What 99% of Startups Get Wrong About Trust | Akhil Nigam | Finmo

Shamil Malachiyev: Hello everyone, and welcome to this week's episode of The Founder's Code. For all of you who are watching on YouTube, you might have noticed we have a new office — we're in a new podcast studio here. So this is where you're going to be seeing us in the future. And our guest today is Akhil Nigam, who is a co-founder and chief product officer of Finmo, a fintech platform focused on solving evolving chief financial officer needs around global treasury management for middle-segment businesses. Hi Akhil, thanks for coming on the episode. Can you tell us a bit about what you do at Finmo, and when your fascination with numbers and finances started?

Akhil Nigam: Thanks for your time. Yeah, sure. I'm one of the co-founders at Finmo, and I'm currently looking after the product function. My journey basically started like 20 years ago. I did my undergraduate in tech, and my goal was to be an engineer and do some hardcore tech stuff. Doing meaningful, impactful stuff is what I wanted. And after a few initial years of being a techie, I went into product, because I was fascinated by building stuff from scratch. You know, when you have an idea and then you build it — I had that itch to build something. So coming from a tech world and trying to get into the why and the what — that's what inspired me. That's how I got here.

And within Finmo — when we started, we were three co-founders, and then we gradually added two more. So five co-founders in total. And to be honest, a lot of people do ask us: how come you have so many co-founders? It depends on the case, because the treasury industry, which we are operating in, is quite wide, and you need solid pillars across industry and product. You get bombarded with compliance, regulations, networks, partnerships, go-to-market, technology. So I can say that we have a solid foundation, because our founding team are those pillars. When I started Finmo, in 2021 or probably a little bit before, you get to do everything: marketing, writing, putting labels on bottles, acting as customer support with the initial clients, doing sales. You do a bit of everything. So I started that journey doing that. Now we have scaled to about 150 people across the world.

Shamil Malachiyev: With a lot of people when they're starting — I see a lot of solo founders trying to break in, and I see that investors predominantly like to come into teams of two or three co-founders, if we look across the scope. What would you say to those people are the benefits and the drawbacks of doing something either solo or in a small team, versus having larger co-founding teams?

Akhil Nigam: Yeah, that's a great question. I think there is no set formula that a company will be successful with one co-founder or multiple co-founders. Yes, there are fintech companies, and non-fintech companies, that have been successful with a solo founder and a great exec team supporting the person. And there are fintechs and non-fintechs with multiple co-founding teams. So the bottom line is, there is no formula where someone can say: I have multiple co-founders, so I'll probably be more successful.

But I can say one thing. A company is made of people — that's what a company is. It's people that are central to it. It's not just one person's vision. There's an idea that two or three people have looked at — or even one person, and that's also okay. If one person has looked at an idea and wanted to execute it, that's perfectly fine. The important thing is: if you have more co-founders and they believe in your vision, they feel more engaged. The ownership is there. They feel that: yes, it's my idea as well, and I want to build it. There's a feeling of strong ownership when you have a co-founding team. And then, typically, co-founders tend to do multiple things. It's not just "I'm doing product, I'm doing sales, and that's all I'm going to focus on." You share the load. I've seen great companies where a problem doesn't get escalated — you find a problem, you fix the problem, irrespective of whoever gets to it first. You don't wait and say: oh, it's not my problem, I have to go to someone else to fix it. That's mindset.

And if you have that mindset — yes, when you get more co-founders, sometimes decision-making becomes slower. That is something you need to figure out: hey, we can't have five people making decisions on everything. We have to have some kind of a decision-making tree. And that's how you go. That's what we did in Finmo as well.

Shamil Malachiyev: Because I know that even when people have one co-founder — when there are two of them — they have to put a lot of effort into maintaining a good, healthy, effective co-founding relationship. Some people even go to co-founder therapy, where they try to talk things out with each other. Now, when I imagine there are five people — does it get harder to maintain that good relationship, the conversations, the respect?

