Embark on a journey through the intricate world of financial compliance with Natasha Vernier, the Co-Founder and CEO of Cable, as she joins me, Greg Myers, on the Leaders in Payments podcast. Natasha takes center stage, weaving the story of Cable's inception and its mission to equip compliance officers with a robust platform for pinpointing regulatory slips and control failures. The company's unique SaaS model is not only redefining compliance monitoring but is also scaling to serve a variety of financial institutions, big and small. Together, we discuss Natasha's impressive transformation from finance to the forefront of the fintech revolution. We also uncover the origins of Cable's distinctive name and its pivotal role in crafting agile, compliant financial services.
As we progress through the episode, the focus shifts to the transformative power of automation in compliance testing within the banking sector. Natasha likens automated banking controls to the essential dashboard alerts in a car, pointing out the need for similar advancements in financial services. The dialogue explores the intriguing concept of the 'bank of Taylor Swift,' suggesting a future where financial services are woven into consumer platforms that people already use and love, further emphasizing the role of technology in appealing to the tech-savvy Gen Z demographic.
Embark on a journey through the intricate world of financial compliance with Natasha Vernier, the Co-Founder and CEO of Cable, as she joins me, Greg Myers, on the Leaders in Payments podcast. Natasha takes center stage, weaving the story of Cable's inception and its mission to equip compliance officers with a robust platform for pinpointing regulatory slips and control failures. The company's unique SaaS model is not only redefining compliance monitoring but is also scaling to serve a variety of financial institutions, big and small. Together, we discuss Natasha's impressive transformation from finance to the forefront of the fintech revolution. We also uncover the origins of Cable's distinctive name and its pivotal role in crafting agile, compliant financial services.
As we progress through the episode, the focus shifts to the transformative power of automation in compliance testing within the banking sector. Natasha likens automated banking controls to the essential dashboard alerts in a car, pointing out the need for similar advancements in financial services. The dialogue explores the intriguing concept of the 'bank of Taylor Swift,' suggesting a future where financial services are woven into consumer platforms that people already use and love, further emphasizing the role of technology in appealing to the tech-savvy Gen Z demographic.
Welcome to the Leaders in Payments podcast, where we talk to C-level leaders from across the payments landscape. We'll be discussing the products and services that impact the payment space today, as well as trends and predictions for the future of payments. We will also hear stories from our guests about their journeys to the top.
Speaker 2:With Cable's technology, we are taking in 100% of the account and transactional level data, and we are automatically monitoring all of that data all the time for any single instance of regulatory breach or control failure, and so what that means is we flag those issues as soon as they occur.
Speaker 3:That was Natasha Vernier, the co-founder and CEO of Cable, and she is my special guest on this episode, episode 312 of the Leaders in Payments podcast, and I'm your host, greg Myers. Cable is the all-in-one effectiveness testing platform that helps compliance officers comply with financial crime requirements. Natasha and I dive deep into Cable and the role they play in the financial services ecosystem. Cable targets compliance officers at banks and fintechs and, as Natasha likes to put it, they help compliance officers say yes, we've got a great episode ahead, so let's get started. Hi, natasha, thank you for being here and welcome to the Leaders in Payments podcast.
Speaker 2:Hi Greg, Thank you so much for having me.
Speaker 3:Absolutely Well, let's go ahead and dive right in, If you don't mind. Tell our audience a little bit about yourself, maybe where you grew up, where you went to school, where you currently live, a few things like that. We'll jump into your professional background in just a minute.
Speaker 2:Of course. So I'm Natasha Vernier. I was born and raised in a town called Cheltenham, which is in England, a couple of hours west of London. I went to a school called Dean Close there and I lived in London for the majority of my adult life to date. I moved there for university. I went to King's College, loved living in London for many, many years and just last year made the move across the pond and I now live in the Bay Area with my wife, my two children and my dog.
Speaker 3:Awesome. Well, let's talk about the company. So tell us what Cable does.
Speaker 2:Yeah, cable automates the effectiveness testing of financial crime controls and, I suppose, put another way, we enable compliance officers to understand how well their controls are working, so that they can walk into regulatory exams and audits and know with certainty whether they have any regulatory breaches or control failures.
Speaker 3:Okay, and what specific verticals do you focus on?
Speaker 2:Okay, and what specific verticals do you focus on? We work mostly today with banks, program managers, any financial institution that has a nested relationship, so we work a lot with banking as a service banks or embedded finance banks. We work with program managers and payments companies. We also do work with fintechs and crypto companies as well. It's relevant for any regulated financial institution or any fintech that may not be directly regulated but which really understands the relationships that they have with their banks, the risks that their banks have with regards to regulatory compliance, and where those fintechs really want to mature and demonstrate their control compliance to those banks.
