Steve Monaghan
Appearances
Chief Change Officer
#285 Steve Monaghan: The Advantage of Age in the Age of AI
Absolutely. It's a very simple formula. And I think that you're absolutely correct in summarizing it that way. People don't like being told what to do. They like to be part of the journey. They need to understand. They need to be brought along on that journey and then given the ability to contribute to it and actually enhance upon it.
Chief Change Officer
#285 Steve Monaghan: The Advantage of Age in the Age of AI
And I think that's always been the mark of success of an innovation group or any innovation officer is to have other people take ownership of those ideas and be humble enough to let go and appreciate that other people can actually take it to a level that you mightn't see because you're relying on their expertise.
Chief Change Officer
#285 Steve Monaghan: The Advantage of Age in the Age of AI
And I think that's the greatest compliment you can place with any employee or colleague. is to really try and bring out the best of both sides so you're actually getting the sum of all versus I'm going my way and take it or whether you like it or not. And that's just completely destructive. This is just game theory 101.
Chief Change Officer
#285 Steve Monaghan: The Advantage of Age in the Age of AI
Sure. Actually, I'll start back earlier.
Chief Change Officer
#285 Steve Monaghan: The Advantage of Age in the Age of AI
I think when Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone, that he actually moved technology from something that only the young could do or that the 20 to 30-year-olds could do and made technology so simple to use that it actually engaged from three-year-old kids or three-month-old kids that could swipe a screen all the way through to grandparents that would previously not touch a device.
Chief Change Officer
#285 Steve Monaghan: The Advantage of Age in the Age of AI
If you look at it in the same context now with what we're seeing with generative AI, it's now making technology so much more accessible to people that would have felt somewhat alienated by technology in the past.
Chief Change Officer
#285 Steve Monaghan: The Advantage of Age in the Age of AI
So the bank that you refer to in the Philippines, one of the observations that I shared when I was working with their leadership team was that this is the first generation of technology where actually older people have an advantage because they know how to ask better questions.
Chief Change Officer
#285 Steve Monaghan: The Advantage of Age in the Age of AI
And I think that's a very profound point because a lot of the younger kids may actually be somewhat disadvantaged because they don't know the right questions to ask. At this stage of generative AI, I think that makes quite a significant difference, as we know, with what we see in prompt engineering, etc. Older people do have an advantage.
Chief Change Officer
#285 Steve Monaghan: The Advantage of Age in the Age of AI
In this particular instance, the average tenure of someone in that leadership team was ranging, I think, between 27 to 40 years. And they'd worked across every element of the business. So being able to ask the right questions, if you think of technology as not an individual light bulb switch, it's more a network.
Chief Change Officer
#285 Steve Monaghan: The Advantage of Age in the Age of AI
So when you understand the network, you're in a better position to actually understand the implications and to craft your question in a way that takes into account some of the constraints of the network or some of the opportunities or accelerants of the network.
Chief Change Officer
#285 Steve Monaghan: The Advantage of Age in the Age of AI
so that experience is pretty hard to come by it's why if you look at most ai what you want to do is take the experience and expertise and encode it and this is the perfect nexus of that you're getting people that would when they retired in the past would retire with all their knowledge Now we've got this enormous ability to encode that knowledge and take advantage of it and then pass it down.
Chief Change Officer
#285 Steve Monaghan: The Advantage of Age in the Age of AI
Younger kids tend to ask simpler questions. They're still learning the basics and the ropes and trying to understand. They've generally got very limited exposure in terms of geographic exposure or business division exposure. Because I think the one other thing I've appreciated as I've got older is humans can't scale. We tend to specialize.
Chief Change Officer
#285 Steve Monaghan: The Advantage of Age in the Age of AI
We're an accountant or we're a marketing person or we're a finance person. And very few are able to really succeed in multiple spheres of business. But technology is horizontal.
Chief Change Officer
#285 Steve Monaghan: The Advantage of Age in the Age of AI
technology goes across all of those silos so one of my favorite sayings is the value lies between the silos not necessarily in the silos and that's why the older people definitely have an advantage because they're not constrained in getting those questions into an ai which can then draw upon that reservoir of knowledge to actually return more valuable responses
Chief Change Officer
#285 Steve Monaghan: The Advantage of Age in the Age of AI
Good morning, Vince. How are things? I began my career in Australia, started as a commercial pilot and started to learn technology as a function of that. So in many ways, much of my career actually was founded then and there. I used to fly 22 hours a day and I'd run the company during daytime and fly at night.
Chief Change Officer
#285 Steve Monaghan: The Advantage of Age in the Age of AI
Yeah, absolutely. These are the core things that you try to get across in any sort of digital transformation project. You want to get some sort of level of emotional engagement, right? So that's the whole experience side of the equation. Then you want to make things very simple for your customers and simple or simplicity is cognitive. One plus one equals, we all know the answer.
Chief Change Officer
#285 Steve Monaghan: The Advantage of Age in the Age of AI
So the quicker you can get people to make decisions by giving them the right information, then that's obviously an advantage. And then the last part is effort. Minimum type swipes and swipes to actually execute your decision. I refer to that as ESE or easy, right? Experience, simplicity, and ease.
Chief Change Officer
#285 Steve Monaghan: The Advantage of Age in the Age of AI
And they're the three objectives that in any digital transformation that you set as your primary objectives for the customer. That ability to interact with emotion, simplicity, and ease.
Chief Change Officer
#285 Steve Monaghan: The Advantage of Age in the Age of AI
I've been lucky to work for some of the largest corporations in the world and transform them digitally. Now I'm trying to focus on economic transformation. I think one of the things as you look around new generations of technology is that a lot of people forget that the constraints which they take for granted no longer exist. So that's the case today with economics and finance.
Chief Change Officer
#285 Steve Monaghan: The Advantage of Age in the Age of AI
We have people that are paid in Azure usually every month, right? And if you actually look at the constraint of that or the belief that's just the way it is, it's actually quite wrong. If you consider that an employee joins a company and doesn't get paid for 30 days means that they're essentially accredited to the company for that 30 days.
Chief Change Officer
#285 Steve Monaghan: The Advantage of Age in the Age of AI
And what's happening is while they're giving their cash flow to the company to take advantage of, they're actually usually burdened by much higher cost debt. So if you look at that, you're taking very high cost debt to substitute for low cost debt, which results in direct capital destruction, both at a company and economic level.
Chief Change Officer
#285 Steve Monaghan: The Advantage of Age in the Age of AI
And if you look at it, if you're able to actually optimize that across companies and supply chains and economies, we feel that you should be able to increase GDP by about 20%. So it's a very big play and it relies on knowledge of legislation, finance, supply chains, a whole range of different factors and looking for those inefficiencies between each of the silos.
