Monica Millares: [00:00:00] Hi, Ken, how are you today? It's a pleasure having you in the show.

Ken Hart (Snowdrop): Monica. It's a real pleasure to be

Monica Millares: here. Thank you. And I'm really looking forward to this conversation because like you and I had a chat at Money2020, then we had a separate catch up and we were talking about Hey, thinking differently, how Snowdrop is different in terms of you're not busy funded, which that gives you a competitive advantage in terms of how you do things.

Focusing on what you call the toothbrush products, which I love. So it's a very unique conversation. So really looking forward to it.

Ken Hart (Snowdrop): Thanks. Thanks. So maybe a bit of context because I'm not a dentist and we don't sell dental floss and toothpaste. So snowdrop spin around a little bit about the company.

We're based in the UK. We've been around for 10 years and we work primarily or the original premise of the company was to work closely with the Google maps team. So we would resell Google maps and develop around Google [00:01:00] maps and we did that in the real estate. Travel initially in transportation markets.

And then what we're trying to do is really focus on like a B two, B2C approach, and we would give. The best location, intelligence, location, and rich data to say a large real estate company so they can make it more clear and intuitive with people go to a website, figure out a real estate portal, where should I live?

Why the toothbrush metaphor? Because what we did was we really try and do things. When you're dealing with the consumers young, old, male, female, you want to deal with problems that people have every day. We call it like a toothbrush, right? Hopefully everyone listening to this podcast brushes their teeth every day, right?

Yeah. So it's not just a small amount of people once in a while. We're trying to tackle problems that are daily problems for the mass of consumers. That's hence the term a toothbrush

Monica Millares: approach. Yeah. And that is a very good. Even like [00:02:00] term because it's like day to day use all of the fintechs, B2C fintechs, where like, how do we become a day to day product?

And then it's, I think we can have like very interesting conversations, but before we go into the detail of it, just for everyone to get a feel of who you are and learn a little bit about your mindset, I'll just ask you a few questions on Ken as such. So let's start with what is your definition of success?

Ken Hart (Snowdrop): Frankly, it's a good balance with my family, and I have four daughters, and they're getting increasingly getting old. They're getting ready to go off some of them to university. I really say it's success is having something that good balance and join people you work with. Obviously, when you do something that's impactful, you want to have a degree of autonomy.

In what you do, and that's why I think, that balance and autonomy is my definition of success. It's not you've hit a certain milestone. It used to be like that, but then you'd hit [00:03:00] those milestones and things don't really change. You know what? Hitting a certain milestone is important.

That's great. But it's not my definition of success. It's really enjoying the people you work with and having a time to have that balanced life. Yes,

Monica Millares: yes. I agree with you because the people that you work with make a massive difference. We work like most of the day, right? So yeah, definitely. And then of course you are founder, CEO, you run this company for many years.

What's your biggest productivity habit?

Ken Hart (Snowdrop): Ooh. I will say there's two things that at least they work really well for me. One is what I call the walk and talk. And by the way, this is a productivity hack, but I would argue a good relationship hack. Yeah. Or good friends and family hack, whatever you want to apply to.

So walk and talk for me is sometimes if something is going not according to plan, if someone is doing something that. You're not sure what's going on a [00:04:00] walk and a talk in the park or something like that can be really useful. So it's just a good chance to get to know some. Rather than sitting down, maybe face to face and having a coffee that could be useful to my personal productivity hack, if you will, is to go for a walk in the park.

We have the offices. Right here, beautiful parks in London. We'll go for a walk and a talk and say, Hey, what were you thinking? What happened then? That's, a big one for me. The second one is sometimes there's times you just focus get into the phone, get things done and I find listening to music, certain types of music is really good and enables me to really zoom in on what I need to get done and, produce things well.

So those are my two bits. Yes,

Monica Millares: I like that. It's focus and then basically have the difficult conversations in a safe, relaxed environment that it's walking. It's not a confrontational. It's a

Ken Hart (Snowdrop): no walking. I've never heard. [00:05:00] Yeah, I don't want to it's not necessarily a bad moment to have a walk and talk, but sometimes hey, you're not sure what's going on where that person's not sure what's going on.

Or you're worried. Maybe they're upset or something or. Or you're a walk and a talk is always a good thing.

