Venturing to Work Unconditionally, Making Banking Better, Bradley Leimer

Interesting interview with regular Irish Tech News contributor Bradley Leimer

1 min pitch for what you are doing now?

At Unconventional Ventures, we help drive innovation to improve systematic financial wellness. This means that we work with our clients to dig more deeply into the roots of financial needs – into societal shifts like our aging populations, the changing nature of work, broad based income inequality, the needs of women and forgotten demographics, and ways to better support the new face of entrepreneurship. We do this to further to provide context, to further help understand and address this new economic reality that the financial services industry and our communities are facing.

We do this by connecting startup founders to funders (to get more diverse ideas to market). We provide mentorship to entrepreneurs (to challenge their business models and who they intend to serve). We offer strategic advisory services to a broad set of corporates (to better understand and impact their focus). We help broaden opportunities for diversity within the ecosystem (because it is far from a fair system today).

Our belief is that anyone with great ideas should have a chance to succeed. Simply put, we are here to make banking better, and we are doing that by changing both hearts and mindsets.

Making Banking Better, Bradley Leimer

Why did you get involved with your new project Unconventional Ventures?

As with a lot of things in life, it was partly serendipity and partly the need for deeper meaning. I have spent most of my career within financial institutions or supporting their efforts through marketing and technology partnerships. For many of us working within the industry, our business model has far too often contradicted our personal values.

I worked hard at places like Santander to make serving the financial needs of every demographic part of the global innovation and venture team’s focus – but the business needs of a global bank (and the needs of a public company) don’t always allow for longer term returns – for truly investing in customer relationships focused on providing as much value to customers as a corporation gets out of them.

When I had the opportunity to start working on projects with more partners that also cared deeply about how society was changing, I jumped at the chance. I now get to work with deeply thoughtful people like my friend and founder Theodora Lau, Arun Krishnakumar at Green Shores Capital, and Daniel Gusev at Gauss Ventures, organizations like Flourish Ventures (part of the Omidyar Network) and Gates Foundation, conferences like Money20/20, Finovate, and especially Fintech Talents, and startups like BillShark, Fundera, and Stoovo.

We get to talk with and work with people around the world who are making a difference within financial services. This has been very rewarding and incredibly meaningful to me personally. I hope everyone has the opportunity to feel this way and drive their career to such a place.

How are you unconventional / what do you do differently?

Within financial services, we have this opportunity to touch every single life on the planet, to be a part of everyone’s day and have meaningful long term impact on lives across generations. Not every industry can say that. What we do that is unconventional is to challenge business models, confront the status quo of who our clients are serving, and question the value of what they are providing.

We work across our clients to connect ideas and value propositions with each other to expand particular solutions to more of the market – whether it is a challenger bank model, a small business or gig economy platform, or assessing ways to save more efficiently or protect our most vulnerable – we need to have more of these solutions become widespread and commonplace. And we need more banks and venture firms to partner and invest in these solutions that level the playing field financially.

The question for us is always whether the industry is doing more giving or doing more taking, whether we are focused on the right things, and whether we are trying to serve the needs of all. We aim to be part of that solution, whether through our clients or through our efforts to get people to think differently, with more empathy.

Looking back on your experiences in a more structured environment, what insights do you draw from then, and how are you applying this to your current work?

Even working within financial services, I was never one to not share my opinion for something I truly believed in. You might say I have always been a corporate rebel – and structure and patience have always been a challenge – but the walls of a room or the confines of a brand shouldn’t dampen your passion or your ability to take action.

One thing I did learn from my twenty five years inside financial services was the need to gain levels of consensus throughout the organization, through research and positioning a point of view so clearly that others were ready to march with you behind the flag you now shared. You have to get people to share your point of view as much as you have to slow down and understand theirs – to appreciate different backgrounds and to build empathy as much as any amount of consensus.

What happens as you move up (and down, and around) the corporate ladder is that you (hopefully) appreciate the opportunities that you have had in your career and you are able to help so many others to level up similarly. This is perhaps the most rewarding part of business. Of all the teams and projects I have led in my career – from digital banking launches to Y2K remediation to venture due diligence and everything in between – the relationship building you have to do within a firm of any size is what translates so directly to what we do today.

It’s people in the end – the messy, yet fascinating parts of how we think, how our backgrounds and biases both conflict and connect, how relationships are formed and how they impact our lives and our business models. People are at the heart of everything, so connect with those that most resomate with you, those that most challenge your thinking – both personally and professionally – and start tackling the big problems that need to be addressed.