Chief Change Officer
#285 Steve Monaghan: The Advantage of Age in the Age of AI
And so that's where I'm really focused on now and been working here and interacting with governments and regulators and corporations, etc. And the new year has started well, so we'll see if I can bring it to take off. But as with everything in my career, it's a big mountain to climb. And this time it has such incredible social impact.
Chief Change Officer
#285 Steve Monaghan: The Advantage of Age in the Age of AI
And as a method of getting some sleep, I taught myself technology, how to use spreadsheets when that was a brand new technology. And it enabled me to get this advantage over my competitors that enabled me to, A, achieve my objective of getting sleep and be able to get quotes in people's hands immediately that would usually take most companies a few days to go and fulfill.
Chief Change Officer
#285 Steve Monaghan: The Advantage of Age in the Age of AI
If you look at this capital inefficiency, it actually hurts the poorest in our poorest employees and the poorest in our communities the hardest because they pay the most for alternative debt while they fund their employers cash flow. This just makes no sense to me in a modern and real time world. This is an initiative that I've undertaken with a small team.
Chief Change Officer
#285 Steve Monaghan: The Advantage of Age in the Age of AI
So I'm just part of the team that's going and developing platform, et cetera, to go and kickstart it. We've been spending a lot of time talking with banks and trying to educate them and with regulators and trying to educate them and with politicians, et cetera. So I sit there as part on the execution, part the investor behind it. We'll be going for capital at some point. This is my legacy project.
Chief Change Officer
#285 Steve Monaghan: The Advantage of Age in the Age of AI
This is the one that I really want to happen because it has such an enormous social impact.
Chief Change Officer
#285 Steve Monaghan: The Advantage of Age in the Age of AI
Yeah, absolutely. When I look at investing in entrepreneurs, I usually look for humility, grit and integrity. And if you can bring those magical things together, if you're not humble, you can't learn. If you don't have grit, you won't see through the hard times. And if you don't have integrity, there's nothing to build on.
Chief Change Officer
#285 Steve Monaghan: The Advantage of Age in the Age of AI
So if you try and take those three things and look at it, I get to work with a range of quite tremendous entrepreneurs. And every single company that I've invested in, either myself or I was an LP in a global fund, every single company comes across a point of hardship. And it's incredibly mentally taxing on some of the founders.
Chief Change Officer
#285 Steve Monaghan: The Advantage of Age in the Age of AI
And I've had and currently have a couple of founders that I've worked with and invested in that are actually having quite significant mental health issues. One has completely stepped away from the business at the moment and for the right reasons. And I'm completely supportive of that. And I think that if we look to who we are as human beings, I often take a view that
Chief Change Officer
#285 Steve Monaghan: The Advantage of Age in the Age of AI
which most VCs I think would disagree with, but I actually think the human being is far more important than money. I think that you want to keep these brilliant folks operating, but you don't want to push them over the edge. And I think there's so much pressure in just being an entrepreneur that most folks from the outside don't understand it. Anything can go wrong.
Chief Change Officer
#285 Steve Monaghan: The Advantage of Age in the Age of AI
I had one company recently that had signed agreements
Chief Change Officer
#285 Steve Monaghan: The Advantage of Age in the Age of AI
and and then all of a sudden at the 11th hour the financial institution reneged on them and all done right so then now they're facing near bankruptcy hopefully they'll fight their way through and they're certainly closing some pretty big accounts at the moment so there's hope but you can't imagine the toll when you've invested so much of your life into a startup.
Chief Change Officer
#285 Steve Monaghan: The Advantage of Age in the Age of AI
From there, I became more interested in the business side than the flying side. And then I started teaching financial institutions how to use spreadsheets and then started building models that people would build front ends around and payrolls, etc., And moved into the software industry and then moved into the hardware industry with Dell Computer Corporation.
Chief Change Officer
#285 Steve Monaghan: The Advantage of Age in the Age of AI
And in one case that I went through about a year ago, my founder had spent seven years building it up only to have he had award winning product in the health tech field. Very long, long tail to get there. Had great reviews from some of the best institutions on the planet. But he wasn't yet profitable. And when funding dried up, his company evaporated.
Chief Change Officer
#285 Steve Monaghan: The Advantage of Age in the Age of AI
The mental toll was just immense because you're not just responsible for yourself as a founder. You're responsible for everyone that works for you. And I think that a lot of people underestimate just how onerous that responsibility is. The fact that I have founders that have mental health issues to show their focus and their feeling is behind that humanity. And I think that's a great thing.
Chief Change Officer
#285 Steve Monaghan: The Advantage of Age in the Age of AI
I think it's very common. My response to folks that have that issue is saying it's very simply you have the wrong investors. I think that... If you deny people the ability to share, you're actually being part of the problem and actually more likely to lead to the failure of your investment than if you actually have a tolerance or more importantly, an alertness to what's going on.
Chief Change Officer
#285 Steve Monaghan: The Advantage of Age in the Age of AI
When you see something going wrong in the business, the first thing I ask is always, how are you feeling? And I've had many entrepreneurs that have run, these are like quite well-funded startups that come back and say that you're the only person that's asked that question.
Chief Change Officer
#285 Steve Monaghan: The Advantage of Age in the Age of AI
And if they don't have that outlet, then the chance of that mental health issue either spiking or becoming quite serious actually increases. Everyone knows that founders often suicide. I don't want any of my founders to suicide at all. That would be the worst possible outcome for the company as an investor and for me as an individual.
Chief Change Officer
#285 Steve Monaghan: The Advantage of Age in the Age of AI
And I think that we need to be far more open to actually being empathetic. If you look at it, going back to ESC, it's one of the core principles of everything to do with customer interaction and with founder interaction. That emotional quotient is the foundation of everything that we do in life.
Chief Change Officer
#285 Steve Monaghan: The Advantage of Age in the Age of AI
If you look at, there was a book written by Paco Rabanne many years ago, which I took to heart, is why people buy. And they make decisions with emotion, justify with logic and take action when it's easy. E-S-E. This is what drives trade and economies, etc. And the most important, at the end of the day, this is all about people and people matter.
Chief Change Officer
#285 Steve Monaghan: The Advantage of Age in the Age of AI
I was on their startup team for Asia Pacific, developed pricing models, all sorts of things. So spreadsheeting really gave me my basis in understanding tech. And then, of course, creating hardware started to teach me about the importance of Moore's Law, Metcalfe's Law and Crider's Law, etc. So as I built the business across Asia Pacific, I moved from Australia into Malaysia.