Monica Millares: Cool. I like that. I used to have a manager back in the UK that exactly at some point we would be like, Hey, we have meetings. And it was like, shall we go for a walk? It's I can bring my notebook and take notes as we walk, which was cool.

Okay. So then the last one, before we go fully on into the episode, what is the favorite, your most favorite part of the work that you do?

Ken Hart (Snowdrop): The favorite part of the work that I do. I think I like connecting with people and connecting the dots. So I enjoy what I do because I'll have a client meeting.

We'll discuss some really interesting things. And it's about asking often the right questions. What does good look like? What do you want to do? Is [00:06:00] that keeping you up or getting maybe sometimes you need to pull a little bit more information out of someone and then you'll come across another meeting.

Or you've read something else and I like connecting the dots. That's really something that I genuinely enjoy doing. I'd like to think I'm okay at it or even better than okay at it. And it also enables me to think about what are the next things to come? So that's probably the thing that I enjoy most about what I do.

You got to have the time, the team And the sort of stability though, to do that, because if not often we're all in just heads down do, fight a fire here, put out a fire there. So having the time and the ability to step back and connect the dots is something I definitely enjoyed.

Monica Millares: Awesome. I like that. And it's connecting the dots and connecting with people, basically. Yeah,

Ken Hart (Snowdrop): yeah, definitely.

Monica Millares: Cool. Okay. So then let's get into the conversation as such. And I want to start with the purpose, [00:07:00] what's the story behind Snowdrop? Like why, what motivated you to say, Hey, I'm going to start this tech company and then continue and not only motivated to start, but then motivated to keep going.

Ken Hart (Snowdrop): Remember I talked about autonomy. Let me give you a bit of a story from 2006 or 2007. I was at Yahoo. So I'd worked for some really big companies in my time. And me and two or three others were brought into a very I'm going to be talking about a very important meeting with a senior person running Yahoo Europe.

And that person was looking at their BlackBerry at the time and said, what is this whole iPhone app thing? I don't get it. And we're all sitting around explaining to the person right now this is a new format. It's a new user experience and people are used to using their BlackBerry to type just email, but an app is really a much more engaging way to.

To, to deal with content, not just [00:08:00] emails, but any sort of content. The executive at the time said how much advertising money are we making in app advertising today? And the answer is very little because it just started. And we said, look, first go the eyeballs, the consumers go first to the apps, and two or three years later, the advertising money eventually follows the eyeballs.

To which the exec said I won't be here in 2 years, so let's shut down the mobile business. So that experience was a really painful experience, but it opened my eyes to how big companies often think often very short term. This quarter next quarter end of the year, and not really a lot of thought beyond that.

So later on, I had the opportunity to create a company and it's always fearful. I remember again, sitting at the kitchen table. Buying the domain and stuff like that. And, you have to feel what's going through your emotions there. And it's what am I afraid [00:09:00] about? This is not that hard.

But what I've loved about the experience, what prompted me to create Snowdrop was. To do something with a group of people that I truly enjoyed and having a bit of that long term ability to carry something through. Not because VC is telling me to do it or some guy in corporate headquarters in California needs to do it right to do the right thing the right way.

The right time. You need to have autonomy to do it. And that was why I wanted to create a company. Why did we pick Snowdrop? And why did we pick the field that we work in as a second answer your question? And, something that I thought was really compelling when I was a little kid, this great story of Dr.

John Snow, who you may or may not know, in 18, was 1854, there was an epidemic in London, in Soho. It was a cholera epidemic and something like several hundred people died in a few days. And they went to [00:10:00] the authorities, the people living in Soho, and they said, You need to do something. And the authority said, it's bad ear miasma.

We can't do anything. Oh, and a doctor who lived in London at the time, young doctor, Dr. John snow said, and he sat there one night and he drew up a little map of the neighborhood and he drew a little black line where all the dead people lived and they said, where's the local source of water? And he drew that and it happened to be right in the middle.

And then he immediately ran to, I think it was a local priest and they said, Oh, my goodness. And they disconnected the pump from the well to end the epidemic. This is before microscopes. This is before they understood what bacteria was. So what I loved about that story and why we call the company Snowdrop after Dr.

