Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Foreign welcome everybody to the third edition of Haller's Playbook.
Delighted to say I'm joined by the co founders of Mass Group, Rob Brown and Simon Blacklidge. But before we come on to talk about the strap line of our podcast, which is where sport meets trading. What a summer of sport we've had so far. And it continues whether it's England versus India at Lords, whether it's England rugby getting a clean sweep in Argentina and the usa, the Lionesses reaching the finals of the Euros, or indeed Scottish Scheffler proceeding to yet another major win in Northern Ireland and telling us actually what matters is health, family, not winning majors. And you got a classic insight into how people rise at the top of their sport and deal with the pressure and what, what it really means for them. So, and you know, dare I say it, we got the British and Irish Lions down in Australia trying to get a 2 nil clean sweep and win the series against the Wallabies, who, as I spoke to David Campisi earlier today, actually think they're going to win. So it's a huge amount going on.
But to my mind, and coming into the third of our podcasts, first one being with a top racing car driver, talking about high speed decisions which you've got to make at 150 miles an hour, or Sculpberger, whose son played in four Rugby World Cups and talking to him on Mandela Day was a real special moment. But here we are getting into the guts of the business that I'm proud to be sponsored by Mass Group. And we've got the co founders here.
And so against the background of the recent accolades you've just received for being one of the fastest growing companies in the UK and arca, the fintech space, I thought it'd be good to start by just saying, how's this all happen? So from a standing start, Simon, the CEO of the business, suddenly you've got this act like you're growing like crazy. Where does it all start? I mean, in a back room somewhere.
Tell us the story from the beginning.
[00:02:20] Speaker B: Question and thanks for having us. So it all started probably, you know, well, the company was incorporated five years ago, but it started way before then.
I had another technology company which basically brought other brokers to market. So over a 10 year period, we brought over 100 brokers to market and helped them with things like platforms, liquidity payments, CRM systems. So over that 10 year period, I knew exactly how to create a brokerage from start to finish. Seeing some of my previous clients grow from Nothing to like $200 million firms today.
So I knew the basis of what they've done and how we could basically implement that to what Mass Markets was doing.
Fast forward from 10 years ago to lockdown.
There was an opportunity for myself to go and get FCA regulated to become a liquidity provider within the stack of those brokers that we'd already onboarded.
We got regulated over a year's period and then we started to plug in our own liquidity to those 100 brokers that were already on my technology company from that point, obviously I was introduced to Rob, we were looking at doing other business ventures together and I said to Rob, look, how do we go and grow this business? What do we need to do?
We basically put a 10 step plan in place, start to finish and just executed one point after the other as quickly as possible.
And it's kind of led where we are today.
[00:03:54] Speaker A: Well, that's fantastic. And Rob, turning to you and obviously as co founder and someone who's got a hat for strategic development as much as doing the actual business, tell us how.
Obviously Simon's talked about the initial meeting, but you've got those two very difficult hats, haven't you, getting the business done and thinking forward into the strategy. So how do you manage that against the background of being such a young company?
[00:04:23] Speaker C: Yeah, I think the challenges that we face are really down to resources. I think the people in the business, their foresight, where the business grows, you know, it's a collective kind of decision on where the business is moving into.
So I think our main challenge is having enough resources to be able to do everything that we want to do and actually focus on, you know, one thing at a time as opposed to, you know, hundreds of different ideas and growth places for us to go. So I think yeah, there is obviously a lot of challenges, but I think we all work very collaboratively. We put an idea out there and if it is the right idea, together we work towards getting it done. And I think that's really helped us as we've grown, as we've, you know, completed on other projects like Mass Digital and the crypto side, getting licensing there. Mass fund where we've created a fund and all of this is really ancillary services to support our core business and make it easy for clients to trade with us.
So yeah, I think that's kind of probably the biggest challenge is, you know, we've got know really good ideas but how do we get to that point?
So yeah, we'll have to rein ourselves in. I think this when well, it's great.
[00:05:42] Speaker A: And I, I'll come. Obviously picking up on you mentioning crypto. I'll come back to that in a second. But you, you make some very good points. I remember when I left the UBS business in the late 90s and set up Donaldson Lufkin Generette from scratch. We in a disaster recovery zone actually for the first six months, about three of us.
And we had to build a team from there. And I guess that, you know, when we talk about this incredible sporting team, achievements you've seen this year, building a team is so important, isn't it? And just, just give us an insight into. When you're sitting there looking at each other at the very beginning of things, you build a team, what type of people are you looking for to build that collaboration you talk about?