Chief Change Officer
#285 Steve Monaghan: The Advantage of Age in the Age of AI
I asked one of my staff to take leave because it was very obvious that they were having mental health issues. And that leave made a world of difference. And that person went on to become very successful. And I won't narrow it any further, but was very successful in the career that followed.
Chief Change Officer
#285 Steve Monaghan: The Advantage of Age in the Age of AI
And that person stayed working with me for quite some period of time before they left and found a bigger and better role. If you don't give people that opportunity to get back in balance, then I think that everyone loses.
Chief Change Officer
#285 Steve Monaghan: The Advantage of Age in the Age of AI
I think the major thing for me is community. And that could be private or public. But I think having someone that you can speak to, someone who's always open and nonjudgmental is really the first piece. And if you have that and you're willing, it's a two-way street, right? You've got to find the people that can be supportive for you. And equally, you've got to be open to be real with them.
Chief Change Officer
#285 Steve Monaghan: The Advantage of Age in the Age of AI
Thank you. C. C. C. C. C. C. C. C
Chief Change Officer
#285 Steve Monaghan: The Advantage of Age in the Age of AI
And then my final role with Dell was in Korea. I set up the Asian Product Development Center for Compact Computer Corporation. That was also an equally interesting journey, working with some really brilliant people. My last role with Dell with Compaq was to set up the Indian business, which was failing miserably. And so I had a very kind boss that said, jump on a plane on Monday to India.
Chief Change Officer
#285 Steve Monaghan: The Advantage of Age in the Age of AI
You've got to either fix or close the business. And closing is not an option. So I was given this tremendous opportunity to go and spend some time in India. And I went out to market, looked around and found out that who we thought our competitors were. Everyone said it was impossible that we can compete, but it made no sense because we were the world's biggest PC company.
Chief Change Officer
#285 Steve Monaghan: The Advantage of Age in the Age of AI
How could you not be cost efficient? So after looking at how the market worked, how customers interact with the technology, et cetera, went back, financially modeled everything, worked out a better supply chain model to Dell, and then recreated the products to fit the financial model.
Chief Change Officer
#285 Steve Monaghan: The Advantage of Age in the Age of AI
And when we did that, we zoomed from number four in the market and unprofitable to number one in a quarter and stayed that way for the next 10 years. That really gave me the basis for moving into finance. I went to Citigroup asking for help to redo my financial supply chain. They weren't so sure what a financial supply chain was, so I moved to Citi.
Chief Change Officer
#285 Steve Monaghan: The Advantage of Age in the Age of AI
I developed their first mobile payments patent in 2001, something that most people use today. I called it multi-entry bookkeeping. Today, you call it a ledger, and we use barcode on the phone for mobile payments. Today, you use QR codes.
Chief Change Officer
#285 Steve Monaghan: The Advantage of Age in the Age of AI
Then from corporate investment banking in Citi, moved across, opening up a consumer finance division for a CBC bank, and then moved to Japan where I got to run a consumer bank and did a turnaround of that business during the Lehman crash. Then I moved across and became an entrepreneur, as I've done a few times before, actually. Ended up
Chief Change Officer
#285 Steve Monaghan: The Advantage of Age in the Age of AI
going to singapore where i became the first chief innovation officer at dbs helped get them on the path to digital transformation then moved across where you and i met at aia where we run around the aia accelerator and created hong kong's first unicorn and then moved across after that to being an entrepreneur again and building the first insurance company underwriting system with ai
Chief Change Officer
#285 Steve Monaghan: The Advantage of Age in the Age of AI
And then after that, moved across, became a digital officer in Saudi Arabia for Rehab Bank, and then moved back here to Japan after COVID to establish really a focus on advisory investment. I've invested in a bunch of startups and now starting my next big thing, which is a swing for the fences player to transform economies. No more small stuff.
Chief Change Officer
#285 Steve Monaghan: The Advantage of Age in the Age of AI
Very simply, learning. If I distill it down as I reflect on all of those transitions, it was really about this insatiable thirst for learning that I have. Not only that, but being able to work with others and inspire them to get that same thirst for learning.
Chief Change Officer
#285 Steve Monaghan: The Advantage of Age in the Age of AI
So many of the folks that have worked for me have gone on to be quite wildly successful chief innovation officers of insurance companies, etc. And they've also transitioned industries. So one thing that you find that's common across everywhere is business is business and technology is technology. There's no such real thing as fintech or health tech or insurtech. It's all just tech.
Chief Change Officer
#285 Steve Monaghan: The Advantage of Age in the Age of AI
And all you've got to do is work out how you use that toolset within your business practice. So every time and every transition, every country I went to, there was always something new to learn about that culture, some insight that they had that I didn't. So I learned as much going into each of those roles as I was able to bring to the table with that past experience.
Chief Change Officer
#285 Steve Monaghan: The Advantage of Age in the Age of AI
There's been so many failures. I'll start at the beginning. When I joined Dell Computer Corporation, I had gone through a three-hour interview where the national sales manager had picked apart my resume. I was joining as a product manager. And he basically challenged every line in it. And at the end of the interview, he was so frustrated because he really didn't want to hire me.
Chief Change Officer
#285 Steve Monaghan: The Advantage of Age in the Age of AI
He said, I can hire someone with 10 years experience. Why should I hire you? And I said, if I had 10 years experience, I wouldn't be applying for this job. About two months later, I'm sitting in the office at 11pm working on this monstrous multi-spreadsheet model that generates pricing once a month. And I put my head in my hands and I thought, oh my goodness, I've oversold myself.
Chief Change Officer
#285 Steve Monaghan: The Advantage of Age in the Age of AI
I really just didn't think I could do it. But I went back and I read every single book I could on pricing, accounting, valuation, everything. And I went in a very short period of time, went back. rebuilt all of those models.
Chief Change Officer
#285 Steve Monaghan: The Advantage of Age in the Age of AI
Instead of making them just disparate pass-offs, I actually integrated them all, created configurators in Excel, started being able to do forecasts instantly, which was something that would take days usually. And then I started to look at how you would use for technology the way it's really meant to be used is to arbitrage time.
Chief Change Officer
#285 Steve Monaghan: The Advantage of Age in the Age of AI
So how I could actually get a time advantage over my competitors, exactly what I'd done in aviation. So for me, and that experiential learning is the most powerful form of learning was actually became the foundation for everything that followed. So it's a little like riding a bike. You can study it all you want, but until you actually apply it and put it together, you can get on the bike.