Akhil Nigam: Yeah — definitely, with more people there are going to be more misunderstandings and a lot more things, because there are more people. You have to talk to multiple people to get things done. But I think when you choose your co-founders, trust is very important. The mutual trust — being honest and being transparent about what's on your mind and in your heart. That prevents those misunderstandings. If you're not transparent with your co-founders, then he's not a co-founder — you're just sharing a title. Co-founders are the ones who can not only talk about the good, but can actually say: hey, I don't think this was right. I think we could have made this better. And then you talk, and you discuss, and you disagree — of course we can't agree on everything. There are disagreements and there are agreements. But with honesty, and being transparent with each other, with the trust, you overcome that.

And additionally, having more people as co-founders adds a lot of complementary skills, and clarity on responsibilities. The important thing is the clarity on responsibilities, because the co-founders bring unique strengths to the table. Each of ours brings a unique strength. I have a co-founder who is very good with relationships and partnerships. One is on product, which is what I'm leading. One is on compliance, and another is on go-to-market — more commercial sorts of things. So if you like, it's a pizza made with the best ingredients. I'll put it that way.

Shamil Malachiyev: I sometimes feel that too. When I have to take care of sales, marketing and all of that, I always go back to thinking it would be nice to have somebody who will feel the ownership and will not quit when things get tough. But the thing that's stopping me, having done multiple companies, is this: at some point of the company's growth, you sometimes start noticing that some of the people are not growing as fast, and there are people on the market who would be able to do a better job at that point. But by then it's almost like you're already married — each time you make a position a co-founder position, it's almost like a marriage. And then the best thing for the company would be to put another person in the role. Does it ever overcomplicate things when you have five people with ownership? Or maybe I'm just not seeing it, because I haven't experienced anything like that myself.

Akhil Nigam: Yeah — when you think about it, definitely, ownership. Which is why, when you have multiple co-founders, you have to agree on certain things: what's the area of responsibility you're going to take, to have some kind of clarity. Conflict is inevitable. It's there. If you think it's not going to happen, I think you're fooling yourself. But managing it constructively — the nice words would be empathy and active listening, and it's not fluff, you do need these things.

And I think when you get into this kind of a marriage, you accept that it's like a marriage. You accept the person, with the likes and dislikes, and you still continue with that marriage. I was talking to somebody earlier in the morning — somebody joining our product function, coming from a different function, mostly from operations — and I was telling them the same thing. It's a beautiful marriage. It's just that you're not living with the person; you're just accepting them as they are. And if you can survive doing that — which actually takes a lot of patience — you have to deal with it. Not all battles are worth winning. You lose some, you win some. Sometimes you definitely think: why wasn't I part of this discussion, that decision? Those things are there. But at the end of the day, you still keep going. That's what makes you strong enough — if you can still keep on going despite these challenges, and not quit. Because that's one thing you look for in a founder. If you're quitting because "I don't see this as my company anymore, I don't see things happening my way — my way or the highway" — nah, then you are actually just an employee. The important thing is you still continue, and you still sail through.

And the important thing is the vision, the mission. The people that believed in your vision and left their jobs. We have some people who came from really large organizations — who had great insurance, the whole company covered, business class tickets and things like that. But they came here. They took the plunge, and they believed in the vision, and they came here. So we have to think about that. They have believed in this vision. So keeping that mission and vision going is really more important, and it should be above the egos that come when you have multiple people in a room. I hope that makes sense.

Shamil Malachiyev: And for any founders who are building their product — can you tell us maybe some of the secrets of how to approach your product in the best way, taking experience from a product officer? Because a lot of people don't exactly know what it takes to make the difference between a project manager and a product manager, and what kind of things you have to think about constantly to ensure the product is successful, and not just technically viable.

Akhil Nigam: No, it's a great question. So yes, there is a difference between a project manager and a product manager. Let me just get back to basics before I answer the question the way you asked. There is a big difference. A project manager is one where the objective has been defined, and then you are just executing it — executing it in a way where you deal with the tech team, you deal with multiple people, you create a RAID log — risks, actions, issues and decisions. You're great at recording, you're great at tracking decisions. You're a good coordinator across multiple stakeholder teams, making sure that everybody's aware of the risks and the decisions that have been taken. That's a project manager.

If someone becomes a product manager and just does this, he's actually a project manager, not a product manager. Whereas a product manager is somebody who defines the why and the what. Defining the product is the job of a product manager. If you can't define, you're basically not doing product management. And when I say define the product, it's about why you're doing this and what you're going to do with it. The why and the what — not the how. The how comes later. The how is maybe project management, if I keep it simple.

