Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series. Before we dive into our discussion our readers would love to “get to know you” a bit better. Can you share with us the backstory about what brought you to your specific career path?
I’ve always been passionate about technology, and its potential to transform our lives. Over my career, I’ve been able to play in the NBA of financial services. I spent five years working at Klarna, where I founded the company’s product group as Chief Product Officer (CPO), and finally acted as Chief Technology Officer (CTO).
As my career progressed, I became more and more enthusiastic about social impact and building a purposeful and highly profitable business. I believe that the power of technology and money should be leveraged for the greater good. After leaving Klarna in 2016, I met my two co-founders of RiseUp and found we all shared a common goal of wanting to build a game-changing Profit with Purpose company.
We started looking for an issue we could solve by having hundreds of conversations with people about their day-to-day reality. It became clear that financial stress was dominating people’s lives. During my time at Klarna, I learned that impacting user experience by leveraging the customer’s unique data is the most important thing regarding money. Yet, most personal finance tools available at the time provided a poor user experience that was not built with the user’s wellbeing and personalisation in mind.
Most of us don’t manage our finances on Excel, hate the word ‘budgets’ and struggle to understand the world of finance. At large, most people feel it sucks. So, we set out to create a new kind of financial service, one that is simple and personal for everyone and that puts your wellbeing first.
What do you think makes your company stand out?
It may sound obvious to many people, but money plays a huge role in our mental wellbeing. The findings from our latest research report show that financial stress affects our mental health (56%), eating habits (41%), relationships (33%), work performance (25%) and friendships (21%).
However, this fact isn’t so obvious to the developers of most budgeting tools, which are designed to focus on numbers and ignore the fact that money is, ultimately, emotional. With RiseUp, we’ve created an app that doesn’t make you feel guilty about buying that coffee you enjoy on the way to work and doesn’t punish you for your spending habits.
By connecting to all your household accounts and using advanced AI, the RiseUp app provides you with a simple, real-time view of your cash flow and personalised recommendations on how you can improve your disposable income. RiseUp improves customers’ disposable income by more than £300 per month.
In addition, a big part of changing our relationship with our finances is talking about money, and that’s where our community comes in. RiseUp provides support within an online community, which shares valuable advice and inspiration, helpful tips, and we regularly host events with our community.
Another aspect which makes RiseUp stand out is its unique offering which helps financial organisations plug into the AI economy and leverage open banking data. Traditionally, leveraging open banking data has presented financial organisations with many challenges.
By partnering with RiseUp, financial organisations can bypass these complexities and access their customer’s unique data through RiseUp’s app. This not only provides value to the organisation, but also to the customer who receives personalised recommendations on tools to improve their finances.
You are a successful business leader. Which three character traits do you think were most instrumental to your success? Can you please share a story or example for each?
I think one of the most instrumental character traits that has helped me succeed is my ability to articulate problems and make them appealing for others to solve. Solving problems at scale using technology requires the smartest people in the room to be engaged. These people are usually engineers who can be instrumental in applying their skills to help tackle a problem. If you can get them inspired and intrigued by an issue, they in turn will likely build the best possible solution.
For example, helping people feel powerful about their money every day is a big problem to solve. From day one, I defined the problem simply: We need to leverage financial data to create a daily reason for people to interact with their money. Shaping the challenge to my team in this way pushed them to create an innovative solution I would have never envisioned myself.
Another character trait that has driven me throughout my career is my personal drive to learn fast and deep. I never enjoyed school and didn’t manage to survive more than two university semesters. However, I throw myself into whatever topic I stumble upon and look to master it. One of these topics has been around human behaviour and money, which has allowed me to effectively evaluate the challenges RiseUp faces.
This character trait is essential in the current climate, where AI is shaping our society. Two years ago, we started investing in AI heavily and converted our system to be AI based end to end. Recently, we learned how difficult it is for financial institutions to undergo this same transformation.
I encouraged the team to learn in the same way, which in turn allowed us to identify the venn diagram between financial institutions data, AI, and our customers’ needs. This resulted in an incredibly simple solution that helps them accelerate the adoption of AI, and make it a main lever for their business. This has become one of our biggest competitive advantages.
Finally, my most important trait is being a team leader. Building and maintaining teams are one of my biggest passions, and I love being part of highly functional and result-oriented groups. My approach to building teams comes from Patrick Lencioni’s five dysfunctions of a team — meaning that I invest a lot of time in building trust, accountability, and commitment.