Jon Snow was that sometimes location information or a map is so intuitive. You just there's an immediately call to action. And so the whole idea that you can use mapping experience and give clarity [00:11:00] to consumers. Was really the basis of why we created the company Snowdrop, where it certainly named it after Dr.

John Snow, who's buried in the old Brompton Cemetery now in London, and that's a little long winded story about why create a company, why we call it

Monica Millares: Snowdrop. Yeah, and I think we can go deeper into both. But I'll start with the Snowdrop as such. I love, the inspiration of the name. Can you explain to us, what exactly do you do as a company when it comes to providing maps?

And how does that relate to customers and Proper practical interfaces like what did you guys do?

Ken Hart (Snowdrop): Sure. Sure. So what we do is we have a lot of mapping expertise and location expertise and we believe that there's moments in the consumer's lives. Like, where should I buy this apartment? Where should I live?

Where should my commute be? Where should I go on holidays? What does that look like? Or [00:12:00] what is this bank's spend than when I'm living my bank bill, right? So the whole idea is there's moments in people's lives where there's a lack of clarity. There's a lack of transparency. And if you could just make sense of it quickly and intuitively, we believe often on a map, they just get it.

People don't need to overthink things. They know exactly. Oh, that's a six minute walk from that hotel. To the British museum. Great. I'll book it now. Or, oh, that's where I went for lunch last week. I recognize that transaction. That's the clean name. That's the logo. I'm not freaking out thinking about I've been hacked.

There are all these moments that we try and focus on where we use Location enhanced data enrichment to really create that clarity and that intuitive user experience. That's our mission out there. That's our North Star. Obviously, that works in real estate, travel, financial services around payments and transactions and figuring out where I should go on holidays or booking a hotel.

[00:13:00] But we believe that in time, it could expand to other areas as well. So it's about adding clarity. So people have an intuitive understanding what they're doing.

Monica Millares: Thank you. Can you expand on financial services as such? What are the use cases? Because I think some of the apps, let's say in the big fintech, new banks you have your trends, you go into the app and then you see the transaction.

Some of them do display a map. Others don't display a map. What's the use case for a fintech?

Ken Hart (Snowdrop): It's funny, Monica, when we started doing this, gosh, I want to say five, six years ago, I went to a couple of meetings in old street part of East London. And I met a company and I went, it was almost like a used pet shop.

It was this rundown little office. And it had some guys sitting around and this, we're going to build a bank. I was like, really? You can do that. And I was very fortunate to be at the right place at the right time. So Marco, the guy from Google, myself, we're talking to this company. That the time is [00:14:00] calling itself mondo and they were saying, yeah, we're going to create a bank where we want to create a radical new user experience.

In fact, we want to be so good that we never have to invest in a call center. And I said, what do you mean? I said, yeah, people don't understand their transactions. We're going to do it differently. We want to be a mobile only bank. That are really transparent, a great user experience. Mondo, for those who are not sure or never heard of Mondo, went on to change their name to Monzo.

And really, we gave them the Google Maps and helped them out and build that initial transaction enrichment. Tookoff. Starling called us right afterwards. Ann Bonham said, I'd like that too. Then Moniz, et cetera, et cetera. And what we saw, there was a gap between these Challenger banks who are out there really trying to differentiate and do things in a brand new way and the more traditional banks.

I remember going to a couple of the traditional banks saying, what do you think about this? And the traditional banks are like, it's just pretty, it's not meaningful, [00:15:00] literally, it doesn't matter. It's just pretty or a French bank said, Oh, French users, they don't want that. I was like, why? They're not confused over their transactions.

Oh, they can't be bothered. So what we're seeing is that your traditional bank, there's about a year to gap between the challenge for banks. We're watching this, by the way, not just in the UK. Banks like N26 in Germany or Rebellion in Spain, Nikkel in France. And then finally, the more traditional banks were like, you know what?

This is starting to eat into our business. You're taking away some very valuable users that if they migrate from traditional bank to these new banks, we're going to lose a lot of lifetime value of these customers when they, get better jobs and start applying for mortgages. They won't be turning to us to traditional bank.

