Thomas Gillan of BR-DGE On 5 Things You Need To Succeed In The Modern World Of Finance & Fintech

Never underestimate the importance of choosing an investor that is aligned with your goal and understands the highs and lows that growth will bring. Choose an investor who tries to pick you up and the team up in times of difficulty instead of standing on your neck and putting you under unnecessary pressure. As a CEO, you will have enough challenges without having another person making life difficult for you. When this relationship works well it can be a real strength. It can also create a team that is totally open to challenges and can take things head on.

As part of my series about the “How to Navigate and Succeed in the Modern World of Finance”, I had the pleasure of interviewing Thomas Gillan.

Thomas is CEO at BR-DGE, a leading payment orchestration platform based in Scotland. Prior to BR-DGE, Thomas held leadership positions in B2B SaaS technology businesses; working across corporate strategy, go to market execution, finance, and international expansion. He also founded SIS Ventures, Scotland’s first impact-focussed VC fund.

Thank you so much for your time! I know that you are a very busy person. Our readers would love to “get to know you” a bit better. Can you tell us a bit about your ‘backstory’ and how you got started?

My journey has been quite unorthodox, with a huge variety of experiences and a constant exposure to entrepreneurship that began at a young age through involvement in various family businesses. Initially working in corporate finance, I then joined an impact investment fund and then founded an early-stage VC fund investing in high-growth technology businesses. Investment is fascinating, working with some brilliant founders and management teams, a term I remember well was “it’s not hard to do VC but it’s hard to do it well”. Nothing can be more true.

After several years on the investment side, I felt it increasingly challenging to add value without having operator experience myself. So I made the switch to a B2B software firm with a strong payments team, which marked my first serious introduction to the payments industry within an ISV environment. This hands-on experience showed me how complex payments can be and it was clear that data-led optimisation was a significant opportunity to improve outcomes and return efficiencies.

Now leading a scaling payments company, I love sitting on the operator side, there’s nothing more rewarding for me than seeing a team and product grow, solving challenges, and driven by an ambition to create a global leader.

It has been said that our mistakes can be our greatest teachers. Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?

That’s an interesting one. It sounds really obvious but if you don’t make mistakes, are you even learning? I think that’s got to be the basis of culture in any organisation. Certainly, that’s been hugely important in any organisation I’ve worked in or led. You encourage people to make their own decisions, take risks, and do it in a way where there’s safety to make mistakes. That’s how you really get innovation in my opinion.

One of the early lessons I learned at a previous company is how easy it is to identify a gap in the market and believe you’re the right person to address it. You feel energised, assemble a team, and concentrate on solving the problem — all at 100 miles per hour. However, when you pitch the dream, to investors, customers or your board, you assume that they’ve got that level of either understanding, ambition, and creativity to address it. You go straight to the destination instead of taking people on the journey, and they don’t get behind the idea, which is frustrating for everyone involved. I now always over index on bringing people with me and try taking a step back now and then to ensure everyone is aligned that needs to be and we’re all paddling in the same direction.

Are you working on any exciting new projects now? How do you think that will help people?

There’s always a lot happening in payments and fintech, but it all comes back to solving key problems for consumers and our customers. At BR-DGE, we’re a payments orchestrator and at the heart of everything we do is the customer. Our goal is to make paying as seamless as possible with fewer clicks and less friction. We’ve all experienced the frustration of outdated checkout processes that ask for unnecessary details, and it’s a terrible experience. It was an experience that was acceptable five or ten years ago, but those experiences shouldn’t be acceptable today.

So, we’re focused on improving that journey by working with merchants and payment providers across the ecosystem to provide smooth, secure and super-fast payment experiences for their customers. We do that by helping them tap into popular local payment methods to improve transaction conversions, and implementing value-added services like dynamic checkouts and smart transaction routing amongst other game-changing benefits. It’s all about enhancing convenience and ensuring payments are friction-free and highly optimized.

The fintech industry is known for its fast-paced and ever-evolving nature. How do you lead your team through periods of significant change or disruption? What strategies do you use to maintain team morale and productivity during such times?

Keep going. That may sound simple, but belief is essential. You need to understand where you’re going and what you’re building towards, and you need to ensure your whole team understands and is on board with that goal too.

