Delivering Exponential Results in Banking
What would it actually take to build a 10x digital wealth platform from scratch — customer obsession, skunk works teams, and the courage to rip out the infrastructure standing in your way.
Laksh Gangwani is Chief Growth Officer at ViewTrade and founder of Digijanus, Asia’s largest financial services chat-show with 80,000 followers. As ViewTrade’s first regional executive hire, he has driven expansion across Singapore, Australia, Thailand, Dubai, and India. Recognised as WealthBriefing Asia’s Leading Individual in 2021, Laksh brings two decades of capital markets and wealthtech expertise from Thomson Reuters, LexisNexis, and Symphony — building the show as a platform for the industry conversations that need to happen.
Ned Phillips founded Bambu, which became one of the world’s foremost digital wealth technology providers — delivering cloud-based, algorithm-driven platforms that made saving and investing accessible for institutions of every size. A veteran builder who has sat on both sides of the transformation table, Ned is known for his radical customer-first philosophy and his refusal to accept legacy infrastructure as an excuse. His candid, energetic perspective makes him one of the most sought-after voices in fintech.
This is Part 2 of Laksh’s extended conversation with Ned Phillips — and where the first episode diagnosed the illness, this one writes the prescription. Laksh puts Ned squarely in the seat of a Head of Digital Transformation at a large bank, tasked with building a DIY investment platform and challenged to map, step by step, what a genuine 10x outcome would require.
What unfolds is one of the most honest and practically grounded discussions of wealth technology transformation you are likely to hear. From radical customer discovery on the street, to the decision of whether to build or partner, through the brutal reality of fractional share infrastructure, all the way to pricing strategy and managing organisational resistance — Ned holds nothing back. Laksh pushes back as the institutional realist throughout, creating a dialogue that captures every transformation paradox that banks actually face today.
What Does a 10x Outcome Actually Mean?
We are going to deliver what we call the 10x Digital Transformation Playbook. Ned, how would you define a 10x outcome in digital transformation? We are building a DIY platform. How would you describe a 10x outcome?
The revenue that we receive from wealth goes up ten times. That is the 10x.
Let’s structure this in four parts: customers, capabilities, talent, and business — all coming together for a viable 10x revenue outcome. You are head of retail now. How do you identify the customer segment first?
Go Into the Streets. No Survey Will Tell You the Truth.
Most of us know what piece of our technology sucks. I would gather a group internally and exclude anyone who didn’t speak honestly. Then I would find somebody who knows nothing about our system and record their face as they use it. No delight — we have an issue. Then I go into the streets myself. No survey. Stop people. Ask them why they don’t use the bank’s wealth offering. When I find someone who does use it and loves it, I listen to almost nobody else. Done in one week. No longer.
Great start. You build a team of Avengers telling you what you need to hear. Then raw one-on-one feedback from real people. What happens next?
Great technology is like a good joke — if you have to explain it, it wasn’t a good joke. Give it to a normal human. Say nothing. If they cannot open it and use it, we have a problem. When you buy an Apple iPhone, there’s no mystery. Open the box, take it out, it works. Why is ours not like that? That is the only first-principle question.
Build or Partner? And the Fractional Share Problem Nobody Wants to Solve.
Step two: are we going to build it, or is someone helping us? I want one killer feature — one button with two outcomes. Invest or don’t. Nobody wakes up wanting a balanced equity portfolio. They want a better financial life. Find the person who knows how to build that. The Robinhood founders were gamers, not finance people — that’s exactly why it worked.
Why go to a partner first rather than analyse your system dependencies? More projects get derailed on data and ecosystem constraints than on a vendor’s ability to build. When Bambu comes in, half your tech doesn’t support fractional shares. Your custodian doesn’t. Your middle office cannot handle a fractional number. Now we are talking about open-heart surgery.
