Podcast IMH Media Network & Aldemis

Aug 05, 2025·By Aldemis

Podcast IMH Media Network & Aldemis

Transcript

Aldemis services introduction

Alexander Mihalcea (00:00)
So, welcome everyone, I'm Alexander Mihalcea and today we're joined by Richard Ney, Managing Consultant of the Aldemis. Thank you for being here.

Richard Ney (00:08)
No worries, thanks for having me.

Alexander Mihalcea (00:12)
Before we dive in, could you give us a quick overview of what Aldemis does?

Richard Ney (00:17)
Sure, Aldemis is a general consultancy, mostly focused on FinTech. The main purpose is to make sure that tech and business fully align. I was having a number of discussions with CEOs and CTOs that feel that sometimes there are some break in the communication. I launched Aldemis fairly recently.

Until a months ago, I was the CEO for a fintech called Lerex, which was playing in the Banking As A Service space. So Aldemis is really capitalizing on my technology background, but as well on my CEO experience to make sure that tech deliver for business.

Alexander Mihalcea (01:01)
Okay, okay, that's fascinating. And what inspired you to join all them? Was there a specific moment or experience that sparked this journey?

Richard Ney (01:09)
I've always used Aldemis as a consultancy vehicle to some extent from way back. But I think the reason to really relaunch it is the growing frustration that technology wasn't used to its full potential. There was a number of situations where I could see CTOs on board tables struggling to get some of the important tech concepts understood and getting the right buy-in from the rest of the board. And equally, I could hear CEOs being concerned about tech being built for the sake of tech, and not for the sake of return on investment. Because I've always been really passionate about both tech and business, I wanted to help bridge that gap.

Making sure everyone's understood what everyone else is doing and pushing in the same direction.

Alexander Mihalcea (02:15)
Okay, and as a whole, what drew you to focus on the fintech and financial sector?

Richard Ney (02:21)
We do focus on FinTech, but you're right, it's the larger financial piece. To give a bit about my background, I spent my early career building stock exchanges and trading platform, as well as core banking systems. I've always been in that kind of larger financial ecosystem, but more recently into FinTech. The thing we really focus on is situations where you need low latency or high throughput, or high level of automation. Something we are being asked a lot about is: How do you reduce your cost of operation or cost of customer onboarding through automation and through technology? So that's really the pieces that we focus on. But obviously it extends to some situation where we would help around, you know, investor funding and fundraising from that technology aspect.

Alexander Mihalcea (03:20)
Okay, interesting. And for example, what's been your most valuable learning experience in this industry?

Richard Ney (03:27)
That's a good question. I think there are two things that spring to mind: from a business point of view, it's the usual misconception that if you build it well, customers will come. That's never been my experience. I think, you can build a great product, but if you don't market it, if you don't talk about it, customers will not come.

I think sometimes, especially in FinTech that are led by technical founders, they build an amazing piece of tech, an amazing platform and think that the rest will fall in line. It will definitely help, but there are other things you need to do to make sure that you're growing at the pace you want. We can help with that.

Another learning that springs to mind is being careful about anticipating what customers want. I've seen myself build solutions where I was sure people would want it. I spent time building something and actually customers wanted 10 % of it. When they start using it or when you start having discussions, you realize that it's merging into another direction.

So I would encourage going back to the MVP, just build the strict minimum, speak to your customer and build on that customer need and experience is more important than just trying to anticipate as much as possible.

Alexander Mihalcea (04:59)
Yeah, right.

Right, right, right. So let's go back to when you first started. So what major challenges or gaps did you see in the market that made you think this needs to be solved?

Richard Ney (05:13)
It's going back to those board discussions around miscommunication and frustration. One clear example of that is I was sitting on the board about 18 months ago just as a general advisor / observer and there was a discussion between a chief technical officer and a chief financial officer, and to some extent, with the CEO as well.

There was a lot of background, and some political baggage in that discussion, but the discussion became about the chief technical officer having to justify what a DevOps engineer was doing. And the CEO was non-technical founder, the CFO wasn't technical, and the CTO really struggled to articulate what are DevOps and why there are needed.

