Fintech payments: Swipe cards to Stablecoins, with Sean Forward, UK CEO of payabl

Summary

In this conversation, Matt Cheung interviews Sean Forward, the UK CEO of payabl, a fintech company specialising in payments. They discuss the role of payabl in helping merchants accept payments, the concept of omni-channel payments, and Sean's journey in the fintech industry. They also explore the future of payments, including stablecoins and central bank digital currencies. Sean emphasises the importance of staying informed about industry trends and being discerning about the sources of information. He also highlights the diverse range of roles within a payments company and the value of teamwork and diverse skill sets. Finally, they briefly touch on the potential impact of a change in government on the fintech industry.

Takeaways

-payabl is a payment processor that helps merchants accept payments, with a focus on credit cards.
-The concept of omni-channel payments refers to the ability to accept payments through various channels, such as credit cards, bank transfers, and cryptocurrencies.
-Staying informed about industry trends and being discerning about sources of information are crucial in the rapidly evolving fintech industry.
-There is a diverse range of roles within a payments company, and teamwork and diverse skill sets are essential for success.
-The future of payments may involve the widespread adoption of stablecoins and central bank digital currencies.

Chapters

00:00 Introduction to payabl
03:03 Understanding Omni-Channel Payments
12:17 Sean's Journey in the Fintech Industry
25:08 The Future of Payments: Stablecoins and CBDCs
33:02 Skills and Attributes for Success in Fintech
43:17 The Potential Impact of a Change in Government
45:03 Conclusion and Contact Information

https://www.linkedin.com/in/sean-forward/
https://payabl.com/
https://www.linkedin.com/in/matthewcheung50/

Keywords

payments, fintech, payabl, omni-channel, stablecoins, central bank digital currencies, industry trends, teamwork

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Chapters

• 0:00 Introduction to payabl
• 3:03 Understanding Omni-Channel Payments
• 12:17 Sean's Journey in the Fintech Industry
• 25:08 The Future of Payments: Stablecoins and CBDCs
• 33:02 Skills and Attributes for Success in Fintech
• 43:17 The Potential Impact of a Change in Government
• 45:03 Conclusion and Contact Information

Transcript

Matt (00:01.724)
Hi, this is Matt Cheung. I'm founder of Work in Fintech. And in today's interview, we're delighted to be joined by Sean Forward, who's the UK CEO of Payable, a fintech company specializing in payments. Hi, Sean.

Sean Forward (00:17.806)
that. How you doing? Thanks for having me on. I'm thrilled to come and have a chat.

Matt (00:22.94)
Yeah, they're fantastic and yeah, I really appreciate your time. Well, I guess before we jump into your own story, can you just tell us who Payable is and what do you do?

Sean Forward (00:32.749)
Yeah, absolutely. Payable is an omni channel payment processor, which in sort of day to day speak is helping merchants accept payments from their customers. So we focus mainly on credit cards. So if you've got a merchant that is looking to accept payments, let's say it's, I don't know, vintage or somebody like this, they're online, they're looking to take your payment to pay for a purchase.

we help them with the acceptance piece of that. So from the point of putting your credit card number in and you clicking go or submit, we take the payment, we do all the technology around sending that out, taking it from your card and then giving it back to the merchant. So it's very much about the merchant ecosystem. So giving merchants the ability to pay, that's...

probably the best succinct way of describing it. The company itself is really dynamic as an organization. We've got three main hubs at the moment. One in London where I'm the main person as far as the management here. We also have Frankfurt, obviously in Germany and that's where all our techies are. And then we also have Cypress, which is part of our operational hub.

We're about 200 people, wide ranging, broad skill sets. We've obviously got people who are techies doing the programming and understanding how different connections move together. We have management. We obviously have people selling, making sure that we're getting out to our customers, making sure we're understanding what our customers need and a whole range of...

different types of different types of role from from marketing to sales to to accounting across the board. I've got I've been with the company for quite a while, nearly 15 years now. We've been in slightly different, different guys, but playable as an organization is very dynamic. And we've got a very young staff base who are very smart and articulate, real

Sean Forward (02:57.064)
sort of breakers within the industry. It's a really great company.

Matt (03:02.716)
What does the Omni Channel bit mean?