There's a risk they'll be turning to the neo banks or this challenger banks. That's been our experience where we see the same problems, by the way, taking place in other parts of the world Southeast Asia, Latin America, et cetera. The one thing that I [00:16:00] would mention is that Google recently did some research for the company.

I think it's called Oxford. Maybe reporting or Oxford business reports. Anyway, they asked a bunch of people around the world. Where do you see the use of location and maps in the UK? It was the second most popular answer was to clean up banking transactions. So it's one from this very niche little thing a couple of years ago.

Only challenger bank turning road to like mainstream people expect this now. Sorry, my phone going off there. That's fine. Yeah,

Monica Millares: that I couldn't expect that when you go, especially someone like Google, like, when Google goes and asks consumers, where could you like to see basically location and rich data that consumers come back and say in my banking

Ken Hart (Snowdrop): transactions, it should be there now.

And but that's a big shift and [00:17:00] that's not been the same in other markets. We see it initially in a handful of European markets, but if for other people, it's still, oh, it's just a nice to have. It's pretty. It doesn't really impact the business. The statistics speak otherwise, right? We've seen the number of calls to call centers dramatically decrease the amount of time that people have in the call centers, not to deal with confusing transactions, but to upsell new products to the banks.

Increases app ratings, handset at bank went from three point 4. 3 to 4. 6 overnight by launching some of this enriched data services. So there's some real business benefits to frankly, giving your consumers a good experience.

Monica Millares: Yes, that is very good to hear because if you were to ask me in a very critical manner, Hey, Monica, the map in the app, I got to be like, that's a vitamin, not a painkiller, but actually.

There are very specific use cases where, like you've, mentioned before, it's we are removing [00:18:00] anxiety from customers in very specific touch points. And in that case it's definitely a painkiller. And like you say data is showing that there is a business case behind it.

Ken Hart (Snowdrop): Yeah, just think about in the UK about 11% of all transactions take place outside of the UK in Luxembourg, it's 43%.

Now, I don't know Qala, Lumpur, Singapore, but you would imagine a large number of those transactions are not in the domestic market, and a lot of those transactions are. I don't know the merchant. I don't remember where I was. I don't recognize those brands. I'm changing my spending habits. Maybe it's a different currency as well.

So there's a lot of extra confusion. You would know this better than anyone over there at big pay, right? About when people travel abroad, looking at a map is just one piece of the puzzle, but it definitely can add value and really removes the anxiety that consumers have if they don't remember where that transaction took [00:19:00] place.

It's a real reading point.

Monica Millares: It is because then it's not just the map. It is like you said, the name, right? It's like the name, the map from memory. You also offer it like the logos. So it helps me remember. What did I do with that transaction or identify, transactions that I'm like, Oh, I don't remember if I did that.

It happened to me recently that I was, traveling went to Amsterdam and I came back and I was like, I had a Malaysian domestic transaction a few days after. And I'm like, I don't, I generally don't remember what I did. That's it. It's yeah, but then it's it's, yeah the, and you, in this, in my case, the amount was very low.

So I'm like, I'm not even going to be bothered to go into raising a dispute is the other, but sometimes you're like, but it's still in the back of my head. I'm like, what was that transaction? And because then the second thing that comes to my mind is I have [00:20:00] not identified the transaction. I'm like, is this a potential fraud?

Attempt that it's we do the first one, it goes through and then A few weeks later, we do a bigger one. So that's, what goes through my mind as a product person, maybe not as a consumer.

Ken Hart (Snowdrop): And that's literally what goes through your mind as a consumer as well. And if you think about, typical example, I once my wife took the kids out for an Italian restaurant and it came back in the statement grow Mecca.

She was like, Oh my God, I've never been to grow Mecca in my life. I've been hacked grow Mecca. Is the name of the company that owns the franchise for the mama mia pizza chain, where we happen to be. So it's Inditex is the corporate entity, Zara, Wysh they're Massimo Dutti, et cetera, maybe the brand.

All those sort of examples where people fall up and they go, I don't understand this transaction, all that anxiety. It's not just [00:21:00] the map, it's the clean name, the right name, clean name, a logo, and then if you're still not sure, see it on that map. A lot of other people out there do just categorizations, shopping didn't know that Gromekka was a restaurant would not have helped me.