In that case, the salary bracket might be slightly different than other type of technologiest and that became really apparent that there was a gap. from my point of view, wearing both the technical and business hat, I think what the CTO wanted to do was best for the business, but the CTO struggled to get the traction.

So after that board is I reached out to the CFO and had an 'off the record' discussion, and reached out to the CEO as well. that decision was overturned fairly quickly.

But that's really when I realized the main challenge the CTO was facing at the time was that the CTO was still using a number of technical words to describe the situation where I just went back to layman's term, pure business. I really focused on cost saving with the CFO. I really focused on the business benefit to the CEO.

And that's what I think helped unlock that discussion. So that was one of the first moments where I realized, well, wait a minute, there are still some of those gaps happening today in decent mid-size businesses.

Alexander Mihalcea (07:25)
Yeah, because that's very interesting. And for example, could you elaborate on why the existing solutions weren't meeting these needs?

Richard Ney (07:34)
Yes, I think if you look at lot of consultancy out there, they focus on one of the aspects. They focus either on technology or on business. I don't know of many consultancies that really cover both sides, really look at how both work together.

They focus on how you build technology, do you deliver good technology, and things like unusual project management. But at board level, there isn't a clear integration with the C-suite. CEO, CFO, COO, some of the advisors, everyone needs to understand what is going and be on the same page to be comfortable that they're spending the right money in the right places.

What we're seeing on the market today are budgets are getting tighter, it's bit more difficult to raise money. People want to make sure that they're cutting the right area and making sure that you're addressing the right thing is really important. Then you have the consultancies that focus really much on the business size, but often struggle to articulate what they need from the tech team. The CTO brief becomes very, very high level and there are room for disalignment.

Most CTOs that are with these institutions are really, really good, but still it doesn't help. Aldemis can help them a little bit more to focus on the right thing. I think the current solutions don't go far enough either way, either not far enough with the business, or not far enough with the technology. So that's really what Adlemsis is focusing on.

Alexander Mihalcea (09:23)
Yeah, right, because for example this was my next question, so walk us through how Aldemis addresses these challenges. What makes your approach unique?

Richard Ney (09:31)
I think the really unique piece with our approach is that every single challenge, decision, question, we always go back into how does that benefit the business. You're about to spend a pound in technology. How do we demonstrate that that pound in technology is right? How is that going to contribute to more than a pound the revenue, the valuation, etc...

Alexander Mihalcea (09:44)
Mm-hmm.

Richard Ney (10:00)
A lot of businesses are still trying to grow their valuation effectively, either through revenue or other metrics, they will want to grow their valuation. So how do you make sure that, every part of your technology directly contributes to your valuation? And that's really the focus we are having. If a decision is right for the business, it's right for the technology as well.

Interestingly, when we first engage, sometimes there is a bit of a question mark on the technology side of, wait a minute, we're going to have to justify, we're going to be asked more questions. But actually, when we start engaging, it's not the case. What we find is that when you explain to technology team that this piece of work is going to really contribute to the business, and this one less so, everyone wants to help the business. So what we find is that the team naturally aligns to the pieces that are really contributing to the business.

I'll give you an example of that. We joined, probably five, six years ago now, a business to effectively to improve the business of the perception of development quality issue. It was an old piece of technology.

The software had probably been around for 10, 12 years, wasn't really motivating to work on, was kind of the usual, there was not many new features, it was pure BAU and things like that. And the tech team was motivated, but not greatly motivated. Because of that, there was a perception of quality issue within the dev team.

The reality is that when project fails, it's never just one team, right? So the issue was larger than that. But there was a perception that the tech team wasn't delivering. And the first thing we did is we took the whole team in a room, it was a team of about 25 people. We took the whole team in the room working, the team that was working on that old cash cow type of product.