Chief Change Officer
#285 Steve Monaghan: The Advantage of Age in the Age of AI
you really don't know. And so repeatedly, most people would be scared to do something new. Absolutely not for me. I thrive on it because I know I'm going to learn something and failure is just part of that journey. And that's well established in the business world. I've gone on to fail at many things, but each of those things has led me to the next big thing.
Chief Change Officer
#285 Steve Monaghan: The Advantage of Age in the Age of AI
And I think that's the most interesting part of my journey.
Chief Change Officer
#285 Steve Monaghan: The Advantage of Age in the Age of AI
Part of that learning process was always I was the outsider. I was the outsider from a company perspective, from an industry perspective. I was the outsider from a cultural perspective because I was from a different country. I've been an immigrant in most of the countries since my 20s, right? So I've lived as an immigrant.
Chief Change Officer
#285 Steve Monaghan: The Advantage of Age in the Age of AI
So I've always been the outsider, which gives me an advantage and a disadvantage. And the advantage is I have a view, an external view. I'm not tainted. I'm learning from the other side of the equation.
Chief Change Officer
#285 Steve Monaghan: The Advantage of Age in the Age of AI
What I distilled it down from is the reason that people are fearful that they don't want to change isn't that they don't want to change. Actually, I think everyone wants to change. We love going on holidays to new places. We love having different meals every day.
Chief Change Officer
#285 Steve Monaghan: The Advantage of Age in the Age of AI
But if you're going to place a minefield in the middle of that journey and place everyone at risk, no one's going to go and make that journey to do that new thing. And that learning helped me distill into the reason that you get the most no's is because people don't know. They don't understand. They haven't learned. They don't really see what that new thing is.
Chief Change Officer
#285 Steve Monaghan: The Advantage of Age in the Age of AI
My full role has been to turn a no into a K-N-O-W. So a no to a no and then into now. And that's really the role of any business person and any innovation officer or any digital officer is to actually go and make that happen.
Chief Change Officer
#285 Steve Monaghan: The Advantage of Age in the Age of AI
The way that we made that happen, and it was particularly successful at DBS, where my partner in prime I'd worked with in Japan, and he was the head of talent management for DBS, a gentleman by the name of Tom Patterson. Tom worked in HR, and so we came up with this program of learning, venturing, and capital.
Chief Change Officer
#285 Steve Monaghan: The Advantage of Age in the Age of AI
So how do you take learning so people are no longer fearful that they know that they can take advantage of that technology and transformation? and transform that learning into venturing, experiential learning, which is the most powerful form of learning, and then into capital for acceleration. How do you really start scaling things?
Chief Change Officer
#285 Steve Monaghan: The Advantage of Age in the Age of AI
And when you bring that approach to bear, it works from the board to the branch. Really that focus on learning, making sure people understand, getting enthusiastic about change. And in the technology industry, change is a constant. We're forever planning to do things where the tech doesn't even exist today.
Chief Change Officer
#285 Steve Monaghan: The Advantage of Age in the Age of AI
But we know we can get there and we know that we can actually have that growth mindset to go and scale the business off the back through either price cutting or taking advantage of cost reduction, etc. That doesn't exist in most industries. So that was a huge advantage for me coming from the tech industry into the financial services industry.
Chief Change Officer
#285 Steve Monaghan: The Advantage of Age in the Age of AI
The moment you could start helping people understand how the tech industry worked and why their margins keep increasing while everyone else's keep decreasing was because they're driving depreciation costs as well as value in appreciation of features. So they're creating their own markets and then they're driving and making huge amounts.
Chief Change Officer
#285 Steve Monaghan: The Advantage of Age in the Age of AI
So if you take Google, it was probably five or six years ago, increased the personal storage from one to two terabytes. has been stable for five or six years. But in reality, the cost per gig has actually plummeted. On average, it halves every 18 months. So their margins continue to improve while your experience of that service doesn't necessarily change.
Chief Change Officer
#285 Steve Monaghan: The Advantage of Age in the Age of AI
Once you understand how tech works and apply it into new businesses, and you can give people that understanding and how they can use it as a multiplier, such as AI, then gives that growth mindset, which is very important for everyone in business.
Chief Change Officer
#195 Steve Monaghan: From Flying High to Finance Disruptor — No Seatbelts Required
Absolutely. It's a very simple formula. And I think that you're absolutely correct in summarizing it that way. People don't like being told what to do. They like to be part of the journey. They need to understand. They need to be brought along on that journey and then given the ability to contribute to it and actually enhance upon it.
Chief Change Officer
#195 Steve Monaghan: From Flying High to Finance Disruptor — No Seatbelts Required
And I think that's always been the mark of success of an innovation group or any innovation officer is to have other people take ownership of those ideas and be humble enough to let go and appreciate that other people can actually take it to a level that you mightn't see because you're relying on their expertise.
Chief Change Officer
#195 Steve Monaghan: From Flying High to Finance Disruptor — No Seatbelts Required
And I think that's the greatest compliment you can place with any employee or colleague. is to really try and bring out the best of both sides so you're actually getting the sum of all versus I'm going my way and take it or whether you like it or not. And that's just completely destructive. This is just game theory 101.
Chief Change Officer
#195 Steve Monaghan: From Flying High to Finance Disruptor — No Seatbelts Required
Sure. Actually, I'll start back earlier.
Chief Change Officer
#195 Steve Monaghan: From Flying High to Finance Disruptor — No Seatbelts Required
I think when Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone, that he actually moved technology from something that only the young could do or that the 20 to 30-year-olds could do and made technology so simple to use that it actually engaged from three-year-old kids or three-month-old kids that could swipe a screen all the way through to grandparents that would previously not touch a device.
Chief Change Officer
#195 Steve Monaghan: From Flying High to Finance Disruptor — No Seatbelts Required
If you look at it in the same context now with what we're seeing with generative AI, it's now making technology so much more accessible to people that would have felt somewhat alienated by technology in the past.
Chief Change Officer
#195 Steve Monaghan: From Flying High to Finance Disruptor — No Seatbelts Required
So the bank that you refer to in the Philippines, one of the observations that I shared when I was working with their leadership team was that this is the first generation of technology where actually older people have an advantage because they know how to ask better questions.
Chief Change Officer
#195 Steve Monaghan: From Flying High to Finance Disruptor — No Seatbelts Required
And I think that's a very profound point because a lot of the younger kids may actually be somewhat disadvantaged because they don't know the right questions to ask. At this stage of generative AI, I think that makes quite a significant difference, as we know, with what we see in prompt engineering, etc. Older people do have an advantage.
