E-Money Accounts, Tech and the Human Approach | Cumming’s Pepperdine Crypto Questions with Sean Kiernan, Founder and CEO of Greengage

In this edition of the Hugely Popular Cummings Pepperdine Crypto Questions, Claire Cummings is joined by Sean Kiernan, Founder and CEO of Greengage. 

Claire and Sean dive into who Greengage are, what they offer, their personal approach to their business and how the tech they’ve developed supports them.
 

Sean Kiernan is the Founder and CEO of Greengage, a digital finance pioneer. He has extensive experience in financial services, having worked in various executive management positions. He founded Greengage after working at the first bank in the world to offer crypto products to clients, Falcon Private Bank, where he served as the COO and Interim CEO of the London operation until leaving to establish Greengage.  Prior to that he held management positions at Clariden Leu, a division of Credit Suisse, and Zurich Financial Services. Mr Kiernan has an MBA from the University of St. Gallen and a BSc from Georgetown University.

Contact Greengage: 

Email info@greengage.co

Website: www.greengage.co 

Podcast, The Gage https://greengage.co/our-thinking/podcasts 

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Transcript

0:07

Thank you everybody for joining us for this edition of Cummings Pepperdine's hugely popular crypto questions. I'm pleased to say that we can also add the words award winning to that because we are the winners of an award for our podcast. Now today I'm interviewing somebody else who also has an award winning podcast. It's Sean Kiernan from Green Gage and I'd recommend everybody listens to the Green Gage podcast. The gauge and Sean is going to talk to us about his work as what I would term additional finance. Pioneer Greenage offers E-money accounts to its customers, and I'm gonna ask Sean a bit about what E-money is and the services that Greenage offers, and then going to bit more depth on three particular aspects of the Green Gauge business. So, Sean, thank you for joining us and tell us about Greengage and your role as a digital finance pioneer and about the e money offering that you have. Hello, it's a real pleasure to be here. I'm obviously a big fan of what you do with the podcast and what you do generally. Thank you. GreenGage is a labour of love, really. I've been working at it for the last five years. And in terms of what we offer, it's, I would say, a different approach to finance. We love the tech. We love the innovation that's happening in crypto, blockchain, LTE. And what we've tried to do is humanise that. To, to bring a combination of the, the innovation that we're, we're seeing unfold in payments and capital markets. But, but bring that into a, with every one of our clients, a dedicated relationship manager. And what that means in practice, you've mentioned e money. We offer to our clients so they can have fiat transactional accounts, currently GVP and Euro. We're crypto friendly. So quite a few of our clients are in the crypto space, but not exclusively. In addition to that, we offer B2B lending, where once we have the relationships and the transactional data, we really know our clients. We kick the tires. And with that information, we can partner with third party balance sheets, credit funds, family offices, and the new digital world to source debt funding for our clients with partners. And the last thing we do is tech. We built our own core banking stack on Salesforce and Azure, and we're launching apps and we have consulting that we support our clients with. So tell me, first of all, the thing that I find most interesting is that you talk about a labour of love, and half a decade on this labour of love, and actually I think it is, I think that was when we met, wasn't it? Five years ago. And as part of that labour of love, you talk about really working with the clients that you have who have accounts with you. Tell me a bit more about that sort of personal service because while I think it's, it's, it's clear to everybody that GreenGage is not a bank, I mean at no point have you ever said that or nor does it appear on any of your materials. People do open e money accounts with you and it sounds to me as if one of the things that distinguishes you from other people in the wider world of finance, not just digital finance, Is that very personal relationship you have with people who have e money accounts? And that personal relationship, I would say, is very lacking in many areas of possibly more traditional finance. How do you, how do you sort of partner with your clients as well as partner with the people who will provide the balance sheets for you? I mean, in a way, it's not rocket science, and it's something I'm fascinated with because nobody else has done it yet, because it's pretty straightforward in terms of the principles. Yeah, and here I think we're all humans. We're all looking for somebody that we can speak to and can understand us. We've been trained. To use apps and websites to access finance and we have to deliver those and those give us efficiencies and a huge amount of automation in terms of getting things done and people can be empowered to take those actions themselves. And so we, we at GreenGage had to have that. I mean, we had to build and we spent millions on it. On the build of the tech. Yeah. The labour of love, to a certain extent. Um, and we built it ourselves, because we wanted to have that control to give clients flexibility. If we wanted to add a feature, we can add things relatively quickly in a way you can't if you outsource your tech fully. But the bit that's different is, um, most of our competitors just start with the app and the app is typically very whizzy and it works, but it doesn't always work. And often we pitch to clients that banking is free or the accounts you get are free and they're not free. We all know in the background that the banks are earning the net interest margin. The index that are offering free accounts, they're either being funded by venture capitalists, or they have some source of funding to scale until they can then monetize the relationship, or they're shifting people into