Shamil Malachiyev: So basically aligning all of the technical stuff with the actual goals that need to be achieved using the product.

Akhil Nigam: Yeah. First is: why are we doing this? Why do we want to build this treasury module in the platform? You're building this treasury module because there's a problem. So what's the problem statement? You backward-track. Okay, there's a problem statement — the problem is with the SMBs. How big is the market? Fifty percent of the GDP of a particular country is SMBs. Employment is close to 50 percent SMBs. Getting to that data confirms: yeah, there is a problem. Then you look at the market: how is the current market addressing it, and what is the gap that's missing? And that gap is what the product manager has to focus on. How can I address it? Automation and tech come very late. I want to solve that gap, and it could be solved by, maybe, not a piece of code. It could be just a process. Maybe I have two people sitting who just do it — I hire an analyst who does it on Excel, and that also solves the problem. You start talking about tech when you want to solve that problem in a more automated fashion that can be scalable — that can actually become a product in itself that you can go out and commoditize and sell across multiple markets. That's when you start thinking about tech, and people, and "I need to have a team," and things like that.

And coming back to the question you asked about founders and companies thinking about product: within Finmo, we believe in one thing — we are a product-led organization. What it means is that we're going to find the problem, we're going to validate the problem, and we're going to build for that problem. And then we're going to make sure that as we expand it, we validate as we go, with customer feedback and things like that. If we build something and it does not sell, I think we should can it and move on to the next thing. How quickly you can it, and how quickly you move on to something more meaningful — that's what drives a product function. That's where your tech and agility and all those other things come into play.

Shamil Malachiyev: I can see that you clearly have a lot of experience in the field and around the field. And what I've noticed for a lot of founders — me included, really — is that one of your first engagements in the industry is building a startup. You don't necessarily have the experience of actually working for another company, a well-oiled machine, where you can see how it's structured, what the motivational structure is, how the management works, the people, how the machine runs. And when you're trying to build something of your own without having any of that experience, you have to make a lot of tests which you could have avoided. So a lot of people tell me: I wish I'd worked for another company. With you — once you finished your master's in Dublin, for a few years you did independent contracting work, right? And then you moved on to working for larger companies, like Citi. Could you tell us about that experience? What was that like?

Akhil Nigam: Yeah — life in Dublin was Guinness, and it was amazing.

Shamil Malachiyev: And singing in Temple Bar.

Akhil Nigam: Absolutely. There are people who definitely differ with me, but I actually love Dublin for the food — and the Guinness, for sure. And life at Citi was exciting. It's one of the few corporate banks that have a great footprint for both the commercial and large-enterprise market when it comes to corporate banking. They're less reliant on partner banks, so they own the platform experience, and they're able to provide better liquidity solutions and cash management solutions to a larger enterprise market — their key customers are huge conglomerates.

Before that, I did a lot of contracting, which was more specific-purpose stuff. I was hired to do specific work around SEPA, because at that point in time there was a big movement around the Single Euro Payments Area across the European Union. So I was part of that, doing a lot of ad hoc, specific work for the banks. And typically what happens — I'm not generalizing, but typically — banks outsource plenty of mandatory regulatory and compliance-specific work. Say you want to build a product to automate case management, for example. Rather than building something from scratch, they go out and tender an RFI and look for fintechs who are actually doing this. So earlier I was part of those fintechs addressing those problems, and when I joined a bank, I was on the other side — the client side, the one consuming those solutions. I wouldn't say my life got easier, but it changed my perspective, because I was looking at the big picture, compared to just solving the problem from the vendor side. Coming back to Citi — I did learn a lot, but I was typically working on one specific product; I didn't get the opportunity to work on multiple. That was Dublin.

Then Citi moved me to Singapore, to lead a commercial cards rollout for the public sector. It's the public sector, so I need to be careful about what I say. But in the public sector there are ministries, statutory boards and a lot of other things, and they typically do not want to talk to five different people in the bank — one person doing sales, one managing the account, one doing demos, one doing service, one doing product. They don't want that. They want one point of contact. Some large multinationals have the same kind of setup — service talks to service — but the public sector typically doesn't have that kind of setup the way multinationals do. So definitely, banks are a complex setup. And I think it's because they're just built that way — they're large, and they're built for scale. Sometimes people call it being a cog in a wheel. I wouldn't say that, but you're just: okay, I'm doing service, I'm just doing service.