I asked the COO, and the chief product officer to come in and to explain where the product fit in the overall businesses. And what they explained during that meeting to developers is that, it was an old product. It was going to be retired, the product has you know, it shelf life was about three years still or something like that. But the product was currently contributing to 80 % of the business revenue. And when they articulated how important it was for the business, and they were saying, you guys, you 25 people are generating 80 % of the revenue for the business, for the 300 people in the organization. That's where 80 % of the revenue is coming from what you guys are doing. When there is a bug happening, which is critical, that revenue is going to decrease. So the fact that you're fixing bugs quickly allows us to maintain that. And then they explain what they were going to do with the team and the plan to move into a new product and, what was going to happen post three years.

But just that message of saying, you 25 people are generating revenue for 80 % of everyone here. That just made a massive difference in the approach. And we saw a difference in the tech team delivery. Like I said, the overall perception was larger than that. Once we fixed tech, we had to look at other pieces. But mapping technology with business is extremely, extremely powerful.

Alexander Mihalcea (13:46)
Yeah, 100%. And for example, when you talk to potential clients, what's the biggest misconception they typically have about what you do?

Richard Ney (13:57)
A typical misconception is the one I described that it is going to annoy the technologists, it is going to become a challenge or a barrier for technologists. That's the biggest misconception because usually we are selling mostly to CEOs and COOs. We're able to explain that but even when we sell to a CTO, we're able to explain from past projects that actually is not the case. We are really able to help both sides. If I look at the example of the DevOps engineer, bridging the gap also helps the CTO.

So one of the differences in the approach from a technology point of view is that Technologies don't have to explain us why we need to address technical debt. They don't have to explain us the benefit of testing automation. They don't have to explain us some of those basic tech concepts. We get it, right? My background is as a developer. We're developing technology all the time. We can go right with the business and help articulate those benefits. The second misconception is about our cost. How are we going to get the return investment? And I think that one all depend on the size of the business.

If it's less than 10 people business and the revenue is very small, we probably won't engage to start with because we feel we won't deliver the value. For slightly larger businesses, making sure that the bussiness fully leverage technology as a real benefit. In some projects we are able to cut onboarding time by 80%. We were able to drastically reduce operational costs, things like that. So we can demonstrate return on investment. And we have a number of project examples on our website.

Those are the two biggest misconceptions.

Aldemis success stories

Alexander Mihalcea (16:08)
Also, could you share a specific success story of a client who saw significant results using your solution?

Richard Ney (16:16)
There are a of them that springs to mind. Going back into the team generating 80 % of the revenue, we primarily engaged because the customer had started a regulatory project. I think we engaged in November and the customer needed the project to go live, I think it was March or April, I remember roughly a six months project.

Our customer had realized very quickly that things were going wrong, things couldn't be done. They had started the project three months before speaking to us and they already had forecasted six months delay. We engaged and were quite drastic around what could be done and what could not be done. I think it's another difference in our approach. We are not afraid of having difficult discussions so people know exactly what's feasible or not.

Effectively through our engagement they managed to hit their timeline and I remember the whole business thought that it was never going to be feasible, they were really worried. We were able to meet a timeline and they didn't have to decommission anything. If the project had failed, they would have had to switch off those 80 % revenue until we could deliver. So there was a very large impact for them.

Another success stories on a smaller scale, was a new startup probably a couple of years ago. There were two co-founders, one business, one technologist, and they just had an argument. So the technologist left with the tech team, and the business person was left with the source code and a bit of documentation, but not many. In order to keep customer contracts, they had to be live within three months.

Alexander Mihalcea (18:32)
Yeah.

Richard Ney (18:48)
That's someone I knew personally, so we were able to engage very quickly. It was actually a friend of mine that contacted me and said, hey, here's the situation... We jumped in, recovered from source code, and effectively fixed some bugs and managed to get live in three months.

There are a number of others successes, some are on our website.

Another example is all about reducing the cost of onboarding and automation. Not through Aldemis, but prior to that, a project I led was automating the testing for a stock exchange. And effectively, what had happened is that the stock exchange had ended up being in a situation where they were changing their API provider. They were changing their whole client API.

