Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
00:39:06 · Patrick O'Shaughnessy, David Vélez
[00:39:06] S0: Who are your biggest influences? I know you've learned from some of the great entrepreneurs, some of the great investors out there. When you think about your whole new bank chapter of your life, who are the people that jump out that have most actually influenced how you think about something? Who are they and why did they influence you the way they did? [00:39:23] S1: We began the company as a reaction of a consumer pain, of me realizing how bad consumer banking in Brazil was, and how painful it was, and then realizing that this was a proxy for what the majority of the country was actually feeling. So we'll always admire companies that are very consumer obsessed, that know that to win, they need to be able to offer the best product and best service in a way that creates almost fanaticism. And so from that perspective, we were very inspired by Amazon. Since the very beginning, Amazon being the more traditional consumer obsessed company and how they build this consumer obsession and how they thought about that. We started Disney very carefully because this is a company that wants to create magic experiences. Maybe it's not super obvious, but even in banking, a boring banking product, we want to create a magical experience for customers. [00:40:14] S0: What did you learn from Disney? That's an interesting one.
00:40:14 · Patrick O'Shaughnessy, David Vélez
[00:40:14] S0: What did you learn from Disney? That's an interesting one. [00:40:16] S1: I think it's the communication that you create with consumers and just simply the magic aspect of it. When you enter a Disney park, the setup of that entry path that you have, it's almost like you're entering into a kingdom. And the service that you get from everybody that works inside Disney and how they treat the young children, spectacles that they create and the fireworks that they create, they're really thinking about how do you create a product that is magical in nature. And that's something that we push our teams around is for something as boring as sending money. How do you create a magic experience out of that? The welcome kits that we're sending to our customers here in The US, when they receive that welcome kit of the first credit card, the first debit card, we're trying to create a magical experience in that moment. And we're very inspired by that. [00:40:59] S0: The customer obsession thing is something that sounds obvious now, maybe Amazon really pioneered this way of thinking. Nothing's for free, what are the trade offs associated with being so customer focused? It's become a popular thing to say and the temptation is like, yeah, everyone's customer focused to varying degrees. But what does that actually mean? What is the hard part about being so customer focused?
00:40:59 · Patrick O'Shaughnessy, David Vélez
[00:40:59] S0: The customer obsession thing is something that sounds obvious now, maybe Amazon really pioneered this way of thinking. Nothing's for free, what are the trade offs associated with being so customer focused? It's become a popular thing to say and the temptation is like, yeah, everyone's customer focused to varying degrees. But what does that actually mean? What is the hard part about being so customer focused? [00:41:21] S1: I think the hard part is, as with any cultural value, to do what you say you do. Like you see it in any company that has very nice sounding values on the wall. Then the question is, are they actually executing that? Especially when it's inconvenient. Most companies will be consumer obsessed, but then when they are suddenly seeing themselves making more money because they invented a new fee, then, oh, well, maybe I'm less customer obsessed here and I want to make a little bit more money. You're prioritizing the short term versus the long term. And actually in the entire AI debate, you actually don't hear that much conversation about customers. Because there is so much energy and focus around how to use AI for efficiency and optimisation. There is much less conversation about consumer obsession here. And this is where humans still are beating the AI. So the biggest complexities is actually prioritising this value, even when it's inconvenient to do so, especially from a financial perspective. But also the AI bro, the tech bro is much more enamored today with the technology versus the consumer experience itself.
00:41:21 · David Vélez, Patrick O'Shaughnessy
[00:41:21] S1: I think the hard part is, as with any cultural value, to do what you say you do. Like you see it in any company that has very nice sounding values on the wall. Then the question is, are they actually executing that? Especially when it's inconvenient. Most companies will be consumer obsessed, but then when they are suddenly seeing themselves making more money because they invented a new fee, then, oh, well, maybe I'm less customer obsessed here and I want to make a little bit more money. You're prioritizing the short term versus the long term. And actually in the entire AI debate, you actually don't hear that much conversation about customers. Because there is so much energy and focus around how to use AI for efficiency and optimisation. There is much less conversation about consumer obsession here. And this is where humans still are beating the AI. So the biggest complexities is actually prioritising this value, even when it's inconvenient to do so, especially from a financial perspective. But also the AI bro, the tech bro is much more enamored today with the technology versus the consumer experience itself. [00:42:27] S0: I'm really curious how you think about your own product, like literally the thing I see on my phone versus your own agent versus new agents being introduced in the marketplace. Do you think there's a world where it actually matters that your marketing is to agents more than it is to humans? Like how do you think about that world or whether to provide your own interactive agents versus a product that you're clicking around in on your phone?
00:42:48 · David Vélez
[00:42:48] S1: I think agents become a customer segment, important as consumers as a segment, and you have to provide a product for the agent, and you have to market to the agent, and you have to do SEO for the agent. It's the same way we have under 18 segment, and we have a small business segment. This is an entire segment and we're treating it as a segment. We have a team dedicated to understanding that segment and understanding the needs of that consumer, which is the agent. So that will be equally important, but I don't think it's going to be necessarily 100% of that decision. Because I think still specifically in banking, and this might be different in other segments, for example, but in banking, you go back to trust and branding, and the human will want to know where your life savings are deposited. There is the human aspect of that. And so you're still marketing to the human and you're still building the trust with the humans. You've got to do both. And also for some products, there'll be more delegation. And for some products, there'll be less delegation. Specifically for areas like in Brazil, where we have 65% of the entire country as a customer, we have the opportunity to be that agent to the consumer. And the customer is coming directly to our app and asking our agent for support specifically with financial products. And we can do it in a way where it's actually an open agent. It even provides product from third party banks and third party financial institutions. So there'll be a mix of this happening at the same time.
00:44:03 · Patrick O'Shaughnessy
[00:44:03] S0: If I think back to our original conversation five years ago, and you just think about yourself, how you've changed the most in five years, or what surprised you the most in the past five years, what comes to mind?