Shamil Malachiyev: And has working in a large company like that changed you in any way — in the way you approach working with other people? Maybe it made you tougher, because sometimes you have to go through toxic situations which test your character and make you either adapt or evolve. Have you noticed any transformational moments for you personally, between before you joined Citi and after you left, looking back at those years?

Akhil Nigam: Yeah — typically at large companies, you just tend to ask: why don't we move fast? Moving fast was a problem, because there are multiple layers of approvals, and when you're in a multinational company, there are even more layers of approval. But the great thing about working at the bank in Dublin, at Citi, was that I was learning from the best in terms of the product itself — the products a lot of corporates love. So at least that part I was really happy with.

But building my character — coming back to the question — I think the character mostly got built when I actually started my own startup. Because early on, I thought that success was product-market fit and recurring revenue. That defined success. But then, when we onboarded our first treasury client, we had an unsuccessful FX hedge — a conversion — due to a cutoff time. It wasn't a bug or anything of that sort. It's just that FX works with market cutoff times, and they could not do a hedge because of the cutoff time. And it wiped out a few days — a weekend, and there was a holiday on the Monday — of their cash runway in that currency.

That moment changed me a bit, because when you build a platform that holds and moves other people's capital, it forces a shift: you're not just building a product, you're building impact — and here it was wiping out somebody's runway. It's the amount of responsibility that comes with that. Decisions stop being abstract, and they start having real human consequences when you're dealing with somebody else's cash. When I noticed that, I gathered everyone and said: guys — I mean, it wasn't our fault, but it gives us a sense of realization — we have to build a lot more capabilities, like maker-checker, making sure that nobody makes those kinds of mistakes. There was a big industry case around an analyst sending a large sum of money to the wrong beneficiary, and it turned into a multiple-year fight between the beneficiary and the sender. These kinds of things do happen. But being from the industry, how can we be more responsible, try to identify those issues, and give tools to the customer so that those kinds of issues don't happen?

So I did a bit of a pep talk. We need to develop resilience and humility in treasury — every bug, every latency can cost customers real money. Rigorous testing. Build playbooks for outages. And we also developed a culture of admitting mistakes.

Shamil Malachiyev: How did you do that? How do you build a culture around admitting to mistakes?

Akhil Nigam: Because I think being honest about a problem and bringing it out probably goes a long way. That's what I've seen and experienced myself.

Shamil Malachiyev: People generally think: okay, Akhil is my boss, I want him to see me as the best kind of person. If I show him that there is a bug, maybe he thinks it's me doing my job badly. I don't want to risk it — let somebody else find it and tell him. How do you turn that around, so it becomes: hey, I found the bug, and we can fix it in time?

Akhil Nigam: I think it's about highlighting that even if you make a mistake — we have to look at the impact of the mistake, but depending on the impact, we definitely have to learn from those mistakes. That's the kind of culture we are trying to establish within the company: yes, everybody makes mistakes. Some make really big ones that could cost the company a lot of reputational risk and monetary risk — we don't want to go to that extent. But I'm talking about the stuff where, even if it's with a customer — maybe we added a new piece of code and that resulted in downtime — we send out a note to our customers apologizing for it. And we also mention the reason behind it. We stick to the honest version. Plus, we mention what kind of actions we are taking so that it doesn't happen again. And then, when we go back internally, we change the processes — how things go into production from test, and so on. We go and tweak those processes.

But coming to the question you asked, about how we build the culture of admitting mistakes: it's about setting the tone at the top. When I make a mistake, I go and apologize, irrespective. When I'm talking to the clients, I do say: we made a mistake. We are trying to get better. And then I expect that people who are working with me have the same kind of mindset. Because what happens is: you lie, you probably escape that particular situation. But sometimes the problems come out a different way. And when they come out a different way, it becomes a much bigger problem. So calling that out to people, and saying that problems are still acceptable to an extent — setting up that honest culture is much more important.