Alexander Mihalcea (19:43)
Mm-hmm.

Richard Ney (19:46)
The situation was that they only got access to the new API on Monday and it had to be retested and live on the Friday. Can you imagine retesting the Whole Stock Exchange, right? So we spent a lot of time prior to that. I can't remember the exact situation and why the API wasn't ready before that, I think it was a configuration thing. I can't remember why it took so long to get a new one available. But anyway, we had three months. We knew three months prior to having to retest. We spent a lot of time in those three months to automate everything. And when the new API dropped on the Monday in the test environment we are able to retest everything within two hours, get that to the provider, the provider was really quick at fixing bugs, and effectively by the Wednesday, all bugs had been fixed and the API was ready to go out.

That's some of the things which would have been, again, it's really about what does the business need, how can we do that, and there's also an element of maybe you need to compromise on a couple of the nice to have points.

Those are a few examples.

Broader industry trends in FinTech

Alexander Mihalcea (20:24)
Yeah.

Yeah,

interesting. And now looking at a broader industry, what key trends are you seeing emerge?

Richard Ney (20:48)
In the FinTech industry, the massive one that everyone talks about is AI, but from what we're seeing, the FinTech industry is still not leveraging it. There are few businesses at the periphery of it that use AI extensively, but as a whole, we are not seeing a massive shift to AI. But we are seeing some strong element of automation being adopted, but automation, not AI. But I'm sure its going to come.

The biggest trend we're seeing at the moment is around regulatory changes. We saw things like the ATP fraud compensation coming into place at the of last year had a bit of an impact. Not as much as we thought in the industry though, but there was an impact.

Because of that, we saw the cost of payment processing increasing and then people looking at automation to kind of go back to a reasonable cost of processing.

As part of that, I think we see a number of people talking about what we call FinTech 2.0. So if you look at the FinTech today, FinTech today have taken a number of legacy processes and legacy software. They've built a very nice UI on front of it and they've been great in lot of cases, this is great user experience. But the user experience is still backed by some of the old process and some of the old system. And the reason it's a problem is becasue it's a bit dysfunctional in places, right? That's where you see things like getting offboarded as a customer, or gettig onboarding but blocked on the first transaction, or I get blocked and it takes me three weeks to explain to compliance why it's fine or I'm getting off-boarded with zero reason.

We're seeing a number of situations at the moment where SMEs get off-boarded from their bank with no reason whatsoever. That's because all those processes are not quite working together. What we call FinTech 2.0 is that through AI and automation, we believe that all of the teams, whether it's technology, compliance, onboarding, ... all of that is going to work together and therefore the decisions that are going to be made are going to be more normalized, more homogeneous, and the risk is will make more sense and the decisions are going to be easier to address. So I think that's what's going to happen longer term.

That's one thing we had built with Lerex is a platform which was fully real-time, highly automated, and all of that could work in a much more effective way.

Alexander Mihalcea (23:52)
All right.

Right, and because you mentioned this, what regulatory challenges are impacting the industry most significantly?

Richard Ney (24:02)
I think APP was a big one, APP fraud. Again, we all expected almost the end of the world on this one. It didn't really happen. I'm still not sure we've seen the end of it, but it's definitely not as big of a problem as we all thought, which is good.

One of the challenges on the regulatory element is the pace of change that we've seen over the last couple of years has been very difficult for lot of business to maintain. And as well, the disparity within the UK and Europe, especially in situations like crypto.

I was talking a little bit about AI. Similarly, it would be great to see more information from a regulatory body on what they're going to accept from an AI point of view, because you could have an AI fraud system in place or onboarding system, but is that going to satisfy the regulator?

So I think one of the challenges is going to be making sure that we understand what the regulator is happy to do or not, following those new types of approaches. It would be great to see some more homogeneity between the UK and the EEA. Because a lot of businesses operate across both jurisdictions. So when it's not clear, it becomes difficult. And we are seeing that in crypto, creating some real challenges because the framework are not the same.