Sean Forward (03:05.993)
Omnichannel, the word Omni is obviously sort of a focus at the moment and it's really multi. So there's many different channels that merchants want. So for example, if you like paying with a credit card, you can pay with a credit card. If you like paying with a local transfer, like bank to bank, you can pay with that. If you like to pay...

with crypto or some sort of central bank digital currency, we cater for an omni channel of everything that people want to be able to pay with. So what we're also looking to do as well is make sure that we are set for the future. We're looking to make sure that different currencies and different ways of paying are adopted early. And if people are looking to use those methodologies,

then we make sure that we have that as part of our service. So it's omni solution and omni channel, there being the different ways of paying.

Matt (04:17.116)
So you said you've been at the company for 15 years, but you've actually been in FinTech for even longer and probably before even the word FinTech was bandied around. Can you talk about what FinTech was when you started in your first interactions with payments?

Sean Forward (04:26.822)
Yeah.

Sean Forward (04:36.229)
Yeah, sure. Absolutely. I'll go back just a little bit before that, if that's okay with you, Matt. I originally trained as a PE teacher. So I was on the road to be out there changing people's fitness and health and sport, which was wonderful. And I'm still actively involved with schools, particularly in rugby coaching still now, which I absolutely adore.

Matt (04:42.332)
Yeah, yeah.

Sean Forward (05:05.541)
But my wife and I just got married, so this is 27 years ago, and we didn't quite feel so that we wanted to stay put. So we decided to come and we need to go and work or travel or sort of be, you know, a nomad for a while. We ended up actually in St. Kitts, which is in the Caribbean. It's a really, really tiny island. And this was in 1998. And a friend of ours,

offered us some work. We had no idea what it was, but we gave up our teaching jobs and said, come on, let's go, let's go and do something a bit crazy. And so we ended up being there, planning on being there for three months. We ended up being there for two years and we got involved in a company called Data Bank. And Data Bank back then was a piece of technology that sat in a

in a hotel system. So when these hotels in the Caribbean region in St. Kitts and the other islands there, they used to use this system and it's hilarious to think about it now, but on your credit cards, the number used to be embossed. So it used to stick up and they used to put a piece of carbon on here and get a machine and go like this and then send the transactions off and da da.

Anyway, what what data the bank did, it used the very, very early internet to send out an IP or an internet protocol transaction. So instead of moving from this carbon situation, it became one of the very early internet protocol transactions. It still took two minutes probably to go and to think how long it would go through now.

know, within an instant, you know, we were sending those things out. And it got rid of all the fraud and the charge backs and the different elements and the settlements, so how quickly the merchant got their money. It was sort of very revolutionary at the time. But the really interesting thing here, we were doing, I don't know, let's say $50 ,000 worth of US dollars over there, in processing

Sean Forward (07:32.223)
on a monthly basis and we were thinking, right, hotels, hotels. But suddenly the US had this massive change of direction with the way that they were legislating gambling. So in the UK, we go to Ladbrokes or whatever we go and put a bet on. But in America that long ago, it was illegal to do so.

And what happened is, is there was a big insurgence, it was where the first .com came through, there was this massive surgence of online casinos and sports books or bookmakers that couldn't work in America. So what they had to do, they had to find a way of doing it elsewhere. And we had a big part of the solution, which is the way to accept the payment.

And basically they took our piece of code and put it into their cashiers. And we started taking payments for the online gambling industry, which at the time we had no clue about. It was totally alien from us. So we went from doing like 50 ,000 to do 50 million a month in processing. It was just crazy. So, you know, we're probably 30 years old at the time and it was wild. We ended up.

There was another piece of the company called Secure Bank, which was in Florida. We ended up living there. We ended up doing a reverse takeover of a NASDAQ company and it was public for a while and then it wasn't. But it was such an exciting time. PayPal looked to buy us at one point. So I'm not sure I actually met Elon Musk, but he was somewhere in the building apparently when we were there chatting with him. So anyway, look, that was...

we finished doing that probably 2003 2004 and

Matt (09:34.044)
And what were you doing? What was your role at the time?