these automated solutions at any cost. And at the expense of service, what we do is combine human service with the fintech approach. And for me, crypto is the enabling. piece to, to unlock. How do we get in, in medium term, the likes of digital debt products to our clients, the likes of innovation in payments, that we can use these new technologies to deliver better service, but with an approach which is more, I call it an iron man or iron woman, where the tech allows the human, that is the relationship manager, to be better. The tech is the starting point. And, and it's, and it's enabling, but what really matters is the fact that if I, if I were a GreenGage client, I'd, I'd be able to talk to you. Yeah, and it's something that I... How, how ridiculous that something so basic and so human is so... You know, it's just unusual and it doesn't have to be that expensive. Um, the fascinating thing for me is as bank branches have kind of been shut down in the countryside, like there's a lot of good people out there that are not working for an absolute fortune, but they have experience and they understand how clients tick. And if we give them the platform to engage with clients digitally, but still with a human approach on the phone, we can set up WhatsApp groups with our client or we can meet in person. I mean, these are approaches that obviously you don't want to speak with somebody handling your finances every day, but when you do want to speak with them, you want to hire them. But when you want to explore an idea or a need, you can actually speak to somebody who knows you and knows your business. Exactly. And therein, to be frank, lies our profit. If we're able to resolve the pain points of our clients, and if our approach is to listen rather than to pitch, if we're able to say, For example, a client has an issue where they need funding for their, for their growth. And if we're able to help them, because we understand them, we built a relationship over time, and deliver something that they wouldn't be able to get elsewhere, they're very happy to pay us a fee. Uh, if, if, if they get what they want. I mean, what you do, what I always think that, that we do as a law firm is we find solutions. You know, we're not, okay, those solutions are based in law and, and, and regulation. But really, really, we're, we're solution providers. That's what, that's what people pay us for. That's what people talk to us about, that's what people need. And it's, it sounds as if that's very much the approach that you take at GreenGage as well. What do you need? How can we get it? How can we build it and get it for you? So, Sean, we were talking about solutions and our, for both of us, our work is to find solutions for our clients and one of those solutions that you find is debt funding. Can you tell me a bit more about the debt funding solutions that you provide to clients? Yeah, and it's something that, uh, just generally we are looking very closely at solicitors and accountants and other professional services as a model for us. So we think people wouldn't nickel and dime their solicitors particularly. And when you do pay a little bit to, to, um, Financial services provider like Greengage who has a relationship with you and who has who has an understanding of how you tick and can facilitate transactional services. The bit that we then can bring that one of these pure tech providers. Cannot is a little bit more in terms of connecting our clients to two partners on these partners are typically I mentioned that credit funds or family offices are increasingly the digitally native area, which we're looking to plug into, but we're able to deliver than higher volumes of say, borrowing to our clients than they could get from a purely embedded finance or purely fintech led approach. Yeah, which caps out really at a couple hundred K, um, which is still great and we recommend our clients do take these approaches if they can and what we offer is in addition to the, to off the shelf funding, say, the embedded financer or FinTech led approach is we offer as well. A credit library of partnerships, which we have built for as long as we've been going, if not longer, because the staff members of GreenGage have their own relationships, which we bring to the table. And what we do then is a bit of matchmaking. And that, uh, and that means, uh, working with both sides of the table and making sure that people understand what they're getting into and funneling discussions such that when our clients need the money that they, that they're looking to borrow. They find the best partners. Um, and this, uh, for me, it's fascinating that there's a lot of noise in the fintech space. There's always some new innovation, which is great, but very few people have been able to systematize that noise and distill what actually matters for the underlying client. And that's where we see our differentiation. Right. And I think that ties in very nicely, actually, with what you were saying earlier about the more personal approach. I think it's sustainable in a Web3 world. For our model, relationships and data, I think, are the only things that a firm like us can rely on to create a moat, if you will, for our business to be sustainable. You know, I, I, the way I tend to think about Web3 as well is that actually it's, it's more about personal interconnections. It's about, You know, you have and you own your, you know, your own assets that you sort of, that you put on Web3, and because that brings you right into it. It's a more personal communication than was possible with Web 1 or Web 2. Exactly. And the costs, and what I get really excited about is the structuring costs should come right down. So the capacity to underwrite, say, commercial paper or fixed income instruments and put them into the capital markets. And that I suppose brings us nicely on to sort of the third, the third sort of line or emphasis that you have within the Green Gauge business. which is actually tech. So can you tell us a bit more about the tech that you have and how that sort of enables you to give a more personal service? How almost the provision of tech takes away the tech interface. If that