Speaker 3:Okay, and who are your target audience? What's their title? Who do you sort of focus on?
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's actually an interesting question because there are two fairly distinct audiences there, and the tool Cable helps to make collaboration between these two teams or groups of people in banks and financial institutions work more smoothly, I guess. So the people that use the product mostly are compliance officers. Those are the people who immediately see the value in the product, who understand how much time it can save. Whose team benefits the most from the product? That is also. It's also the case, though, that we work very closely with the people in the companies, in the financial institutions who lead the banking as a service teams or strategies overall, who lead the banking as a service teams or strategies overall, and we actually have, in a number of cases, had the first engagement from banks, from those banking as a service teams, where they really want to work more closely with compliance teams, want the compliance teams to have tools to enable them to run faster in a more compliant way. So it's really the compliance officers and also the BAS or embedded finance leaders in banks.
Speaker 3:Okay, and is it a SaaS-based software model?
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's exactly right. So we take in a lot of data. It's all hosted in the cloud and we have a web application where both those BAS leaders in the banks and the financial institutions and the compliance officers can do their work.
Speaker 3:Okay, and when you say financial institutions, obviously here in the US there are whatever number 10, 12,000 of them. So do you focus on big, small community banks, credit unions, or is it really across the board, any of them? It would be a valuable product.
Speaker 2:So any of them. It is a regulatory requirement to do independent testing of controls, so for any regulated financial institution it is relevant. Today we work with a whole range of size of banks and fintechs. We work with some of the larger fintechs, like the Mercuries of the world, and some of the larger banking as a service banks, like Evolve, and we also have some banks that are more community-focused but are expanding into the banking as a service or correspondent banking spaces, like Quaint Oak Bank and Axiom Bank.
Speaker 3:Okay, and then I have to ask about the name Cable. Where did that originate?
Speaker 2:I've started telling everyone this now and so it's not really a secret anymore. So the official line is that we're building the cabling and the infrastructure that helps connect compliance officers and the ecosystem to help them understand how much crime they're stopping and to enable them to stop more financial crime. But the actual story, which I guess, if I tell you, is going to be out there in the world the actual story is that my favorite place in the world is my in-laws lake house up in very, very northern Wisconsin, and it's on a very beautiful lake called Lake Namakagan and it's in the Schwamigan Bay National Forest. And both Namakagan and Schwamigan are very, very difficult to both say and spell, and the nearest town is called Cable, so that, honestly, is where the name came from.
Speaker 3:Oh, I love it. That's a great story. I'm glad you shared it, because I always ask the question when it's a unique name, because there's always a good story behind it, from completely made up to your story. So that's a great story. I'm glad you shared that. So quick question about the marketing sales side. So you're obviously targeting these banks and fintechs. How do you go to market? Do you have a direct sales team? Do you work through partnership channels? How do you go to market?
Speaker 2:Yeah, we do have a go-to-market team. We were lucky enough last year to meet and be introduced to a woman called Candice Sogren, who has led a variety of sales teams at Marketa and Socure and ZeroHash so in the financial crime space, in the program manager space, in the crypto space and she joined us as chief revenue officer last August. She is running our go-to-market organization. We have AEs, BDRs and we are actually currently hiring for a marketing manager. So we do have a direct sales team and we find a lot of success doing really bespoke events, dinners, speaking with our customers one-on-one in those ways. So that is a lot of how we go to market. We do have channel partnerships. We are partners with Plaid and Treasury, Prime and a number of other players in the fintech and banking as a service space like that as well.
Speaker 3:Yes, Okay, great, great. Well, what would you say differentiates cable from your competitors out there?
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's an interesting question because there aren't actually any direct competitors today. So there are two main requirements that financial institutions have with regards to financial crime, and the first is to have financial crime controls in place to try to identify suspicious behavior. And so in that bucket I group all of the different control providers, which are all of the financial crime compliance tech or reg tech providers that you've probably heard of. You know, the unit 21s, the alloys, the tariffs, the comply advantages, the nice actomizers and so on. They all do control provision, they do KYC or identity verification or transaction monitoring. The second regulatory requirement is to have this independent testing in place, and until cable came along, that was done entirely manually by every single bank in the world. And whilst that regulatory requirement is to have that testing be truly independent, none of those control providers can actually also independently test the controls that they are providing. So those control providers are companies with which we hope to partner, if we're not already partnered with them, but they are not competitive to us. They simply cannot independently test controls that they are also building.
