27:22):
So we came across firms that have completely shut off
onboarding or advisors who have one hundred and twenty clients.
They haven't onboarded a new client in two years. They
would love to, but they're at capacity with the amount
of work that's associated with each incremental client that comes
after that point. And so the opportunity for us is
they're dealing with heavy manual paperwork. Generally it's like very
(27:46):
low value and their existing software I would describe as
Windows ninety five esque. It's very clunky and it really
fights them and so it's not loved. And I've never
met a group of customers that has had a more
visca reaction when you ask them, hey, can you tell
me about the software you use? Your CRM. Do you
enjoy using it? What's your experience been? Like like crazy
(28:10):
crazy responses that we've had. We've had, you know, people
going red in the face, swearing, like all just the
most unimaginable things. And so that presents a huge opportunity
for us when you kind of put this confluence of
things together, it's like what we believe in is that
there should be more advice, that the advisor needs to
(28:30):
be turbocharged. Essentially, the human in the loop remains incredibly
important for the actual advice delivery, and the best thing
that you kind of are equipped to do is to
build relationships with your client. It's not to do everything else.
And so the opportunity for MALU is to basically be
the operating system or the piece of software that wealth
(28:51):
managers and advisors live in on a daily basis to
get the work done that they actually need to do
and uplift them kind of above the paper the menual
tasks so that they become I would describe as like reviewers,
not doers. So you finished a meeting with your client,
you know that you need to put together an annual
review later. For example, that could take you a week
(29:11):
or you might need to outsource it to someone else
to do, whereas we can now deliver a draft in
two minutes and it's ninety five percent there, and you
can spend thirty minutes doing a once over and a
check off to tweak and edit and understand you know,
how that document has essentially rived at that place.
Speaker 1 (29:35):
So you're using a lot of artificial intelligence here. But
this isn't a robo advice player or anything like that.
This is taking all the admin and burden off financial advisors,
so they've actually got more time to focus on understanding
what their clients need.
Speaker 2 (29:49):
Yeah, and the way that we're described as like, you know,
clients not paperwork, or you know, your your purpose is advice,
not admin. Like if you were to ask any advisor,
you did not get into this profession for the admin.
You've got in it for, you know, the reason of
helping clients, building trust, delivering advice. And so the way
we delivered the product was one as a wedge with
(30:13):
a note taker that it's hyper specialized to financial advice.
That might seem counterintuitive to people, but it's extremely powerful
for a couple of reasons. One, there's a huge amount
of nuance in the advice space. So if you were
to use a generic transcription tool as part of a meeting,
you just get a chronological A to Z of that
exact conversation, And an advice conversation could be ninety five
(30:34):
percent relationship building and there could be five percent kind
of smattered throughout that conversation that's actually relevant to advice
your goals, your motivations, your rest tolerance capacity, fees, all
of the above. And so we can use templates to
extract and structure the most relevant pieces of the advice
conversation for your internal facing compliance purposes. But then also
(30:56):
like an external facing follow up to a client for example,
so an advisor no longer has to take notes after
the meeting, have second person in the meeting taking notes
for them, rely on anything else other than our products,
and because where so will hyper specialized to advice, we
become an incredibly powerful tool and product and part of
their day. And the feedback that we've had is incredible,
like unsolicited on a daily basis, This is changing my life.
(31:19):
This is the best thing that's happened to me in
twenty five years of the industry. Hey, I can onboard
more clients already and we're only just getting started. And
now what we're able to do is move into the
post meeting workflows. So you have the context for a meeting,
you have an incredible kind of set of information, and
now we can begin to action and undertake work on
the behalf of the advisor, for example, generating advice documents. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (31:41):
It's incredible, isn't it. And there are other companies in
this building I think that are doing a similar thing,
for instance in healthcare for GPS. So it starts with
transcription and having a conversation, as you say, feeding it
into a general transcription service. It's powered by AI. Like
an offer or something like that isn't going to get
you the results. It's all the work that you do
to fine tune that for a particular use case such
(32:04):
as financial advice. That's the real power of it.
