Fintech for the People

Amee Parbhoo sits down with TS Anil, Global CEO of Monzo Bank to talk about his personal and professional journey, how he managed the company through the pandemic, what his principles are in building a sustainable and growth-oriented business, and what he sees for the future of inclusive fintech.

Show Notes

Fintech is no longer just about expanding access to financial services; it’s also about increasing their quality. In this episode, Accion Venture Lab’s Amee Parbhoo sits down with TS Anil, Global CEO of Monzo Bank, to discuss his principles of building a sustainable and growth-oriented business, and what he sees for the future of inclusive fintech.


TS shares his personal and professional journey, and how he managed a company through the pandemic. During the conversation, TS also shares some practical advice for CEOs and founders on leading in uncertain times. 

To learn more about Accion Venture Lab, visit our website and follow us on Twitter and LinkedIn.

Creators & Guests

Host
Amee Parbhoo
Writer
Cassidy Butler
Producer
Laura Krebs
Editor
Reese Clutter

What is Fintech for the People?

Fintech has the power to build a more inclusive world. Fintech for the People is about the innovators who are developing fintech solutions that reach the people who’ve been left behind. In each episode, we’ll hear from innovators who are creating financial solutions that bring every person the financial tools they need to grow their business, support their family, and build their community. Together, we’ll learn how fintech looks different in spaces and places where basic financial services are a luxury — and how solutions to address these challenges require a different level of creativity, empathy, and execution.

Fintech for the People is an Accion podcast hosted by Amee Parbhoo, Managing Partner of Accion Venture Lab – an early-stage investor in inclusive fintech startups. Learn more about Accion Venture Lab here. Episodes will be released in seasons, on a weekly schedule.

Amee Parbhoo (00:12):
Hi, everyone, and welcome back to this exclusive season of FinTech for the People. I'm Amee Parbhoo, managing partner of Accion Venture Lab, and I'm excited to continue sharing more stories behind the work we do and the people who are driving truly inclusive FinTech innovation in every corner of the world. As an early stage investor in FinTech startups, Accion Venture Lab has spent the last decade investing in over 60 companies across Africa, Latin America, Asia, and the US, and we believe in the power of FinTech to reach those who've been left behind.

(00:47):
In this special season, we've shared discussions that happened during our FinTech for Inclusion Global Summit late last year. The summit brought together over 250 people in the inclusive FinTech community and we felt the conversations were too good not to share beyond the conference doors. We ended the summit with a fireside chat I had the pleasure of hosting with TS Anil, Global CEO of Monzo Bank. I'm excited to share this wide ranging conversation where TS shares his personal and professional journey, how he managed the company through the pandemic, what his principles are in building a sustainable and growth oriented business, and what he sees for the future of inclusive FinTech. We hope you enjoy the conversation. So thank you, TS, for joining us.

TS Anil (01:33):
Great to be here.

Amee Parbhoo (01:37):
We have around 200 plus people here who've come in from all over the world, a mix of investors, entrepreneurs, folks who are all in the financial inclusion industry. So they're excited to hear from you. I'd love to really start with your personal story. Like I said, I mean, you've kind of had the slow pull into FinTech. Starting in banking, Visa, and now Monzo, what took you down the path to where you are today?

TS Anil (02:02):
So first off, thanks so much for having me, Amee, and for the 200 folks that are in the room there. Amee, to your question about my journey coming here, so I ended up being in financial services my whole life, consumer financial services my whole life and nominally, it seems like it's the same industry, but I've been lucky enough to solve very different kinds of problems in roles around the world. So working in very developed markets like the US or Japan or the Europe, Western Europe to countries in Africa and Asia. Very different kinds of problems, very different kinds of businesses, business models. So even though it's been the same industry, I feel like I've gotten the opportunity to learn a whole bunch of stuff and lived and worked around the world.

(02:47):
But through that whole career, there were two massive unscratched itches for me. The first was that I couldn't visualize a scenario where I would hang up my boots from a professional career and not have actually been part of the zeitgeist of our times. This idea of working in a tech company, in a startup, building something with explosive growth and scale and that just felt like it wasn't something I had done. Even at Build Business, it's a big company, this idea of doing something more in startup, it was really appealing, and then there was a deeper itch than that even, which was this idea of wanting to fundamentally be a part of reinventing what banking means for the future.