Chief Change Officer
#195 Steve Monaghan: From Flying High to Finance Disruptor — No Seatbelts Required
In this particular instance, the average tenure of someone in that leadership team was ranging, I think, between 27 to 40 years. And they'd worked across every element of the business. So being able to ask the right questions, if you think of technology as not an individual light bulb switch, it's more a network.
Chief Change Officer
#195 Steve Monaghan: From Flying High to Finance Disruptor — No Seatbelts Required
So when you understand the network, you're in a better position to actually understand the implications and to craft your question in a way that takes into account some of the constraints of the network or some of the opportunities or accelerants of the network.
Chief Change Officer
#195 Steve Monaghan: From Flying High to Finance Disruptor — No Seatbelts Required
so that experience is pretty hard to come by it's why if you look at most ai what you want to do is take the experience and expertise and encode it and this is the perfect nexus of that you're getting people that would when they retired in the past would retire with all their knowledge Now we've got this enormous ability to encode that knowledge and take advantage of it and then pass it down.
Chief Change Officer
#195 Steve Monaghan: From Flying High to Finance Disruptor — No Seatbelts Required
Younger kids tend to ask simpler questions. They're still learning the basics and the ropes and trying to understand. They've generally got very limited exposure in terms of geographic exposure or business division exposure. Because I think the one other thing I've appreciated as I've got older is humans can't scale. We tend to specialize.
Chief Change Officer
#195 Steve Monaghan: From Flying High to Finance Disruptor — No Seatbelts Required
We're an accountant or we're a marketing person or we're a finance person. And very few are able to really succeed in multiple spheres of business. But technology is horizontal.
Chief Change Officer
#195 Steve Monaghan: From Flying High to Finance Disruptor — No Seatbelts Required
technology goes across all of those silos so one of my favorite sayings is the value lies between the silos not necessarily in the silos and that's why the older people definitely have an advantage because they're not constrained in getting those questions into an ai which can then draw upon that reservoir of knowledge to actually return more valuable responses
Chief Change Officer
#195 Steve Monaghan: From Flying High to Finance Disruptor — No Seatbelts Required
Good morning, Vince. How are things? I began my career in Australia, started as a commercial pilot and started to learn technology as a function of that. So in many ways, much of my career actually was founded then and there. I used to fly 22 hours a day and I'd run the company during daytime and fly at night.
Chief Change Officer
#195 Steve Monaghan: From Flying High to Finance Disruptor — No Seatbelts Required
Yeah, absolutely. These are the core things that you try to get across in any sort of digital transformation project. You want to get some sort of level of emotional engagement, right? So that's the whole experience side of the equation. Then you want to make things very simple for your customers and simple or simplicity is cognitive. One plus one equals, we all know the answer.
Chief Change Officer
#195 Steve Monaghan: From Flying High to Finance Disruptor — No Seatbelts Required
So the quicker you can get people to make decisions by giving them the right information, then that's obviously an advantage. And then the last part is effort. Minimum type swipes and swipes to actually execute your decision. I refer to that as ESE or easy, right? Experience, simplicity, and ease.
Chief Change Officer
#195 Steve Monaghan: From Flying High to Finance Disruptor — No Seatbelts Required
And they're the three objectives that in any digital transformation that you set as your primary objectives for the customer. That ability to interact with emotion, simplicity, and ease.
Chief Change Officer
#195 Steve Monaghan: From Flying High to Finance Disruptor — No Seatbelts Required
I've been lucky to work for some of the largest corporations in the world and transform them digitally. Now I'm trying to focus on economic transformation. I think one of the things as you look around new generations of technology is that a lot of people forget that the constraints which they take for granted no longer exist. So that's the case today with economics and finance.
Chief Change Officer
#195 Steve Monaghan: From Flying High to Finance Disruptor — No Seatbelts Required
We have people that are paid in Azure usually every month, right? And if you actually look at the constraint of that or the belief that's just the way it is, it's actually quite wrong. If you consider that an employee joins a company and doesn't get paid for 30 days means that they're essentially accredited to the company for that 30 days.
Chief Change Officer
#195 Steve Monaghan: From Flying High to Finance Disruptor — No Seatbelts Required
And what's happening is while they're giving their cash flow to the company to take advantage of, they're actually usually burdened by much higher cost debt. So if you look at that, you're taking very high cost debt to substitute for low cost debt, which results in direct capital destruction, both at a company and economic level.
Chief Change Officer
#195 Steve Monaghan: From Flying High to Finance Disruptor — No Seatbelts Required
And if you look at it, if you're able to actually optimize that across companies and supply chains and economies, we feel that you should be able to increase GDP by about 20%. So it's a very big play and it relies on knowledge of legislation, finance, supply chains, a whole range of different factors and looking for those inefficiencies between each of the silos.
Chief Change Officer
#195 Steve Monaghan: From Flying High to Finance Disruptor — No Seatbelts Required
And so that's where I'm really focused on now and been working here and interacting with governments and regulators and corporations, etc. And the new year has started well, so we'll see if I can bring it to take off. But as with everything in my career, it's a big mountain to climb. And this time it has such incredible social impact.
Chief Change Officer
#195 Steve Monaghan: From Flying High to Finance Disruptor — No Seatbelts Required
And as a method of getting some sleep, I taught myself technology, how to use spreadsheets when that was a brand new technology. And it enabled me to get this advantage over my competitors that enabled me to, A, achieve my objective of getting sleep and be able to get quotes in people's hands immediately that would usually take most companies a few days to go and fulfill.
Chief Change Officer
#195 Steve Monaghan: From Flying High to Finance Disruptor — No Seatbelts Required
If you look at this capital inefficiency, it actually hurts the poorest in our poorest employees and the poorest in our communities the hardest because they pay the most for alternative debt while they fund their employers cash flow. This just makes no sense to me in a modern and real time world. This is an initiative that I've undertaken with a small team.
Chief Change Officer
#195 Steve Monaghan: From Flying High to Finance Disruptor — No Seatbelts Required
So I'm just part of the team that's going and developing platform, et cetera, to go and kickstart it. We've been spending a lot of time talking with banks and trying to educate them and with regulators and trying to educate them and with politicians, et cetera. So I sit there as part on the execution, part the investor behind it. We'll be going for capital at some point. This is my legacy project.
Chief Change Officer
#195 Steve Monaghan: From Flying High to Finance Disruptor — No Seatbelts Required
This is the one that I really want to happen because it has such an enormous social impact.