Sean Forward (09:37.467)
Well, to be honest, to start with, it was everything and anything. It was like plugging the holes as far as anything technical was concerned, because I was a PE teacher. So I was enthusiastic. I was keen to learn. I always had a sort of an entrepreneurial eye for an opportunity. So again, I think that's one of the...

one of the key messages that I'd always give to anybody, I'd give to my own kids who are 22 and 19 now, you've got to keep your eyes open for an opportunity. And it's not just business, it's in life really. And you're only gonna see an opportunity if you keep your eyes open and often they stumble and hit you in the face. Sometimes you have to look a bit deeper. But I ended up doing everything. So I was...

really started really on the accounting side. And then I moved to the account management side, looking after the merchants, making sure that they knew how to technically integrate the solution we had. When the settlements didn't arrive on time, they were shouting at me down the phone, I was calming them down. It was, at the nerdy part, and I'm sure you know, Matt, with your experience of running your own business, you have to be

open to try and do anything. You can't always do everything, but you can give it a good go. And if you can't do it, go and find somebody who can and sort of solve the problem. So I came into the company, you know, just to sort of help. And I ended up, ended up managing the sort of the portfolio of the, the, the sales side and then the account management side. I then ended up becoming sort of the

operations director and then the operations sort of COO role, that chief operations officer type of role. And again, it was just very much learning on your feet. Be curious, you know, ask questions, go online. I mean, online back then was a whole different way of doing things. But you know, that was another era.

Sean Forward (11:58.747)
I ended up doing everything Matt is the answer and often not very well, made a lot of mistakes I'm sure and just kept being curious, kept asking questions and keep moving forward really.

Matt (12:17.468)
And so after this data bank and all the things you were doing there, where did that lead to and what was the next place you went to?

Sean Forward (12:28.219)
Yeah, so when was that? Not to put it into chronological order here, but let's say we got to about 2008, it was the finance of crash. We were living in America at the time. We had two kids. We were living just north of Orlando, actually. And what I'd done there, I'd moved slightly.

slightly more towards the tech side of the processing of the credit card transactions and again some of the early prepaid card work that Visa and Mastercard were doing. There was a company called M2 there and we had two or three different type of methodologies for processing the transactions.

and we had a real focus on the actual switching of the transactions through to Visa and MasterCard. So as I'm sure you're aware, when you're taking a transaction using a credit card, again, back then that was really the only way of paying, is that you have two sides of the industry. You have the issuing, so it's the banks who are giving customers the cards that they actually use.

And then you have what's called the acquiring or the merchant acquiring. So it's the piece that's allowing the merchants to accept the payments on that side. And we were working still within that merchant piece, but what we were focusing on is speeding up those transactions. So we were moving away from the, you know, 92nd type of model, which was common.

particularly as the internet speeds were increasing and we were getting down to sub second type of models. And that actually started to roll out and move through. We ended up selling the technology in what really would be called now a SaaS. So software as a service type of model, which is, it was a gateway. They use a payment.

Sean Forward (14:50.843)
processing gateway, which we then sold to other banks and to other processors and to other organizations so they could also process their own credit card transactions. So that was a good journey. Say 2008 came along and we decided, because the US went very flat as far as the crash was concerned,

we decided it's probably time to go back to the UK. So we came back, we came back there. I was involved in another couple of prepaid card programs at that point. Again, mainly looking at the sort of the tech piece around that. So looking to manage the technical sort of infrastructure management. And I wasn't actually doing the coding. I was doing the

I was organizing the teams to do the user experience, so the UX and the design, but also managing the business flow of the technology piece, which is sort of where my sweet spot as far as my sort of skill set is. And yeah, it was a lot of fun. So we ended up...

setting up a company called Powercard, Powercard 21. There was a slightly different company just before that, but we'll talk about Powercard. And Powercard was a program manager, which means that it was a prepaid card solution that was focused for merchants to issue prepaid cards to their customer base.

