CTO interview: Emanuele Blanco, how Moneyfarm attracts tech talents
This week I am lucky to be presenting you Emanuele, CTO at Moneyfarm, the digital wealth manager company that raised £36 millions in their latest Series C at the end of 2019. Emanuele explains what is Moneyfarm, but more important for techies: how do you attract talents in today’s job market and make sure the team keeps performing as it grows.
I see from your background you did a lot of contracting, including at Moneyfarm. How did that lead you to the role of CTO?
I’ve been in the industry for a few years and I wanted to see different companies, therefore I spent some time as a contractor. Contracting is a good way to see a lot in a short period of time, going from challenge to challenge. It’s interesting and varied. You get to meet many different companies, ways of working, and technologies.
When I joined Moneyfarm early on as a contractor, I loved the team and colleagues, and I quickly saw the huge potential. When they asked me to join permanently, I said yes. The vision and product attracted me. The product, what we do for our customers, was really the key factor in deciding to join.
What is the differentiating factor for Moneyfarm?
We want to help people to invest without the hard work. Moneyfarm provides simple, top-performing investment solutions using a combination of technology and easy to access investment consultants. It’s basically a cost-effective way to invest with actively managed portfolios and the guidance of experienced professionals, attracting experienced investors keen to delegate. I am proud to say that we really keep finance simple, and accessible.
How does it work? What countries do you operate in?
We currently operate in Italy and the UK. Customers are instructed to create a profile on the platform and answer some questions before they get matched with a good-to-go portfolio and a Moneyfarm investment consultant in order to reach their investment goals.
Each portfolio contains a broad, handpicked mix of cost-efficient exchange-traded funds (ETFs). It offers free withdrawals and the ability to exit and avoid further costs. To target the highest possible returns consistent with the risk level, Moneyfarm uses optimisation algorithms to help their experts choose combinations of different asset types, regions and currencies.
Typically, the higher the risk level, the more a portfolio will be invested in stocks and shares, while further down the risk scale, the balance will shift more towards bonds. Every decision is based on data and research, driven by quantitative techniques and qualitative judgment overseen by Moneyfarm’s investment committee.
The investment committee’s tactical asset allocation strategy focuses on balancing long-term view with a shorter, one-year perspective. Proprietary quantitative models make the most of short-term market opportunities as they arise. Moneyfarm’s strategic asset allocation team looks 10 years ahead at the expected returns and volatility of every asset type and how they might react to economic and political developments. Portfolio managers monitor the markets every day to make sure investments are working hard, reinvesting the dividends paid out by assets in portfolios.
There’s a lot of competition today with a big need of programmers and a small pool of talents. How can tech companies attract tech talents?
I think it’s very important to have an employee presence to show the world what you do, the challenges you’re solving. People want to work in companies where they’re empowered to do their job. It’s not good to restrict the tech team to only shipping the features, but to make them core in helping the company think about what they’re building. We’re moving to a world of product-engineers: developers who are no more factory workers working in a chain.
The key is to utilise their problem-solving skills to not just come and write code, but to solve bigger business challenges. People want to be part of the mission, to be part of something. Not simply looking for somebody who tells them what to code.
And in big organisations? How do you maintain that distributed ownership without diluting the general direction?
If you build the organisation in small teams (payments, investments, etc.), you can build that domain knowledge in small teams. When the organisation grows, it’s hard to keep the impact of the engineers, but that’s the difference between successful organisations and the others: keeping the speed and value generation as the company grows.
It’s crucial to make sure every engineer makes an impact.
Funny you mention that as my next question is about measuring the performance of your engineering team?
At product initiative level, everytime we think about building a new feature we make a bet: we don’t know if it will be a successful feature or not. We need to constantly experiment. I think it’s important for the teams to be high performing, even if the experiment is not interesting for customers, so we need to be able to pivot quickly. You need a team that experiments all the time, not getting stuck in a problem.
Another key factor is the delivery practice: I’m a big believer in small increments of software that you can ship fast. We built an environment of continuous stream of building value. We look at metrics such as cycle time and deployment frequency and continuously think on how we can improve those.
Shipping code frequently means we are delivering value frequently. Waiting 3 or more weeks to ship is something not representative of a high performing team. No release should be more than 2 or 3 days.
For bigger pieces of code, release the code in production even if it’s deactivated for the user and use techniques such as feature flags. You can start testing the features then via unit, or acceptance tests and derisk the chances of a big rollback should something go wrong in a big release. And turn on the switch when all the pieces are ready.
What advice would you give to a developer starting their career today?
When I started my career, we already had Google and Stack Overflow — I’m not that old! — but there’s so much I didn’t know at the beginning. Find someone who can help you; a mentor, a person who has done it before.
The problems junior developers face are the same more experienced ones have faced. Get involved in communities, but not just the tech part of learning a new language or framework. Ask about the approach to work, soft skills, interacting with the organisation. Be curious. Most of the time the problems we face are not technical but people’s problems. This is something many junior developers don’t realise: clever code might not be maintainable by the team so it turns out to be bad code.
Think about where you want to go in 5 years’ time. Starting the right way can pave a very successful career.
If you want to connect with Emanuele, click here.
To learn more about Moneyfarm, visit their website: moneyfarm.com
If you’re a techie working on something exciting or you simply want to have a chat, get in touch with me. I’m currently CTO at Kolleno.com
