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Sukhi:
Welcome to the BLS Podcast. I’m your host and founder of Bridging Legal Solutions, Sukhi Dhillon Alberga. This is our fifth podcast in a series of educational episodes featuring groundbreaking entrepreneurs and professionals coming together, to discuss the creativity that inspires them and makes their businesses flourish. To be clear, the podcast is not a platform for providing any legal advice, but strictly an educational tool for our listeners.

Welcome to the BLS Podcast. I’m your host and founder of Bridging Legal Solutions, Sukhi Dhillon Alberga. This is a kind reminder to our listeners that the podcast is not a platform for providing any legal advice, but strictly an educational tool for our listeners. Today, our topic is entitled Fintech Insiders Explaining Industry Innovation. I am so thrilled to introduce Maria and Stephen Wayman, are co-founders of WeyMedia Inc. and its software platform, moneyGenius and creditcardGenius.

Both platforms use proprietary ranking algorithms to help users review financial products and credit cards. This power couple is from Atlantic Canada, and their platforms have helped many Canadians use their technology to save money. Welcome and thank you so much for joining me today.

Maria:
Thank you, Sukhi. We appreciate you and we appreciate being here.

Stephen:
Thanks for having us.

Sukhi:
Thank you. Thanks, Maria. Thanks, Stephen. I’m going to just ask you this question right out of the gate for our listeners, if you can just tell us your entrepreneurial journey?

What inspired you to go into fintech business in the first place, and how did it begin and where are you right now in present day?

Stephen:
Yeah. Sure, I can handle that one, Sukhi. The main inspiration, I think, for our business started back in the early 2000s, mostly with me when I was learning to become an adult and manage my own money. I was a new computer science grad and it was the dot-com bust era, where finding a software development job was not even possible. Nobody was hiring developers without experience, which I had none because I was supposed to go into co-op, but then ended up choosing the shorter route.

I didn’t really have any real-world experience, but I had managed to work summer jobs, leverage scholarships, and live at home with my parents to put myself through university debt-free. But I was also into expensive tech, being a computer science grad, and struggling to find a job that paid even $30,000 a year with my degree. Finding ways to spend less money and get more for the money I had, that became my hobby.

Over time, I got pretty good at it. By 2007, I was pretty skilled at saving money and started to ask myself if people might be interested in reading online guides on how to achieve the same results, without spending countless hours on trial and error. And reading bloated forum threads that were thousands of posts long, to learn the things that I had learned over the past five years or so. It turns out nobody was really doing that yet in Canada.

I spent the next three years planning the launch of How to Save Money, and that’s now called moneyGenius, as you mentioned earlier. I launched that as a side hustle back in 2010. Looking back, I would’ve launched it right away in 2007, but at the time, I naively believed you needed to have almost everything figured out before you launched. You learn.

Sukhi:
Most entrepreneurs do, right? Yeah.

Stephen:
Yeah, exactly. In 2014, I spoke to Maria about making it my full-time gig, and she agreed. A year after that, after experiencing some small, initial growth, she joined me, and that’s when we get serious about building a real company and evolving it from the side hustle that it was.

She led the incorporation of our business as WAY Media, and worked with me to launch our first Genius brand, creditcardGenius, in 2017. The rest they say is history. That’s when things got really interesting for us now that we were working together and being around each other 24/7. I think Maria maybe has some thoughts on that.

Sukhi:
I’m sure she does.

Maria:
For sure, working together when you’re a couple is not for the faint of heart, shall we say. Functioning as a unit that extends beyond our roles as parents, which is in of itself, can be a source of friction while maintaining our individual and professional identities is anything but easy. But of course, we’re not always aligned in every decision.

However, we try to always work to find ways to reconcile and translate those differences into a more refined course of action, ideally as quickly as possible. It can be a recipe for disaster or success, and we’ve experienced both. Fortunately, one thing that Stephen and I do have going for ourselves, is that neither of us are quitters.