Or would not have helped my wife and that's in that case. So categorization alone, it's nice, but you really need the whole solution of location enhanced. We believe transaction rich to make sense of it all. And then you can also do spending insights. Here's where Brits go when they go travel abroad, or here's where.

People go when they go to Kuala Lumpur, or whatever it may be. You can do a lot more when you have that level of detail.

Monica Millares: Yes. And then just like brainstorming, putting these out there, like right now, of course, across the world, we're all a little bit tight when it comes to money, like the cost of living, it's just like going to the roof.

So it's actually yeah, maybe in the past we [00:22:00] were a little bit more lenient when you were like, ah, I don't know what it is. And then you just forget. But I think right now it's, every like, Tesco, every little helps. Even if you are unsure. Of what the transaction is, and then you have a reminder of, oh, yeah, actually, yes, I saw the map.

Oh, yeah. Now I know that helps to our peace of mind because financial stress is a real thing.

Ken Hart (Snowdrop): It definitely is. I think if I remember the statistics in the 4 is something like in the UK, 40 percent of users. Just make it to the end of the month, right? They don't have an extra savings at the end of each month.

That's a lot of people that really are pressed financially and with high inflation, high energy bills, it's a problem. If we can give some people more clarity and how they're spending, and then in time, we can work with the banks to recommend spend money here, not here. Maybe there's a reward here.

And you could [00:23:00] clearly identify the transaction, spot that transaction, give a cashback or some sort of incentive. Those are additional use cases, as well as stuff like ESG tag you're spending so much money on these merchants with these merchants. Or actually better merchants for the environment.

You may want to shift your spend a little bit over here. So there's a lot of things you could do once you have that clarity of transactions, a lot of insights and a lot of nudging that you can do to your consumers afterwards.

Monica Millares: I like that because now you're just exactly you had your core proposition and then now it's okay we've nailed the corporate position.

Now, let's see, how is it that we can collaborate with the banks fintechs to come up with. Ideas on how we can not enrich the data, but enrich customers experience such that they have. Better relationship with money better habits as such.

Ken Hart (Snowdrop): Yeah, some banks are doing a great job of it, [00:24:00] but I think sometimes you need to look outside the banking sector to really emulate the best experiences, right?

If I said today, you're going to grab an uber to go from point A to point B, you would expect to be able to see that car showing up an estimated time in a while to pick you up, right? That experience. Is the standard expected experience now, right? That's a great example of if you're going to be traveling in the future, you want to get rewards and loyalty programs where you're going.

You want to get recommendations where to stay. There's a lot of things that banks can do to really enhance the user experience rather than just, try and Give just a logo or something like that the other thing that I just would mention briefly monica is a lot of banks still have what I would say a do it yourself mentality.

They want to build everything from a to z themselves One of the things that we've also done through our partnerships with visa and google and [00:25:00] elsewhere Is really make it easier, both in terms of technology, but commercially and legally to just take a very simple API key off the shelf, say, from us or Google or Visa, plug it in and go.

So we've had customers that instead of trying to build this stuff all themselves from scratch, they've actually implemented in a weekend. And that covers 200 million points of interest in the world. Millions of logos, 95 percent accuracy rates. Yes, some banks will always have a default. I'll build everything myself.

That's also something that could be best applied or learn from elsewhere. You don't need to build everything yourself, right? You can really take something off the shelf. That's really good and proven rather than try and manage logos or manage Sure.

Monica Millares: And I love now that you're getting more into the product side of the conversation because exactly, it may seem that, Oh it's yeah, we'll just manage our names and our logos [00:26:00] that is not the area of expertise of a bank, a, and then B it is complex C once you roll it out, whatever you build, it will be buggy and you'll have to maintain it.

So the, how it helps you achieve your mission to help people with their financial services is basically. If I work with someone like you, then I can ensure that part of the process is sorted while I use the rest of my resources to focus on my core functionality. That it's, Hey, how do we help customers have better.

Financial lives, basically.

Ken Hart (Snowdrop): Yeah, very much so I'll give you an example of a very large bank in Southern Europe to try to build this themselves. They spend millions of dollars on software licenses and they have about a 75% match rate, right? That means one out of every four transactions they get wrong and they're spending literal.