When it comes to your goal, having a ‘north star’ and knowing what you’re building towards is critical. You might call it the vision, or the endgame, but whatever you call it, you must not assume communication with your team. It is your responsibility to ensure that your key messages and goals are communicated to and understood by everyone in your organisation. And remember that messages need to land in a different way for different people depending on their role.

As a leader, you must also consistently define your organisational culture and ensure its lived and breathed throughout the company. For example, there are two very different cultures at Microsoft and Apple, but they are both very successful companies. At Apple, the approach since their inception has been to get it right first time and ensure that the user experience is the best it can be the first time around — it needs to be pretty much perfect before a customer uses it. On the other hand, at Microsoft, the approach has always been to ship product and get it out there for customers to use and iterate based on active feedback. This shows two very contrasting views and cultures by two very successful technology businesses, neither is right or wrong but the key is that the team understands the culture.

Having held several leadership positions now, I can look back in my career and recognize that a strong culture has underpinned every successful venture I have been involved with. Equally when culture has failed, the organization will not succeed.

How do you come up with goals for your area of responsibility within the organization?

As a small but growing team of around 100 people, we take a ground-up approach to setting our direction, tone, and ultimate goals. We drive accountability by actively involving team members in the goal-setting process. This collaborative approach not only fosters a sense of ownership among our team but also ensures that our goals are informed by diverse perspectives and expertise.

By creating a transparent and inclusive objective setting process, I feel you can drive ownership and accountability more effectively — but the key thing is people at all levels know what they bring to the table.

As we embark on a rapid expansion phase, this approach will help us to scale in a sustainable and considered way. We’re not about growth just for growth’s sake — we’re growing because enterprise-level merchants and other ecosystem players recognize the value that our payment orchestration can create for them. We’re all really excited by what’s to come for BR-DGE, but that means it’s more important than ever for us to maintain that culture of transparency and togetherness so we can continue on the same trajectory.

How do you manage reporting to your board?

Our board is very close and cohesive when it comes to understanding our business. It is supportive of both the business executives and the wider team. As a result, our meetings are focused on solving scaling problems and taking deep dives into opportunities.

Our formal communication largely consists of standard meeting cycles that allow us to get into very meaty subjects and enable us to really move the dial in the organization. These meetings are a good opportunity to get people engaged and go deep into specific areas of challenge or opportunity in the organization, allowing us to win in the long-term.

Almost more or at least equally important is regular communication with the board and I’ll usually speak to our chair and investor director a few times a week. Scaling is tough, and you need alignment and support at every turn to succeed.

Do you have any specific strategies that you use to manage your teams?

We’re a completely remote-first organization. For us, that is a strategy in that it impacts engagement, people, and how we bring our team together, both physically and in terms of our business goals. I do still believe that it is important for people to know their colleagues well, so we still maintain regular get togethers, formally and informally, to update people across the business and at an individual team level.

This year, we have spent a lot of time on our organisational design to make sure that our company is scalable. If you asked anyone who is a leader in a company, they would probably agree that going from 25 to 50 employees can be painful as the close, family feel of a small company needs to change as it grows. We’re now on the other side of that transition with 100 employees, and we’re focusing on our next challenges, opportunities, and how we can support our team to evolve as the company does.

For us, a big change was shifting the mindset from ‘wearing many hats’ to creating structures where people are specialists at a functional level. There are some exceptions to this rule at BR-DGE, but in general we have spent a lot of time identifying individual contributors and managers to create a structure that is not hierarchical, but works as an interconnected, cross-functional way of working.

Fintech companies often disrupt traditional financial services by focusing heavily on customer experience. Can you describe a customer-centric initiative you spearheaded at your company and the impact it had on your business?

This might be the accountant in me, but for the past 10 years I believe that data has been one of the most important aspects of our industry when it comes to improving the customer experience.

At BR-DGE, we’re leveraging data insights to offer targeted payment options and loyalty flows based on individual customer preferences and behaviours. This personalization not only streamlines the checkout process and removes friction, but also significantly increases conversion rates. By putting the consumer at the center of our product we can ensure that we use data to both optimize the plumbing, but also deliver exceptional user experiences.

Improving the end customer’s experience is about optimising the payment flows for our merchants, and to do that data is such a central piece.