Chief Change Officer
#195 Steve Monaghan: From Flying High to Finance Disruptor — No Seatbelts Required
Yeah, absolutely. When I look at investing in entrepreneurs, I usually look for humility, grit and integrity. And if you can bring those magical things together, if you're not humble, you can't learn. If you don't have grit, you won't see through the hard times. And if you don't have integrity, there's nothing to build on.
Chief Change Officer
#195 Steve Monaghan: From Flying High to Finance Disruptor — No Seatbelts Required
So if you try and take those three things and look at it, I get to work with a range of quite tremendous entrepreneurs. And every single company that I've invested in, either myself or I was an LP in a global fund, every single company comes across a point of hardship. And it's incredibly mentally taxing on some of the founders.
Chief Change Officer
#195 Steve Monaghan: From Flying High to Finance Disruptor — No Seatbelts Required
And I've had and currently have a couple of founders that I've worked with and invested in that are actually having quite significant mental health issues. One has completely stepped away from the business at the moment and for the right reasons. And I'm completely supportive of that. And I think that if we look to who we are as human beings, I often take a view that
Chief Change Officer
#195 Steve Monaghan: From Flying High to Finance Disruptor — No Seatbelts Required
which most VCs I think would disagree with, but I actually think the human being is far more important than money. I think that you want to keep these brilliant folks operating, but you don't want to push them over the edge. And I think there's so much pressure in just being an entrepreneur that most folks from the outside don't understand it. Anything can go wrong.
Chief Change Officer
#195 Steve Monaghan: From Flying High to Finance Disruptor — No Seatbelts Required
I had one company recently that had signed agreements
Chief Change Officer
#195 Steve Monaghan: From Flying High to Finance Disruptor — No Seatbelts Required
and and then all of a sudden at the 11th hour the financial institution reneged on them and all done right so then now they're facing near bankruptcy hopefully they'll fight their way through and they're certainly closing some pretty big accounts at the moment so there's hope but you can't imagine the toll when you've invested so much of your life into a startup.
Chief Change Officer
#195 Steve Monaghan: From Flying High to Finance Disruptor — No Seatbelts Required
From there, I became more interested in the business side than the flying side. And then I started teaching financial institutions how to use spreadsheets and then started building models that people would build front ends around and payrolls, etc., And moved into the software industry and then moved into the hardware industry with Dell Computer Corporation.
Chief Change Officer
#195 Steve Monaghan: From Flying High to Finance Disruptor — No Seatbelts Required
And in one case that I went through about a year ago, my founder had spent seven years building it up only to have he had award winning product in the health tech field. Very long, long tail to get there. Had great reviews from some of the best institutions on the planet. But he wasn't yet profitable. And when funding dried up, his company evaporated.
Chief Change Officer
#195 Steve Monaghan: From Flying High to Finance Disruptor — No Seatbelts Required
The mental toll was just immense because you're not just responsible for yourself as a founder. You're responsible for everyone that works for you. And I think that a lot of people underestimate just how onerous that responsibility is. The fact that I have founders that have mental health issues to show their focus and their feeling is behind that humanity. And I think that's a great thing.
Chief Change Officer
#195 Steve Monaghan: From Flying High to Finance Disruptor — No Seatbelts Required
I think it's very common. My response to folks that have that issue is saying it's very simply you have the wrong investors. I think that... If you deny people the ability to share, you're actually being part of the problem and actually more likely to lead to the failure of your investment than if you actually have a tolerance or more importantly, an alertness to what's going on.
Chief Change Officer
#195 Steve Monaghan: From Flying High to Finance Disruptor — No Seatbelts Required
When you see something going wrong in the business, the first thing I ask is always, how are you feeling? And I've had many entrepreneurs that have run, these are like quite well-funded startups that come back and say that you're the only person that's asked that question.
Chief Change Officer
#195 Steve Monaghan: From Flying High to Finance Disruptor — No Seatbelts Required
And if they don't have that outlet, then the chance of that mental health issue either spiking or becoming quite serious actually increases. Everyone knows that founders often suicide. I don't want any of my founders to suicide at all. That would be the worst possible outcome for the company as an investor and for me as an individual.
Chief Change Officer
#195 Steve Monaghan: From Flying High to Finance Disruptor — No Seatbelts Required
And I think that we need to be far more open to actually being empathetic. If you look at it, going back to ESC, it's one of the core principles of everything to do with customer interaction and with founder interaction. That emotional quotient is the foundation of everything that we do in life.
Chief Change Officer
#195 Steve Monaghan: From Flying High to Finance Disruptor — No Seatbelts Required
If you look at, there was a book written by Paco Rabanne many years ago, which I took to heart, is why people buy. And they make decisions with emotion, justify with logic and take action when it's easy. E-S-E. This is what drives trade and economies, etc. And the most important, at the end of the day, this is all about people and people matter.
Chief Change Officer
#195 Steve Monaghan: From Flying High to Finance Disruptor — No Seatbelts Required
I was on their startup team for Asia Pacific, developed pricing models, all sorts of things. So spreadsheeting really gave me my basis in understanding tech. And then, of course, creating hardware started to teach me about the importance of Moore's Law, Metcalfe's Law and Crider's Law, etc. So as I built the business across Asia Pacific, I moved from Australia into Malaysia.
Chief Change Officer
#195 Steve Monaghan: From Flying High to Finance Disruptor — No Seatbelts Required
I asked one of my staff to take leave because it was very obvious that they were having mental health issues. And that leave made a world of difference. And that person went on to become very successful. And I won't narrow it any further, but was very successful in the career that followed.
Chief Change Officer
#195 Steve Monaghan: From Flying High to Finance Disruptor — No Seatbelts Required
And that person stayed working with me for quite some period of time before they left and found a bigger and better role. If you don't give people that opportunity to get back in balance, then I think that everyone loses.
Chief Change Officer
#195 Steve Monaghan: From Flying High to Finance Disruptor — No Seatbelts Required
I think the major thing for me is community. And that could be private or public. But I think having someone that you can speak to, someone who's always open and nonjudgmental is really the first piece. And if you have that and you're willing, it's a two-way street, right? You've got to find the people that can be supportive for you. And equally, you've got to be open to be real with them.
Chief Change Officer
#195 Steve Monaghan: From Flying High to Finance Disruptor — No Seatbelts Required
And if you're prepared to make that commitment and you found the right people to support you, then I think a lot of these problems can be avoided.
Chief Change Officer
#195 Steve Monaghan: From Flying High to Finance Disruptor — No Seatbelts Required
I'm a bit of a nerd. I tend to follow topics that are interesting. So one of, or interesting to me, or the filler gap in my knowledge, if I look at who's inspired me in the world of finance, it's got to be Demodaran.