(03:25):
And God knows I tried in the banks and companies I worked in, but for a whole bunch of reasons that are well documented, incumbents rarely end up reinventing the industry they're in. So when I first encountered Monzo, there was a real sense of sweet spot over here because there was some great foundation that had already been built at Monzo, a tech stack that is second to none, product market fit in the UK, a brand that had captured the imagination of people because this combination of mission oriented company, a particular tone of voice that brands struggle for, which we had aced, and we had a real business going. So there was a great foundation. At the same time, it wasn't the sense of coming in to run something. It was the sense of actually building because it was a huge ambition to build against. So it was a sweet spot of both those things, good foundations, but huge ambition and that's really how Monzo also happened.

Amee Parbhoo (04:18):
That's great. Well, and you kind of alluded to this around the banks just not being positioned in a way to deliver that growth to take advantage of this big opportunity in a way that the tech companies are. I mean, what is it that makes Monzo so disruptive? How is it able to take on the big incumbents, and I'd be curious, you've worked around the globe, we have a lot of entrepreneurs here working in emerging markets. Does that same hold true in emerging markets?

TS Anil (04:47):
Yeah. That's a great question, Amee. So I'll say a couple of things. The reason incumbents don't reinvent the industries they're in is pretty well documented. This idea of legacy mindset, legacy business models to protect, legacy technology are huge factors. There's a lovely line in Silicon Valley which says God built the world in seven days because he had no legacy technology to start with, and that's true because, and I say this with the humility of having worked in big banks with massive technology budgets, but really, really hard to actually build new stuff because just maintaining the back technology is so hard. Along comes a company like Monzo and there is a massive opportunity in this world for mission oriented companies that can solve big problems and get at that from first principles.

(05:42):
Start with a clean slate, build a dream tech stack, and with the way technology evolves, building it with a view on where the world is going. In this context, that means a world where everything is on the cloud, everything is microservices architected, all of that. So we've built this from scratch. The other incredibly important part I think, which helped Monzo, and it's for anybody in the financial services world and certainly FinTech, whether inclusive FinTech or even otherwise, is this idea about regulation, and my view on regulation is as follows because even inside a Monzo, there'd be lots of people that would sort of roll their eyes and say, oh gosh, regulation, oh God, we have to do this stuff, regulators don't get it, and so on and so forth.

(06:25):
That's fairly common chatter in the FinTech world to hear about regulation being described like that. My perspective though was different, which is I think that if you're running Amazon, for instance, you can't roll your eyes about warehouse logistics and shipping. If you're running Apple, you can't roll your eyes about the supply chain and manufacturing at incredible scale and efficiency. Those are just core to being successful at the business you've chosen to be in, and when you're in financial services, regulation is the same thing where you've got to own it. You have to believe that this is the problem that you have to be really, really good at. It's not a necessary evil, it's not a painful thing, it's not eat your vegetables, it's none of those things.

(07:09):
It's part of your business and you just get good at it. And I think that's an important perspective. So at Monzo, one of the reasons I think we are successful is because we have shifted our perspective to that as well. We believe that, look, this is a part of the industry and if we get it right, if we learn to operate in the regulatory framework and do it incredibly well, there's a bunch of good outcomes. One, of course, regulators themselves evolve when they see good models. The other is that it actually creates a real motor around our business. So that's been incredibly important to us and I think that's part of what I'd say to anybody in the FinTech world, that if you're thinking about your business, it's fine for short periods of time to think about playing on the fringes of regulation or whether the regulatory arbitrage for the business model, but that's not a sustainable long-term business to bail out. So to answer that question. [inaudible 00:07:57] the question you think I missed.

Amee Parbhoo (07:58):
First of all, I think that's a really important point. I mean, even in our space, I think we've moved away from some of the language of disrupting financial services because there's an important role that all of FinTech plays, but that doesn't mean you skirt around elements that are core to financial services like regulation. You have to play within that and be on that side, but I think the second piece of the question was around from your global experience, does that still play out in emerging markets?

TS Anil (08:27):
Sure. So yeah, it's a great question. I think, so emerging markets I think in some senses are possibly more challenging, and the reason I say that is this whole thing I said about legacy, what happens in emerging markets I think is that because the embedded industry is not as strong, the embedded industry doesn't have as much legacy, you find that the leapfrog better. So a simple example, the average banking app in the UK sucks relative to the average banking app in, say, India or in another emerging market where people have just leapfrogged the whole stage of evolution, and the average standard can actually be better from a digital perspective than what you expect to find in the developed markets. So in the emerging markets, I think people will leapfrog technology.