Millions to try and do this, whereas, why you can't get the stuff off the [00:27:00] shelf and just go. And it takes a few days to set up. But hey, there's some of those big banks have that sort of established mindset that need to build everything in themselves. I think over time they'll recognize that's not really the best use of their time and money.

Monica Millares: Yeah, I agree. Yeah, because it's not the core functionality. I'm talking about mindset. I want to expand on product mindset as such and what you talked about autonomy. So how has autonomy helped you build the product that you wanted to build?

Ken Hart (Snowdrop): It's a good question. I have a couple of stories coming to mind.

I'm not sure I can share them all, but, look we've been an independent company for 10 years since our inception. No VCs, no private equity, nothing of that. And we've been profitable. All that time through thick and thin, we've always managed to accrue a little bit of retained urns.

When you have that sort of autonomy, you can do things to [00:28:00] take. A long time, we're working with projects now that we started talking on banks literally 4 years ago. There was an interest. They disappeared. People change. They come back or we'll work on a new region or a new product that will take years to develop.

And it's not because the technology isn't good. The technology is constantly improving and getting an improvement in leaps and bounds. It's just the banking sector is a slow moving sector in general. And so if you're not able to do something over a long period of time, like 3 or 4 years.

You're not often going to be given that opportunity under short term pressures. Again, think of the story when I was a Yahoo, right? If I don't, I'm not going to be here in 2 years. What's the point? The other thing is realistic expectations. Before I created the company, I went to another company and we had to go from 0 to 10 million.

To a hundred million in three years [00:29:00] of new product revenues. And it was like, that's not realistic. And the reason was they had all these other investments that were going to probably not be successful. So our investment had to cover all those other losses. So again, that's making the VC or the private equity company balance their portfolio.

It's not necessarily the best thing for your company or your product proposition or your team. Right so it's getting that balance long term autonomy table to do the right thing in a realistic period of time. So that's been really important. And then it's. Getting the right people who can really think very clearly, is this the thing that's going to move the needle?

Are we best positioned to do this? It may not be the biggest addressable market out there, but it needs to adhere to, is it a real problem in people's daily lives that we can probably be the best, the number one or two out there in terms of fixing this problem. The last thing I'll [00:30:00] talk about is just a metaphor that I have in mind.

Monica's zippers. Yeah. I often say the problem is right between your legs and people go, what? I'm like, look down at your pants or your jacket. There's a Japanese company called YKK. They make zippers. That's all they do, but they're really, good at it, right? They don't make clothing, they make zippers.

So if you're a clothing manufacturer, you'll probably use YKK zippers as part of the thing. So I believe in the FinTech space or financial services space, there's a role for these very specialized, dedicated companies that just do one or two things really, well.

Monica Millares: Yes, and I have a follow up question to that because it seems easy, but it's difficult, right?

Just to say, yes, we're going to be the best in this thing, that it's going to be a day to day use. But then when you pose that challenge to a management team, [00:31:00] working in a FinTech, you're like, Oh, how do we go about it, right? What could be your advice for. Product teams and leadership teams that are trying to answer that question.

Ken Hart (Snowdrop): I can only tell you what we've done and I'm sorry. I can't I don't know if this is a advice that's applicable elsewhere, but I would start by saying no. 1st thing is think of a big block of marble. And if you're going to be Michelangelo, you're going to be creating David out of that. The first thing you'd be doing with your ham and chisels thing.

No, no knocking things off. Not us, not our core expertise, not adjustable for us. And then you're going to get to start to see a shape. And then 2 or 3 people around a table, because it's not a committee here. It's 2 or 3 people. They're going to say, okay, that's, this is now going to take a shape.

So I would start by saying no to a lot of things because it's easy. And I've made those mistakes too, to try and do too many things. Or too [00:32:00] many disparate things at the same time really feel emboldened to say no, we're just going to do a few things.

Monica Millares: Yeah, I like that. And that comes back to your productivity habit of focusing

Ken Hart (Snowdrop): or combine that with walk and talks.

But what I've had is I've been fortunate to work with people that I've known for 30 years. We have some great people in the company. Directly in the company where advisors and there's a couple of moments where you need to be challenged product, leadership, finance, whatever. And a lot of those conversations like, no, we're not going to do that.

