Streamlining Australian home loans, with Vincent Turner

Designers speak about 'the job to be done' - you don’t need a taxi or an Uber or tuk-tuk, you need to get home to bed; you don’t need a mortgage, you need to finance your house purchase; you don’t need to spend every second weekend researching market rates, you just need to be on the best deal you qualify for. In this episode, I speak to Vincent Turner about Australian mortgages, about startups and why ‘early-stage businesses’ is perhaps a better term, about design thinking and deep working, and about a rather special belt.

Uno is at home online at https://unohomeloans.com.au/  Or on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/company/uno-home-loans/

You should check out Yoku belts at https://yokumensbelt.com/ (you know you need a smart new belt)

And you should also follow Vincent at https://www.linkedin.com/in/vhturner/

LinkedIn is also where you can find and connect with me: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brendanlegrange (please do reach out, follow the show's page, and share the content with your networks)

Meanwhile, my action-adventure novels are on Amazon, some versions even for free, and my work with ConfirmU and our gamified psychometric scores is discussed at https://confirmu.com/ and on episode 24 of this show https://www.howtolendmoneytostrangers.show/episodes/episode-24

If you have any feedback or questions, or if you would like to participate in the show, please feel free to reach out to me via the contact page on this site.

Keep well, Brendan

The full written transcript, with timestamps, is below:

Vincent Turner 0:00

Australia for whatever reason, is unnecessarily divergent and complex, not in the pricing aspect of the lending, that is fairly competitive, but when it comes to the approval part of the process, there is a huge amount of customer confusion as a result of that.

And one, if not the highest penetration of mortgage broker deals as opposed to direct lender deals. The way a traditional broker would solve that level of complexity is through deep knowledge and expertise and experience in having done lots of deals, and usually a close working relationship with a small number of banks. And so the reality is, and industry data supports this, that most brokers will typically use one, two, maybe three lenders for overwhelmingly 80% of their loans.

When we looked at online mortgage broking we looked at how might you make that better and different investing in incredibly high quality tooling for the broker to turn that broker to a superstar?

Brendan Le Grange 0:55

I've been working with credit scores for 20 odd years now. And one thing I've learned in that time is that there were only a few business questions whose answer is, we need a more accurate scorecard.

The outputs of our data analytics needs to be useful before there anything else, and useful can often be simple.

So, while I spend every day working on a score that has 300 or 400 nuances of risk to it, I can get just as excited about a score that outputs red, amber or green, if the latter influences customer action. Which it seems to be doing for Australian mortgage holders curious about a refinance.

That and more, in today's How to Lend Money to Strangers with Brendan le Grange.

Vincent Turner, founder of Uno Home Loans and host at Shape the System podcast, welcome to my show.

Vincent Turner 1:56

Thank you, wonderful to be here.

Brendan Le Grange 1:57

Now, we're going to end this episode by talking about a kind of magical men's dress belt designed to be 'one less thing', to be the last belt you'll ever own, but first, we have to give the people what they want, which is some lending stories.

And your lending story is an interesting one full of twists and turns: from enrolled university student to VC-backed founder of a messaging company, that became a mortgage software provider, that moved around the world, a planned design degree that became a new FinTech, that moved back home, that became the basis for Uno Home Loans.

Which is full of spoilers, but also probably the longest lead into the internet. What did your early career look like?

Vincent Turner 2:39

In simplest terms, I'm a college dropout. And I don't necessarily wear that as a badge of honour.

But as a impatient 19/ 20 year old, doing a degree, I didn't have the option of doing medicine or law or engineering, and so commerce - or business depending on which country you're in - was kind of the degree that was available to me, if you like. And I did that degree, half willingly, but at the same time, was pretty close to, and cognizant of, the last major tech boom, the initial .com, boom, if you want to call it that.

As someone who had grown up in a household full of computers, and my brothers are all in software, you know, I kind of joked that we have a full stack family, it was inevitable that I will be close to the intersection of finance and tech, and basically dropped out of university to pursue a tech opportunity that had landed on my desk. I met a mortgage broker, ironically, given where I'm at now, who had some ideas around what he wanted on his website and I had some ideas as to how to execute that and had been thinking about that as well.

And, well, any combination, probably could have raised money at that time, but basically, I dropped out of university to pursue a tech business that was focused on messaging. And it wasn't until we got into the business that we realised we had a bigger opportunity, in fact, in building mortgage software for banks, and so we pivoted to that.

