Nik Milanović, Founder of This Week in Fintech and General Partner of the Fintech Fund — On fintech, philosophy, inclusion and community
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In today’s episode, Andrew Janssens sits down with Nik Milanović, Founder of This Week in Fintech and General Partner of The Fintech Fund.
Nik has spent the last decade working in fintech and microfinance, and is one of the leading voices covering fintech globally. He has also been a key organizer in building the fintech community, bringing together fintech enthusiasts all over the world. Earlier this year, he closed the Fintech Fund, a venture capital fund focusing on early-stage fintech after many years as an active angel investor.
Prior to This Week in Fintech and the Fintech Fund, Nik was hire #1 at Funding Circle, led Strategy at Petal and subsequently led Business Development and Strategy for Google Pay and Google Finance.
In this content-packed episode, Andrew and Nik discuss:
- Nik’s early start in Microfinance, and how it has informed his philosophy on Fintech:
“You know, my career has taken a very circuitous route, but my core interests are eventually getting back to how you can help people improve their financial situations. I think we have the means and the technology and the global interconnectivity to really pull people out of extreme poverty on a level that we haven’t before in history.”
- Nik’s gratitude that This Week in Fintech has grown as Fintech itself has been maturing over the last few years
“I started out the newsletter as an internal team email to our Petal team, and then forwarded it to a couple friends as a weekly news update. And they’re said “Oh, this is great, subscribe, me.” I said, “Well, there’s no way to subscribe. I just send this out as an email.” But that was kind of the genesis of setting it up as its own newsletter and email and making it public and to the place that it is now, three years later.
Fortunately, for me, in that time, there were a lot of inflection points for fintech. It was a pretty unloved product category, you know, even just like four years ago, and then key events like, you know, Visa’s attempted acquisition of Plaid, you know, made everybody sit up and say, “Oh, this is interesting. There’s like real tech to build here. And there’s real exit opportunities if I’m an investor.”
And what I’ve enjoyed so much about that is like, Alright, there’s more media attention. There’s more venture dollars and fintech, but really, it’s great having this flood of super talented people building and working on FinTech products.
You know, I’ve been working in FinTech since 2011. And the space looks very different. Back then it was like a weird hobbyist community, where we would have these meetups organized by Matt Burton, who is at QED now, where it’ll be like in somebody’s basement, and like, there’ll be 25 of us (and maybe only 25 People in FinTech in San Francisco). And, you know, nobody knew what to call the space. And we were asking ourselves, should we call it online lending or new finance?”
- What’s next for This Week in Fintech
“We’ve been operating in loudspeaker mode for the past three years, where everything that we’re doing, we’re organizing it or broadcasting it. So, we host events, or we write newsletters, or we host a podcast. But what I want to build goes beyond media. I want to put together the Industry Association for Financial Technology, and that requires a lot more than just a fixed media asset. It means really developing kind of one place for the FinTech community to come together.
So we made an announcement last week that we acquired and rebranded the Global Finnovation Slack community, which is a community of about 5,000 people in FinTech that’s grown organically over the past three years. The growth of Finnovation really mirrors the growth of this week in FinTech over the same period, and Shamir Karkal… put together the Innovation Group, and it’s just grown, you know, crazy, very organically over that time.
But, you know, there’s a lot of people who are really engaged in the community, but there’s not a lot of structure, or programming. And so we started talking, nine months ago about whether we can combine these two. And so I’m glad that it finally is seeing daylight now because I think the next real step for us is to put together a kind of Reddit style forum for FinTech specifically where we have a ton of content curation and programming and a glossary of terms.”
On Diversity in Fintech
“It’s good that we’re in a place as an industry where two white men on a podcast are thinking about how they can contribute to improving diversity — the burden of diversity should not have to fall on diverse people. And so it’s a good question to ask. FinTech sits at the intersection of finance and technology. And these are two industries that traditionally have been dominated by people who kind of like fit the same profile.
There’s a lot to unpack there, but you as a person are like more likely to join an industry where you see more people who you feel are good models for you, and who you can see yourself becoming like, you’re more likely to join an industry and like move up and it like where you have friends working in industry. Or if you have connections with companies, that industry. And so, you know, in my mind it is not enough to just say FinTech companies are open to hiring anyone.
And it doesn’t matter what your background is, you kind of have to be like, less passive and more proactive to get to the goal of like building a more representative industry, where you’re creating channels, and you’re creating, mentorship and networking sessions, like we do women’s focus networking sessions before our events in Latin America that Christine has been leading. And you really promote the profiles of people who come from underrepresented backgrounds working within fintech.
When you do things proactively like that, I think you’d make it easier for people who are like on the sidelines to say, hey, I can I I want to jump into FinTech and I want to work on FinTech because I actually see people there that I think I can be like, or I see people there who like look like me or come from the same background as me. But it doesn’t happen automatically. And it doesn’t happen overnight. I think it’s a work in progress. And it’ll always be a work in progress. But if each of us is kind of doing a small thing to improve representation, you know, I think that we really meaningfully get there in a way that like many other industries may not.”
- On “joining the dark side” as an investor
“I do miss like the company building side, maybe one day, I’ll be back. But I naturally found myself just like trying to stay on top of everything happening in this very crowded, very quickly moving space. And that I think that lends itself over time to investing. It started, years and years and years ago with angel investing and then managing the syndicate. And the syndicate led to the fund one which has been, in my mind, like a very successful proof of concept.
And now I’m starting to have real conversations raising Fund II which is like really institutionalizing where we see our core competency being. And the thing that I really, really enjoy about investing is kind of on two sides. One, it’s meeting really sharp people and hearing their vision for the future. Especially when it’s like a non consensus vision … But then after the investment, like it helps me scratch that itch of still being involved with early stage teams.”
- Why early stage investing is like space exploration
- Nik’s love of music
- and a whole lot more!
Check out the Episode on the platform of your choice here
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About Nik
Nik Milanović is the Founder of This Week in Fintech (TWIF) and General Partner of The Fintech Fund. He still writes two newsletters a week for TWIF.
Prior to This Week in Fintech and the Fintech Fund, Nik was hired as the first employee at Funding Circle. From there he moved to Petal, where he led Strategy (and started TWIF as a weekly update to his team). Subsequently, he led Business Development and Strategy for Google Pay and Google Finance.
About This Week in Fintech
This Week in Fintech is a digest of all things in global fintech. From a single weekly newsletter it has grown to coverage of fintech news around the world.
About The Fintech Fund
The Fintech Fund is an venture fund focusing on early-stage fintech and defi.
About the Author
Andrew Janssens is a second-year MBA Candidate at The Wharton School, where he is part of the Wharton FinTech Podcast team. He has a passion for the nerdy corners of financial services, venture capital, and all things FinTech. Don’t hesitate to reach out with questions, comments, feedback, and opportunities at ajanss@wharton.upenn.edu.
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