Every person we interview, I interview. Because this was one of the biggest challenges I had when we started on this idea: hiring. If you ask me what doesn't let a founder sleep at night — it's hiring. How can we get people? Because as a founder, our job has to be more strategic: think about the vision, what we can do next, where the world is going, how we can make sure the vision holds — with the customer focus around it. And if we get into the day-to-day, it becomes a lot more difficult. Which is why we need people — people who think like you, or maybe much better than you, who will tell you: hey, this can be done better, and I will do it. I will bring more skill to this. That's the holy grail, right? Every founder wants people who are much smarter, who can understand and think beyond what others couldn't. For us it's about spending time there — on the hiring and the people. And one of the questions in our interviews is always around mistakes: how you overcame them, what you learned from them. There are a lot of case questions around those things, because we want to make sure that when people come in here, they come with that mindset of being honest and transparent about what they do, day in, day out.

Shamil Malachiyev: The thing is, people are so scared about making mistakes. Even to the point — I was talking to a founder friend of mine, and I could clearly see that he has an opportunity to grow. We were talking about why he isn't taking the actions necessary to take on all of those new customers. And eventually, after about an hour of conversation, it turned out he's scared that if they have more customers, there will be more chances of making mistakes, and getting into those arguments and things. And the real thing is: mistakes are okay. They happened at Amazon yesterday, or the day before — half the world was left without those services. If huge companies like that make mistakes and recover and continue working, mistakes happen at every stage. It's just admitting, fixing, learning, moving on. Do you also think it's partly important for founders themselves, as leaders, to show that kind of behavior — so it's not just something you tell everyone to do, but something you show by your own example?

Akhil Nigam: Yeah. Exactly. Absolutely — that's what I mean. I don't come and tell them: look, follow what I do. It comes from your actions. Because if you are true to what you preach, it shows in your actions, and when you have smart people around you, they will pick it up and see: hey, I think that's the better strategy, let me try it that way. So far that has worked for us.

But personally, I would say building Finmo rewired my priorities: short-term trust over short-term growth. Being more about stewardship than ownership.

Shamil Malachiyev: Can you explain that a bit?

Akhil Nigam: As in: I am here to work with you — compared to "hey, this is me," more of a hierarchy kind of thing. It's more like: let's work together. We are in this together. Let's fix it. We need to fix this together. It's not just your problem, it's our problem. We need to collectively work and fix it. When you make just one person responsible for the problem, they feel: hey, I'm left alone, and there's nobody around to help me. But when there are multiple people thinking about it and working towards it, that does a lot of wonders, from what I've seen so far.

Shamil Malachiyev: What do you see as important qualities that founders should have?

Akhil Nigam: I think I touched briefly on it — founders should be more strategic and visionary, and that's where they need to spend more time.

Shamil Malachiyev: So what about the first initial years of building a company? Because even though we want to be strategic and visionary, there is just so much operational overhead. You have to do marketing, sales, delivery sometimes, hiring, HR, finances, dealing with company registration and everything. It is really hard to put your head out of it and just start thinking about vision and strategy. You almost feel like you don't have enough time.

Akhil Nigam: No, absolutely. When you start small, that's where most founders spend their time — doing multiple things. And that's inevitable, because you start with two people, then you grow into five people, then ten, then twenty. As you grow, you have to make sure you come out of the day-to-day. But yes, when you start small, you have to do everything. Like for us — all of us were doing sales. Most of the investors ask: how do you do sales? Do you have a regular sales motion? I said: yeah, we want to get to that sales motion, but at this point in time — this was our first year — most of the sales was founder-led. We were doing demos for the prospects, explaining the benefits of what the product can and cannot do, understanding what their problems are so that we can fit. It's solution selling, rather than just saying: hey, this is what my platform does. Because a great product does not do great sales by itself. So it's important to mold yourself into more of a commercial person. A commercial person is focused on: how can I bring benefit and then commoditize it? And then there's the product person — like me — who thinks: I want to solve a problem for this customer. Even if I don't get paid, I'm okay, but I'm happy. That's how founders think in the first year. They're not thinking about how much they can get from this customer. They're thinking: how can I solve the problem? This problem resonates with me, which is why I'm building this. I think all founders should have that mindset, and most of them do, in my experience.