[00:06:27] Speaker B: Yeah, it's a great point. And one of the main things that Rob and I spoke about was the core message that we wanted to put out as a company is like we're all about the people and that's what it matters. No matter what Rob and I come up with as our mad plans, sometimes if we don't communicate that correctly to the team and they don't believe in those plans, this company's going nowhere. And I think from our competitors and the business that we're in, a lot of them are owned by banks, huge balance sheets and the people we want to employ, and I say this to my staff, whether they like it or not, is we're trying to build a Premier League team on a League two budget. And I think the problem that we had in the initial stages is that we couldn't afford those wages, we couldn't afford those people that we really wanted to bring in on the massive salaries. But what we did was we sold a dream, we explained what we wanted to go and people are passionate about that. People don't want to just be a small dog in a big basically factory or big wheel. Like they want to be part of something, seeing it grow.
And even though we're in it on a day to day basis and it's. Sometimes you've got to take a step back and realize what you've achieved in those. In that two year period.
You know, people happy to be part of it, they're seeing it grow. Obviously, as you mentioned before, Simon, becoming the 32nd fastest growing company in the, in the UK is a massive achievement and everyone loved it, everyone's happy to be a part of it. And yeah, so that's.
[00:07:57] Speaker A: And so Rob, when you're talking strategy And I guess people come into the business and they ask who you are, what you're doing, what you're trying to achieve.
How do you find yourself explaining that? Because as Simon said, people come from a big business. Is it that they're attracted by being able to make more of a difference in a smaller.
[00:08:22] Speaker C: I think so. I think, you know, we're all about the people and, you know, if we can see that we get on, we can find the ways to collaborate, then I think that's the biggest thing for us. Like, would they fit in to our way of doing business? You know, are they going to be seen as, you know, externally, like all of these things? I think it's all about really the people. So that's the number one. Like if, if we can find that we're interacting well and we can see the opportunities, then it's those people that we're actually really, you know, keen to like invest in and move, move with.
[00:09:01] Speaker A: I think it's a really interesting, you know, real live example of the British and Irish lions come from nothing. I they've got those groups of people who might be very good at what they've been doing, they might be great players in their own national team and they've got to come into something completely new and make a winning proposition and they've got to go out there and perform on the highest stage. There's so many crossovers to the world of sport in terms of how businesses need to react. And I think one of the great things that I taken away over the years and Sir Clive Woodward made it into a distinct impression, the teacup moment. And actually if any of the people watching saw the lionesses women's football team scoring some great goals in the last minute of the game when they were out of the competition, it was all about thinking correctly under pressure. The teacup moment. And sports kind of owned that ever since Johnny Wilkinson scored the right footed drop goal to win our World cup in 2003. You know, what caused him to be in that position to make that amazing contribution that won us the World Cup.
And I'd like to sort of investigate a little bit about decision making under pressure because ultimately you operate in a high speed transactional environment where a mistake, particularly when you're a young team growing, you've got big decisions to make, haven't you? I mean, give us a little bit of an insight into how you make those decisions and the pressure and what you learn from getting them wrong sometimes. Because you can't always get your trading decision right, can you?
[00:10:44] Speaker B: I think from my side, I've always, from my, my whole career, always been in the trading game, from, from obviously running a tech company to, to where we are today. And I've, I've just basically grown my career out of just being under pressure constantly. And I don't think we realize as a company sometimes how stressful an environment it is because so many people are just used to working under that high pressure environment that it just becomes the normal after part of it. But you know, every day there's, there's something crops up because there's thousands and thousands of trades going through every day, every minute.
You've just got to make the best decision possible and it comes down to have you got the data that you can grab together quickly and what are the risks associated with that data. And it basically comes to number crunching at the end of it. What percentage chances do you have of making that, for example, like Johnny Wilkinson making that drop kick or if we get out of this position now, what happens? Where do we think the market's going to go? Is it going to impact the businesses in the other areas, things like that. So if you've got the data and people around you, those decisions become easier and easier to make.
[00:11:54] Speaker A: Yeah, I think that's absolutely spot on. I think those moments in time where, and that's not just transactional decisions, is it? And coming to you Rob, about the strategy and you referenced crypto earlier in the context of mass digital.
I was slightly light hearted as I read that Rachel Reeves was trying to use some bitcoin to raise some money and pay off some of the government debt.
But at the same time on a much more serious note, regulation taking place in the U.S. jP Morgan talking about, you know, credentializing, institutionalizing the whole world of bitcoin and crypto. It seems like this is developing into a massive opportunity and obviously mass digital is focusing on that world. So tell us a bit more about that Rob, in terms of where you want to take.