So one of the particular sectors that we had was to pay commissions to salespeople within a company. So the company would use PowerCard's platform to log in and then they would say, Matt, you are one of the sales team for, I don't know, company A, and we needed to pay you. What we did is that you would use PowerCard in order to issue

Sean Forward (17:10.267)
issue the prepaid card and we would then at that point you would have that card it had a an app it's pretty rudimentary at that time but it was an online portal and an app which showed you your balance and your transaction history and then the merchant would load the account and then they could pay all of their sales people

with funds rather than sending it to bank accounts. The salespeople were usually geographically diverse, mainly in Europe, but sending funds to bank accounts was difficult. So they used the prepaid card and it worked fantastic. It was really, really good. We had different types of vertical that we worked with and we ended up sending, I think we had about 120 ,000 cards over there.

the sort of the lifespan of that program. We work with different banks, one in Bulgaria, two in the UK and one in Ireland and issuing Visa and MasterCard, prepaid cards, which is fantastic. Then what happened about four years ago, so that was about, that was sort of 10, 11, 12 years of the last sort of 15.

At that point, we sold Powercard to Payable, which was in the same group, but we rebranded at that time to Payable. So the group of companies which Powercard was part of,

We amalgamated those, I sold my piece of that and the company became payable. I then stayed on as the UK CEO. This was about four years, three and a half, four years ago. And yeah, it was sort of a great journey. Again, running your own business is difficult. Again, you're coming back to being a, you know, trying to be good at everything and then making sure you're hiring the right talent.

Sean Forward (19:31.468)
making sure you've got good people coming through, you're staying up to date with your technology, you're looking after merchants and customers. You know, it's a tricky, sort of a tricky thing to do, but very, very rewarding. It doesn't always go well. So you have to, I think some advice I had one time, I can't remember who gave it to me and I'm sure it's not new advice to anybody.

is that in life you have peaks and you've got troughs and you've got peaks and you've got troughs and it's just part of being a human and being alive. And what you try to do is to level, try and keep as level and steady as you possibly can, particularly in business, because other aspects of life go there. So don't overly celebrate the highs.

although you've got to recognize them, but don't sort of dwindle or don't focus too much on the lows either because they all come back up again. It's a bit of a cycle. So definitely recognize the highs and the lows and keep them as they are, but keep things in perspective and try and flatten out the peaks and the troughs of the journey. And I've always tried to do that.

It's one of those things that sometimes it's easier to do that than others, but to follow your own advice. But you know, it's one of those things that, you know, that's interesting. But yeah, then.

Matt (21:11.196)
It sounds like there's, I suppose, other external factors that have played a part from how you've described your journey. There's kind of like some macro factors there as well. You had obviously some regulation which changed things, which is why the US and their stance on gambling meant that all of a sudden, bang, you have this kind of explosion of business. And then similarly,

Sean Forward (21:22.217)
Yes.

Sean Forward (21:33.161)
Yeah.

Matt (21:35.58)
from the great financial crisis in 2008 that actually led you back to the UK. And then in parallel to that there's this other trend of technology as well. And technology seems like you've been there at these different points and embracing new technology and its nascent state and then building something up as you're going along as well.

Sean Forward (22:00.681)
Yeah, no, absolutely. Yeah, no, it is. And it's still changing now, Matt, and I'm sure you know, you know, as well as anybody is that things are always changing. The sort of the buzzwords within the, you know, the fintech world at the moment is very much about bank to bank transfers. So again, I'm very much focused on the payment side of fintechs and financial technologies and the way

that people pay for things. And there's a big push, although credit cards are still very, very popular, and we've obviously got different ways of paying with credit cards these days. Apple in particular are so prominent within their sort of tap and go type of methodologies within the Apple wallet on your phones. And it's fascinating.

Because things keep changing, nothing stays the same. And they'll say there's this big push at the moment between to push people between bank to bank payments. So on a lot of the apps, you know, you've got Revolut, you've got a lot of the personal banking apps, Starling, Monzo, all those sorts of guys, is very much a way of encouraging people to push payments to bank to bank. And it mainly that's because it's cheaper for the banks to do that.

What you've got to do is just keep your eyes open, I think, with what's coming through and what's coming up. One of the fascinating things that I think is happening within the industry, and I'm extremely interested and excited about it, is the concept of digital currencies. So we've all heard of cryptocurrencies, different types of...

Bitcoin and Ethereum and these types of things which are decentralized payment methods. I think those technologies will stay around, but it's the underlying technology which will revolutionize everybody's day -to -day payment flows. And it might be that we don't know about it really as consumers and people on the street.