(09:15):
So as someone in the FinTech or financial inclusion space, as most of you are, it's easy to peg yourselves against the worst of the world, but really, the smartest banks in each of your countries is moving fast, is leapfrogging and that's who you need to be even further ahead of. So I think it becomes a little bit harder on the regulatory front as well as also seeing regulations leapfrog. I mean, some of the stuff that we have in emerging markets or developing markets which are about digital ID or about new regulations or payment banks or lighter bank regulations for digital players, a lot of that stuff hasn't even come in the west, hasn't even come in the developed market. So even regulations are leapfrogging creating new opportunities. So it is a different world, I think, but many of the core lessons, core insights about how you build something that lasts remain, I think.

Amee Parbhoo (10:08):
One thing that's evolved in financial inclusion is when we first started talking about financial inclusion, it really lended more to access. It was how do we expand access of financial services, and I think the whole industry has shifted to think more about quality of those services, around usage, and I'm curious how you approach that at Monzo. What's the opportunity for FinTech, not just opening bank accounts, but really shifting how those are used and what the additional quality of those services look like for their customers?

TS Anil (10:39):
Sure. I should start with the access point though. I want to make one point on access, which has certainly been part of our learning journey so far, which is that access is a difficult problem to solve. Financial inclusion in the context of an industry where financial crime is continuing to increase, where fraud is continuing to increase and it's all migrated to digital channels makes solving the problem of access also incredibly hard and regulators haven't kept pace. So regulators have still got long to-do lists that define compliance as opposed to looking at new technologies that can allow us to solve for knowing our customers better and onboarding customers better.

(11:19):
So it's a difficult problem. I don't want to minimize the access point. It used to be that access was only about technology and how could you actually serve at scale, but the financial prime regulatory context on this is only going to get a lot harder in the coming years in my view. So that is a problem, and at Monzo, we're constantly building new tools, better, smarter data to get better and smarter at this stuff because the bar keeps rising, but to where you're going with it. So it's not enough to onboard, it's not enough to just open an account and just give someone access. You want the product used, not just because it's good for the company, obviously, revenues get driven by whether the customers are using it or not.

(12:00):
But because that's really what this is about. If you're not putting a product in the hands of customers that is actually solving the problem for them, they're not going to use it. So at which point in time, you're left with the situation where opened a bunch of accounts, but really, it's not moving any material needle in terms of helping people here live better lives financially. So I think from my insights, our insights have been that be incredibly sharp and clear about what problems you're looking to solve and then build the best experiences around it. Framing the problem in really clear terms helps you build really amazing products and tools and features on that.

(12:36):
And what served us well is that we build our products with our customers, and that's two things. One is we actually have a really active community of users and the community, as you would expect with early adopters in the digital world, are opinionated, are digital and engaged. So we discuss features with them, they will input all the time. They'll upvote stuff they like and give us brutally honest feedback. So that happens all the time. So that's a big part of it. The other part of it is it's really based on learning from how customers are actually using the product, and we invest a ton in our user research teams because then if you're clear about the problem we're looking to solve and you build something and that you keep iterating to get better and better, then you create this dynamic where it's not just about onboarding a new account.

(13:27):
It's about actually people are using that feature, are using a tool that you've created in the app. They're getting more engaged with you, it's helping them solve a problem in their real lives, and that's the virtuous cycle and as that happens, people talk about good experiences. So as that happens, they tell their friends and families, and so you end up impacting many, many more lives by the idea of just figuring out what you want to solve and then learn with our customers, and there's the other piece over here, which is about user research. We don't use our research to help users frame the problem because oftentimes, that can be inadequate. There's classic Henry Ford line, which was that if you asked users what they wanted, they would've said faster horses. So it's important that you don't use the users to shape the problem definition itself, but you take a view that goes beyond, but it [inaudible 00:14:25] with them on the solution. Does that make sense?

Amee Parbhoo (14:27):
So does that end up looking like helping you design better features rather than a product specifically or how do you-

TS Anil (14:34):
Both. So it depends on what you call product, and in the tech world, everything gets called a product. So without getting semantic about it. So a product, if you define a product at a slightly bigger level, which is let's say helping customers invest. So if you define investments as a product, then the features and the tools and the way the thing is designed, how customers engage with it, what gives them discomfort, how do you actually take them through that journey, that becomes the journey with users.

