The Grant Williams Podcast Ep. 107 - David Fergusson FULL EPISODE

**Grant Williams** (0:10)
Before we get going, here's the bit where I remind you that nothing we discuss should be considered as investment advice. This conversation is for informational and hopefully entertainment purposes only. So, while we hope you find it both informative and entertaining, please do your own research or speak to a financial advisor before putting a dime of your money into these crazy markets. And now, on with the show. Welcome, everybody, to another edition of The Grant Williams Podcast. Something a little bit different today. I'm actually talking to an old friend of mine, and I think for the first time in the history of this podcast, I need to make a disclaimer here, because I have a private investment in the company about which we're going to talk, Atlas Consolidated. It's not listed, you can't buy shares in it, it's a private company. But the story is fascinating, and having been chatting with my guest, David Fergusson, the CEO recently, it felt a very good idea to actually talk with him and get an update on what's happening in the world of digital banking, because it is a fascinating part of the financial ecosystem. Without any further ado, here is my conversation with my friend and the CEO of Atlas Consolidated, David Fergusson.
Great to see you, my friend, it's been a while. How are you?

**David Fergusson** (1:31)
I'm very well, it's been years, actually.

**Grant Williams** (1:33)
It has been, it's frightening, actually. We had a lovely Japanese meal in London, but that was, you're right, it's probably two years ago now. It's incredible how the time flies.

**David Fergusson** (1:42)
I think it's...

**Grant Williams** (1:42)
You don't look like a man who has been on an entrepreneurial journey. You look rather too hale and hearty for that.

**David Fergusson** (1:48)
Oh, yes, that's what happens when you eat your stress. You get very hale and hearty, and certainly got the scales to prove it.

**Grant Williams** (1:56)
Listen, let's talk about what you're doing, because it's a phenomenal project, as I've said before. But I guess the smartest thing to do is just to set the stage as to the things about banking that made you want to do this in the first place, and then we'll get into what your goals were ultimately when you founded the company. So let's go back to before the beginning, when you were looking around for a problem that needed a solution.

**David Fergusson** (2:25)
Ultimately, our big, I guess, sort of interest in the space came from the fact that, frankly, a lot of people don't get great service from their financial institutions. It's expensive. It's not particularly flexible. It's just not a great experience. And one of the things that became very clear to us is that the technology was developing at such a rate that we would be able to provide much better services to much more people at a much lower cost. Everyone's taken a look at their pension pot and they've worked out, well, if I pay this amount of money in over a lifetime, and my pension provider is charging me these fees, if I think about the aggregate amount of money I put in, they end up with 40 percent of the compounded return at the end of my life. That seems like a lot. You reverse the calculation and you think, well, actually, what does it mean for an individual who gets an extra half a percent on their investments or savings and half a percent less on their mortgage, for example, and over the course of a lifetime, they're 80, 90 percent better off? These are the sorts of numbers that we looked at and thought, this is just unassailable. We have to be able to do something here. That's what led us to the original project, which was Hugosave in Singapore, which is the investments and savings app. And then as we built out that, it became clear that there was just a need for a better mousetrap, for want of a better word. The banks and financial institutions needed a better, more flexible platform that allowed them to provide these services. And we unwittingly built one as we built Hugosave. And so we quickly looked at our platform. We thought, okay, hold on a second. How does this work for the full bank?
Well, we ended up building Hugohub, which is a call to customer digital banking platform. We came right the way back into the central bank, reporting the real-time general settlements with the central banks, the payment rails, the central ledgers that people need to run a bank, all the way through the product factory up to the user experience layer with the app. So it's an entire end-to-end platform that we built with Hugohub. And so when we think about the larger business now, Atlas and Hugosave, which is the Singaporean non-bank financial institution, and now a meaningful chunk of this bank in Pakistan that we've started with some partners there. So Hugosave, and that's the first deployment of a full bank end-to-end solution. And it's great. That's how we ended up there.