Speaker 2 (32:07):
Yeah. Yeah, and it's really resonated. So you know, we
have been live in market for seven months now. We
have paying customers in the UK, South Africa, Australia and
New Zealand. We're doing Singapore shortly as well. I'm there
next week. So this is like globally applicable. We are
seeing like a huge amount of kind of pool and
demand for the product. And yeah, it's a super exciting time.
Speaker 1 (32:30):
You've just raised some preceed money, what four point six
million dollars? Yes, yeah, correct, so's the what's the plan
for what runway will that allow you to use?
Speaker 2 (32:39):
It mainly allows us to accelerate product development and so
that's kind of twofold one. It's resource the team up
more to make the most of the opportunities that we
see in front of us, so go faster and as
a result of having more people, you know, within reason,
actually be able to ship the product faster as well.
So it's to grow our teams you know in London
and Sydney and in Wellington, and then also look at
(33:01):
opportunities in other markets too.
Speaker 1 (33:03):
Yeah. And I've just been reading great book nineteen twenty
nine Andrew Ross Sauken, getting really inside what happened with
the Great Crash of nineteen twenty nine and drawing parallels
to today. Are we in a bubble? Yeah, an AI bubble.
So I think there's a lot of people who invest
are looking for better quality advice to navigate, not just
(33:26):
be sheep that are jumping in the latest thing. That's
what happened in nineteen twenty nine, although back then it
was all margins. You know, people were borrowing to buy shares,
which is never really a good thing, and then the
margin calls came in and they're all bankrupt, you know,
so interesting your views on what the future of financial
advice is. Obviously in the background is artificial intelligence and
(33:47):
robo advice, and it stands the sense that this is
a very data driven industry. There's huge amounts of data.
If you can get hold of that data, there is
incredible value that may augment or even replace some of
the functions that that advisors play just looking at it
screens of data coming into them.
Speaker 2 (34:06):
My view on the future of advice is that it
will be hyper personalized. It will be available to anyone
at scale, and this is probably more of the kind
of tenure of you. I still believe in the value
of the human in the loop. I think the main
constraint there is regulation. Regulators will not move to, at
least in my opinion, you know, open up huge swaths
(34:26):
of the advice market to a complete kind of software
driven experience that maybe possible. Who knows, like a lot
will play out in that space. But I still very
much believe in the value of the human and the loop,
and ultimately our goal is to transform the underlying unit
economics of what it means to deliver advice. So at
the moment, it's very much if I wish to grow
(34:48):
my advice firm or offer advice to more people, I
need to make a set investment in terms of growing
headcount or ability to resource all the admin that is
associated with each new client, and I don't necessarily have
a set return for that. So it's changing that equation
saying that you can grow your firm without having to
make these big bets or take on additional risk, and
(35:10):
ultimately bring down the minimums which are now existing and
actually are going up at a lot of these firms
either you know, liquid assets of five hundred thousand or
a million dollars for example, and start to move that
equation in the other direction. So, for example, I think
the average advice fee in the UK has increased like
six percent in the last twelve months, and so really
it just continues to price consumers and people who need
(35:33):
access to advice out of the market. And so for us,
the mission is transform the underlying P and L and
the unit economics of what it means to deliver advice
to a customer so that we can actually reverse that,
and I think that to me is the more pressing problem.
