The first Manchester Tech Forum in 2020 assembled the city’s start-ups spearheading growth of its burgeoning fintech sector. With an eye on what’s to come in 2020, entrepreneurs shared their experiences of hiring and developing their product within the dynamics of Manchester’s wider fintech ecosystem.
Polly Taylor-Pullen, who heads up business development at Nivo, discussed bridging the gap between financial services providers and millennials, adopting a national hiring strategy, and putting Manchester fintech on the map in 2020.
About Nivo
Nivo is a secure communication channel that helps regulated service providers deliver an easy, convenient experience for their customers, with no technical effort. They’ve helped organisations reduce signup time from 8 days to 5 minutes, cut fraudulent applications and build priceless advocacy with their customer base. It’s the fastest, most cost-effective, and lowest-risk way for financial services companies to go digital and make the entire customer life cycle, from onboarding to servicing, paperless.
Creating an easier experience for customer engagement
Polly explains how until recently financial services companies had to rely on traditional communication methods such as post, phone calls and email to engage with their customers. Due to strict regulation they were unable to keep up with the way that most of us have evolved to communicate all the time, which is through instant messaging. Nivo has solved that issue by creating an encrypted communication channel which allows companies, big or small, to innovate and deliver a better experience than their competitors.
Our flexible working policy and having offices in both Manchester and London means we can recruit the best people from the national talent pool.
“As the millennial generation starts to engage with financial services institutions, they will be looking for the provider with the easiest, most streamlined experience. It’s simple: the companies who fail to adapt and deliver a digital customer journey will miss out on the new millennial demographic and even risk losing existing customers to more convenient alternatives. Most of these businesses cannot compete on cost so they use Nivo to compete on service.”
Recruiting talent nationally
As a spin-out from Barclays, Nivo’s founding team have a strong background in corporate onboarding and innovation within banking. As a team of 12, Nivo is tipped to grow substantially this decade. Polly explained how, as a high growth start-up, Nivo is looking to hire ambitious, entrepreneurial people across their two offices.
“I joined Nivo in September 2019 as part of three critical hires to accelerate Nivo to its next growth phase. For the last 6 months, it has been our core focus to build a repeatable, scalable business development model and now we are looking to grow our headcount to help us keep up with market demand.”
“Our flexible working policy and having offices in both Manchester and London means we can recruit the best people from the national talent pool. Having said that, our head of marketing, who had recently completed her MBA in London, made the move up to Manchester to work for Nivo. Putting Manchester on the map is something we’re all passionate about and can see massive potential here.”
Creating a Manchester fintech unicorn
“All our efforts are working towards creating a unicorn fintech company in Manchester. It’s ambitious but momentum is building for fintechs to really thrive here. There’s a reason the big tech players like Adyen and Google are expanding into Manchester. I wrote my dissertation on how moving the BBC up to MediaCity was a huge step towards decentralisation and now, with Manchester tipped to be the next biggest fintech hub, I have big aspirations for Nivo to play a role in that growth.”