Sean Forward (24:19.782)
But behind the scenes, it's going to revolutionize these things. And the two big next steps as far as I can see are stablecoin and central bank digital currencies. So CVDC is the acronym for it. So if we take stablecoins, I don't know if you want to talk about those now, Matt, but they're sort of topics that I think are really fascinating and people

you know, probably heard about stuff and there's probably a lot of unknowns about it and it's well worth, particularly somebody coming into the industry. It's a very exciting topic to talk about and to learn about and you know, it's definitely an interesting one.

Matt (25:08.3)
no, please do. I mean, it would be good to understand what your view is as we move forward in the future and how that's going to impact what you're doing in your business and how it's going to impact the person on the street.

Sean Forward (25:22.659)
Yeah, okay. So look, let's take the two. So what I'm seeing is this evolution, and it's very common, this evolution is where you have a very disruptive technology, which let's call that cryptocurrencies at the moment, which is totally outside of any regulation. It's set up for a particular need, which is usually not satisfied by the

current infrastructures of either government or regulation. And you've got this need and what the gap that cryptocurrencies and let's use Bitcoin as a specific example. What it initially set out to do is break away from the traditional banking constructs really or the frameworks. And you could send money directly to each other.

You could send it cross -border, you could send it long distances. There's a whole range of things. The other thing which is again interesting coming back to my journey is the gambling industry is often a ground breaker within the industries because people want to gamble and there's other types of probably grayer types of...

things out there where people are looking for different solutions. And that's where the cryptocurrency has come in. And what I think is going to happen is, is very much like other methodologies, is that regulation will start coming in. And the UK is extremely well positioned for this with the FCA and the way that they're regulating particularly stable coins.

Europe is slightly ahead as far as the legislation and the regulation is concerned, but the UK is not very far behind it. I think we've been waiting for this. The general election, obviously, the general election has just finished today, which is going to have an interesting bearing on what comes next with FinTech as well, I think. But we'll use that as another topic. So what I'm seeing is that you've got the

Sean Forward (27:45.887)
underlying technologies that cryptocurrencies have developed and expanded and sort of spread. But the day to day person on the street still probably doesn't know what a cryptocurrency is. If they do, it would be something probably a bit crazy, you know, some sort of inflated cost of a coin or whatever. But what I

What I'm seeing and what I anticipate happening is that there is stablecoin. So a stablecoin is something that is pegged to something that is tangible. So let's take a UK stablecoin. That would mean there's slightly different nuances of this, but let's take the main concept is that each pound sterling that you issue digitally as a stablecoin, you have to back that by having the funds held.

in a bank. And what I'm seeing there will happen is that the technologies that have been used for cryptocurrency will be used, but in a regulated environment, particularly within a stable coin, so pound for pound scenarios. And there's, I mean, we can talk about some of the use cases for that another day. And I think the vast majority of use cases we haven't even thought about yet.

So that's really going to change. Though stable coins are generally issued by private companies or banks or these types of things. In the UK, it's still very new. So there aren't very many stable coins yet within the UK, but I can see that being very significant over the coming, let's say 12 months. I think you're going to see some real big players coming into the stable coin market.

And then longer term, so peeling out of the private issued type of methodologies of paying, we come back to the central bank digital currencies. So it will be the Bank of England actually issuing digital money, which will be very much the way that we use, I'm going to say pound notes, we don't have pound notes anywhere, we have pound coins and you know, five pound notes, the notes in our wallet, but.

Sean Forward (30:08.538)
in a digital environment. So it'd be very much the ability to pay each other peer to peer and genuinely peer to peer, rather than going through an intermediary of any sort of sort and actually paying merchants in a digital methodology. Again, a lot of the use cases of this, I don't think we've even thought about yet. They've yet to emerge. So over the next, you know,

I don't think we'll see a CBDC in central bank digital currency in the UK for another five years at least, but there'll be another five years at least until some of the very sort of specific use cases start coming, sort of coming through. Anyway, Matt, look, it's a topic I can go on about for ages.

Matt (30:57.852)
And how would that impact your business at Payable? If there is then a UK digital currency and you can just pay peer to peer, not paying any transactions or maybe to a network just to keep the thing running, how does that impact your business?