Then we're just going to have an AI you know,
driven advisor that's going to deliver advice to everyone, Like
that could well happen in the future, but you have
(35:55):
to understand like the fundamental drivers of what it means
to one be an advisor to deliver advice, and then ultimately,
like why you will doing this? It's to deliver a
better experience for the end consumer. Yeah, And I think
that's probably the second piece that gets lost in all
of this. It's a lot of software. I think in
the AI space at the moment, it's never been easier
to build. That is true, but it's also been never
(36:17):
been easy to deliver a really shitty product experience. And
I think if you look at adoption of many many companies,
they have very high churn. It gets you know, forced
from management and a business setting down upon teams, and
a lot of the individuals won't adopt it. And so
our goal is to build a product that is delightful,
(36:37):
is loved, so you know very much the shares is framing,
but for business setting like is truly valuable and allows
the end user to realize value very very quickly. And
then from there it's about how do you actually elevate
and uplift the experience for the client. So a lot
of people right now will say, hey, there's this manual
piece of paperwork. There's steps one, two, three, four, five.
(36:58):
We're just going to understand what they're steps are, and
we're just going to use AI to like, you know,
write the paperwork or kind of take that down to
steps one or two. Whereas our view is you need
to understand the outcome that you're trying to achieve, what
the customer and client experience is at the end of that,
and then just design with that in mind, forget everything else.
And so it means that you can kind of fundamentally
(37:19):
re architect how a lot of this work actually gets
done in the background. And I think that's part of
this kind of Shares is a light year and consumer
late approach which we're bringing to this kind of antiquated
when those ninety five esque like industry, when it comes
to software, it's build for the consumer, build something that
they love that you know, stacks up against any other
(37:39):
kind of social or social media either that they might
use in terms of experience and force adoption. So I'll
give you like a really concrete example. It doesn't matter
whether you're an individual advisor or whether you're the managing director.
You get the same experience when you come to our product.
It's self serve onboarding, sign up in two minutes and
you know we've got a test or a demo meeting
(38:01):
for you, or you can upload your own or you
can add Marlow to a meeting straight away. So the
time to value is very very quick, but it results
in like a bottom's up, like sales motion. So I
did a demo on Friday with a pretty large UK firm.
We already had two of their advisors and customers of ours.
And so what that means for the first time ever
is that the advisor in this situation as a product
that they love, they can turn around to their management team.
(38:23):
They can bang their fist on the table and say
this is changing my life. I love it. We need
to roll this out across the whole firm. So it's
a very different kind of sales process and cycle, and
in a lot of cases is resulting in way way
higher adoption. Of the product and durability. So to give
you some numbers, we have had almost zero churn after
(38:48):
seven months with hundreds and hundreds of paid seats globally,
all on monthly contracts. You can leave us at any
point in time. But it's because we are starting to
get that kind of ingredient in that next in terms
of B two C to B which is built for
the consumer and the individual and have them kind of
advocate on your behalf to roll out the product. We
(39:10):
have advisors who are running training sessions for their colleagues.
We have firms who are talking to their competitors about us,
and like the anecdote that comes back is, I can't
believe I'm doing this, but I'm talking to one of
our beggest competitors and I've given them a demo of
your product, which is an incredible piece of feedback to
have it. But it's because the focus is on the
(39:31):
user experience and the value that you're delivering opposed to
in a lot of cases just automating steps one to
five and then trying to extract as much money out
of someone as you possibly can.
Speaker 1 (39:40):
Yeah, it's pushing up the price of giving that advice
as well making it inaccessible. So yeah, that's great. You've
got a team back in New Zealand of small team
and Wellington of engineers working on the coding and then.
Speaker 2 (39:52):
Yeah, yeah, so we're kind of building engineering and product
across Sydney and Wellington. We kind of have a go
to market function now for Asia Pacific out of Sydney
and are doing the same in London as well, so
kind of go to market for UK, Europe and other
countries in that time zone. So South Africa for example,
or East Coast US works pretty well for us. And
(40:13):
then also building kind of like marketing and growth function
in the UK as well. So our view is like
New Zealand companies should be building global from day one.
