Soldo Q&A — Daniele Marino, Head of Product Development

User Obsession as a Business Strategy

In the latest of our interview series, I sat down with Daniele Marino who heads up the Product team at Soldo.

We’d recently spoken at an event, and Daniele had given me an overview of the Soldo offering. But I was keen to dig a little deeper and get an appreciation for the journey that the business has been on.

One theme that I really felt encapsulated the story of Soldo was how user input and feedback had directly helped shape key pivots in the product and strategy.

As simply as possible, can you summarise what Soldo offers?

Soldo offers a way of rethinking company spending. We provide the same kinds of cards as you’d expect with a traditional bank account, but linked to a ‘smart account’ that allows for multiple users in a business environment. These users can all have their own cards, with unique rules that govern them. Whomever controls the account (normally someone from the finance team of a business) has complete flexibility in how they setup their structure and rules.

And how long has Soldo been up and running? When was the business founded?

We launched in January 2015. I was one of the initial team of five here in London, and we’ve since expanded to Italy — with our team of engineers now working out of Rome.

The story really starts with our founder, Carlo Gualandri. Carlo is a serial entrepreneur that’s had a knack for identifying opportunities at the right time. With everything that PSD2 is set to bring in 2018, we think Soldo is also right on track to to be the right product at the right time.

And how did you reach this point in the product?

In terms of our history, our initial vision and offering was aimed at families. The idea being that with one account you could have multiple cards with different rules that govern how they can be used. The card you provide your 15 year old son or daughter with might have a relatively low daily budget on for example.

What we learned through our user testing however was that the value of this concept, with its roots in business principles, was not necessarily recognised by all of our potential market. We came instead to realise that while we had up to that moment only thought of Soldo as a consumer product, it was actually better positioned as a business product.

Businesses deal with these principles every day and so they see the value that Soldo brings far more easily than in the consumer world. Different teams within a business have different requirements and each team, or even individual can have a card geared to their requirements and the account team can immediately see who’s spent what and where without chasing paperwork.

While people were often intrigued in the family offering once the concept had been fully explained — we realised it would require a huge (expensive) marketing and PR campaign to communicate this on a significant scale. Not every family immediately sees a tool that helps with the management of their finances as being valuable. In contrast, finance teams within companies see this value straight away and can easily justify the investment because they can also see the savings it will bring them.

What are the biggest benefits of using Soldo over traditional methods for covering company expenses?

So our goal is really to relieve a lot of the painful processes that finance teams face.

We try to work in line with how accounts teams already work, but also make their processes and tasks easier. Accounts teams will normally be fighting with statements and chasing physical receipts and details regarding payments on company credit cards, which eats into their time.

With Soldo, employees can enrich transactions with photos of receipts that relate to specific transactions using their phone or add notes and extra details. This means that everything should be ready to go by the time a report needs to be generated.

We’re working on reaching the point where individual cards can be limited in budget, on the types of businesses they can spend money with, the countries they work in and a full range of other options depending what is and isn’t relevant for that particular business.

In terms of flexibility, rather than allocate cards to people, it may be more useful to have separate cards for specific purposes. Eg. a card that is used for online advertising, one for office supplies, one for client entertainment etc. The flexibility is what a lot of people love as it can work around how they are structured and like to work.

We automate what is a painstakingly manual process for a lot of people.

Have you seen more interest from small businesses or larger enterprises so far?

Well we’ve actually had a bit of a dual scenario. We have interest from both SMEs and larger enterprises, but their journeys are typically a bit different from one another.

For SMEs it’s pretty easy — they see the product, like it and sign up. They’ll typically then use it in a wide range of ways.

For larger companies it’s a little more complicated because of the number of stakeholders and the processes involved in on-boarding such a product. In truth it depends on the people and businesses involved, but the general trend between the two that we’ve noticed is when it comes to what Soldo is used for.

The product is flexible to scale to cover a wide range of things, and there’s obviously a distinction between business as usual expenses (eg. subscriptions to relevant software, office supplies etc) and employee expenses such as travel or food etc.

Small businesses are more likely to use Soldo for both of these, whereas larger enterprises may use for one or both, or even just for the requirements of a single department. This has all become a part of us discovering the needs of our users and being flexible enough to cater for them.

What’s the most important thing being worked on at Soldo right now?

As we work with more businesses, we’re discovering new needs and requirements. As a result, we’re working on building an even wider number of potential rules for Soldo users to be able to control how their money is spent.

Some of the things we’re working on at the moment include:

• A country whitelist and blacklist eg. a specific card can only spend with UK businesses for example, or the specific range of countries or regions that you do business with or travel to.
• Merchant Category Codes eg. this card can only spend with financial service businesses.
• Time specific eg. a card can only be used between 9–5 — or perhaps it’s being used for the expenses from a business trip, and will only be active for the week that person is away.

The other key thing going on at Soldo is that we’re now entering an exciting growth phase. We’ve spent the last two years really building and improving the financial and product platforms and we’ve learned so much from users.

We’ve also received some strong funding and we’re now looking to focus on really improving how we onboard, register and create an amazing first impression for any new Soldo users.

What’s your approach to User Testing at Soldo?

We’re really flexible in how we work with our users. Depending on what works for a given business and how they operate, sometimes we’ll host them here at Soldo, otherwise we’ll prefer to observe them in their own office.

We’ve had some really interesting lessons even not necessarily from listening to direct product feedback, but in listening to how they express their problems, their expectations for the product and what they’re trying to achieve with it.

We also have regular email exchanges with core Soldo users listening to their feedback and experiences, and even new employees offer a really interesting perspective. They’re not bogged down in the legacy ways of thinking about our product and so can find it easier to find new solutions or to critique the product from a fresh perspective.

I genuinely believe that user-centred design is everything when it comes to our product. I always try and drive everything back to this — always validating with user and external feedback.

What are the most important lessons you’ve learned at Soldo?

I think this is related to what we talked about before, and more general than a specific point…

Users are always right. At the beginning of my career I considered myself more of a design thinker. I’d think of a game (I was originally a game designer) and I’d make it, and when I received any feedback that contravened your concept, you’d be able to justify it being core to the game mechanic or the game, or that they were simply viewing it out of context.

I also used to value the feedback of those around me more than someone out of that close circle. In reality, I’ve learned that being ‘out of context’ is actually often the best way to view something in a different way and to spot things you might not have otherwise considered.

That said, I’ve always been a listener because of my personality and my general philosophy, so turning this focus to users was a huge. For me it was about reconciling my desire to seek new knowledge with things that I was actually the creator of. With the final version of anything being ultimately for the user, I gradually learned that they have the best perspective on shaping a product.

Now, especially with Soldo, everything we do is built closely with users.

What sets Soldo apart from other banking startups?

The first thing I’d mention is our method of development. We’ve proved it to be fast and iterative. This gives us an advantage in developing and improving our product. We’ve delivered a really solid product in just about 6 months.

The second thing is our tech. With Soldo everything is built in. A lot of platforms in our industry are highly reliant on third parties because they have pre-built platforms within the product. We’ve built our product from the ground up so we have complete control over what we’re putting in the hand of our users. We want to minimise the elements of the product we don’t have control over because otherwise you’re always at risk of something going wrong that’s not your fault.

The final thing I think comes right back to our emphasis on users. This is instilled across every team at Soldo whether it’s finance, risk, customer care or anywhere else. Even in how we market Soldo, we want it to be clear that our users are everything.

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