Here's why. And it really makes you sharpen your argument. Like I said, that hammer and chisel knocking things off is a very useful way to start.

Monica Millares: I like that. I like that as a framework to take away from this conversation to be like, Hey, it's no just for the sake of saying no, because there's a lot of narrative around if you look at product leaders, product [00:33:00] culture, Oh, you have to learn to say no, but it's no, it's not learning to say no for the sake of saying no.

It's more of a strategically. We are not that we're not positioned to be the best here. We it's defining who you are not to define who you are. It's getting philosophical, but yeah.

Ken Hart (Snowdrop): My, my kids are getting ready for university. And part of the thing that I would say is the experiences is hard.

There's so many choices, so many things you could do, and it's very competitive out there. So my 1st advice to any parent or any child is preparing to go to further their education is figure out not what you want to do. Figure out what you don't want to do. Start by saying no. Like I said to my daughter.

Do you want to do this? And she's no, do you want to do this? No. And so it helps you focus a little bit more. Then you can start to focus in and figure out what's best for you in terms of your skills or it's best for you in terms of, your passion in [00:34:00] life and being realistic as well, what can actually achieve.

It's better than to be good at 1 or 2 things. That's a small market. That you can really carve out and do that incredibly well than to come to be number 8 or 9, in a huge market, in my opinion, it's harder to be the leader in something small than not really an important player in a bigger overall market.

Monica Millares: Yeah, that, that's good, advice for anyone thinking of life changes, career changes, getting into UNA or because like many people now in their late twenties, late thirties, mid forties, they're like, I want to change. A lot of people are going through what I call either the quarter of a life crisis or the midlife crisis.

And then the process is similar, right? Yeah. Defining who you want to be next.

Ken Hart (Snowdrop): Yeah, and I think, there's probably a bit of this element of you do what you're [00:35:00] expected to do what you think to make your parents proud of you or your peers proud of you. But you get a point in your life.

I don't know when that point is. Maybe often traditionally, it's in your little later on, not your early 20s or mid 20s, but a little later on. We're like I've achieved this. Now I'm going to do something that's more meaningful to me. And the advice that I would have to anyone, let's say early 20s to early 30s.

Yeah. Isn't really to worry too much about what they make it's, or, even, their title or anything like that. It's about, are you learning? Are you really excluding things in your life? By the way, it said the same thing about dating people. If that person's not for you move on.

The right person. So approach work the same way. I'm learning a lot. I'm getting a lot out of this. Is this something that I'm actually getting fulfillment from or enjoyment from or a good life skill that I can then use later on in life? So [00:36:00] if it's not for you, move on don't waste your time.

Monica Millares: Yeah, at the same time. Yes, I love the exactly move on. But at the same time, I would say for anyone listening. Listening, don't move on like too fast, like genuinely sit down and be like, Hey, is this, me being emotional and I'm like, Oh, I don't want to deal with these or just sometimes you just have to push through and be resilient and it's learn, then move on.

It's different approaches, right?

Ken Hart (Snowdrop): Yeah. Don't just change for the change sake, figure out why what's missing, why this is not for you and gravitate for what you really do want instead.

Monica Millares: Yes. Yes. We're talking a lot about people and careers we, ended up in this conversation, right? So building a company is complex and we have any discipline within any company will be like complex and difficult, [00:37:00] but I think the most difficult part of building a company.

And the most beautiful part as well is people. So people sometimes it's, hard to bring the best out of people when we have a lot of pressure. How did you do that? What's your leadership style such that you bring the best out of people? You keep them in a high performance. Place and do it in the long term, right?

Because otherwise it's easy to get into. I'm done. I'm burnout. Bye. Bye.

Ken Hart (Snowdrop): That's a hard question. It's a good question. I don't know if I have any secrets to share. I can, only just say we try and create a culture. So how do people work together? There's processes and stuff like that. But I think what's more important anytime when we interview people, both from the candidate looking to join Snowdrop and for us looking to hire them.

I really think there's two things. The questions that we're often asked is, what's the culture like at Snowdrop? And the question we have for that [00:38:00] candidate is, what's your attitude? What are you going to be like to work with us if you join this team? And we try and create a culture that is fairly transparent, fairly flat.