Speaker 2:To date, and I expect this to change soon. I hope it changes soon. There hasn't been another new entrant into this independent testing space. Now I think perhaps the more interesting question is sort of where does the competition for budget come from? Because that's really like the sales question that we bump up against, and that is, you know, internal teams. It is other software that you can buy in the governance, risk and compliance space, because compliance teams are not used to buying lots and lots of technology to do their job, and so there is often just a set budget. And so what we have discovered is that we are bumping up against other, more generic GRC tools on occasion, and so we have also built out some of the functionality that would enable our customers to do that work, as well as the really unique automated testing that we do, based on the actual account and transactional level data.
Speaker 3:Okay. So traditionally, would a bank have a full-time employee or two that would do this work, or is it more? They have to do it once a year and they go hire someone and try to figure it out once or twice a year.
Speaker 2:I spoke to the head of financial crime for the lending team at one of the top five banks in America a year or so ago five banks in America a year or so ago and he told me that in their lending team alone they had 1500 people manually testing accounts and transactions for effectiveness. And that was just in their lending team. So it is not just one or two people, it is the largest banks have hundreds or thousands of people manually testing accounts.
Speaker 3:Wow. So is your software able to replace all of what they do, 80% of what they do, Sort of. How does that work?
Speaker 2:So those people are spending their time manually reviewing a small percentage of the accounts and transactions going through a bank. So we mostly hear that people manually test less than 5%. Sometimes it's north of 5%, less than 10%, but that's rare. It's usually less than 5%, and so they are spending their time looking at this tiny sample of accounts or transactions and trying to understand if they have complied with every single regulatory requirement, if all of the controls have been applied correctly to this account or this transaction, and when they do that, if they find an issue, they then have to go through a process of understanding. If there are more occurrences of that particular issue in all of the bank's data, they have to remediate those issues, and often the case is that they discover issues that actually began three or six months ago, and so there's a huge number of accounts or transactions to actually remediate. That usually involves bringing in a whole series of contractors or consultants to help remediate that too.
Speaker 2:With Cable's technology, we are taking in 100% of the account and transactional level data, and we are automatically monitoring all of that data all the time for any single instance of regulatory breach or control failure, and so what that means is we flag those issues as soon as they occur.
Speaker 2:And so not only do we stop those teams having to dip sample to try to identify the issues, but we also enable them to have only one or two or a handful of accounts to remediate, instead of six months of previously onboarded accounts or transactions to remediate. So those people, those teams it depends we can usually save a significant amount of headcount, but what we really talk about is how we can enable those teams to focus on true value-add work, proactive work, and anybody who has worked in a compliance team knows that the vast majority of work that is done is retroactive remediation work, looking backwards and just trying to put out fires With cable. You can look forward. What we like to say is we help compliance officers say yes, we help them say yes to more growth, to more business opportunities, and we enable those teams to focus on high-value work that, with their subject matter expertise, they are truly uniquely placed to deal with.
Speaker 3:Okay. Well, I wish I could say that. I thought that whole space was going to improve in the compliance and there'd be less money laundering and less issues, but I don't necessarily think that's going to happen. So the next question is where do you see all this headed say in the next maybe three to five years?
Speaker 2:That's a good question. You're right, crime is only on the rise and especially with every new technology that is discovered or commercialized, I should say we see an increase in financial crime, be it fraud or money laundering or all of those types of things. So it happened with crypto, it will happen with AI, it already is and every time there's a new technology, crime will increase. Where is this space going? Specifically, compliance, I mean I just do not see how every single bank in the world does not automate the testing of their controls. I mean we have automation of testing in all parts of our lives, really in all parts of the bank other than financial crime already.
Speaker 2:And we drive cars this is the analogy I like to use and the car is full of controls. There are brakes, there is oil, there are windscreen wipers, there are lights, indicators, and there are also testing of those controls with alerts. You know, on your dashboard in the car we are told if the brakes are not working or if the oil is too low and so on. And that testing of controls, even if we may not think of it in those terms, it exists everywhere in our lives, but also in banks, in financial institutions. It just weirdly does not exist in an automated fashion in financial crime, apart from with cable.
Speaker 2:I've been reading Kara Swisher's new book, and she talks about how she had this realization that everything that can be digitized will be digitized, and I think that is exactly true for what we're doing here. So in the next three to five years in the compliance space, much more automation, testing. Automated testing is really where I see it heading. I don't know if you were asking, though, if I have thoughts on where payments and banking is heading, or just compliance.