So: getting into talking to the customers, understanding their problems, molding the solutions, doing demos, configuring. We went to the extent where we created a back office, and then we actually onboarded the customer, and they started transacting, and we called them every day asking: hey, are you feeling comfortable using the dashboard? Are there any kinds of issues? "Yeah, my counterpart sitting in the Philippines has an OTP issue." Okay, let's figure it out. There are certain carriers in the Philippines that don't handle OTP well, and certain markets have regulations where you can't log in with an OTP, or you require some kind of approval to send an OTP. It was on our roadmap, probably three months down the line. So we rolled out an authenticator mechanism — 2FA via an authenticator app, like a QR code — within a week, and we gave it to them and said: hey, why don't you ask your Philippines team to start using 2FA via the authenticator? And it worked out.

When you are closer to the customer, you get that nice feedback, which was in your roadmap anyway but just got moved much earlier in the curve, because you're actually listening to the feedback directly. The closer to the customer, the better. Though it's not always me now — today, after running this for four years, I spend more time with the customer success and sales teams, listening to feedback. I do still listen to a few customer calls to understand how it goes, but we need more holistic data and feedback, so I spend more time there to get that. So to answer your question: yes, it is a challenge in the beginning, because you want to be there where the action is happening. Sometimes you want to control it, because you think that if you take control, you're probably going to do it right the first time, rather than depending on somebody — because it could go wrong, and then my customer gets upset. So you do it yourself. And that's where my point about hiring comes in: hiring the people that I can fully trust, and knowing they are actually going to solve it — I don't need to tell them how. They're proactive, thinking it through. That's the real challenge a founder has to go through. And if you solve that, it solves a lot of problems from a scalability standpoint.

Shamil Malachiyev: And another thing I see almost all the time — and a huge mistake that I made building my first startup — is that first, I thought that everybody thinks like me. If I think this is a great idea, then everybody will think it's a great idea. And for the first release, I don't need customers to tell me — they're humans too, I can think up what the dashboard should be, what the features should be. I'll just concentrate on building something that's going to be amazing — to compete with the biggest platforms out there, but better. And I'll work for three, four years until it's perfect. And then I'll show it to the customers, and it's going to be: well done, this is amazing. What can you tell founders thinking in that way, to persuade them to release the early, sticks-and-stones version of your product — to get the users to say whether the idea in your mind actually resonates with them, and whether you need to pivot, do something else, do another iteration earlier on?

Akhil Nigam: Yeah, I think you touched upon some of it already. Typically, the world is moving much faster than before. This generation — the AI generation — gets access to information much faster. Even product management, from a market-study standpoint, has become — I won't say simpler, because you still have to put your head into it — but it has gone down from, let's say, a week to two days, or maybe a day, because of all the AI tools that you have, like the ChatGPTs of the world. Even prototyping. Even market research. If you want to validate a particular problem, you can actually feed in a few surveys, and it will tell you: this is what I'm seeing. You can quickly validate those things. So from a product management perspective, validation of the market — testing the market, testing the problem — has become much easier. If I want to build a dashboard, I can do research saying: tell me the key differences between A, B, C and D. And it tells you straight away. And then: what are they not focusing on? And it will tell you certain generic stuff. So you build from there.

Shamil Malachiyev: Can I just slightly clarify for people — when you're doing that kind of market research, especially around a feature, like whether this is something that my customer segment will need: how do people get over the hurdle of ChatGPT going in and telling you "this is fantastic, you've had a really great idea, this is absolutely something that's going to work"? How do you make it give you the real answer — the critical-thinking answer?