Everyone has the right to be what we call a challenger. I'm not sure I agree. What about this? And come with an alternative, ideally. Do it in a respectful way, right? So we try and not fire what I would describe as excellent sheep. I want people who can challenge and say, no, let's do it this way instead, right?

So being the brightest person in the room or the best in academics or having so many titles, I'd rather people have more scars than medals. If that makes sense, and maybe that's because, in Spain, where I spent a lot of time, it's something called titulitis. We're like, look at all my medals.

They've never done anything, but it's all medals and honors and certificates. I'd much rather for people who screwed up, [00:39:00] made mistakes and had the emotional awareness and emotional intelligence to learn from it and say, Oh, I'm not going to make that mistake again. I got that scar already. So it's a culture where people can challenge each other.

And then support each other. We're not a big company, right? We're roughly 30 people or so. So it's relatively easy to do something at a company of that size. I think if you're a company that's growing very quickly, you have to also be careful not to hire too many people that you're, that impacts the overall culture.

That's something that we're extremely careful about. We'll pause after a month or after two, three months of someone joining and be like, is this person really the right fit? Yes, I really like that. You have to be pretty brutal. I guess is the word sometimes about that. It doesn't always work out.

Monica Millares: Yes, I think it's a culture fit is way more important than you are the most qualified [00:40:00] person to do the job, but not the right culture. Yeah, definitely. Thank you. It's been a fascinating conversation. Just to wrap up. If you were to change one thing in FinTech that could make the lives of customers, employees and shareholders better, what could you change?

Ken Hart (Snowdrop): Oh, gosh, just one thing. That's a hard one. Monica. Nothing. I

Monica Millares: know. I know. It's the most. 1

Ken Hart (Snowdrop): thing I would change is to really think about the consumer experience. People, are like, oh, we don't want to onboard another vendor or procurement process takes us time, or we're going to build it ourselves.

It's they really often don't hear or think or consider the user experience. There's a lot of lip service, but it's not really thought through. And I would argue the beauty of some of these. Challenger [00:41:00] banks, when they started, they really, do care about the consumer experience deeply care about it.

And that really makes a difference. If there's one thing I would suggest is because there's so much inertia in what we do people don't change their banks that frequently that maybe you don't need to think about the consumer experience that much. But that would be something that I would really advocate that people think about.

Think about the long term value of a customer that you captured 18 and getting them all the way through to their 88, right? Think about their different stages in life and thinking about making sure they have a great experience with you because making great experience often they don't go together, right?

Monica Millares: Yeah. It's that's why challengers exist, right? And the key words that caught my attention as you were talking was. You were saying like the initial child in your banks, they genuinely cared about user experience, customer experience as such. And I think if we were to inject a little bit about [00:42:00] caring about customers as humans.

Genuinely across fintechs and the banks across the industry that requires a mindset shift and a culture shift. It's not just a process shift. But yeah, I think we could have more impact.

Ken Hart (Snowdrop): There's, I'm not the 1st person I said, I won't be the last, but we're still the early, early, early days of all this.

So we have a long. road ahead of us, a lot of ups and downs, a lot of change. Stay tuned. That's what I can say. This is going, it's going to be accelerating over the next couple of years. And think about what people really want. Oh I need a PFM. No one needs a personal finance manager.

Only three to 5 percent of the people use it once a month, right? You're not solving the problem for all your consumers. You're just ticking the box. You're being another excellent sheep. What we need to think about is giving the consumers the real experiences that makes them manage their lives more [00:43:00] meaningfully, right?

Help them over those different stages of their life. Don't just tick a box. That would be my suggestion.

Monica Millares: That's a beautiful message to end. Where can we find you on Snowdrop?

Ken Hart (Snowdrop): You can always find us at snowdropsolutions. co. uk. Big presence on LinkedIn and I'll be traveling around coming to a, an event.

I hope near you, but always keen to reach out. And we'll be doing a couple of things with Google and Visa over the next couple of months. Hope to bump into you again soon.

Monica Millares: Cool. Awesome. Thank you, Ken. Thank you, everyone. See you next week.

Ken Hart (Snowdrop): A real pleasure. Thank you for having

Monica Millares: me. Likewise. Thank you, Ken.