Chief Change Officer
#195 Steve Monaghan: From Flying High to Finance Disruptor — No Seatbelts Required
And then my final role with Dell was in Korea. I set up the Asian Product Development Center for Compact Computer Corporation. That was also an equally interesting journey, working with some really brilliant people. My last role with Dell with Compaq was to set up the Indian business, which was failing miserably. And so I had a very kind boss that said, jump on a plane on Monday to India.
Chief Change Officer
#195 Steve Monaghan: From Flying High to Finance Disruptor — No Seatbelts Required
When looking at things like when I wanted to learn how to be a better marketer, I read a copywriting book by William Strunk that said that a sentence should contain no unnecessary words in the way that an engine has no unnecessary parts. But there are many books that I've loved reading.
Chief Change Officer
#195 Steve Monaghan: From Flying High to Finance Disruptor — No Seatbelts Required
But recently on the topic of AI, Mustafa Suleiman, who was the co-founder of DeepMind, wrote a very interesting book, which was nothing particularly new, but very well researched and very well done. put through in a very coherent manner to actually explain some of the risks and opportunities of what's happening with AI.
Chief Change Officer
#195 Steve Monaghan: From Flying High to Finance Disruptor — No Seatbelts Required
And I think that too few people actually understand the ramifications of the directions that we're headed. And as an example, I wrote an article for Forbes, I think in 2016, talking about AI and just saying that we weren't ready. And in Forbes refused to publish it because it wasn't positive. They seem to have been positive on lots of other things that haven't worked out very well.
Chief Change Officer
#195 Steve Monaghan: From Flying High to Finance Disruptor — No Seatbelts Required
But I think realistically, Sullyman paints a very good picture to how you must have a very balanced view of AI. As an example, the ability for people to create bioweapons is now going to the home. AI gives you this enormous compute capability and the ability to do things in ways that weren't possible before. And so the risks around that are growing.
Chief Change Officer
#195 Steve Monaghan: From Flying High to Finance Disruptor — No Seatbelts Required
Now, we've dealt with very similar risks in the past as we've evolved with technology. But now we're entering a new sphere and a new age where bioterrorism or the dark side of what happens with A.I. can be just as bad as the good side of AI. Almost every week we read about new types of cancers being addressed, etc.
Chief Change Officer
#195 Steve Monaghan: From Flying High to Finance Disruptor — No Seatbelts Required
And in the background behind all of these medical developments that we see, it's because of people in a very smart way scaling AI and understanding permutations of everything. So Solomon gives a very good example of a company that was looking at chemical compounds. and had set the gain function for toxicity to be zero, right?
Chief Change Officer
#195 Steve Monaghan: From Flying High to Finance Disruptor — No Seatbelts Required
To find what are the best medicines that you can actually ingest that actually achieve curative results. And then as an experiment, they turned the function from zero to one and looked at the most toxic outcomes and they actually invented new compounds that didn't exist that were more toxic than VX gas. So I really encourage people to go and have a very balanced reading portfolio.
Chief Change Officer
#195 Steve Monaghan: From Flying High to Finance Disruptor — No Seatbelts Required
One of the books that I found most intellectually curious lately is Lemon's book.
Chief Change Officer
#195 Steve Monaghan: From Flying High to Finance Disruptor — No Seatbelts Required
My pleasure, Vince. Thanks for having me.
Chief Change Officer
#195 Steve Monaghan: From Flying High to Finance Disruptor — No Seatbelts Required
You've got to either fix or close the business. And closing is not an option. So I was given this tremendous opportunity to go and spend some time in India. And I went out to market, looked around and found out that who we thought our competitors were. Everyone said it was impossible that we can compete, but it made no sense because we were the world's biggest PC company.
Chief Change Officer
#195 Steve Monaghan: From Flying High to Finance Disruptor — No Seatbelts Required
How could you not be cost efficient? So after looking at how the market worked, how customers interacted with technology, et cetera, went back, financially modeled everything, worked out a better supply chain model to Dell, and then recreated the products to fit the financial model.
Chief Change Officer
#195 Steve Monaghan: From Flying High to Finance Disruptor — No Seatbelts Required
And when we did that, we zoomed from number four in the market and unprofitable to number one in a quarter and stayed that way for the next 10 years. That really gave me the basis for moving into finance. I went to Citigroup asking for help to redo my financial supply chain. They weren't so sure what a financial supply chain was, so I moved to Citi.
Chief Change Officer
#195 Steve Monaghan: From Flying High to Finance Disruptor — No Seatbelts Required
I developed their first mobile payments patent in 2001, something that most people use today. I called it multi-entry bookkeeping. Today, you call it a ledger, and we use barcode on the phone for mobile payments. Today, you use QR codes.
Chief Change Officer
#195 Steve Monaghan: From Flying High to Finance Disruptor — No Seatbelts Required
Then from corporate investment banking in Citi, moved across, opening up a consumer finance division for a CBC bank, and then moved to Japan where I got to run a consumer bank and did a turnaround of that business during the Lehman crash. Then I moved across and became an entrepreneur, as I've done a few times before, actually. Ended up
Chief Change Officer
#195 Steve Monaghan: From Flying High to Finance Disruptor — No Seatbelts Required
Going to Singapore, where I became the first chief innovation officer at DBS, helped get them on the path to digital transformation. Then moved across where you and I met at AIA, where we ran the AIA accelerator and created Hong Kong's first unicorn. And then moved across after that to being an entrepreneur again and building the first insurance company underwriting system with AI.
Chief Change Officer
#195 Steve Monaghan: From Flying High to Finance Disruptor — No Seatbelts Required
And then after that, moved across, became a digital officer in Saudi Arabia for Rehab Bank, and then moved back here to Japan after COVID to establish really a focus on advisory investment. I've invested in a bunch of startups. And now starting my next big thing, which is a swing for the fences player to transform economies. No more small stuff.
Chief Change Officer
#195 Steve Monaghan: From Flying High to Finance Disruptor — No Seatbelts Required
Very simply, learning. If I distill it down as I reflect on all of those transitions, it was really about this insatiable thirst for learning that I have. Not only that, but being able to work with others and inspire them to get that same thirst for learning.
Chief Change Officer
#195 Steve Monaghan: From Flying High to Finance Disruptor — No Seatbelts Required
So many of the folks that have worked for me have gone on to be quite wildly successful chief innovation officers of insurance companies, etc. And they've also transitioned industries. So one thing that you find that's common across everywhere is business is business and technology is technology. There's no such real thing as fintech or health tech or insurtech. It's all just tech.