Speaker 3:Well, I wanted to make sure we covered sort of your niche of kind of the world. But yeah, if you have thoughts on broader, bigger picture payments industry things, I'd love to talk about that as well.
Speaker 2:And I think it's going to be really, really interesting.
Speaker 2:We have been hosting these dinners all around North America and the UK recently and at every dinner we've hosted with compliance and banking experts, this concept of the bank of Taylor Swift has come up every single time.
Speaker 2:And if I were to summarize where I think the payment space is heading, that's it right. I think that we will move away from the concept or people consumers understanding or thinking about who they bank, with what rails they're using to bank, with how they're sending money, and they will just be accessing their finances, moving money, sending money, thinking about their money, with regards to, and connected to, the things that they enjoy and that they want to be spending their time on. So we have this weird dichotomy today where people spend their time doing all of this stuff and then, to be able to pay for anything, they go to an entirely different place that is not connected or related to how they spend their time or their money or their energy, and those two things are getting closer and closer together. So I think we will end up very much down the path of the embedded finance world, which is probably not necessarily a very new thought, but I definitely think that's where we're headed.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and it's interesting because this conversation is coming up more and more. I mean, some people take it to the angle of you know it becomes more seamless or frictionless. Some people take it to the angle of Gen Zs are driving it because they grew up mobile and everything was seamless and easy. So they have that expectation and it won't be long until they're managing and running companies. So there's going to be that expectation and it won't be long until they're managing and running companies. So there's going to be that expectation. But I think, no matter which route you take, I think the way you've positioned that is absolutely where it's heading. And why does a consumer care if it has a name called Zelle or PayPal or whatever? It doesn't matter. To at least the Gen Z kind of world, it does to maybe us payments people, but to them it's just to your point, it's the collision of experiences and payments and it should just be so seamless and easy and no one even needs to think about it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, exactly, and I think that there'll be a world where people just don't know the name of the bank that is holding their money. And I think that Apple is really in an interesting space here, because with Apple Pay and the Apple Card and how you can save with them now, and it would be so, so easy for them to connect your payments with who you listen to in Spotify or through Apple Music and where you're spending your money in the app stores and on what games you play and all of those things, and if you can tap your phone and the money comes from the right place, based on where you're spending it, and the rewards or the points or whatever it is are logged in the right place. In that ecosystem, it doesn't matter who you bank with, you just have access to the money that you need in your hand.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I do think that's the future. I'm not sure when we get there, but I think that is definitely the future. Well, let's switch gears a little bit and let's talk about you. So talk about your journey, how you started the company. You're obviously the co-founder, but maybe what's your background? How did you get into this? And maybe just give us that background story.
Speaker 2:Sure, I have a law degree and I'm a chartered accountant and I was working in corporate finance and honestly hating it. I was very unhappy and I discovered the world of tech and about that time there was a group of fintechs or back then we were calling them challenger banks in the UK. There were four main ones that were starting around 2015. And I thought that I wanted to get into tech. It seemed way more exciting and interesting than what I had been doing and I thought that, of all the areas of technology that I could move into, I had a background in finance and so fintech or challenger banking would be a good fit. I started working at Monzo in January 2016. And so, for those who don't know, monzo is a UK bank.
Speaker 2:When we started back then, it was a non-regulated fintech working with a sponsor bank in the similar structure to how Chime and others in the US work, and the plan had always been to be a fully regulated bank. So from the beginning, we were applying to the FCA and the Financial Conduct Authority and the Prudential Regulation Authority in the UK to become fully regulated as a bank, and I pretty quickly was asked to deal with the fraud that we were having and I had never worked in financial crime before. I didn't have any experience in that, but I loved it. It was fascinating. Perhaps I'm just nosy, but it was really interesting to investigate accounts and try to understand the intention behind payments and that led to me helping write the policies and procedures for us to get a banking license obviously from the financial crime perspective and I built up that team and became head of financial crime for about four and a half years there at Monzo and I went on a bit of a roller coaster there in terms of my views on whether I would ever start a company.
Speaker 2:I remember joining Monzo and thinking it was the coolest thing ever and that I absolutely wanted to do it one day.
Speaker 2:And then I remember watching Tom Blomfield, the CEO and co-founder of Monzo, go on a bit of a journey himself and it seemed like it was a very, very stressful job that I did not want.
Speaker 2:And then towards the end of my time at Monzo I started thinking about some of the decisions that I would have made differently and thinking about how really perhaps I could do this.
