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Oliver Hughes

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57
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2021-01-14
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2021-01-14
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  1. “There's very few similarities, to be honest with you, between my previous job experience. They were both initially in cards because obviously Visa was a big payment system. I opened the office, eventually became head of visa in Russia, and basically built a sales force and then some product development. But the outposts that I opened in Russia, which was an outpost at the time, is now very big office. That was more about the sales and business development side. In Tinkoff, it's about product and platform and it has been since the beginning. Why did I join Tinkoff in the first place when Oleg Tinkov, the founder, asked me to move over? I knew that the market was ripe back in 2006, 2007. It was ripe for a disruptive player.”

    2021-01-14 · Invest Like the Best · Oliver Hughes – The Secret FinTech Giant – [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.16] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “Even when we started back in 2007, which was a different world geopolitically, there's never been an abundance of private equity, still less so VC funding. There was some capital, but capital has always been scarce, and over the years it's actually become even more scarce. We're not able to take, say, something out of school, but we don't want to take VCNP money. And then hopefully sometime we'll crack the code and be able to monetize. In our case, we've had to live hand-to-mouth existence. We've been through three crises. in a market where capital is very scarce and so we have to treat it as such and this means that we've had to be extra disciplined about how we manage bottom line manage capital of our organization”

    2021-01-14 · Invest Like the Best · Oliver Hughes – The Secret FinTech Giant – [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.16] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “A couple of things at play here. We have a very disciplined approach to managing capital and managing the bottom line. That philosophy is embedded it throughout the whole organization in all of our business lines, in all of our team members. It's a lingua franca of the organization. That's number one. Number two, we've always been very focused on product lines that produce a positive bottom line result as opposed to going into, for example, a liabilities-led strategy and then hoping that at some point we'll find out how to monetize the customers that we're bringing in through, for example, debit cards or mobile app or whatever it might be. We started with products that we knew were going to make as a bottom line positive return. And then went into other services through which we could build up our volumes of customer inflow whilst monetizing at the same time. We've always done it in a different order. The third thing which is very important is that we're in Russia. It's the only market in which we work correctly.”

    2021-01-14 · Invest Like the Best · Oliver Hughes – The Secret FinTech Giant – [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.16] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “They gave us ticketing and tons of other stuff, which we now make available to our existing customers. We have a large customer base of now 12 million customers in Russia. We make available to them tons of different digital services, including these partner services. In our super app, you can order flowers, book a restaurant table, order a taxi, open a credit card, a debit card, book an airline ticket, whatever. So across virtually the whole digital spectrum of services. So that's where we are today. We've been highly profitable all the way through. We're actually just at the beginning of our journey because there's still tons and tons to do.”

    2021-01-14 · Invest Like the Best · Oliver Hughes – The Secret FinTech Giant – [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.16] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “In Russia, we embarked on a process of diversification. So we realized that we had a large inflow of customers, of applicants. We could generate acquisition flows anywhere in Russia using our online model and offline distribution through our smart career platform, which we'll probably come on to a little bit later. And we decided to go into other product lines. We started building other financial service products such as an SME transactional business, a brokerage business, an online acquiring business, lots of other lending businesses. And then we went beyond finance and into what we call lifestyle services. So some of these lifestyle services we built ourselves, these are beyond financial services. So we built a virtual mobile operator, an online travel agent, lots of content provision, and then started partnering with other service providers who gave us e-commerce.”

    2021-01-14 · Invest Like the Best · Oliver Hughes – The Secret FinTech Giant – [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.16] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “We started as a credit card monoline acquiring customers through direct mail with zero branches, always cloud-based digital player before the idea of neobanks came along. We built up a business and broke even just before the financial crisis, the global financial crisis in 2008-2009. Whether that crisis nicely learned a few things along the way, and then went into rapid growth and actually a little bit of diversification until the Russian crisis, our second crisis, in 2014-2015. So we'd already become quite a large player in credit cards, but we'd also started taking deposits online and we'd move all of our business to digital channels and online servicing. The Russian crisis comes along 2014-2015 and we also weathered that very nicely remained profitable all the way through. There was a big banking system, cleanup and shakeup.”

    2021-01-14 · Invest Like the Best · Oliver Hughes – The Secret FinTech Giant – [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.16] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “We started commercial operations back in 2007. There's actually a story to tink off for at least a Tinkoff brand, which is named after Russia's leading entrepreneur, Oleg Tinkov, so is a person. If you think Richard Branson in Russia, then that's something akin to Oleg Tinkov. He's a serial entrepreneur and he had several companies immediately prior to the bank. He had a beer business and a restaurant business also called Tinkov, which he sold and the proceeds of that sale went in starting. What was initially a credit card monoline. So in 2006-2070 he put the initial team together, we launched in early 2007, so I've been with the organization ever since the beginning, as I've basically just about all of the senior management team, the whole 14, 15 year journey.”

    2021-01-14 · Invest Like the Best · Oliver Hughes – The Secret FinTech Giant – [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.16] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source