Somehow by God’s grace, we find our way to always bounce back. Finding a way to turn conflicting viewpoints into elevated, informed course of action, is something that we for sure have lots of practice on.

Sukhi:
I think for every entrepreneur out there, even for our listeners, know you have to have a level of tenacity and resilience and grit. It takes grit. Put two couples together and two personalities and parenthood in the mix, I’m sure you guys are a fun household, for sure.

Now if I could ask you both this question as well, and either one can answer these questions as we dive into the interview. What’s the most challenging obstacle you think when you launched fintech, the platform? Pardon me. How did you get to this level of success you think today, really, truly?

Maria:
That’s a great question. To answer the first part of your question, I think the most challenging obstacle so far for us, is figuring out our differentiated product market fit. When we launched creditcardGenius in 2017, we knew that we wanted to turn it into the de facto credit card platform and resource for Canadians, with our comprehensive and unbiased rankings and first-class, personal finance content at its core.

But we also knew that we needed to have a destination product. It took us a few years to figure out what that product to launch that our audience would love, but that also fits within our organizational core competencies. As a small organization, we can’t do it all, so that took a few years, a few trial and error. To answer the second part of your question, how we achieved a level of success we’ve had today, is just through sheer persistence.

We have no investors, no mentors, no prior entrepreneurial experience. When the cards are stacked against you, so to speak, you eventually realize that what looks like a disadvantage, can turn out to be just the opposite. Because now you’re forced to be scrappy and efficient and creative. Then you find a bigger strength inside you that you might not have otherwise discovered. That’s where the grit comes in, the persistence comes in, and you end up surprising yourself.

Sukhi:
I love that answer. I really do. Stephen, do you have any thoughts to add on that?

Stephen:
I think Maria well covered that one, Sukhi. It really was a battle of persistence for us to just never give up and never quit.

As Nike would say, “Just do it,” so we kept doing it and kept launching, and kept failing and trying new things until we got there.

Sukhi:
Just hearing from your answers here, it sounds like when you’re starting anything, even a start-up in fintech business.

Are there any differences from other kind of industry startups do you think? Or are there some similarities and pitfalls that you might encounter, you think?

Maria:
I think at a high level, I don’t think fintech is much different than other businesses, because at the core of any successful business is trust. Steve Jobs’ obsession with elegant and frictionless design, and Jeff Bezos’ insistence on an empty chair that represents their customer.

The most important person in the room included in all their company meetings, cemented Apple and Amazon’s positions as leaders in their industries. Both Jobs and Bezos were obsessed about their customers, and this is how you build trust.

We built trust over time by knowing our audience, and consistently providing value and good user experience. Trust is foundational in all successful businesses, including fintech.

Stephen:
Yeah.

Sukhi:
Sorry. Go ahead, Stephen.

Stephen:
Well, I was just going to say, the second part of your question about other innovators and connecting and finding commonality with them. I can talk to that unless you had a follow-up for Maria on the first part there. We found that running an online business is a lot harder than it looks. I found in the early days when I told people that I spent full-time hours operating a website, they looked at me like, “That’s it? That’s all you do?”

Even today when I tell people we have nearly 20 employees, it takes them by surprise. But when you think about it, even Google at its core is a simple website, and it takes tens of thousands of employees to run Google. Sure, the barrier of entry can be very low. How the competition to capture and maintain an audience and attention is unbelievably high. There’s also many moving and complicated parts behind the scenes to keep everything running smoothly that people never see.

That said, we found in our small, local market, there were very few people who truly understood the kind of national, online business we were building that was both B2C and B2B. Ultimately, we turned to reading and discussing books written by business giants and tech greats, to find common ground and learn about strategies and pitfalls that other tech entrepreneurs were facing.

We tried to learn our best from that and implement strategy that was customized for our world, based on their world and how we could adapt that.

Sukhi:
Well, that sounds really good. Do you think there’s a level of trial and error that takes place when you’re doing this process?