(15:02):
So as an example, when you do research with customers on investing, you realize the number of places where customers have anxiety and anxiety that's often born of ignorance, not feeling like they understand it, not feeling like somebody's taking the time to explain it to them. So the whole education journey becomes critical, and educating in the context of short attention spans and in the context of an app interaction is a pretty high bar, and so that's a big part of what we invest in as well. Just let's understand if someone's not taking an action, what's the real barrier? What are they bumping up against, and how do we actually fill that gap?

Amee Parbhoo (15:43):
That's great, that's great. And that ties to my next question. So we've had the last two days here, TS, we actually had closed door sessions with 40 FinTech CEOs and if I were to create a word bubble of the last two days, the keywords would be healthy unit economics and profitability. That's what we talked about, and usage drives toward thinking about higher, just more revenue per user. So I'm curious, how do you come with that balance? You talked earlier this summer, actually, about still focused on long-term growth, but there's of course pressure, I'm sure, for moving toward breakeven and profitability. What's the right balance?

TS Anil (16:26):
Yeah, it's a brilliant question and I joke with my investors all the time that you folks have suddenly discovered the P word, profitability because 12 months ago, you're like, why aren't you sponsoring a football team? Why aren't you doing this? Why aren't you doing that, and suddenly, the language has shifted to dude, what's happening with cash flows?

Amee Parbhoo (16:45):
It's good to know it's not just the seed and series A and series B companies that are dealing with that.

TS Anil (16:50):
It's everybody, but I think it's refreshing. I think it's refreshing because it rewards great companies. Any crisis separates great companies from the rest and this is not going to be any exception, and you'll see people that have actually built great business models, sustainable businesses actually breaking away from the pack. So there's a few different threads in what you've said. This profitability versus growth trade off, which is the way this gets described, I think is a false dichotomy, and I say this a lot because in the tech world, the context in which this question is asked is a great one. The context is that you've had lots of companies build a model where growth was the most important thing.

(17:34):
And growth was achieved by spending a lot on acquiring customers and marketing and the hope was that monetization would follow, and to be fair, there's a long list of examples of companies where they followed that model, got great momentum, got escape velocity, and reached the level of scale where success was in some senses assured. So it's a viable model in some contexts, not dismissing the model, but it's not for everyone and the last decade of near free capital has made everybody think that's the way, that's what you do, that's what you learn. You build a model where you spend a hundred dollars to acquire a new customer in the developed world and good things will follow. I think there is another model though.

(18:21):
The Monzo model is about building amazing products which solve customer needs, doing it in a way that is very core to our mission, and our mission, Amee, as you probably know is make money work for everyone, which means it's truly about giving customers products and features and tools in the app which allow them to make good decisions with their money, giving them transparency, giving them the visibility and the ability to actually act on all of that. When you build a product with that ethos where the mission and the customer at the heart of it and you add to that amazing product engineering data design, you end up creating a product that customers love. Our net promoter score is 70, seven, zero.

(19:08):
What that means is our customers are constantly talking about us and in an industry therefore where people are spending massive amounts of cash to acquire new customers, we spend near nothing. The vast amount of our user growth comes entirely organically where I don't spend a penny because a product has sold itself and the network effects and the virality and the promoting aspect of it that our customers do makes the growth therefore not an expensive proposition, number one. Number two, we have always said we would monetize transparently, responsibly, and our customers are therefore very, very contribution positive on day one.

(19:49):
Now if that's the business model you've built, which admittedly is holy grail business model where user growth is not bought either through marketing or through pricing and so on, and customers are contribution positive, then profitability versus growth is not really a trade-off. Then the trade-off is not profitability versus growth, but profitability versus bigger investments you might want to do in pursuit of the ambition, which is a good trade-off we'll talk about, right? Should we launch a new country? Should we launch a set of new products, or should we solve for profitability?

(20:20):
And in that context, I mean, business leaders around the world have to make that decision every day and not just business leaders. In any context, you're making short and long term trade-offs and I've always thought about it as sort of being disciplined with saying, how are you placing your chips? Are you placing 60% chips on short term like we do and then 30 and 10 on stuff that has a one to three year impact and then three plus impact? So 60/30/10 has a simple sort of heuristic over here. There's no science to this, of course, but distributing the chips beyond that to say that look, first is business partners be responsible, like I said. So the dichotomy goes away, but then the short-term and long-term trade become one of how you distribute the chips.

Amee Parbhoo (21:01):
Yeah, it's not about whether you grow, it's how you grow and how you do that to help with that dichotomy. That's great. Another topic that's come up in these last two days of the CO forum is leadership through difficult times, and you actually took over at Monzo during the pandemic and so was focused on managing, but also building the team during that time. Tell us about that experience, and also, I think the entrepreneurs in the room would love to hear any advice you have of sort of leadership during these difficult crises.