Brendan Le Grange 3:54

What was that like, as a youngster out in Australia who, yeah, familiar with computers, but how familiar were you with this idea and this world of startups and entrepreneurship?

Vincent Turner 4:05

Yeah, there's kind of two parts to this that I think about the business that got venture funded was certainly by no means my first foray into trying to be an entrepreneur. And I wasn't consciously thinking, I'm gonna go and be an entrepreneur. I was working jobs, I was working in cafes and restaurants and doing what normal teenagers do to make some money. But I did my own things because I was impatient.

And so even though we're in Australia, which, you know, especially in a world less connected than the one today, could be considered a long way from anywhere. Perth, on the West Coast, is doubly isolated again.

But what WA has, it's quite interesting, although I'm not based anymore, it has a very entrepreneurial flavour to it. When you're a long way from anywhere, you kind of have to make things happen yourself. But it's also blessed with a huge amount of natural resources. And quite often those resources are developed by people who are entrepreneurial. They'd go out, you know, with a measuring tape and a pick axe or whatever it is, and exploit and find resources.

And so that's actually a lot of the culture of Perth. It's quite gung ho and entrepreneurial.

And the people who backed that first company, were all out of infrastructure and mining, and they had no knowledge of technology, but had seen, wow, there's these tech companies, a lot of money being made, we kind of need to have some irons in the fire. And so I think it was a very unusual situation but it was also, you know, right person, the right time, which kind of was a feature later in my career as well, I guess.

Brendan Le Grange 5:26

And then you you took the fight to the home team, as it were, moving to San Francisco. How different was the reality when you got into that orbit of Silicon Valley itself?

Vincent Turner 5:37

Yeah. Well, I think the the step in between is important one, which was that the messaging business we were running out of Perth ultimately required me to move to Sydney. And in moving to Sydney, I didn't get into a tech scene, I got into a banking scene.

And so I actually spent about six or seven years building software for major banks in Australia, predominantly in the mortgage industry.

And I actually left Sydney basically, because I got sick of it. And the business had evolved quite significantly. And I was not in business with the same people I originally founded the business with. So for a whole bunch of reasons, I kind of left Sydney rather than went to San Francisco.

And I didn't move there chasing a tech scene. I moved there because I wanted to do industrial design. However, a lady who had helped us in the business in Sydney, had said you should go there, because it's a bit like if you're going to be an actor, you got to go to Hollywood, at least at some point in your career.

And late 2009. When I first visited it, it was an interesting time, because you had basically the GFC, you had a whole bunch of people in the doldrums about that. And San Francisco and the Bay Area generally led the US out of the GFC from an economic perspective, from a attitude and or perspective. And 2009 was kind of the resurgence of tech, it was the second coming of tech.

And it was really only landing there realising holy crap, I'm back in the zone here, this I should really take advantage of this, that it became about actually, let's start another tech company here in the valley.

Brendan Le Grange 7:00

And their company Planwise, is, I guess, the roots to Uno Homeloans, which is now back in Australia.

Australia's online mortgage broker focused on helping busy Australian professionals who want their home loan sorted without the hassle. For those of us who don't know what that market looks like, if I was in the market for one of those famously expensive Sydney houses around about 2015, what would the process have looked like for me trying to raise some finance as a borrower?

Vincent Turner 7:34

Yeah, look, the Australian housing market has its nuance, but it is not remarkably different from any really developed a housing slash mortgage markets. So anyone who's listening in Canada, or in the US to a degree or the UK or even parts of Europe, this is going to sound familiar, right, which is essentially that you have a large amount of retail brands. And by large, I mean anywhere from 10 to hundreds of retail brands in Australia, it would be somewhere in between that number, there is a huge amount of choice as a result of that, and a fair amount of customer confusion.

What the Australian market has, I think quite uniquely is one if not the highest penetration of mortgage broker deals as opposed to direct lender deals. And my observation, having spent some time in the US some knowledge of the UK and a little bit of knowledge of Canada as well, is that Australia for whatever reason, is unnecessarily divergent and complex in not the pricing aspect of the lending that is fairly competitive, but the approval part of the process.

And so if you take your example of someone trying to get a loan in 2015, to buy one of those expensive Sydney houses, which I thought you were going to say $15 to $20 million house, not 2015, so I'm glad we're talking about a normal house in Sydney, which is still horribly expensive. But if someone's trying to do that, visibility on price is actually not the biggest challenge. And people will often be like, I just want the best rate. And what they will misunderstand is that there is very few vanilla deals left in the market, very few deals where someone comes in, and it's just me and my wife, we're both salaried employees, we have one child, we have no debt and have good credit. Any bank will do that deal, right? So those customers often will go directly to a bank or can go directly to a bank.