Can I ask you to expand a little bit about earning trust with the consumer? Do you have further insight you think on that?

Stephen:
I think trial and error and maybe Maria can handle the trust with the consumer, but foundational to our company is running lean. There was actually a book called The Lean Startup and also another book that was companion to that movement called Running Lean that I read years ago before I started this business. I used that as foundational and experimentation continues to be foundational to everything we do.

We’re running experiments about every new thing we try and we try to build it as lean as we possibly can, just to see if something will make a difference, will move the needle, will have an impact, will connect with our audience, connect with our users. If it works, we improve it or we make it more efficient, spend more money on it. If it doesn’t, then we just pivot and go in a different direction.

Sukhi:
Thank you. That sounds good.

Maria:
Yeah. As for trust, I think the core is knowing who your audience are, what their hopes, dreams, struggles are, and then providing them the solutions that they may or they may not know. For us specifically, we’ve stayed in touch with our audience by reading the emails that we receive from them. I’ve personally done that since I’ve joined Stephen.

In 2016 until 2022, every single day, I would read comments from our readers, emails from them. What kind of questions they’re wondering about, what kind of topics they’d like for us to cover, things like that. Just always providing value and putting them first. Putting, let’s say, their wellbeing first. How can we help them save money? How can we help them maximize their credit card rewards?

It’s the same concept that I think Steve Jobs and Jeff Bezos employed, when Steve Jobs would care about what the inside of the iPhone looks like. It’s not necessarily something that their customer would see, but in his mind that’s creating value for them. Because they know it’s beautiful from the outside, but even the inside, it’s the same level of elegance.

I think creating that level of trust is just always putting on your customer hat and asking yourselves, not just how can you increase profits or do your sales? But more than that, how can you provide value to your customer? Because at the end of the day, all businesses exist because of their customer, and that’s how you create loyalty as well.

Sukhi:
I agree with you. I like the way how you said that as well, because there is a level of understanding what are their hopes and dreams? And an understanding that the product that you have in front of you and the level of which of the standard that you’re giving it. Then I think there’s always some level of servitude in how you serve them and execute it makes a difference.

Because I think there’s still a real component of relationship, establishing that relationship with the consumer, and that confidence in the trust that comes from it. I really have to say kudos to you, Maria, and the dedication and the commitment it takes to read emails and feedback while you’re running a business, doing everything else that’s on your plate, but valuing what the consumer has to say.

Then for both of you to take that and say, “Well, how can we improve better? How can we do it in a lean way and what works and what doesn’t work?” I really admire that. That’s fantastic. Can I also ask you this question? Now that you’ve been, it’s been quite a number of years now that you’ve been in a fintech, how much has changed? In your opinion, what direction do you think the industry is going, especially with continued application of generative AI?

Maria:
Yeah. Great question, Sukhi. How much things has changed, first of all, technology is always changing. So much has changed since we’ve started and much more will change, as you alluded. Moore’s law has long been the credo of tech companies since 1965, when Gordon Moore predicted that the number of transistors in an integrated circuit will double roughly every two years.

What that means is that computers and electronics will become faster and cheaper over time, and history has proven Gordon right. It doesn’t look like we’re slowing down anytime soon. If anything, the opposite. In fact, the CEO of OpenAI that brought us ChatGPT, Sam Altman, published his own op-ed declaring Moore’s law for everything.

I think it stands to reason that Moore’s law has been a guiding strategy of tech companies, that allowed and continues to allow big tech specifically, to gain such monumental scale that dominates all facets of our lives in such unprecedented ways. If anything, big tech with their fintech arms, look even more positioned to integrate financial products into their existing ones.

What that means for smaller businesses like us, and we’re all small comparatively, is that we need to lean into our core strengths so that we can keep playing and competing in this global arena. As for the second part of your question about generative AI, I’d say the scale of adoption of generative AI was certainly unexpected. OpenAI and Microsoft launched ChatGPT late November 2022.