[00:12:43] Speaker C: Yeah, I think regulation in the crypto space and the adoption, I think probably over the last 12 months, I think it's been a huge increase from big institutions coming in and the speed at which it's developing now is unbelievable. You know we've got a Lithuanian registered vast that allows clients to, you know, on off ramp crypto but there's new rules in European which are different to, you know, other regulations. So we've recently purchased an MSB in Canada for different product services within the crypto space. So what we're finding is we are having to involve really, really quickly with the changes to make sure that we are in line with what we should be doing for clients. And again, you know, clients expectations in different regions, what they require is different to what we offer in Europe.
So you know, it is, it's definitely, we're seeing, you know, like the adoption is massive and we just want to be a part of that. You know, initially we created the product to service our existing clients that wanted to use crypto for trading traditional asset classes, which has worked really, really well. However, we're now at a stage where we're seeing this as a bigger opportunity where as a standalone entity servicing different parts of the industry with you know, again, an area that's still unknown to so many.
So that's kind of, you know, what we've been doing and you know, we want to be in a position, I guess, where we're actually relevant for, you know, the institutions, the corporates and utilizing, you know, what we think that we've built, which is fairly similar to what we've done on our FX business with you know, very good, well known liquidity providers providing services to us.
And we've leveraged that same E FOSS in our FCA regulated entity as we have done in the crypto space. Space. So we've just kind of, you know, made those small changes to adapt it for crypto. But it, yeah, it's working really, really well. And I think, you know, we've made one of our first standalone hires in a digital space to kind of start to, to build that up as a standalone entity. So yeah, a lot happening there.
[00:15:07] Speaker A: It's a, it's a very, it's a fascinating and to hear you talk about the cross pollination of your, of your, your traditional business into the, the digital business, which is I think a real sort of telling, different point of differentiation if you had to just reassure people because this, as you said, it's quite an unknown market still. And even though some of these big names are now talking about, you know, bringing it in as a more understandable, recognizable unit of currency, you know, what would be the biggest challenge you think has to be overcome to take it to the next?
[00:15:44] Speaker C: What businesses need to do and they need to look at what they actually do in the traditional finance world. What do you do? Are you trading crypto? Well, trade. No, are you trading traditional asset classes? Okay, so put that in as another product within your traditional trading range and trade, do what you do in the traditional world. So I think that's the key message because crypto is in across every industry and how you interact with it. You know, are you going to lend coins as a trading house? Like, are you in Len? If you, if you lend money, then you can give them an opportunity to be a lender of the Bitcoin. Like that's your business, but it's just in crypto. So I think that's kind of, you know, the key message is, you know, have it as an additional way to be able to interact with your clients in the products that you offer to clients, as opposed to just going out to market and going, we're going to do this crypto. Know if you're a payment company and you're doing payments, do payments in crypto. Like, you've probably got the same technology, you've got, you know, just maybe a few different, you know, ways to interact, like a custody account as opposed to a bank account. But I think, yeah, that, that's kind of the logical way to do it. Whatever you do in the traditional world, you can do that in the, in the crypto world. And I think you'd end up doing really well because, you know, that business and that part of the business, I.
[00:17:08] Speaker A: Think it's the key.
[00:17:09] Speaker C: Yeah, we trade traditional assets gold.
And now clients can also now trade crypto through mass digital. So again, it's kind of lending itself to what we exist and do. We've got all the infrastructure, we've got everything there and it's now just a new product within that kind of area of the market.
[00:17:30] Speaker A: I think it's a key moment and for you to have the, the ability to cross reference is, is going to be a big differentiator going forward, I think. And so we'll watch that space. But it's, it's fast moving.
[00:17:43] Speaker C: Yeah, absolutely, absolutely.
[00:17:45] Speaker A: Just to lighten the tone slightly because away from you go back to obviously the different products you're moving into and the team that you're building.
So I've always. Whether whatever walk of life you're in, it could be sport, can be business, anything. You've got to have some fun, haven't you? You've got to enjoy, you know, you get up in the morning, get into work, enjoy the people you're with.
How do you. What sort of team building? Because it's a young business bringing people in all the time. You've got, you've got different people in different places in Australia, Lithuania and no doubt other parts beyond.
How do you build that team? What do you do to get everyone on the same page? I mean, are these away Days, Is it a golf day? Is it.
[00:18:35] Speaker B: A little bit of everything? We, over the Christmas period we have. So we have an office in Lithuania, as Rob was saying, where our crypto is based from.