But the other 80 plus percent of the market are the customers who say I am it's just me and my wife that bit fine. But I've just started a new job. I had two years out of industry while I went and pursued my startup dreams that didn't work out for me. So now I'm going back into industry, and we've got a kid but we've got another child on the way. And as soon as even that amount of colour gets added into the deal that customers I guess customer experience is they go to a broker because they need to solve that level of complexity that approval complexity.

And there's two problems to do that without a broker. One is the inefficiency of literally going to each of those banks. And the second is the lack of knowledge about which of those banks will do that deal. And the way a traditional broker would do that in 2015 and in fact, a lot of brokers still do that today, is through deep knowledge and expertise and experience in having done lots of deals and usually close working relationship with a small number of banks. And so whilst the broker may have on their website 20, or 30 logos, the reality is an industry data supports this that Most brokers will typically use, you know, a handful, one, two, maybe three lenders for overwhelmingly 80% of their loans.

And so when we looked at online mortgage broking, we looked at all how do you how might you make that better and different?

Brendan Le Grange 10:21

And I guess, how did you do it better and different? What did you do to change that landscape?

Vincent Turner 10:27

Yeah, look, I would say what did we try to do? And what are we doing now are two different things. And like any startup, you know, or any early stage company, I don't love the word startup, I think it engenders a version of lack of experience and knowledge of what you're doing.

But in in terms of any early stage company who's trying to do something different, there's a few things that we did, and are continuing to do today.

One is investing in incredibly high quality tooling for the broker, specifically around that problem of who will do this deal, right. And so a traditional broker would go in and use one tool for pricing one tool for working out how much money you need, they would go into lots of different lenders, platforms, or Excel calculators and run scenarios using those tools individually.

So a lot of what we did was to bring all of that tooling into one place for a broker, not to replace the broker by any measure, we've never intended to not have the mortgage broker in the picture for the customer, but to turn that broker into a superstar to give them the ability to run better and richer and more accurate numbers with less effort, so they can turn that thing around faster.

So we did that then, we do that now. And that's definitely a key part of it.

A thing that we tried to do, which I think has evolved somewhat, is that we had originally thought that having a fully vertically integrated business where the brokers were employees of the company would lead to outsized results, whether that was economic for ourselves, but also customer outcomes.

And we've moved away from that strategy, what we found is that in an industry where you're essentially providing a service for what we term as a high value, infrequent transaction, that is a home loan, asking someone to do that, in a new way with a new brand was incredibly challenging, unless the people who they were dealing with were highly motivated to engage the customer.

And also, were planning to be around for a long time. And the challenge we found with the employee model was that we were a career step someone would work at a bank, and then they would come to, you know, and work for, you know, for a while. And so creating long term deep relationships with a customer was an incredibly challenging paradigm to solve. And there are ways to address it.

But we've ultimately, in the last three years moved to a model, where we have the technology, which I spoke about, and we have the standardisation that comes with having a single brand and having a process and approach of how we do it. But the you know, broker now is actually working in partnership with you know, to build their own business, and they're hungry, because if they don't build their own business, no one will. And the customer who deals with them today deals with them tomorrow.

So that's kind of how we've evolved to where we're at at the moment. It's it feels like a bit of a blend of our initial model and maybe a more traditional broker in terms of the economic model.

Brendan Le Grange 13:05

And I know that you've also got a close relationship with Westpac.

Vincent Turner 13:09

Westpac was an interesting situation.

When I was leaving the US I didn't specifically leave although my visa was expiring. Coincidentally, I found an opportunity to be back in Australia. And that opportunity came about because I was running a FinTech meetup in San Francisco. In fact, it was the largest FinTech meetup on the west coast by the time I left, and I fell into that because I wanted to meet other FinTech entrepreneurs. And when I started, FinTech wasn't even a word. The VCs over there didn't want anything to do with financial services technology because it's too slow and too regulated.

But in running that meetup, I actually got introduced to the venture capital arm of Westpac, and they came to try to meet other FinTech entrepreneurs in the Bay Area, and they met a bloody Australian running this thing.