Sean Forward (31:15.064)
Yeah.

Yeah, it will have significant impact on our business. But coming back to the omnichannel and sort of omni approach to our business and the way that we view things is that we have to stay current with the ways that people are paying because that's the nature of what we're doing. Now, we're obviously still sort of looking to the future. How will that impact?

And what I do is I always come back to very sort of practical elements. There's still going to need to be an infrastructure. You're going to still need to have a digital account or wallet or some way of transacting. Merchants are still going to be able to, they're still going to need, even if they can accept that payment directly, they're still going to need a way of managing that.

They're still going to need a way of interacting with the customer. They're still going to be the management of the user interfaces. So what I think will happen, Matt, and it will take a long time. So we'll be able to move with it. But the actual process of buying and selling, the actual interaction between the two parties.

I don't think it's ever going to go away because there's always, you know, there's at least two parties within the transaction. It's just going to become easier and cheaper. And what we're going to need to do is keep adding value to different elements of that payment chain.

Matt (33:02.204)
So you've obviously been involved in, I suppose, fintech 1 .0 or maybe fintech 0 .1 back in the day with the swipe cards. And then, as we've evolved to, I suppose, fintech 3 .0, we're doing things on chain and so on. How have you kept abreast of the latest trends in technology so you can understand what's coming further down the road? It's always...

Sean Forward (33:09.268)
Hahaha!

Sean Forward (33:17.492)
Yes.

Sean Forward (33:26.068)
Ahem.

Matt (33:27.932)
You want to be going back to your peaks and troughs, similarly with trends in technology, for example, or regulation or new governments coming in. As a leader of a company, you're always trying to think what's happening next year, next five years, next 10 years, and how can we position so that when the next...

Sean Forward (33:33.396)
Yep.

Matt (33:46.172)
thing comes to the forefront, like you're seeing at the moment with AI and then CBDCs and in 10 years time quantum computing or whatever it may be, how are these things impacting what we're doing? How do you stay on top of that? And how do you sound like someone who loves a challenge and is very curious about things? But how do you take that?

Sean Forward (33:54.644)
Mmm.

Matt (34:11.772)
and use it to enrich what you're doing day to day as a business leader.

Sean Forward (34:17.747)
Yeah, it's a lot easier and a lot harder to do that now than sort of time gone by. It's a lot easier because there's a lot more information out there. We've got the internet, obviously the different types of sources of information. But it's a lot harder because there is so much.

And I think that the key to this is being discerning about the information that and the sources of information. And I think this goes for all of us, doesn't it, across the board in all forms of life is that there's so much content, either on social media or whatever. We've got to be really, really careful about how we think about the content that we accept.

And I think the way I approach it is not just industry specific, but it's also day to day. What you don't want to be doing is taking your political information from, let's say, just somebody random person on TikTok. You've got to give some thought about who you're accepting information from. And the way I do that on the...

on the business side of things is I'm really keen and a big supporter of the different trade associations. So in payments, we've got the payment association and we also have another one called Innovate Finance, which is probably a little bit more banking, a little bit more government focused. But the payment association is very much about the

day -to -day people within the industry and the different ways that people pay. So the first thing I would suggest to anybody would be to find good trade organisations that have thoughtful content which gives you a chance to network. Because again, networking is probably the most important thing that anybody can do at any time within their career.

Sean Forward (36:41.614)
is be open to meeting new people, be curious about what their journey is, what their story is, and to share your own, because that's quite good fun as well. But yeah, very much the source of information. So online, you've got like FinXtra, you've got TechCrunch, you've got different online podcasts, like yourself. There's some fascinating people that come on to podcast these days.

know, tell about their journey, but also really dig deep about and it's an amazing way of sharing information because you can get really quite deep on a, you know, on a podcast, you can listen to it while you're walking or driving or whatever. So it's there but to be specific about answering your question is be discerning about the content that you consume and then consume it regularly is really the way to do that.

The other way is to take part in industry sort of exams or learning, make sure it's some sort of formal learning. So there's plenty of certificates, there's plenty of online courses that you can do. Again, be a bit discerning about the choose carefully the sources of where you're gonna get that or where you're gonna do those courses.

