Meet the founder of Layer
I’m Roy Zakka is CEO and founder of Layer, a fintech software company.
“In years to come, advanced financial services will be available to all, and ubiquitous to the extent that they are practically invisible.”
What’s the most common problem your customers approach you with?
Inability to innovate. The current technology and tools they use just cannot do what they want them to do. Simply put, our response to that is to innovate and provide the technology they need, which in turn allows anyone to create new and exciting financial products and services.
How do you believe the evolution of tech will impact your industry over the next 10 years?
I believe financial technology, with the help of good regulatory and policy decisions, will create a much fairer world. According to the World Bank's latest report, nearly 1.7 billion people are unbanked globally. That's close to one-quarter of the global population; to me that is unforgivable. With access to financial services and more importantly, credit, the poorest people of the world can build a much better future for themselves and their families.
Before long, banking will become as easy and as immediate as sending a text message or an email. Financial services will be embedded in everything to the extent that they will be invisible, and available to anyone with an internet connection. That will be a massive plus for humanity.
How does that evolution tie in with the strategic direction of your business?
Layer’s mission is to deliver change in the world through the use of modern innovative technology. We have built our platform with a low-time preference mindset. This means our platform is so flexible that it can change and adapt to any desire our customers have. We have built a platform not just for financial institutions, but for any business that wants to offer financial services. It’s a white-label SaaS solution that any business can use easily and get to market quickly.
We are at the forefront of financial technology and we want to push the boundaries of what we can do for our customers and their businesses.
What are your thoughts on automation, and how do you feel it will impact economies as it grows?
Automation is always good. Everything we use today to simply get things done began life as innovative technology. A car was a technology when it was replacing horses. An email was a technology when it replaced snail mail. Automation gives us back the time that otherwise would have had to spend doing manual/repetitive tasks.
I believe that we one day see a future where technology has replaced most of the jobs we humans do today. Robots will fly our planes, serve us coffee, drive our cars, fix our teeth, etc. This will allow us to only do things that excite us or allow us to be creative. Some people say that automation will take away the jobs of the many. But it will liberate us.
The world will be full of abundance. People will no longer be working jobs they hate. People will only have to work if they want to. Imagine a world where people only worked on their passion projects. How much innovation and creativity would be unlocked. If we get it right, it could be so beautiful.
Are you a non-tech founder? If yes, how did you overcome the obstacles whilst building your business?
I’m very techy. As my team can attest, while on Zoom calls you will often find me running code on my machine. I have always been fascinated by technology and have always played around with it as a child and into my teenage years. So yes, technology is natural to me and I think that gives me the advantage to see what is coming in the future.
How is digitisation empowering your business?
We are a tech company at the end of the day, and we always have been. Our clients, however, are not, so digitisation is our day-to-day. But it’s more than that because we don’t want to simply digitise analog processes. That doesn’t improve the business that much. What we do is deliver proper transformation. Replace what we can and completely change how our clients do business so that they become efficient and productive in a really short time frame.
How do you prepare for an AI-centric world?
As I’ve said, I’m a bit of a tech nerd so AI is very exciting to me. We use AI a lot with our platform. Offering our clients Artificial Intelligence through predictive analytics, allows them to develop new classification and predictive models such as customer attrition, next best offer, transaction categorization, fraud detection, credit risk, charge-off detection, and hyper-personalised products and services. It’s so powerful that we are only touching the service of what it can do as long as we have access to the data.
I believe we will see AI play a much bigger role in our day-to-day lives and we are building some cool products that will help people better understand and manage their money.
How have you seen the need for richer analytics and data evolve over the years?
Absolutely, without data, we are only guessing. All of our clients now rely on our platform to deliver granular insights into how their business is performing. It allows them to make better business decisions and also create and test new products and services and see if they work. Access to rich analytics allows us and our clients to push the boundaries of technology and understand human behaviour more and more.
Where do you draw your inspiration from to continue pursuing and innovating in the tech space?
I draw inspiration from many things, but I would say mainly in building solutions to help people. That’s why I founded Layer in the beginning. The banking experience was awful and to some degree still is. I thought ‘we have tech and the will, why not fix the banking experience’. So I founded Layer. And we’ve done a lot in the last 10+ years but what is coming next gets me very excited.
We’re moving away from delivering individual projects for banks to delivering a financial platform for any business to offer banking products and services but also a lot more. Machine Learning, AI, Lifestyle banks, Rewards, Loyalty, Embedded Finance, gaming, brands, etc. The next 24 months for Layer inspire me to do my best day in and day out.
Hiring the right team is vital in any business. What are your top three tips for hiring and developing engineering talent?
Motivation
If your team is motivated to learn more, do more, and excel, then you’ve got a great place to start from
Experience
I want to see what you have done in the past. What projects have you worked on? Professionally and personally. I want to see how they think through problems
Curiosity
I love a curious mind. Someone who wants to do better and think of new ways of doing things. Someone who asks lots of questions but ultimately gets stuff done.
Why do you think now is the right time for the world to begin exploring and adopting technology that aids sustainability?
There is no alternative to sustainable development. Even so, many businesses believe that the more environment-friendly they become, the less competitive they will become; that it will add to costs and will not deliver immediate financial benefits. The fact is, this is probably true. But we have to take a measured approach to building sustainable businesses. We need to protect the planet but at the same time help promote human flourishing, and this is the conundrum. There is a happy medium where we can be environment-friendly while also protecting the most vulnerable in society.
We can see what is happening now regarding oil and gas prices. Decisions made ten years ago have made us over-reliant on Russian oil and gas. The result is that the poor suffer the most because everything now costs a lot more. So, we need to be careful that we don’t dramatically reduce quality of life for all humans just to meet a metric to make us feel better. We have to think about the people and the planet together.