So we took I think 20, 25 people over to Lithuania. We had our Christmas party there. It was a great time for everybody to get together, apart from the guys in Australia. We had to leave those guys there, otherwise it would be a long flight coming across. But yeah, just trying to get people together. I think that collaboration really happens when people are face to face, even for myself and Rob, like we worked together for the last five years as co founders of this company, just trying to get out, face to face away from the office. Whether that's playing golf on a Saturday morning, you know, playing paddle, playing some kind of sport. And even though the conversations aren't necessarily work all the time, they'll some, they'll predominantly refer to work and then some ideas will crop up. And I think there's a great, you know, advantage to just getting away from the office and just having a separate conversation. And it's not just myself and Rob, it's like all parts of the team as well.
I think there's just a more relaxed environment. People feel safer probably away from the office to say what they think we can improve on. And that's something we've built as well, is that opportunity for people to speak up and say like, where it's going wrong, what can we do better? And because we're still such a small business, we're so nimble to go and improve on like all aspects of it as well.
So yeah, I think it's just giving people that opportunity away from the.
[00:20:06] Speaker A: I think it's really fundamental. I go back in time when.
But some of these bigger banks where they didn't focus on this very much. And when I retired from international rugby, some of the bosses, I always used to think I was about to get fired because they bring you in, they don't tell you what it's about. And I thought, okay, they've rumbled me at last. But they said we want to investigate how it is those group of players came together and became world beating or whatever. And I said, well, some of the themes you talk about and getting people out of their environment and talking to each other face to face, that's what sport does. And these banks weren't doing it. So I said why don't you just take everyone away because, oh, it's going to cost a lot of money. But it's a real, it's A cost well sunk into the business that you actually bother.
Give people that chance, as you say, to have FaceTime because they're not going to tell you in a working environment they're happy or not happy that it's going to work. But outside, particularly if you know, a bit more relaxed environment, they will talk to you. I think any business who doesn't do that risks the happiness of its people because if they think they've got a voice, then they can tell you what they think and if things aren't quite right and fix them.
But you give them the environment to express themselves. And not every business does that. So I think it's an important thing to do and have fun at the same time, of course.
So I always recommend a golf day because you combine all of that. You only have to hit the occasional good shot and then you're fine.
So let's. Can I just ask you about the funds business because obviously you know, you're out there with these strategies. You know, we've talked about the crypto platform and obviously the foreign exchange, the gold business.
Tell us a little bit about what you're trying to do with, with mass funds.
[00:21:59] Speaker C: So look, we, so mass fund again initially was a product really to help support our existing traders, end traders, with capital allocation.
So you know, as we started to sort of get more clients, you know, we're having conversations and one of the challenges we found with some of the most successful traders was that if they had a little bit more capital, it'd make it really easy for them to scale up their strategy and generate more profit.
So from our perspective, we introduced a couple of people to some of the traders so people were looking. So that sort of works really well where they, you know, traders, the good traders tend to, you know, not necessarily have a huge network of loads of investors that want to give them money, but they got really, really good strategies. Their focus is on trading.
So, you know, as we kind of looked at that, we were like, how can we help this client with being able to do more? Which helps us, helps them.
So we had the idea of creating a fund. It's a multi strategy fund regulated out of Luxembourg.
And the idea is essentially as and when we see the good traders, we've got a solution which allows them to draw down on some of that capital allocation. So the fund officially launched in March.
So we've not talked about it too much.
We've been really keen to kind of build up a six month track record which we're very close to doing by the end of August we should have like a full track record for the last six months of a successful strategy that should have been running for many years but within the fund for around about six months. So we currently have a few investors who've kind of backed the fund as well. So we're at a point now where that after this six month track record is produced to really go out to market, find investors that want to have access to alternative investments with reasonably good returns and also help our clients on our traders that we've seen that their strategies work and kind of help both sides to be able to generate revenue or profits from trading. So yeah, we're definitely really excited about that product because I think again it's helping our core business grow, it's helping our existing clients with adding more value there and hopefully we're going to see especially you know, as we start to add more strategies in some really, really interesting fund access to market, which I don't think is quite difficult to get unless you actually own the whole value chain.
[00:24:47] Speaker A: And so if you were to look forward with these three main three business strands that you've got, are you at a point where you've got a level of expectation that says that one or other's going to dominate the business say in the next two to three years, do you see them or you're not looking that far ahead? Just building the base day to day Simon?
[00:25:11] Speaker C: I think just day to day, every day to make sure it's still working.
[00:25:15] Speaker B: I think what Rob said before is like we built obviously markets, mass markets was our core business just providing FX liquidity, CFD liquidity out to the masses.