Chief Change Officer
#195 Steve Monaghan: From Flying High to Finance Disruptor — No Seatbelts Required
And all you've got to do is work out how you use that toolset within your business practice. So every time and every transition, every country I went to, there was always something new to learn about that culture, some insight that they had that I didn't. So I learned as much going into each of those roles as I was able to bring to the table with that past experience.
Chief Change Officer
#195 Steve Monaghan: From Flying High to Finance Disruptor — No Seatbelts Required
There's been so many failures. I'll start at the beginning. When I joined Dell Computer Corporation, I had gone through a three-hour interview where the national sales manager had picked apart my resume. I was joining as a product manager. And he basically challenged every line in it. And at the end of the interview, he was so frustrated because he really didn't want to hire me.
Chief Change Officer
#195 Steve Monaghan: From Flying High to Finance Disruptor — No Seatbelts Required
He said, I can hire someone with 10 years experience. Why should I hire you? And I said, if I had 10 years experience, I wouldn't be applying for this job. About two months later, I'm sitting in the office at 11pm working on this monstrous multi-spreadsheet model that generates pricing once a month. And I put my head in my hands and I thought, oh my goodness, I've oversold myself.
Chief Change Officer
#195 Steve Monaghan: From Flying High to Finance Disruptor — No Seatbelts Required
I really just didn't think I could do it. But I went back and I read every single book I could on pricing, accounting, valuation, everything. And I went in a very short period of time, went back. rebuilt all of those models.
Chief Change Officer
#195 Steve Monaghan: From Flying High to Finance Disruptor — No Seatbelts Required
Instead of making them just disparate pass-offs, I actually integrated them all, created configurators in Excel, started being able to do forecasts instantly, which was something that would take days usually. And then I started to look at how you would use for technology the way it's really meant to be used is to arbitrage time.
Chief Change Officer
#195 Steve Monaghan: From Flying High to Finance Disruptor — No Seatbelts Required
So how I could actually get a time advantage over my competitors, exactly what I'd done in aviation. So for me, and that experiential learning is the most powerful form of learning was actually became the foundation for everything that followed. So it's a little like riding a bike. You can study it all you want, but until you actually apply it and put it together, you can get on the bike.
Chief Change Officer
#195 Steve Monaghan: From Flying High to Finance Disruptor — No Seatbelts Required
you really don't know. And so repeatedly, most people would be scared to do something new. Absolutely not for me. I thrive on it because I know I'm going to learn something and failure is just part of that journey. And that's well established in the business world. I've gone on to fail at many things, but each of those things has led me to the next big thing.
Chief Change Officer
#195 Steve Monaghan: From Flying High to Finance Disruptor — No Seatbelts Required
And I think that's the most interesting part of my journey.
Chief Change Officer
#195 Steve Monaghan: From Flying High to Finance Disruptor — No Seatbelts Required
Part of that learning process was always I was the outsider. I was the outsider from a company perspective, from an industry perspective. I was the outsider from a cultural perspective because I was from a different country. I've been an immigrant in most of the countries since my 20s, right? So I've lived as an immigrant.
Chief Change Officer
#195 Steve Monaghan: From Flying High to Finance Disruptor — No Seatbelts Required
So I've always been the outsider, which gives me an advantage and a disadvantage. And the advantage is I have a view, an external view. I'm not tainted. I'm learning from the other side of the equation.
Chief Change Officer
#195 Steve Monaghan: From Flying High to Finance Disruptor — No Seatbelts Required
What I distilled it down from is the reason that people are fearful that they don't want to change isn't that they don't want to change. Actually, I think everyone wants to change. We love going on holidays to new places. We love having different meals every day.
Chief Change Officer
#195 Steve Monaghan: From Flying High to Finance Disruptor — No Seatbelts Required
But if you're going to place a minefield in the middle of that journey and place everyone at risk, no one's going to go and make that journey to do that new thing. And that learning helped me distill into the reason that you get the most no's is because people don't know. They don't understand. They haven't learned. They don't really see what that new thing is.
Chief Change Officer
#195 Steve Monaghan: From Flying High to Finance Disruptor — No Seatbelts Required
My full role has been to turn a no into a K-N-O-W. So a no to a no and then into now. And that's really the role of any business person and any innovation officer or any digital officer is to actually go and make that happen.
Chief Change Officer
#195 Steve Monaghan: From Flying High to Finance Disruptor — No Seatbelts Required
The way that we made that happen, and it was particularly successful at DBS, where my partner in prime I'd worked with in Japan, and he was the head of talent management for DBS, a gentleman by the name of Tom Patterson. Tom worked in HR, and so we came up with this program of learning, venturing, and capital.
Chief Change Officer
#195 Steve Monaghan: From Flying High to Finance Disruptor — No Seatbelts Required
So how do you take learning so people are no longer fearful that they know that they can take advantage of that technology and transformation? and transform that learning into venturing, experiential learning, which is the most powerful form of learning, and then into capital for acceleration. How do you really start scaling things?
Chief Change Officer
#195 Steve Monaghan: From Flying High to Finance Disruptor — No Seatbelts Required
And when you bring that approach to bear, it works from the board to the branch. Really that focus on learning, making sure people understand, getting enthusiastic about change. And in the technology industry, change is a constant. We're forever planning to do things where the tech doesn't even exist today.
Chief Change Officer
#195 Steve Monaghan: From Flying High to Finance Disruptor — No Seatbelts Required
But we know we can get there and we know that we can actually have that growth mindset to go and scale the business off the back through either price cutting or taking advantage of cost reduction, etc. That doesn't exist in most industries. So that was a huge advantage for me coming from the tech industry into the financial services industry.
Chief Change Officer
#195 Steve Monaghan: From Flying High to Finance Disruptor — No Seatbelts Required
The moment you could start helping people understand how the tech industry worked and why their margins keep increasing while everyone else's keep decreasing was because they're driving depreciation costs as well as value in appreciation of features. So they're creating their own markets and then they're driving and making huge amounts.
Chief Change Officer
#195 Steve Monaghan: From Flying High to Finance Disruptor — No Seatbelts Required
So if you take Google, it was probably five or six years ago, increased the personal storage from one to two terabytes. has been stable for five or six years. But in reality, the cost per gig has actually plummeted. On average, it halves every 18 months. So their margins continue to improve while your experience of that service doesn't necessarily change.
Chief Change Officer
#195 Steve Monaghan: From Flying High to Finance Disruptor — No Seatbelts Required
Once you understand how tech works and apply it into new businesses, and you can give people that understanding and how they can use it as a multiplier, such as AI, then gives that growth mindset, which is very important for everyone in business.