David Jarvis, Founder/CEO, Griffin
Today we're meeting David Jarvis, Founder/CEO at Griffin. They specialise in banking fintechs and platforms as the UK's first full-stack BaaS platform and bank.
I've been following them for the longest time, so it's fantastic to be able to feature David's interview here on FinTech Profile.
Over to you David - my questions are in bold:
Who are you and what's your background?
I'm the co-founder and CEO of Griffin, where we're building the UK's first full-stack BaaS platform and bank. Before this, I spent nearly a decade in Silicon Valley's tech ecosystem, doing development infrastructure at companies like Airbnb and CircleCI. I originally wanted to be an equity analyst but I chose the wrong year to graduate from university (2009) for that to be an option. My career took a sharp left turn and I got into tech, taught myself how to code, and became a startup nerd. Personally - I was born in New York City to an English mother and American father. I moved to Tokyo when I was 6 and lived there for 5 years. I'm an everywhere/nowhere child - nowhere really feels like home to me. Currently, I live in Bristol, close to the city center - a direct consequence of having a Bristolian mum.
What is your job title and what are your general responsibilities?
My job title is CEO. Being a CEO is weird enough but being a founder-CEO means your general responsibilities don't really fit neatly in a list. But here we go:
- Culture design.
- Keep everyone (investors, employees, regulators, the Board) informed, and - to the degree possible - happy.
- Make sure we don't run out of money.
- Along with Allen, my co-founder, own and communicate the product strategy and vision.
- Along with Phoebe, our Chief Revenue Officer, own our GTM strategies.
- Design, measure, and improve the effectiveness of our high-performance governance environment.
- Founder-led sales.
- Strategic partnerships.
- Brand ownership.
Can you give us an overview of your business?
We bank fintechs and platforms.
Our customers are mostly FCA-regulated non-bank FinTechs (e.g. lenders, wealth managers, payment firms), but about a third are unregulated companies with some sort of financial services hook (e.g. payroll with embedded savings, platforms for helping property managers handle rental collection, etc.).
We are a fully authorised bank, but unlike most banks we have no high street presence - we don't bank either of the mass retail or corporate markets. We only work with companies that have some sort of financial services or feature themselves and therefore need a way to create and manage bank accounts and payments at vast scale, typically via an API integration between their platforms and ours.
The sorts of products we offer include safeguarding accounts, client money accounts, embedded savings and payment accounts (what in some cases one might call a "wallet" product), as well as domestic payments connectivity and a suite of tools for managed compliance that help both us and our customers manage risk in a high-fidelity manner.
This is an odd model, but we're not totally unique; companies like Clear Bank here in the UK or Solaris Bank in Germany also do this so it is a competitive market.
We're the youngest kid on the block but we're still managing to win business, so we must be doing something right.
Tell us how you are funded?
We're VC funded - our big investors are EQT Ventures, MassMutual Ventures, and Notion Capital, though we've also raised from Seedcamp, Breega, NordicNinja, Tribe Capital and others. We also have some amazing angels on our cap table. Angels - especially ones with knowledge of your space - are so underrated.
What's the origin story? Why did you start the company? To solve what problems?
About a decade ago, I worked for a company called Standard Treasury that was one of the first banking-as-a-service businesses in the US. We were too early to market and also got some key parts of the business model wrong, but we saw the demand and direction of travel and I really believed in the value of what we were trying to do.
The only catch was that we'd need to be a bank to really do it, which in the US is prohibitively difficult and expensive (there have been very few new banks since the financial crisis).
Europe is a different story, though - we had a huge wave of new challengers coming online shortly after ST failed and when Monzo got their license in the UK I thought that it might be worth a go.
The UK and US fintech markets are very different and it took us several years to really educate ourselves on the differences and we had to iterate the value proposition quite a bit in that time.
Ultimately, the problem we're solving is not an abstract one - we didn't wake up one day and think "the world needs a better bank". What we saw - in both the US and the UK - were that FinTech startups were being consistently held back by their need for a banking partner that could move at the speed they were, especially since without their own bank license they needed a partner to actually hold the cash and manage the accounts.
And thus Griffin was born.
Who are your target customers? What's your revenue model?