Speaker 2:And I had this deep expertise in financial crime and I had seen and understood that effectiveness testing it was being talked about more and more by the regulators and banking as a service was really taking off, and that just made no sense to me without something like cable in place and my wife was pregnant, and so it really was a now or never moment. I knew that as soon as we had a baby, there was just no way I was going to think that I could, you know, drop everything and take a pay cut and start something, and so it was a culmination of having just been so lucky to be on the Monzo journey and be surrounded by such incredibly smart people and seeing that, seeing the journey of the co-founders there, understanding this financial crime space really deeply and having the opportunity to do that, which was really by chance, and then being pushed to do it now or never because we were expecting a baby.
Speaker 3:Okay, and what year did you start Cable?
Speaker 2:So we officially started in 2020, but it was really just me and a business plan. I signed the term sheet for our pre-seed the week before my daughter was born and then for the rest of 2020, for the last sort of two or three months, I was helping with our daughter and trying to hire some people. So things really kicked off in January 2021, which is when my co-founder came on full-time.
Speaker 3:Okay, okay and, as they say, the rest is history.
Speaker 2:The rest is the very first chapter of the book, and there's a long, long way to go.
Speaker 3:Great. Well, what are some things you're passionate about? So, maybe one work-related passion and one personal passion.
Speaker 2:So I mentioned Candice, who had joined us recently as Chief Erfany Officer. She really pushed me to think hard about why I actually started Cable, and beyond the product and the problem that we think we can solve and the opportunity. But there are just so many examples of really successful companies where the founders just seem like they are not super kind and I just want to prove that it is possible to do this and actually be kind. I'm really passionate about that. We have what we call our operating system at Cable. I guess you could think of it as values on steroids, and the first operating system principle has always been be kind, and I just think it's table stakes. If you do not believe you're working for somebody who's kind, you should leave. It is table stakes to expect other people in this world to be kind to you.
Speaker 3:So is that a combination of your personal and professional passions.
Speaker 2:I guess it is. It's definitely my professional passion. I suppose my personal passions I have lots, many of which have dropped off Now I've got two young children. I spend a lot of time with my kids and I have a wonderful wife, who is the only reason I'm able to do any of this at cable. But I love cooking and I'm a huge Formula One fan. I guess you could say that's one of my passions. I'm a Lewis Hamilton fan. I was a bit shaken by the Ferrari news.
Speaker 3:So did you go to Vegas for any of the races? I did.
Speaker 2:I've never seen a race live, but I consider my. When people say that they're an F1 fan, now I like to clarify whether they are a pre or post Netflix fan. So I've been following it for ever, since Lewis Hamilton's first season and, funnily enough, the first person that we hired at Cable, she had worked in Formula One and she'd actually worked for Mercedes, and I was very interested in her resume because of that.
Speaker 3:That's funny. That's funny. Well, great Well. Thanks for sharing that. So one final question. So, as the whole fintech and payments space continues to grow and technology and money invested in it maybe not as much now as there was a few years ago, but continues to grow and people are going through college or university and they see fintech or payments as a career option, if someone came to you and they said, hey, I'm interested in working in this space, and that could be as broad as FinTech or payments and they said you know what do I need to do to be successful, what kind of advice would you give them?
Speaker 2:The first bit of advice I'd give them is to go and work at a startup just for a couple of years, if nothing else, because there is nothing like the amount of responsibility that you're given at a startup, the amazingly smart people you're surrounded by, the access to information and knowledge you get, and so, whatever you've studied, all startups hire business operations managers graduates to help a founder. They are very common roles, and I wish I had done that straight out of university, and that's what I first and foremost, recommend. The second thing I would say, then, is I think I would just spend a lot of time thinking about how young people get, use and spend their money. I think there is going to be a really interesting shift in banking over the next 10 years. Really understanding how people use their money, get their money, spend it, what they want to do with it, how they want to interact with it. I think that's going to unlock a lot of opportunity.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I think that's very true and I think that's very, very good advice. So with that, I believe we can wrap up the show and I want to thank you for your time. I know it's very valuable. I know you're a very busy person, so I really appreciate you being on the show today.
Speaker 2:Thank you so much for having me, Greg. It was great to speak with you.
Speaker 3:All right, and to all you listeners out there, I thank you for your time as well.
Speaker 1:And as well, and until the next story. Thank you for joining us this week on the Leaders in Payments podcast. Make sure you visit our website at leadersinpaymentscom, where you can subscribe to the show and where you'll find our show notes. If you enjoyed listening, please share on your social channels as well.