By January 2023, just two months after they’ve amassed 100 million monthly active users, a growth rate that’s been unprecedented since the internet launched, I believe. What this tells us is that the impact of generative AI is and will be widespread, and not just confined within the fintech or the tech industry. In my opinion, in the very short term, the financial industry, specifically the banks, should have more robust security measures to dispel and prevent attempts of unauthorized logins and access.

For us consumers, we need to adapt and implement at least a two-factor authentication whenever possible. In the short to medium term, we need to have safeguards in place that protects people’s safety and security from a level of actors that employ deep fakes and spread this information. As well as we need guardrails in place that protect people’s work and intellectual property from being reappropriated as harvested data to train these large language AI models.

For sure, transparency and consent should be top of mind there. In the long term, we all need to be collectively in conversations how AI will impact the future of work. We’ll need to reflect on what kind of jobs might be displaced, and what kind of new work will be created. And what kind of skillsets sets our children need, to successfully integrate into and lead a society that’s potentially powered by AI.

We need to start asking ourselves what that future may look like and what can we do to influence what kind of future our children may have now.

Sukhi:
Yeah, thank you for that answer. That was a lot and it covered a lot of important, imperative points, especially in the area of increased usage of generative AI and OpenAI. Absolutely. I think the other thing I probably would like to add and perhaps ask you what your thoughts are on it as well. Is that the G7 Summit, they all got together and all the countries were saying when it comes to regulation of AI in different industries.

It’s certainly going to impact the fintech industry as well. Is that there has to be a level of, like you said, transparency. The duty to, especially for developers, to make sure that when they are using AI applications and stuff, that they are putting all those mechanisms in place. Safety measures for privacy and data security considerations, and protections and biases and things like that.

I know the technology is moving way faster than regulation is. How do you guys find that now that you’re actually in it, and obviously there’s a regulatory body for you guys as well, how do you balance that?

Maria:
I think regulation is good. I’m pro-regulation because I think it keeps us all accountable, and you are absolutely right. I think that our laws, our regulations should catch up, because I think it’s way behind compared with the level of acceleration we’re seeing with technology now.

I don’t think we even have current laws right now that protect and champions children from the harms of social media. We haven’t even done that yet, and social media has been around for 15 years. I hope that we’ve learned something from that, and that we could use that to have a more accelerated response to AI.

Sukhi:
Please, Stephen.

Stephen:
Yeah. I was just going to say big tech’s mantra is to go fast and break things. The regulators, they understandably don’t even understand what they’re dealing with, so it takes them time to understand what they’re dealing with and how to best regulate it. Ideally, regulating quicker would be better, but it’s very difficult to do that, because it’s like the Wild West and you don’t really understand what’s going on.

But I hope that the world collectively learns from the financial history that we’ve had in the United States, where we went through a long period of deregulation. That the free market economy and with very little regulation, it will regulate itself and it will be more prosperous for all. We’ve seen that unproven back in 2008 when people are given a carte blanche to do whatever they want, they will do whatever they want, and whatever lines their pockets the most.

Not what’s best for people or long-term thinking just gets thrown out the window. It’s all short-term thinking, short-term gains, what can I do to get rich now? We don’t want to make those mistakes with technology of this magnitude. We need to be serious about regulation. I don’t like red tape more than anybody else. Red tape is a pain to deal with, but it’s unfortunately necessary.

We need to get better at regulating it and making it in a way that works for companies, so they don’t feel like they’re jumping through infinite hoops just to get anything done. I don’t have the answers on how all that’s going to happen, but that ideally is what we’re going to figure out.

Sukhi:
Yeah, and I agree with you. I think there has to be a level of, because the thing is if you don’t regulate and everyone is fast pacing, trying to get to the front gate, who releases the first new, shiny tech thing next. What could possibly happen with that as well, is that they’re going to run into obstacles. Even with ChatGPT, there has been issues that have come up and they have lawsuits against them out there as well, especially in the States.