Alexander Mihalcea (25:34)
Right, right, right, right, So what challenges do you think traditional financial institutions face in adapting to fintech innovations?

Richard Ney (25:45)
That's a good one. So traditional businesses, I one of the challenges, and that's going to go back purely on tech. One of the challenges that if you haven't built your business to leverage technology stack properly, it's really hard to change.

It's also really difficult to adapt legacy system, it takes a lot of time. So for traditional businesses, I spent a decent amount of time working for large banks and companies like that. It is difficult for larger companies to go back into true FinTech innovation and start delivering FinTech solution. And that's why we see the number of initiatives failing.

It's difficult for a number of reasons, all the way up to board level type of considerations. I think traditional businesses face these countless challenges. I think what's going to happen is they'll start buying out and we already see that happening. They start buying out tech businesses rather than just trying to build them, they just buy them out. But then the question becomes, how do they integrate that as part of the ecosystem?

I think what's going to happen is larger financial institutions are just going to become the backbone. They're not going to be customer facing anymore. They're going to be the mortgage provider behind, I don't know, revolute mortgage or behind starling mortgage, for example. They're going to become the backbone of those fintechs and it's going to go through a couple of layers before it reaches the end user.

The reason its going to end up happening is because what they do really well is the traditional financial services, not user experience.

What are business owners getting wrong?

Alexander Mihalcea (27:54)
Okay. And what do you think? In your opinion, most business owners are getting wrong when they're trying to address this specific problem.

Richard Ney (28:05)
Not enough market research, either pre-lunch or post-lunch. I am still surprised that I speak to businesses and I'm asking, okay, which feature are your users using the most? What do they want? What is their biggest problem? Which is the stuff they like the most? And they maybe have some ideas of those answers but they don't necessarily have a clear answer.

And I think unless you understand clearly what your customers want, it's difficult. But more than that, how are customer need evolving. Providing one thing very well to a handful of customers is very different than what customer will want when you're providing a service to 1,000 of them, right? And those customer group might evolve as your business grows. Your original group might not be the group you're servicing anymore.

So you need to be very clear on what your current customer at this point in time like and dislike. And I think they don't spend enough time on that.

Over the last five, six years, we've seen at the beginning of that period a lot of investment going into fintech. So a lot of people are still trying to raise money at the back of ideas which didn't necessarily make complete sense, or they didn't have a clear rationale for why it was going to work, how they were going to generate money.

I think it's happening a bit less now, but it's still happening a little bit. I think at the back of that, what we're going to see is new fintech type of services that truly generates money, that are truly viable. But for that to happen, there needs to be a cycle of Technology innovation.

When you look at FinTech today, the cost of onboarding a customer is still very high. In some of the businesses, cost of retaining and servicing a customer every month is still very, very high. And unless you use automation to solve those challenges, some of the businesses will never be able to be profitable because their unit economics is just wrong. So I think we're going to see more adoption of automation and AI, and that's going to drive business model that can be truly profitable.

Alexander Mihalcea (30:29)
Okay, and what advice would you give to these business owners who want to stay ahead of these changes?

Richard Ney (30:36)
Watch the market, understand really well what your customers want and be very, very careful about your unit economics and look at ways to drive them down whilst providing a very good service.

Don't be afraid to collaborate with what look like competitors. In previous businesses my competitors have been very useful. My first exit was we sold to a competitor. It was very successful transaction.

Alexander Mihalcea (31:26)
Yeah, right, right.

Yeah, okay, wonderful, wonderful, great advice though. And as you wrap up, what's next for all the enemies and exciting developments on the right side?

Perfect, perfect, perfect. And for listeners who want to learn more or potentially work with all the enemies, what's the best way to get in touch?

Perfect, perfect. So thank you for sharing those insights about you, about your component, about the whole story. And thank you for this amazing podcast session.

Great.

IMH Media Network

Thank you to Alexander Mihalcea, founder of IMH Media Network for hosting us!

Podcast IMH Media Network & Aldemis