makes sense, if I've got that right. Yeah, and it's something that initially was probably less investable in us from, from a classic venture capital perspective, in that we, we started with consulting. So we started with a human first approach to tech. Most of our tech is built on Salesforce and We acquired a couple of years ago, a Salesforce consultancy that had been building a lot of tech for us, uh, as we, as we were launching and which was a specialist in serving the financial services market and that, that understanding of one of these big tech firms in Salesforce and how it can made into bespoke solutions for firms has powered the approach that we take, but resonates across the whole, uh, I think you're hearing this kind of human first, but with, with tech, uh, tech making it possible as, as we've got. Our own tech built and as we've seen trends in the market from our consultancy clients, there's various apps that we have in our pipeline, which are a bit more of that software as a service, more scalable, more investable type approach that we are launching and collectively this constellation of apps, if you will. Is, is something that forms a core banking stack and it's, it's not something that we, we've designed, uh, this massive bulge bracket kind of tick every box with a single system because the whole approach and why we like Salesforce is it's, it's API first. So if we see a better widget. app that is, is not what we have, but what somebody else has, we can plug and play that and form something that's a little bit more, I wouldn't call it a Frankenstein, but a more beautiful outcome and more elegant for the ultimate purpose of what our clients want. So, yeah. And I think that's the thing that's really key, isn't it? Because what you're talking about is what your clients want. Yeah. And ultimately that's what drives all of us. Yeah. It's what, it's, it's what it all, it all comes back to having that personal relationship, knowing what your clients want. Being able to provide a solution to that, and the tech enables the person, the personal approach, and the two work very well together in a way that they don't really always work in other parts of the world. We've all sort of had that experience of just never being able to find a telephone for anybody, and we've all had that experience of when you can actually find a telephone number. It's never answered, and you go to a chatbot, and the chatbot can't really answer your question, and you're, you know, you're just stuck, and you can't go anywhere, and it's, it all, I always find it quite sort of demeaning when that happens, you know, I'm an adult, I should be able to speak to another adult, and work out how to make things work, and it sounds to me as if it's not. You're actually treating people as adults, as your partners, because of your tech, not in spite of it. And we also see it as a great tool to improve the tech. If we have that frontline engagement with our clients, there are bits that we can improve. To give you a concrete example, we had quite a few fiduciary structures that were looking to engage with us as clients. And the thing they kept on banging on around was saying that we needed to have multiple signatory thresholds baked into the system, which would allow them to have flexible appointment of, say, somebody having the capacity to sign off a payment at this level, somebody else at another level, etc. And. Because of the open dialogue we had with the clients, we were able to build this in a way that I think is one of the best around in terms of flexibility to giving that not just for fiduciaries, but also corporates to design what works for them and works for their business in a way that unfortunately, a lot of the challenger banks. They're still not allowing that, um, even in some of the biggest ones. Freedom for clients, if, if they're not necessarily a director of the firm, to set thresholds or limits to control how, how payments can be orchestrated. And that for me is one of the key risks of the business. Um, staff are obviously needing to be empowered to, to support any, any growing SME. Yeah, and it's, and it's the internal policies within the business that, that, that should allow that and should be, yeah, should be sorted out. I remember my young days. doing banking work with Kleinwalt Benson, and of course you're never going to get a member of the main board to sign anything, so there was an authorised signatories book for people throughout the world and, you know, internally the bank had sorted that out, so it was, it was possible to, to deal with some quite major banking transactions. Without, without having to get the, get the main board in, in Frankfurt or what, you know, you, you would've out outta bed to deal with things. Yeah. It's, it's simple stuff, really on one level, but it's, it's just making sure what we build is useful. It's all about the client. That's the key to it really, isn't it? Yeah. And I often think we challenge the banks, you know, they can work really well, but sometimes I think that, you know, the answer to challenger banks is in the name. They can be quite challenging to work with. Sean, it's been an absolute pleasure to speak to you. It's interesting to explore the idea of tech not taking away from the human interaction and what we all need as people, but actually Adding to that experience and I think GreenGage is quite unique in that. Could you tell everybody listening how they can get in touch with you and they can enjoy the unique sort of very personal experience that you offer? Perhaps you could give us your email address and also the website for GreenGage. Fantastic. So the, the website's our first point of call, www dot greengage, GAG co by email. We have info@greenage.co. And we're also people as, as we all have, have heard on this podcast. So, um, uh, you can find us on LinkedIn or kind at various conferences. We, we speak at, uh, quite a few events, and those events are on our website too. Perfect. Easy to find you and enjoy the personal touch and the joint solution finding that GreenGage offers. Thanks so much, Claire. Sure. Thank you very much. Speak soon. Bye bye. Speak soon. Bye.