There have been different issues that have come up with it. Then all it does is it hinders technology and the progress too. I think there has to be a hand-in-hand collaboration with regulators and tech companies working together, and forming those regulations and working together. Getting that dance, right? Getting that balance and dance of progression and progress and innovation because it is very important.

I’d like to share a little cute story. My kids and I, we were in [inaudible 00:26:32] and we were in Calgary. We went to the Spark Centre, the Science Spark Centre, and they had Flint, the robot dog that has AI, and on display. It was really interesting to say, because Maria, you were talking about children and the next generation, and the impact that all these innovations and tech has.

The children, my twins, were so engrossed by it, but then they were also asking the basic things where they were trying to understand why it didn’t have a proper face like a dog looks like. Then why couldn’t it run as fast as a dog? Because it didn’t have the [inaudible 00:27:09]. But the thing was interesting for me, was it allowed me to see things through their eyes and to understand how important it is for us as society, to try and understand the technology that is being subjected to us.

It’s really important for us to even try and understand it and know where it’s going to at the same time. I agree with you, we need a lot of education and education when it comes to consumers. Education to come to our children, and even educating certain government levels of what tech is all about. I do believe that it’s a collective effort that needs to be made. Interesting topic. We could talk about it for a very long time, I suspect.

But I’m going to move on to the next question, or well, maybe a question and a statement, I would say. I feel that in my humble opinion, I believe to create a team that has a level of success, I think that’s really important. You have to have a team that can help you succeed. That team and the components, and the people and the individuals, and the talents you bring together, are really critical. What are your thoughts about that for Stephen? Then Maria, you can add, please.

Stephen:
Yeah, I couldn’t agree more with you there, Sukhi. I think in any and all undertakings, big or small, building the right team is critical. Of course, that’s no different in business. You can only go so far and so long on your own. Unfortunately, this is kind of a lesson that we learned the hard way, which I’ll tell you a little bit about. But running a business can feel both like a sprint and a marathon all at once.

It can be extremely taxing, and you eventually realize that you can’t do it all, so having a great team behind you is crucial to success. Personally, we attempted to be both a strategic and operational part of all aspects of our business for far too long. There wasn’t any project decision or even run-of-the-mill administration work that we weren’t contributing to greatly.

After running on empty for years, we realized we needed to be more bottom-up with our approach to operating the business. That’s why we’ve been making the transition from top-down to bottom-up for the past three years, and it’s going well and we’re looking to expand again. In the near future, we’re going to be putting even more emphasis on putting together a world-class team that can take us to the next level.

You learn things by hard knocks sometimes in entrepreneurship, and we definitely learned that lesson by trying to do everything and maybe having a little too much superhero syndrome.

Sukhi:
Yeah. I think those who are entrepreneurial spirit, do suffer from that, that’s true, at some level. Maria, how about you? Any thoughts?

Maria:
Yeah. Something quick I’m going to add, because I think Stephen covered it well, is that when you step back, people step up.

Stephen:
Yes.

Maria:
That’s one thing we’ve discovered as well. In the beginning, this is our baby, this is our third child. We want to be, I think understandably, be involved in everything.

As the business grows and matures and start getting its independence, much like a little child, you realize that you have to step back bit by bit, and eventually a lot more to let it step up.

That’s what we’ve been discovering in the past two years by stepping back from operations, we’re seeing a lot of our team step up and it’s a great surprise. Maybe not a surprise, but it’s just great to see.

Stephen:
Yeah, it’s great to see.

Sukhi:
Yeah. I have a couple of good friends of mine, one of which is a CFO, and one who has been a vice president for a couple of companies and stuff that helped with other startups and things like that. I recently spoke to them, and one thing that they mentioned was that one of the mistakes that some startups do or startup founders do, is letting go. That they just have that sense of such ownership because yes, it’s their baby, they want to be still in control.