In meeting them, I said to them, Look, I think I'm going to come back to Australia. I have mortgage broking in my roots, I think there's an opportunity to do mortgage broking different and better leveraging technology. And their first words were you should have talked to Westpac. Westpac is interested in backing an entrepreneur to do this. So the relationship with Westpac came about quite organically and fortuitously, and in some respects, serendipitously, right there wasn't I wasn't going to pitch Westpac specifically and I was going to come back and do this anyway. They invested quite heavily in the early days.

But fast forward a few years. Westpac as banks tend to do, just like the employees I mentioned before, had some changes in their own management and their own board and their own strategy and have essentially dialled back that strategy. But it would be remiss of me not to acknowledge that big reason why we are in as present and visible in the marketplace is that there was a huge amount invested not only in the technology in the early days, but in doing expensive stuff like building brands.

But I think also a big part of what makes a business very successful in the early days is actually investing in really strong customer experience and really strong digital presence. And that's have actually nowhere near as expensive for stuff we were doing like TV ads and massive paid advertising, and so hard to unpack that now and unpick that and uncooked the egg as to well, you know, wherever we got to, but a big part about what's driving, you know, success now is having a very clear understanding of our brand and our positioning and our customer being really clear on what our proposition is to that customer in terms of service, it's a service driven proposition, we're a broker, right, we don't sell our own product.

So we're selling the same product as everyone else. So we have to differentiate on service, and then attracting brokers who are also aligned to that. And then being very good at creating a strong enriched digital presence so that people who are looking for a broker find us and then look, read about us and watch our stuff.

And think these are, these are the kinds of people I want to be dealing with, because that's what I want as a customer.

Brendan Le Grange 15:47

Vincent, we spoke already a bit about your passion for design. And I see that whilst that you know, you design the loan score, which is the only mortgage technology to have ever won a good design award.

So let's talk about design in this space. It's not, I mean, I guess it's a slight indictment on my 20 odd years in lending, that I've never even thought of a design award. And you know, many banks are famously bad at this sort of thing. So tell me a little bit about what loan score is. And indeed, then what does design mean in this context?

Vincent Turner 16:21

Yeah, thank you, I think it is something that's not properly leveraged. And maybe that's to our competitive advantage.

But loanScore, four years ago, I think 2019, so maybe four and a bit years ago, we were certainly trying to work out a key part of what our proposition was, like everyone had done a bunch of research or intuitively knew that when a customer breaks it down, ultimately, in a mortgage and a debt product, they're basically saying, I just want to be on the best deal all the time with no effort, that was the easiest way to articulate it.

Essentially, everyone is saying that I will get you the best deal. And we'll make it super easy. And so actually having any way to go out and have a substantive claim over that and also be able to differentiate and get above the noise was both a customer proposition problem and a commercial problem.

And one of our directors at the time had said to me, knowing that I'm a product lead design type person, is you should apply your product brain to this problem. It's a marketing problem. But you know, marketers need a product proposition or a service proposition to talk about right, there has to be something substantive there to make this work. And so in some of the research we did, I observed that about 50% of people didn't even know what their rate was.

Now, my hypothesis was if they don't even know their rate, then saying to them, you should refinance is two steps too early, you actually need to be saying to them, Do you know if you're on a good deal, yes or no? And if we wanted to solve that problem for a customer, how would we solve that problem, right?

Because someone will say, Oh, well, I was at a dinner party, or a barbecue, that kind of the cliche, and, you know, Brendan is on 4.5% and I'm on 4.9%, I must be on a terrible rate. But a mortgage, like most products is not the same as a water bottle or a pen, the price I pay depends on who I am and what I'm doing with it. So your rate and my rate aren't comparable, I actually need to compare my rate to the best rate that I could get, which means running some actual numbers to actually determine it.

And the problem with that is that's actually quite complex.

Brendan Le Grange 18:23

And more so because as you said, it's an infrequent purchase. I did some research on personal loans. When I was in Hong Kong, and reveal the thing that moved, a borrower was not whether the loan was higher or lower than the going market rate. It was whether it was higher or lower than the previous loan had been. And that's a loan every 12 months or a mortgage, or maybe you took out 5-10 years ago. Yeah. People don't know that.

Vincent Turner 18:47

Yeah well, look, I mean, the fundamental problem loanScore addresses is the question of, is my loan any good or not? Yes, no.

How do you reduce that to a binary? No, we just looked at healthcare, right healthcare has to help you understand whether this cereal that you're looking at is healthy or not. So they have a five star rating, you know, the colour coding of orange, red and green.