Akhil Nigam: I think it's about the kind of prompts that you give to ChatGPT, but it's not going to give you an entire straight answer for what you need. It's just looking at the data that's fed to it. What's in your head — you can still probe, but it may come back saying: hey, I don't have access to this information, what exactly do you need? I think you still need some level of brains — your brains — to identify what exactly you're trying to target. Even the feature set that you want still requires a brain. You can ask it to compare two dashboards; it may not have access to those dashboards. It may come back and say: I can only see a couple of things on the website — this one solves this really well and this one does not. But it's just reading the websites, and it's doing apples to apples — or apples to oranges — and telling you. So it still needs that human touch, to go in there and look at it. Because ChatGPT does not understand — or maybe it does — that order-to-cash and accounts receivable are probably the same thing, just said differently in different markets. If you ask a finance guy: yeah, they're almost the same thing. It's still an AI, and it still needs that niche kind of knowledge to make that call. So I think you still need to do a bit of your own thinking. But yes, it complements — it acts as a catalyst in terms of getting the data available to you much faster, and then the PMs can go and do their own research and make some deductions out of it. That's what I see. Again, it's my opinion, and there are definitely a lot of people who probably do it in a much more sophisticated way to get the right answers.

Shamil Malachiyev: Can you tell me about Mo AI? How did you come to it? Because that's something that's on everyone's mind, you know, with AI: how should we be utilizing it? Is there really an AI bubble happening? Should we put a lot of focus on it? Should we give it some time? What was your thinking around adapting to the AI era?

Akhil Nigam: Yeah, look — even when we started, we were mostly thinking that our products and solutions should be focused towards the small and middle segment of businesses, because they lack the tools that they need. Treasury tools mostly serve the enterprise platforms well, and then there are small platforms doing a bit of everything. However — if for a minute you think of yourself as a finance controller, or someone in a company, what you think about day to day is your working capital. I only have X amount of cash in the bank. I am supposed to be receiving Y from a specific customer. I still have to pay some invoices to some vendor in some other market. These are the kinds of thought processes that go through a controller's and a CFO's head, day to day.

So when we thought about it, we thought: okay, let's build the tools that can solve the problems they face day to day. We solved for cash visibility — giving them visibility across multiple markets by connecting their banks, their cash positions, in multiple currencies. That gives them: okay, I don't have to work in Excel. The platform itself gives me the cash positions across multiple entities, markets, and so on. Secondly, if I want to move the money, I don't have to log in to a bank to do it. I can simply move the money from my Finmo dashboard. Because otherwise: there's a purchase order, there's AR, AP, then you actually go into the bank and make the payment, then you upload that receipt and invoice into an accounting platform, and then you do a match. There are plenty of platforms involved, and plenty of processes, and one thing was common: a human sitting at a platform, doing tasks — and some of these tasks are mundane. You just have to do them every day.

Our thought process about Mo AI was: for people like you and me, our lives are simpler — sitting in a car, talking: hey Alexa, hey Siri, do this for me. It has made our lives a little bit simpler for day-to-day tasks — calling your friend, dictating messages. And now ChatGPT is also doing plenty of stuff around that. However — sorry, my phone is asking me a question.

Shamil Malachiyev: Siri probably heard its name. Like: yes, I'm here. What do you want?

Akhil Nigam: Yeah — what do you want? So, we saw that these kinds of intelligent tools were missing on the business side, and that's where the world is heading. We would want to make life simpler on the business side too. The whole thesis of implementing Mo AI was to build an intelligent advisor for the finance function, so that the day-to-day tasks of an analyst — making a payment to someone, all those tasks — can be managed through an agent. As soon as you log in to the Finmo dashboard, Mo will tell you the top five things that you need to look at. And then it will also tell you: hey, you're running low on cash in this particular currency. Would you like me to convert from this currency and make a payment to this vendor? It's due for payment in the next two days. And the conversion takes two days, for example, because some currencies — some exotic currencies — take more time to convert. So we want to have that intelligence within the platform. And Mo is going to take all that day-to-day stuff from CFOs and manage it. And the roadmap for Mo keeps on adding — the more we learn: hey, can we do this? Okay, yeah, you can. There are more prompts you can add.

The world is moving towards automation. The world is moving towards convenience. The Internet of Things has been there for ages now — your payments are within objects, embedded. Similarly, your intelligence is also going to be embedded into those objects that you use. And they can possibly make their own decisions, as pre-fed by humans. You don't have to tell it: I'm done with my podcast, so the mic is off, everything is off. It does it automatically, because I've fed certain events and information into it. So I think that's where the world is heading. That's the trend.

Shamil Malachiyev: What are the main barriers that you have to get over when trying to drive adoption? I can imagine a lot of people would say they have trust issues allowing access to their finances to what is basically an artificial worker. How did you approach it? Because I think that's something a lot of companies, a lot of founders, are battling at the moment.