Because you’ll build crap if you start with dependencies. Your systems have no relevance to what a customer wants. People are trading crypto out here — if you can do fractional crypto you can do fractional equities. In 2017 the head of MAS stood on stage and said: “No objection to the cloud whatsoever.” A year later banks were still asking if they were allowed on the cloud. Your dependencies create half-assed tech and then you justify it. That’s why it’s not 10x and that’s why it fails.
Jump Off the Oil Tanker Into a Speedboat.
What started as a frontend project has become a rip-and-replace of the middle office, back office, custodian, and broker. How would you solve it?
Skunk works. A band of rebels who build in a vacuum — ignoring the limitations but not ignoring the bank. Go into a room, shut the door, and ask: how do we achieve? I’ll plug in a modern fractional broker and custodian. One screen, one button — Invest Now. Every bank has APIs to customer accounts; I just need that access. The new app has zero cognitive load. Would you like to invest a thousand every month? Yes. Click. If the huge oil tanker bank is moving slowly, you scale down the side on ropes, jump in a little boat, and get ahead of it. Then turn around and show them: this is what customers want.
The Shackleton Advert: Who Do You Want in That Room?
Ernest Shackleton’s 1914 advert said: men wanted for long, hard, arduous journey — minimal food, minimal pay, great danger, successful return doubtful. He got thousands of applicants. Today I would write: you see that dusty room no one’s in? Come in, I’m locking the door for a month. Will it probably fail? Yeah. Will you get laughed at? Sure. Could you get fired? Absolutely. You want in? Let’s go. That divides people immediately — and the ones who raise their hands are exactly who I need.
Even with a speedboat, you run into people inside the bank who resist for good or bad reasons. And transformation leaders often arrive on a pedestal looking down. You have to start from respect — ask why those decisions were taken, under what constraints. That changes everything.
With love, kindness, and belief. Nobody wakes up wanting to create confusion. I’d say: give me a month. If I’m wrong I’m wrong. There’s an ultra runner called David Roche who says: it’s not what you’re hearing, it’s what you heard. What you heard is: it’s okay that some people don’t believe. At Bambu, did I take decisions I thought were right? Yes. Did some turn out wrong? Yes. The bank that chose the wrong broker chose it because at the time it seemed right. Totally fine.
Price for Humans, Not for the Industry.
Every month we produce one feature, one button only. Not a platform — one thing we believe clients will use. Month one: one client. Month two: two clients, or we shut it. 2, 4, 8, 16 — any month it doesn’t double, we close it cold-heartedly. On pricing: ignore what banks typically charge. AUM percentages, trailer fees, wrap fees — our industry has made itself incomprehensible. Go into the street and ask a hundred people if they understand. If every single one says yes and you still make margin, you have found your model.
Your RM team will say one relationship manager could put this volume through. How do you manage the CEO and guide them to the right KPIs?
The RM is a dying business — make a choice. Robinhood charged zero for brokerage. Everyone laughed. They redefined an industry. I would say to the CEO: you want 10x, I get it. That superstar RM is playing cricket and I’m playing football. We are two different games. My singular job is 10x revenue. If the CEO can’t get behind that, I’d say — that’s cool, I’m out. You can’t fix a problem if the person above you doesn’t want it fixed.
The first act of any transformation must be assembling people who will say exactly what is broken — and excluding anyone who arrives with a feature pitch. The problem already exists. Watch a stranger try to use your product before you write a single new line of code.
Go yourself. Stop people. Ask them directly why they don’t use what you built. The candour you get from a stranger in thirty seconds outvalues months of structured survey data. When you find the customer who does love it, listen to almost nobody else.
Legacy systems will always provide a reason not to build what customers want. The solution is not to wait. Build in a vacuum with modern tools, prove the customer thesis first, then turn the oil tanker around with real data in hand.
Write the Shackleton advert: it will probably fail, you may get laughed at, the pay isn’t better. The people who raise their hands anyway are who will build something extraordinary. Skillset follows conviction — not the other way around.
Launch one button. If user count doesn’t double every month, shut it without sentiment and build the next one. Price so that a hundred people on a street corner all understand what they are paying — and you still make margin. That is your model.