This trait is crucial when partnering with other organisations. As a CEO, it’s important to build bridges between RiseUp and other organisations. In order to achieve a good partnership, you have to build a cross organisational team that is committed to delivering results together.
Let’s now move to the main point of our discussion about AI. Can you explain how AI is disrupting your industry? Is this disruption hurting or helping your bottom line?
I am a strong believer that every business needs to stop and reimagine their business with AI, because someone else is currently doing it on their behalf somewhere around the world. For the financial services industry, the AI economy presents a huge opportunity. Plugging into it as fast as possible should be an absolute priority for every business as it can help them improve their bottom line.AI can allow businesses to cut costs, improve productivity or imagine new value and revenue never previously available. For financial services, the opportunity here is to use AI to fully leverage the power of unique customer data — the real asset in the AI economy.
However, financial services continue to struggle to plug into the AI economy due to the complexity that comes with accessing and leveraging unique customer data. We’ll only begin to see real transformational change once financial services realise that the key to accessing that data doesn’t come from building their own AI models, but by partnering with businesses that can help them access this data whilst creating real value for their customers.
Here’s a concrete example: three months ago the curation of personal recommendations in our service was done by a human being, while the serving was done by AI. It meant that we only had tens of recommendations and it took our system a while to learn the customer to cater the right recommendation. Fast forward three months, we realised LLMs do a magnificent job optimising the customers’ disposable income. This unlocked AI-curated recommendations that are built extremely fast and provide immediate value for the customer. In a world people lose patience immediately, one must deliver on value that seems much greater than the associated effort. It completely changed the value perception of our service.
Which specific AI technology has had the most significant impact on your industry?
It is important to mention we have used machine learning models in financial service technologies for over ten years. The ability to leverage an enormous set of data points to make better decisions about a customer’s risk profile in real time across a portfolio of tens of millions of customers felt magical during my Klarna days around 2015.
The huge difference nowadays is the availability of models that once were extremely unique to the tech behemoths and are now a commodity enabled by endless service providers.
I find NLP a technology with a huge potential upside, given consumers are unproficient with money. NLP lets people interact through easy-to-understand language, therefore lowering the bar when it comes to making decisions and taking actions in regards to their money.
When someone doesn’t know the professional language, they can get great support from a model that was not available before. It is relevant for saving, investing or how to better manage debt. The potential is limitless. When you operate a business for a while, you most probably have answered all the questions customers might have. Structuring those answers and allowing customers to access a knowledge base with natural language provides efficiency and unlocks new value customers can achieve on their own.
Can you share a pivotal moment when you recognized the profound impact AI would have on your sector?
It took us years to build an accurately categorised transactions model. But it took only a month to adapt it to new markets, leveraging LLMs and search engines. Building a global multilingual model has become a task achieved in months compared to many years in the past. This is just mind blowing.
How are you preparing your workforce for the integration of AI, and what skills do you believe will be most valuable in an AI-enhanced future?
Our engineers are becoming full stack AI engineers. We train them to be able to solve problems with AI, which is changing the way we think about problems. In addition, the whole approach to UX must change, from UI to AI. Designers need to design for AI instead of thinking in interfaces. A great designer needs to create efficient templates the AI can leverage. This is a major shift in mindset and skills.
What are the biggest challenges in upskilling your workforce for an AI-centric future?
The biggest challenge is that the human brain hates change. The change of skills is so rapid, and people have to keep up without losing their professional identity. It is also not only a professional change, but also a deep psychological one.
What ethical considerations does AI introduce into your industry, and how are you tackling these concerns?
The obvious consideration is data protection. And it’s the obvious one, because it is the most important. It’s of course great for organisations to have access to the latest AI models, but in order to use it to leverage consumer data, you need to build trust in your customers and reassure them that their data is in safe hands. This has always been the case, of course, but with the rise of AI, the scale of issue has only increased. AI requires large amounts of personal data to function properly, and people are more aware of the risks that come with sharing their data.
We address these concerns by investing time and resources into ensuring people’s data is safe and secure. We not only use TrueLayer, the world’s leading open banking network, to help connect our users’ accounts, but we have some of the strictest standards and protocols in place to make sure we’re protecting our users’ data. The only way that the use of AI models in personal finances will continue to evolve is based on mutual trust between customer and ourselves, that they give us permission to use their data, and we give them security and transparency, as well as valuable and actionable insights they wouldn’t have had access to otherwise.