Decision-making in fintech involves assessing various risks, including technological, financial, and security risks. How do you approach risk assessment in your role, and can you give an example of a tough decision you made that involved a significant risk?

From the perspective of a CEO, I need to have eyes on all aspects of our business. I have to constantly balance our organisational approach to being innovative and solving real challenges with creative solutions, while also asking questions about how what we do impacts our people, governance, and investment.

There are increasing threats from bad actors, so ensuring the platform is safe, secure, and unquestionably enterprise-grade is high up on my priority list.

Based on your experience and success, what are the “5 Things You Need To Be A Highly Effective C-Level Leader Of A Fintech Company?” How have these 5 things impacted your work or your career? Please share a story or an example for each.

Number one has got to be belief. To be successful, you need to believe that what you’re building and doing is an addition to the landscape and is solving real-world problems. Start ups and scaling is exceptionally tough, I’ve aged 10 years in 2! It can be difficult to continue to believe in and stay true to that original vision as you grow and change as an individual and a company. Especially in the early stages of scaling a business, there are more challenges than you would expect — it comes down to how you adapt to them. They are amazing learning opportunities. It’s like climbing a mountain, getting to the next base camp can be a challenge but that’s what makes it brilliant. If you take them as learning opportunities, you can start to expect what’s coming based on your experiences, and be confident that you will still be successful because you have always had belief in what you’re doing.

My second piece of advice would be to learn from other people who have been in the same position as you in the past. Throughout my career I have always looked around me to people who have been through similar challenges for support, advice, and guidance. It means that I know how to deal with a problem and even navigate around it before it becomes an issue. On another level, it helps me to have a proactive attitude that approaches problems in different ways — how can we accelerate an opportunity? Is it really going to move the needle for our business?

Thirdly would be to never assume that things need to be done a certain way just because they have always been done that way — don’t accept the status quo. If you look at the fintech industry, cards have only been around for the past 60 years, and yet people assume they are the best way of doing things. In reality, physical money has been around for millennia. The journey of currency from money to cards to alternative payment methods is a recent one that will continue to change in ways we can’t event conceive of yet. At BR-DGE, though we recognize that whilst we are experts and have been in business for a number of years already, we are aware that we are still in our infancy and have a lot of growing to do.

My fourth most important element of success is short and sweet — people. Pick your team very carefully, because the people around you will ultimately define both you and your business. If you can build a culture based on people who are fired up and excited about your business, they will become one of your biggest differentiators, without a doubt.

Finally, never underestimate the importance of choosing an investor that is aligned with your goal and understands the highs and lows that growth will bring. Choose an investor who tries to pick you up and the team up in times of difficulty instead of standing on your neck and putting you under unnecessary pressure. As a CEO, you will have enough challenges without having another person making life difficult for you. When this relationship works well it can be a real strength. It can also create a team that is totally open to challenges and can take things head on.

Looking ahead, what do you believe are the key trends that will shape the future of the fintech industry? How are you preparing your company to adapt to these trends, and what role do you see your leadership playing in this adaptation?

Artificial intelligence is undoubtedly going to change the way the world works.

While it may be early days for technology in the fintech industry, I believe we are on the brink of significant transformations, including machine-to-machine payments that require no action from the customer. For instance, consider the experience of charging your electric car. Existing technology enables the car to handle the charging and payment process automatically, allowing it to authorize the payment on your behalf. This innovation eliminates the need for the consumer to step inside the garage to complete the transaction, streamlining the experience and making payments seamless.

Technology such as this will continue to remove the friction in payments even further, so that even one click will be too many for the consumer.

Another important trend is around security, including things like biometric authentication and tokenisation. These advancements not only enhance the protection of sensitive customer data but also build trust, as users feel more confident knowing their transactions are safeguarded against fraud and unauthorized access.

This is what makes payment orchestration essential. By seamlessly integrating diverse payment methods, enhancing security, and prioritizing customer experience, we create a future-proof solution that not only meets the current demands of FIs, merchants, and consumers but also adapts to future innovations.

You are a person of great influence. If you could start a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger.

Keeping it to the payments industry, access to finance is something that continues to be a challenge globally and is holding us back as a society. I would love to see more solutions that encourage financial inclusion regardless of where someone lives in the world and enables them to create enterprise and build better futures.

This was very inspiring. Thank you so much for joining us!