TS Anil (21:34):
Yeah, I'm feeling bummed that I was actually not in Amsterdam as part of those conversations because I would've learned, listened to everybody's stories because this is one of those things that leadership is about shared experiences and sharing each other's experiences, and everybody has a pandemic story, I'm sure. Everybody has a pandemic story, which was this combination of the world going pear shaped and all the hardships in different ways that we all dealt with in our own lives. My particular version had been taking over Monzo in the early weeks of the pandemic and taking over from the founder at a time, which was obviously hard for everybody, but was existential for Monzo.

(22:12):
So it was certainly as exciting a time as it gets and there's certainly, there's two books in there, but if I was to describe some of the stuff that I learned through it, I'd probably pick two or three teams. The first is resilience and it's a word that gets bandied around in different ways, but for me, it's about personal resilience first and then obviously, the business' resilience as well, and personal resilience is a hard concept and it's an interesting concept because especially as you look across generations and you look at the millennial generation who are still grappling with the idea of resilience, who've only seen a couple of decades of really booming economies around the world, this is a tough conversation. For me, resilience means many things.

(23:04):
Number one, it means compartmentalizing. For all the 200 leaders in the room, you know that you are compartmentalizing all day long. You're switching context to going from remediating some big problem that's just blown up in your face to the next 30 minutes later where you're selling somebody because you want to hire them and you want to motivate them and you're giving them the inspirational vision to going to speaking to a team that is solving a deep problem where you're getting tactical. That happens all the time, the good, bad, ugly gets thrown at you all the time, and so some version of compartmentalizing and being in that moment, not influenced by the 30 minutes before or the 30 minutes after is super useful for me.

(23:48):
The other is this idea of the way I frame it is sail through and pass the storm. There's a storm right now in the world, this crazy conflation of geopolitics meets macroeconomics and inflation meets a post pandemic hangover, and domestic politics around the world is at a crazy place. So it's just important time right now and so it's a storm. Capital is drying up, all sorts of things. Economies will slow down. People will really suffer with cost of living challenges, but it's a storm, and figuring out how you look through that to what the world will look like 12, 24, 36 months down the road is the key thing. Other themes for me, look, as a leader, you're constantly giving energy. You're giving energy to people, you're giving energy to your team, to an investor, to some external stakeholder, to a regulator.

(24:42):
You're always in that mode and so if you're constantly giving energy, at a personal level, you need to figure out what refills you, and there's no single answer. They're all different people. Different things will do it for each of us. For some of us, it's going for a run. That's not me, by the way. For others, it is kicking back with friends and music or walk with the family or whatever. Find that thing that refills you because you are constantly going to be giving it to other people and running on empty is not an answer. At a business level, there's a couple of things that I certainly learned through the Monzo journey over the last two and a half years. The first is that obviously, culture eats strategy for breakfast.

(25:22):
And how do you figure out what the culture needs to be? How do you make sure that the whole baby's in bathwater problem? How do you preserve the golden threads of what make you a special company and that need to endure, and how do you figure out the stuff that needs to change, and this is difficult. Each of us will get it wrong all the time, so you have to keep at it, right? So you change something and you're like, oh, actually, just do the second order consequence of it, which is not great and it's going to change the company in a way that's not good for the company.

(25:53):
And then you sort of correct that and then sometimes you realize late that, oh crap, that was a muscle that we needed to have built for the company we're becoming, but being explicit with yourself, having those conversations in the company about look, what's got us here, what needs to stay out of that, but that's not the ambition. The ambition is up there, but this gap needs new muscles, needs new skills, needs new executives on the team and just continue to be deliberate and intentional about that is crazy important. I could go on and on, by the way, because these things you learned, learning every minute.

Amee Parbhoo (26:30):
And on that culture point, I mean, you were a unique position, right? I mean, you were coming on after a founder had started the company, presumably built their own culture. How much did you find at that point and now, are you continuing the legacy? Are you saying, okay, this is the culture of the company? How much are you creating your own culture?

TS Anil (26:50):
The answer is yes to all of the above. That's the point. So you realize that something is embedded in the way the company is operating and then you ask yourself the question of it's worked so far. Is it what we need going forward, and then you realize, and that's why I use the term golden threads. There's some things that we define and said, look, this is core to who we are. We will always be this company. This will not change, and you're explicit about that and you need to tell the company, you need to talk about that with the company saying that, look, this is a golden thread. This is never changing, and then you look at something else and say, look, this was fine. We did it like that when we were a 50% company, but we are 2,500 people now.