That's the thing. And then trade, professional trade associations. There's organizations often that they're looking for a qualification, but you can join those. Again, it's all about networking, get out, talk to people face to face and really understand what people's journeys are and be curious.

Matt (38:29.244)
In terms of other skills that you think are necessary to thrive in working in FinTech and particularly in your area in payments, are there particular attributes you look for when you're hiring people or is it still very much...

As an employer you always want someone who's smart and hungry and is curious and wants to work hard. That's kind of a given. But is there anything specifically you look for in payments? And also there's a misconception sometimes that you need to be a developer to work in fintech. People associate those two things together and obviously there's a big technology angle to fintech.

but there's also lots of other jobs outside of that as well. So can you talk about the diversity of types of roles within a payments company as well as the different types of skills and attributes that you look for?

Sean Forward (39:27.02)
Yeah, I think whenever I'm, if we take the skills and attitude first, when hiring, the first thing I always do is try and learn something about a person. It's something that is not necessarily role related. You know, what do you do?

What have you done in school? What's the breadth of things outside of your curriculum that you've done? If they're university, people come through university. What have you done outside of your, I don't know, your maths degree or your biology degree or whatever? It can be whatever. And I'm a big supporter of the Prince's Trust and Duke of Edinburgh.

these types of things. Often I'm latching on to those types of things early on in the discussion, particularly when I'm interviewing somebody. Often just to break down that initial barrier to try and put people at ease and have a real chat with somebody rather than it being an artificial question and answer type scenario. And then after that, particularly if somebody's coming in new,

that haven't got work experience. Because if somebody's already got a job, it's quite easy then to talk about the roles that they've had and how the different elements of what they've been good at and bad at that job and what they need to develop. It would really be to ask them what they're curious about. So what's interesting to you?

it might be that they are techie, so they like coding or whatever. It's not very often that there's not somebody that unless they're obviously going for a programmers or a developers job that they come up with that. It's usually that they're interested in talking to people or they're good at numbers. They want to be on the accounting side or they want to be in marketing. So they've got a way that they

Sean Forward (41:47.719)
want to project information, they like social media, they like to... So what I usually do is look for personal traits and sort of leading into the second part of your question is that there is in any business, not just FinTech, but in any business, you always have to approach these things as a team. A team is always a group of individuals that have different skill sets that

come together to achieve a common aim. And those, you don't want everybody to be the same, because that's no good. You know, again, I always bring things back to my rugby analogy. So I apologize to people who are not rugby fans, but you need smaller, thicker people to be in the front row, or you need taller people to be in the second row to catch the ball from the line out.

And it's the same in a football analogy as well, in a soccer analogy, where you've got to have goalkeepers and you're gonna have your strikers. So it's very much about what I'm really looking for is somebody that's gonna add something to our team. Some little gem or nugget that's outside of the norm, that's gonna really add to the skill set that...

and the breadth of skill set that we've got within the organisation.

Matt (43:17.436)
So changing topic a bit, we've had, like you said earlier, changing government in the UK. How do you see a change in government impacting the fintech industry? We've seen open banking in the UK, which has been used as a model across the world. Is there any new innovative things which you're kind of anticipating in the works from this new government?

Sean Forward (43:45.606)
Yeah, actually, sorry, just a bit of housekeeping. I've got another call at 11 .30. I don't know if that's going to mess us up too badly here.

Matt (43:54.972)
In that case then, let's drop that one. I'll just finish on this question which is easy. So Sean, thanks for your time today. Just to finish off, can you tell us what your advice would be to your 18 year old self?

Sean Forward (44:18.918)
Goodness gracious.

Go for it, I think is the easy way. Get out there, see the world, meet people, be curious, be open. Yeah, just go out there and do it. Don't worry too much. The journey takes you where it will take you. Just go for it.

Matt (44:45.948)
How can people reach you, Sean? Are you on Twitter or LinkedIn?

Sean Forward (44:49.219)
LinkedIn, yeah, so Sean forward on LinkedIn is probably the best way. I don't do other socials other than through the business. But my email address is readily available to people as well.

Matt (45:03.228)
Sean Forward, UK CEO of Payable, thank you for today.

Sean Forward (45:07.043)
that was awesome I really enjoyed it thank you.