Mass digital and mass fund came as ancillary services which just like helped us grow mass markets. But I think every day we come in and look at it and we always say like, oh, these are, these are full standalone entities by themselves. And I think once we put more time and energy into them, like helping them grow to a sustainable stage, then is then going to hire a full team and letting them run with it. But we think all businesses that we've grown so far have massive legs.
And the difference is you've probably only heard of mass markets potentially. So we're excited about what the future's got to hold for the digital and fund side as well.
[00:26:00] Speaker A: And even though, as you rightly point out, keeping those sort of day to day fires burning is what it's all about and obviously that is huge levels of excitement in itself and then playing out that slightly longer term strategy.
So you obviously don't have A crystal ball. But in the sense that you've grown from a very, very kind of small base to something really pretty significant when you measure it by the growth.
If you were to put out a crystal ball and take a three to five year view of other than the fact there's huge opportunity, do you get the impression that you're going to get started getting held to targets and because anyone coming into the business now is going to say to you, so where do you want this to grow now? What do I see as my potential future? Because every individual who walks into your buildings have their own three to five year personal view. So they're going to be part of your journey.
And so do you find yourself being pressurized to give that longer term?
Because obviously people know they'll be busy day to day. But then what's it going to look like in three to five years?
Or do they themselves not kind of ask you, put you under that sort of pressure.
[00:27:23] Speaker B: And this is a great question. People come in and obviously they want to see career progression constantly, like where am I going to end up? What job title am I going to end up with? How much can I earn at this company? And I think from Robin, my side is setting those realistic boundaries of like where we can go.
What we said five years ago is very different to where we are at today.
You know, we've had some like positive that's a positive and a negative in itself, I think where we obviously we set yearly targets of what we want to achieve, whether that be revenue, profit volumes, different projects that have come on board. And I think if you can keep giving people realistic expectations of projects and we keep ticking them off, that's the main thing, they can see progression, they can see the next level. And I think as a small company, and this is what I've personally found so far, if you hire people from larger corporates, they only ever get exposed to one or two things within that corporate entity. However, they're exceptional at those one or two things. Whereas if people have come from other startups and other mid sized firms, they get involved in a broader broad range of activities and things that they need to get involved with. And I think that diversification of tasks on a daily basis and opportunities there, people really love that because they're expanding their knowledge base. And I always say to them, if you're not having fun here or you're not enjoying your time, like there's so many more opportunities out there, you're more than welcome to leave. And you know, we don't have that many levers in the company so far. So it just shows we're doing something right in that aspect as well.
[00:29:01] Speaker A: And do you see, obviously you've talked about Lithuania, Australia, Canada, I mean, do you, do you see people being based in different parts of the world as again business opportunities?
[00:29:15] Speaker C: Most of our clients, I would say are global. So you know, outside of the uk, you know, we service, you know, clients pretty much globally. So we do need to be again, active in all these regions, whether that's, you know, salespeople going out, meeting face to face or whether that's having satellite offices or kind of areas where we can have exposure to be able to get that FaceTime. So the FaceTime is probably one of the most important things that I think that we've focused on, you know, a lot of information you can learn from a one to one conversation over a few emails online.
So you know, we do try and prioritize that FaceTime. So I think, you know, as a business, as we grow, as we look at new regions and new regulations in different parts of the world, we're going to be looking to expand and you know, have presence globally. So that's where I think, you know, in the next, you know, within the next five years, you know, more licenses, more regions that we're operating in, more product offerings.
Globally is kind of, you know, where I think some of our milestones are going to be, you know, reached as, you know, as we expand.
[00:30:27] Speaker A: Well, listen, I think that's a wonderful way to, to sign off on what's clearly an incredible growth story has been and is likely to, to remain so. And I talked about overseas and obviously with some staff in Australia, they'll all be getting ready for that big match tomorrow where we're going to see where the British Irish Lions can actually take a two nil lead in a three match series. So go easy on them. If we get the result we think we will, they might be a bit depressed on.
[00:30:58] Speaker B: We've got the British guys in Australia so I'm not sure if that's going to go down well or not. But we'll see. We'll see.
[00:31:05] Speaker A: That's the one. The wonderful variety you get in the sporting world, you know, there'll be a winner everywhere. But listen, and what you just signed off with them is exactly the reason why I've got involved and I can see that growth, that opportunity and very excited to be part of that journey and help a young business grow as fast as you have grown and hopefully as fast as you will grow. So thank you for spending some time just getting under the bonnet of what Mass group is all about.
And we'll look forward to hearing more. And in the meantime, that's it from Haller's playbook.
Have a great weekend and see you again soon.