(27:31):
We're serving millions of customers. That's just not the way we are going to do it anymore, and being choiceful about that and continue to make those trade-offs, I think it is the key thing, and coming in after a founder, a loved founder no less, is a challenge because at the end of it, we are each who we are. We can't fake being someone else. You can do it for a small period of time, but if you're CEO, your company's seeing you like 24/7, so you can't fake it. You have to be the person you are. So coming in after a founder, and especially for me because there was also this additional dynamic of the fact that Tom, my predecessor, he was very much of a mold.

(28:13):
Of a type, of certain type of tech founder, and I came with this completely different biography and how do you actually help people figure out that you look past a bunch of stuff and look at the core of things. I mean, for me, I used to joke that everybody wants a different part of me. The regulator wanted to see the gray haired banker, the company and the investors wanted to see the person that was going to 20x, 100x the company, and seemingly, those are different personas, different people, but I can only be one person. So it's just about dialing up different muscles.

Amee Parbhoo (28:48):
Super interesting. You just joined Accion's board earlier this year. We are all incredibly excited to have you, and you know our mission is building a financially inclusive world. So I love your thoughts on what you think it will collectively take to achieve that ambitious goal, and for everyone in this room, you've got entrepreneurs, investors, others in the financial inclusion, financial services space, I mean, are there bold actions you think we all should be taking to achieve that?

TS Anil (29:18):
Yeah. First off, I'm super chuffed about being on the Accion board and my learning journey on it is like crazy steep. So I'm not going to pretend like I have the answers, but there's a few things. Your bold steps question. I think the one thing, I mean, Accion has taught the world how to do this, has been at it for longer than anybody. So Accion has led the world here. I think, let's say two things in terms of the bold steps category for me. The first is this idea that no single part of the economy or society has the monopoly on big, bold, innovative, disruptive thinking, and we are certainly living in an ecosystem where you have to learn from everywhere whether it's very, very commercial big tech companies, whether it's the NGO world, whether it's policymakers, whether it's small FinTech companies, whether it is folks like that are in the room, they're in the hig.

(30:19):
You have to learn from everywhere and find ways to bring the best of things together. So interesting partnership structure. Accion does an amazing amount of stuff in that space, and I don't want to say this public-private partnerships, but also big tech, small tech partnerships, big tech policymaker partnerships. There's so much out there that I think figuring out the ways in which we can build real scale, looking at the overall ecosystem I think is number one for me. The second one, which I think is a more solvable problem, the first one I think is more abstract, but the second one feels more solvable to me, is that there's a whole new generation forming, which is more mission-oriented, which is more socially aware than let's say the previous one and a half generations at least.

(31:04):
You could argue in some senses the baby boomers of the sixties were very socially aware, but there was a gap in the middle after that. This generation cares about mission, cares about their work having purpose, and yet it's intriguing to me that we don't get enough of that generation to come in the world of financially inclusive tech, and I think the big breakthrough for us will be at the point in time where founders around the world or engineers around the world, when they're looking at options of places to go build amazing companies or be a part of an amazing story, their choice set is all of the glamorous big tech and the tech world, but also the inclusive tech world because this is a sweet spot. You get to solve big problems that have real impact and you get to use all of the zeitgeist skills of tech product and engineering design together.

(31:56):
So I think bringing that talent in is a big leap for us all to make, and at the time that I feel the most bearish about the world, when I think like, oh my God, we are never going to deal with climate change. There's no political will. I'll come across some company, let's say, in the climate tech space or in food tech space, and they will talk about what they're doing. There's a company in Kentucky which is building a whole new way of farming, which is going to use 90% less water and this is a tech company. He's doing it every step of the way because he thinks the massive commercial opportunity, but there are people solving problems like that. How do we make sure that we continue to channel the best minds into the world of impact tech or inclusive tech, whatever we want to call it, because that's the reason to be optimistic here.

Amee Parbhoo (32:51):
Thank you so much, TS, for this great conversation.

TS Anil (33:00):
Thank you so much, Amee. Thank you, everyone.

Amee Parbhoo (33:01):
Thank you for joining for this exclusive season and stay tuned for the next one coming soon. We'll be talking to entrepreneurs and others working to leverage FinTech to address the challenges and risks associated with climate change. I look forward to bringing you more of those stories here on FinTech for the People.