Akhil Nigam: That's a great question. Yes — trust in banking is definitely a key factor when it comes to handling money, as I mentioned. But I believe you have to have a risk-based approach, and a risk assessment. For example, if you want to move money: based on your risk assessment, you can automate certain payments — to a beneficiary that you have always sent funds to, and below a certain threshold, for example. But if it is to a beneficiary that has never been sent any funds, or it's the first time, then based on your risk policy, you can take it out of the automation. The most important thing I'm focusing on here is to have that ability, and then, based on the risk-based approach, build the policies that the advisor can work with. Because yes, it's 100 percent true — if you let a platform manage it, everybody makes mistakes. Mistakes are there. But we have to make sure we can mitigate those mistakes, and that's through risk assessment. That's the short answer.

Shamil Malachiyev: And as a last question — could you give some advice? Because right now, a lot of the founders in the industry are probably anxious about where the world is heading, what the world is going to look like, whether they're making enough use of AI. A lot of them are struggling with loneliness, or feeling like they're not successful enough when they hear about all of those raises online. What kind of motivation can you give them, to help them not give up on the journey?

Akhil Nigam: Yeah — look, I don't know if I can give someone advice. I'm not preaching here, because I'm still also learning constantly, from my own experiences and the people around me. But I think what has worked for me is that having strong relationships as a founder is essential — cultivating a network of trusted mentors, advisors and peers who can provide guidance, support and honest feedback. Having those people around you definitely adds a lot of value.

Shamil Malachiyev: How do you find those people?

Akhil Nigam: I mean — you look for them, they look for you. Again, there's no set formula for finding them. It's more that you find them along the way. There are some people — when we speak to customers or partners, even if we don't end up working with them, we still maintain a relationship. Because there is something you learn from someone every day. That's what I believe in. Just because the partnership didn't materialize doesn't mean you can't talk to them. That's the thesis I go with.

And you go to these networking events, where you find a lot more people looking for something similar. Within Singapore we have the SFA — the Singapore FinTech Association — and they organize a lot of events. When we go to these events, we meet like-minded individuals who are struggling with the same set of problems, and some who are more matured, as in: I have seen this — hey, you know what, if you go to this particular market, be careful about this. There are people who have already experienced those things, and they are very open to sharing that kind of feedback. So you have to find those opportunities and grab them as you go, because every opportunity may give you some lesson — or just a friendship. But I think the key to this whole thing is that you have to have open communication and active listening, to help deepen those discussions and connections. It should be relatable: you know what, I feel the same, and I feel your pain. And again, there's no formula. Sometimes you still have to go with your gut, and you just jump, and you typically survive. But there are the few basic things I mentioned — active listening and open communication. They are key.

Shamil Malachiyev: Being a decent human, basically.

Akhil Nigam: Absolutely. And the other thing is investing in relationships beyond just business. Because at the end of the day, it's all people. They are central to what you do — people who believe in your vision, people you work with day to day, your partners in the banks that you work with, and your customers. And especially the relationships beyond your business — the personal friendships and family — provide you the emotional stability that you need to sustain that kind of long-term dedication. Like my wife — I tell her: hey, this AI is coming and killing everyone, the jobs are going away, and things like that. And she says: there will be a time when entire jobs are taken over by AI — but at the end of the day, someone has to start a company and then employ people, right? So the human touch is not going to go away completely. Of course, there are people who differ on that statement. But at least I had someone to talk to, and discuss, and share ideas with. And I discovered something through it. I think that's what you need as you go along.

Shamil Malachiyev: So, world — don't worry. The human touch is not going anywhere. AI will take its place, and we'll always have our own place.

Akhil Nigam: Yeah, absolutely. I think we humans — we made AI, right? And I'm not saying Skynet is taking over yet, but...

Shamil Malachiyev: Well, I want to thank you so much for joining me for this episode, and for sharing your story. I think it's going to be really useful for a lot of founders who are just starting — to learn to value relationships, to lead from the heart, to lead by your own actions. And I think everyone who's listened to this episode in full will get a lot of value out of it. Thanks so much for coming.

Akhil Nigam: Thank you so much. I'm happy to be here.