Taking a big picture view of digital marketing, where are we going? How do we balance data-based insights, with wrong-footed usage like Cambridge Analytica etc?

As a staunch consumer privacy advocate more aligned with GDPR than Silicon Valley, I don’t much like where we are headed, as data driven business models make both our public and (seemingly) most private preferences and predilections part of a much larger personal profile and advertising schema. I take the Silicon Valley model of Facebook, Google, Amazon and others rather personally, because now it has become the norm – even for our aggregated financial transaction data to be used by marketers and hedge funds alike.

The first decade of my career was leading database marketing and analytic teams, primarily leveraging financial customer data for nearly seven thousand clients – this amounted to data on tens of millions of customers coming into our data center every single week. It was a privacy nightmare, as many banks sent us the entire customer file. As amazing as it was for targeting and model building – believe me, getting results to a tenth of a decile made my team very popular in accounting and with clients – customers those days didn’t even have to opt-in until after  Gramm-Leach-Bliley was enacted.

This really changed my thinking around personal data. It’s also why I left that industry. We balance this type of data driven business model through more regulation – especially around critical use of this data for targeting things like political ads. There’s no excuse for a lack of action around consumer protections – terms and conditions and a checkbox of acknowledgement isn’t enough. We need new business models, and new value exchanges. Humans are more than their data. We are more than 1s and 0s.

You now work in a more gig based / remote way, how are you enjoying this in relation to previous roles with Santander etc?

I prefer to work remote, whether it is in the home office, a coffee shop, or a plane. What was great about going to Santander in 2014 was that I was remote about half the time. As the first country head of innovation, I was the only Santander employee west of Texas, based out of my home office outside of San Francisco.

The other part of my time was either at our U.S. offices back in Boston, in Spain or the U.K., or around the global conference circuit. This shift toward a remote environment has been a five year journey. I had also always been one to take my teams out of the office as much as possible. When I led marketing, I would grab my camera and go out and take original photos for the website, posters, and marketing materials.

I would often take walking meetings to get people looking around and to think a little differently. Even the act of going out to lunch or coffee to engage someone in conversation one on one was as important then as it is now.

With technology today, you are never truly remote. Even in an office environment, whether a co-work startup space or what we created at Santander, I think it’s important to mix up your interactions with each other as much as it is to have that space of quiet when you’re writing or intently focused on what you’re working on. Find a variety of spaces that work for you. And try to get out into a new environment as much as possible – it’s good for your mind and your soul.

I have always had a passion for travel – my father worked at United Airlines for 37 years – so I love new places, meeting diverse people, new cultures, and new experiences. Be remote and daydream a bit. Then turn those ideas into action. It’s how we all will change the world.

Where do you hope to be in the next 1 to 3 years?

I want to be doing much of the same thing – to continue to make an impact – one person, one team, one business model, one company, one industry – at a time. We should all have an opportunity to work and live and breathe that which we are most passionate about. At our firm, we believe that every voice matters, that people should be treated equally, fairly and consistently regardless of background.

Because so much of success in life is because of luck – sure, there can be hard work involved for many of us, but for those coming from certain levels of embedded privilege, that’s B.S. – opportunity is far from equal.

I want to continue the discussion as to the need for a social contract, a moral obligation, between the banking industry and the global community. Our industry should have a mission to help larger objectives like achieving global financial inclusion, but also more localized ones that achieve parity of opportunity within our own communities. We must all work together to make every aspect of banking better. That’s what I want to continue to do. To educate, to build, to act.

How can people find out more about you personally & your work?

People can reach out to me directly through email, connect through LinkedIn or Twitter, or by visiting our website and our corporate Twitter. We have a weekly podcast called Rhetoriq, which covers a variety of topics around financial services, innovation, and financial inclusion, co-hosted with Arun Krishnakumar out of London. Also look for our weekly blog on Irish Tech News, and a recent piece on why we do what we do.

Anything else you’d like to add / we should have asked?

I was hoping you would ask why it took me so long to be featured on Irish Tech News!

[Ed. LOL. We’re far too polite to ask that!]

I think Simon Cocking originally reached out to me more than three years ago, and honestly I have no excuse. I just wanted a chance to say thank you for what you and the team are doing in the technology space and for helping us tell our story. It will take changing a million minds to improve the lives of billions. Let’s hope that collectively we can do this across the thousands of steps it will take, for the sake of our families and for the sake of future generations.

See more of Bradley’s articles for ITN here.

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