But sometimes that could be to their detriment to the growth of the actual business itself. There has to be that balance of understanding that at some point, it has to be its own entity. It has to grow on its own even without the founder. But because of the emotional investment that the person has in growing it and building it, sometimes they cannot necessarily recognize that. The fact that you guys learned that very earlier on, is confirmation of your success.

Because that is one of the key things that I’ve been told that founders need to do, so excellent. Great on you guys. I’m going to ask you now, what are the critical lessons you think that every business should grasp for future success in the current climate or economic climate, I should say?

Stephen:
I’m going to narrow in on one major thing that I think outside of persistence, which we talked about earlier and running lean and things like that. For the past decade and a half, access to large amounts of capital to fund a startup business has been extremely plentiful and cheap, due to shockingly low interest rates. Many businesses have been launched with business plans drawn on the back of a paper napkin, with unthinkable amounts of investor capital poured into them, with no real monetization strategy to be profitable.

The mantra has been, “If you have the users, if you have the eyeballs, the money will come.” Profitability doesn’t even matter, especially in the early years, that’s what big tech has been doing. Investors themselves didn’t care that they were taking massive risks with millions of dollars on these companies either, because they knew that 95% of the businesses they invested in could fail, as long as the select few succeeded and grew astronomically.

The system was literally designed around planned failure. This model isn’t good for the individual entrepreneur, because you’re making decisions that aren’t based on real growth and sustainability, and you’re often left holding the bag from a failed business. Many entrepreneurs are holding the bag right now, because access to capital has dried up and they don’t have the revenue and the profitability to keep the business afloat.

We bucked that trend by bootstrapping our business and building it the hard way, brick by brick, when it wasn’t cool, without any outside money or investors. I think today that’s appropriate given, well, back then it was appropriate as well, given that our goal is to help people be better with their money. Shouldn’t we manage our money responsibly as well as a business? We’re trying to teach people to manage their money responsibly as individuals.

Sukhi:
That’s right.

Stephen:
Financial responsibility may not sound sexy, but in the current economic climate, it really does demand it today. The money has kind of dried up, and this is one of the factors that forced us to innovate without betting the farm. If there is that one lesson to take away from our journey, it’s that you should seriously consider operating your business in a lean way, that forces you to make hard decisions and innovate out of necessity.

Try things quickly, get to profitability quickly so you can build a business that lasts. And isn’t beholden to a system that won’t have your back when the going gets tough, because they won’t. The investors will disappear as soon as the money dries up and the opportunity isn’t there. It’s just the way it is. They’re after the quick wins. When that’s not happening, they’re going to be scarce, right?

Sukhi:
It’s wise, it’s very wise advice there. Thank you. Maria, did you have anything to add to that?

Maria:
We’re really aligned there. Like Stephen said, we want it to be from the beginning consistent, in terms of how we manage our finances personally. That is we spend what we have, as well as managing our business finances as well.

From the beginning, we’ve been intentional in spending what we earn, and then reinvesting what we’ve earned back into the business. Having investors may have been nice, but we’ve never had the need for it because of how we manage our finances.

Stephen:
They may have stifled innovation because necessity is the mother of innovation, right?

Sukhi:
Right.

Stephen:
You need to innovate, because if the money’s there, it can actually be detrimental.

Sukhi:
Right, right. Well, thank you. Do you guys have any other departing words that you would want our listeners to know, or anything you’d like to share as we conclude our podcast today?

Stephen:
No, I think that pretty much wraps it up, Sukhi. We just want to thank you and let you know we appreciate the opportunity to be on your podcast and have this chat with you. I don’t know if Maria, I’m sure.

Maria:
Yeah. We could talk about fintech and technology all day long.

Sukhi:
Yeah, coffee date for that. Thanks so much. It was a pleasure. I hope you enjoyed being on the podcast today. I hope our listeners get a lot of gold nuggets from our conversation today. Thank you.

Maria:
Thank you, Sukhi.

Stephen:
Thank you.