You need to be in big markets, and it just
makes sense to front foot a lot of the pain
that most companies experience and go through, which is we
spend a year or two in New Zealand maybe Australia,
(40:34):
we kind of do okay or reasonably well, and then
we decide or raise our level of ambition and then
go offshore. And you could have just kind of chalked
up all those learnings made the mistakes earlier in the
piece and be so much better off for it. So
a lot of people ask, oh, how do you work
a cross time zones or and the answer is we
(40:54):
figure it out as we go. We have the opportunity
to build cultural infrastructure, is what I call it in
terms of how we run the company, how we work
together onboard people allow people to kind of do great
work or get their best out of themselves, and it
results in a really high level of autonomy, but very
kind of clear guidelines for how we operate, and as
we grow, the onuses on the whole team to provide
(41:16):
feedback and input into how we shape that because we
don't have all the answers. But in my opinion, you're
way better off to being big markets because it's a
force multiplier for everything that you do from day one
and you can just back solve all of these problems.
It's not to say it's easy, but it's much better
off in the long run. And the reality is, like
we run a twenty four to seven operation, Like we
(41:37):
work pretty big hours, but it's incredibly rewarding and we
spend a lot of time on planes going back and forth.
But we're kind of at the age and stage where
you know, we're up for that. We're making this choice.
We're fully opted into this. Yeah, and it's for people
to kind of like be up for that, to join
the mission or not. And it's a great filter.
Speaker 1 (41:57):
And like this is the norm now for there are
more people employed by New Zealand tech companies offshore than
in New Zealand by a rapidly growing margin. So this
is the reality global from day one for tech companies
and we've seen incredible success s. That's where the high
growth comes for AURA first, AML, all these other companies
(42:20):
that often have a co founder that has moved to
the US or the UK to build that bridgehead. That's
the recipe now.
Speaker 2 (42:28):
Yeah, and there's a great community of people who have
kind of gone before and done that. Now, it's still
really important to me that we, you know, operate out
of New Zealand or have a presence there, you know,
to transfer learning's economic value like everything else back. And
we're seeing more and more successful companies be able to
keep their entity there for example, not have to flip
(42:49):
it to the US or the UK or another country.
It kind of like it can depend depending on what
age and stage and tiples dictated by investors or certain
other factors down the line, but the New Zealand connection
for us is super important and we think that we
have like a really really good talent pool there and
kind of one of my personal goals is like, how
(43:10):
can we find, you know, super bright, young, ambitious people
and how can we kind of share our worldview with them?
How can we get them over to the UK. It's
super easy to move here. Yes, it's a long way away,
but like I want to be exporting as much talent
as possible or signing people up and saying like, hey,
you've got to do your first six or twelve months
in New Zealand, like learn the business, get across the
(43:31):
New Zealand Australian context, and then move over to London
with us. Like we just have kind of this talent
pipeline and machine that you can't get anywhere else, and
we get on really well. We've shared cultural context and
understanding and it's just a great way of building like
a global business in my opinion. So that's something that
I'm keen to kind of keep pushing alongside everything else
that we have going on, and it's important to us.
Speaker 1 (43:51):
Well good luck for the future. I'm sure you'll be
raising more capital before too long at the growth rate
that you're experiencing at the moment. And congratulations on that
international expansion South Africa, Singapore coming online as well, so
plenty of upward momentum. So congratulations and thanks so much
for coming on a Business of Tech.
Speaker 2 (44:11):
Yeah, I love the chat. Thank you.
Speaker 1 (44:22):
Thanks so much to Hardy Michelle, co founder of Marlou,
explaining how AI can finally free financial advisors from the
mountain of admin so they can spend more time doing
what matters given quality, human centered advice. I think Marlou's
approach is a really great case study in using AI
to augment people, not replace them. If they can help
(44:43):
financial advisors reduce the admin associated with dispensing their advice,
that will hopefully mean more affordable advice, lower fees, but
more importantly, better advice as these advisors are freed up
to focus exactly on what their clients need. So thanksfull
listening to the Business of Tech powered by two Degrees.
If you enjoyed this episode, please rate, review, and subscribe
(45:05):
wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Peter Griffin and I'll
be back next Thursday with more on the Business of Tech.
Catch you then
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