We have a surprisingly diverse customer base, which freaks our VC investors out a lot. Ultimately, if you need to hold and move money at scale - ideally over API - then you're in our target market.
We work with companies like…
- Yonder, on their payments infrastructure for when customers repay their balance.
- Prosper, on core account infrastructure - essentially providing the "hub" account that a client funds before allocating money to specific investments.
- Calmony and LettsPay, in providing client money accounts to property managers who need to collect rent and disburse it to landlords.
- Income Group, in processing bulk payroll at scale while offering a savings account product as an extra hook.
We make money in a few ways, but ultimately it comes down to a combination of fees (platform fees, account fees, payment fees) and net interest income. We're a lovely hybrid of a bank and a B2B software business.
If you had a magic wand, what one thing would you change in the banking and/or FinTech sector?
Oh, I'd just get rid of centuries of systemic oppression and discrimination so that there could be deep benches of diverse leaders at both exec and non-exec level throughout the industry.
What is your message for the larger players in the Financial Services marketplace?
Realising the fruits of innovation takes time - a long time. Yes, there are lots of stories of companies out there that hit product-market fit right away, but you shouldn't judge your own innovation initiatives on that basis. It has taken us a long time to get to where we are, and we've only just getting started.
The riskiest thing is not only not to innovate, it's to kill things too early. Yes, you should be judging with an objective eye whether or not the continued investment makes sense. But if you think it's the right one, have some damned conviction and recognise you're going to need to support the thing for at least a couple of years before you'll have any idea of whether or not it's working.
Also, to the extent you can, create standalone equity incentive structures for people working on innovation, i.e. a separate company with its own stock option pool. Equity is the ultimate incentive-aligning mechanism.
Where do you get your Financial Services/FinTech industry news from?
Like everyone, probably, I am a life-long reader of the FT.
I like the FT's little sister, Sifted, as well. The best publication I read regularly - although not exclusively on FinTech - is The Information. They do by far the best tech journalism overall these days. It's an expensive subscription, but worth it.
Can you list 3 people you rate from the FinTech and/or Financial Services sector that we should be following on LinkedIn, and why?
- Jason Mikula. Runs Fintech Business Weekly and is I think most famous for his coverage of both FTX and now the Synapse-Evolve debacle in the US. Doesn't pull punches, which I love.
- David Brear, CEO at 11:FS. Great takes on UK FinTech and more generally on how to be a good human in business.
- Simon Taylor, Head of Content and Strategy at Sardine (and former 11:FS cofounder, I promise I'm not getting paid by them). Great insights and as a Brit working for a US company you get a lot of flavor on what's happening on both sides of the pond.
What FinTech services (and/or apps) do you personally use?
So - for better or worse, I'm a dual national (US/UK), which means I have to provide a detailed report of all foreign financial services I use to the IRS. This means I tend not to blindly sign up for FinTech apps as it just translates to a bunch of headache for me each year.
That said, I couldn't live without Monzo and Wise. I do all of my day-to-day banking through Monzo, and use Wise to help manage my life across borders.
What's the best new FinTech product or service you've seen recently?
I'll give a shout-out here to Aslan - they've managed to build an earned wage access / real-time earnings access platform that is not only free, it actually results in employees getting more than they would if they weren't using it. It's a totally brilliant product.
Finally, let's talk predictions. What trends do you think are going to define the next few years in the FinTech sector?
"Predictions are hard, especially about the future" I try not to predict things. It's more helpful if I just observe what I'm seeing now that may not be as obvious to other people. It's possible we'll see more new challenger banks in the US with full licenses, but the jury's out on that for the moment.
What I can say is we won't see anywhere near as many new banks in the UK or Europe. There was a brief window - which we sort of missed ourselves - in which there was a very strong mandate for new entrants.
Increasingly I think there is both regulatory and capital skepticism about the need for more new entrants and I'm noticing a substantial dropoff in people even trying. Is this good? Bad? I don't know.
I do think banks have a very heavy regulatory burden and require significant scale in order to become viable in that context; it may be that the market is now too crowded and there's just not enough capital for additional new entrants to reach that scale. Only time will tell.
Thank you very much, David!
Read more about David on LinkedIn and find out more about Griffin at griffin.com.