E15: Merging Product & Engineering in the Age of AI | Fernando Fanton | CPTO, Property Finder

I want to start exactly from Monzo.

So the landscape of digital banking is one of the hardest to crack in because of the nature of economics and the way to build those.

And very few digital banks are profitable.

Monzo managed to be profitable in the last few years.

So first, do you miss your days at Monzo? And second, what did you do exactly to make Monzo profitable? Because I'm certain that the time that you were there in your tenure, Monzo became profitable.

Yeah, absolutely.

Well, thank you so much for those kind words.

I definitely miss a few things from Monzo, but I'm obviously very happy here in the UAE at App Property Finder.

But it is very difficult, to your point.

Actually, I remember when I first joined Monzo, it was almost three-plus years ago, and we were not profitable.

And there was a lot of bad news in the press around neobanks in general and Monzo specifically, the ability to be profitable, to be sustainable.

a lot of critics back then, which have disappeared now, but there was a lot of critics saying that this toy is not serious, like real serious banks.

And I remember as we went through it to realize how difficult it is, so how many things have to happen for a consumer or retail neobank to get there, to get to scale.

And the reason for that is like, first and foremost, you need to be able to grow and scale into the millions of users quite cheaply.

So you have to be able to acquire users almost organically through share of voice.

So people talking with each other.

And we did a lot of work since I joined three, four years ago to actually build that mode.

So I build great features that people will talk to.

I make it easier to refer friends in the application as you were using it.

But it's very, very difficult because you only make money after one year or two years after a user joins.

It takes quite a while to make serious money with them.

And therefore, the question is, OK, how are you going to afford that growth? The other very difficult thing is that scaling a bank is difficult.

Because when you're small, nobody really cares.

The regulations, of course, is there.

But when you become in the millions, and Monzo has like 15 million now.