What are your “Five Things You Need To Do, If AI Is Disrupting Your Industry”?
1 . Move Fast: The AI revolution is already here, and businesses need to adapt quickly if they want to take advantage of technological advancements. If you’re not talking internally about how AI can reimagine your business, I guarantee someone out there will be thinking how they can utilise AI to take your market share. Book an offsite next week, try to figure out how you can do stuff differently. What you perceived as super local in the past can become a global offering quickly, thanks to how easy it is to apply different languages using a commodity model.
2 . Use AI to create real value for consumers and customers: Many businesses will be using AI internally to cut costs and drive efficiencies within the business. While AI can help boost a business’ bottom line, it’s also vital that it’s used to create real value for consumers or your customers. This will help drive trust in your band, and convince customers to trust you with their data. In other words, apply AI on a real need of your customer and justify the access to the unique data you get from your existing loyal customers.
3 . Don’t lose time on building models: AI models have been hailed as vehicles for growth in this AI revolution but unless you are OpenAI, building, training, and maintaining these models can take up valuable time and resources. Instead, businesses should focus more on how they plug into the AI economy without developing their own models.
4 . Focus on leveraging unique customer data: The benefit of AI is that it now allows us to truly capitalise on the vast amount of data people produce in a mutual fashion. When companies are developing their AI strategies, the focus should always be on how they can use unique customer data to both create value for the business and for their customers. In addition, create experiences that make it easy and valuable for the customer to share unique data points with you.
5. Use the tools yourself: If you are not immersed in AI tools and you have not gone through a significant training session, you are doing something wrong. This is not blockchain or the conversational UI trends. This trend is as deep as the mobile or the internet revolution. Stop everything you do and get educated. Today.
What are the most common misconceptions about AI within your industry, and how do you address them?
The biggest misconception about AI within financial services is that it is guaranteed to revolutionise every business. While the technology can create unique insights and allow businesses to reach their full potential, it’s important to note that consumers are increasingly looking for more than just insights when it comes to their money. They’re looking for services which provide a great user experience, and that are designed to meet their needs perfectly. Businesses therefore need to continue investing in their user experience if they’re to unlock value for their customers and businesses. As I mentioned before, user experience is no longer the interface alone. You need to enable a unique and relevant experience. It must be reimagined.
Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Do you have a story about how that was relevant in your life?
I just listened to a podcast I really liked with Maya Shankar, a behavioural scientist. She spoke about how changing identities is really hard and we as human beings are likely to hold our positions and past beliefs. She said something beautiful in my opinion, and I have been thinking about it a lot since: “promote do behaviours, not don’t behaviours”. When we speak to our team members we might focus on what we should not do. If you ask people not to boil water because it is bad for their health they will mainly remember “boiling water”. We need to speak about what people should do. We should train our GPT to speak in dos, not don’ts.
Off-topic, but I’m curious. As someone steering the ship, what thoughts or concerns often keep you awake at night? How do those thoughts influence your daily decision-making process?
Oh, I only have 1,000 of those. Running a startup feels like replacing an engine of an F1 car while going 300 kmph, completing the last round of a crucial race. If it does not feel like that, something is wrong.
Joking aside, it is important to know which fires can burn and which can’t. If you don’t manage to shut down your survival mechanism facing some of the problems, you will not be able to sleep at night at all.
In RiseUp’s case, as we are a community driven brand with an amazing community at its heart, usually I lose sleep around sentiments in our community. Luckily our community team is world class so I feel this fire is under control.
You are a person of great influence. If you could start a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be?
RiseUp really is the movement I want to create. Providing content, AI and community support to make people feel financially powerful everyday is a movement I am willing to wake up to every single day for the rest of my life. Looking at the quote, “A movement is movement only when it moves without you…”, there is still a way to go.
How can our readers further follow you online?
More than anything RiseUp is a movement, so the best way to follow us is to join our online community. As mentioned, there are so many aspects to this community that really can enrich lives. We host a range of events, share regular community challenges, and often meet up for a chat and a drink! You can also follow us on Instagram and sign up to our community newsletter where we share money saving tips, insights and the latest news from our community. You can also now use our free AI engine RiseUp Money Insights, which gives you free personalised financial wisdom and saving tips based on your past spending that you can put into action today!
Thank you for the time you spent sharing these fantastic insights. We wish you only continued success in your great work!