These ways of communicating outcomes to someone in simple enough terms was kind of some of the input to the design thinking. But in reality, what we had to do to create loan score was we had to do some pretty gnarly math, we basically had to run an amortisation of your existing loan, that's simple. But we then had to go and run your scenario through a database of 1,000s of products, get rid of all the ones that weren't relevant to not comparable not available, not eligible, whatever term you want, based on just the 10 bits of data we had, and then we might have hundreds of products left, we would then run amortisation on all of those products and then forth, rank them to work out the cheapest and the worst, and then put your somewhere along that line.

And then we had to somehow turn that into a number out of 100. So there was all this wonderful maths that was going on with the data scientists in the back doing it but the customer experience was I have no idea whether my loans any good or not, and after 90 seconds and just putting in my email, I will now know.

And that product has been enduring.

It's a product feature rather than, you know, the core of our proposition, we knew it would be copied. And we've been copied a dozen times in Australia and probably elsewhere, and copied badly, to be fair, but it but it absolutely helped us to understand that if you set about to create a moment, and redefine a moment using design thinking that you can potentially attack the whole thing.

And just to dwell on that point for a second, I was fortunate enough to be in San Francisco when Lyft and Uber came out. And in fact, we knew the guys who created Lyft, before they were called Lyft, they were called Zimride. And I got into Lyft, about a month after Lyft started. And I tweeted the guy who we'd been talking with, he was like one of the head of marketing in Zimride. And I said, I bet you you get rid of Zimride. And you focus on Lyft full time, because that is going to change the world. And he's like are cool, yeah, that'll, you know, we'll, we'll check in in a year's time. And in literally a year to the week, they got rid of Zimride. And they focused fully on lift.

The reason I bring it up, though, was what car ride sharing did in the early days was that it took the four or five major moments in in taxis and made those moments beautiful. And so if you think about the act of ordering a cab, waiting for a cab, being in a cab, and paying for a cab, are just all terrible moments. And they just flipped all of those on their head. And we think about mortgages in a similar way, you've got these major moments in the process of getting and having a mortgage, how do we find those moments and then use design thinking to flip them all here?

Brendan Le Grange 21:29

Yeah, I didn't grow up in London, or in New York, one of the cities you sort of think of where taxis are this inherent part of their life. And I don't want to stand on a street corner waving at a car going past hoping it will stop. So they took those things, they things I knew how to do the things I was capable of doing. But they were a deterrent. And I use the service less often.

And like a mortgage refinance, I imagined the bulk of people who have a mortgage, they remember what it was like applying. They remember lots and lots of forms, maybe there was handwriting out pages and pages of things. It ain't broke, don't fix it. So they probably sitting there not wanting to take on some big ambitious tasks to refinance and apply at seven different places. And so they don't do it. green, amber red, you then know is it worth the effort.

But also, this is a tangible way of seeing Oh, it is different now. It is very easy now.

Vincent Turner 22:24

solving for what in design terms, you call 'the job to be done', right? I'm at the party and it's 2am, and I want to leave the party and I want to get home to my warm bed, solve that problem for me. And I don't care whether you call yourself a taxi or ride sharing, or Uber, or I'm on the back of a bike in Vietnam, which is a great way to get home at two in the morning if you need to, all of those things enable the 'job to be done' to be done.

And I think mortgages and finance has a lot of similarities to this, which is this refrain of people don't really want the mortgage, right? They obviously want the property or they want to use the equity to buy the boat or whatever it is that they're trying to build wealth that that's the job to be done. And we're pure broker at the moment, we don't offer our own product.

But inevitably, we will offer our own product. And we actually have seen a bunch of what you would call Neo lenders in Australia who now offer broking side, if a customer comes to them, the customer came to them, but not specifically to get their mortgage, but to say I need mortgage solved. Yeah, and you do mortgage.

And at the moment you only sell your product? Well, if I don't fit your criteria, I don't have to go to someone else. And we sort of think about it the same way, kind of transforming it to the job to be done. I think the other big area is that most customers who are transacting on a mortgage are also doing something with the property, right? They're buying an investment property they're upgrading. And so the property transaction is as much a threat and a problem for them as well, you know, so we partnered with a company called picchi, that allows people to do property research as a buyer's agent would completely free. And we don't get paid for it or anything.

But we realised that ultimately, if they're trying to buy a place a need a home loan, but they also need to make a good purchasing decision. And so how do we involve ourselves with that aspect of it is, I think where this is all going as well.

Brendan Le Grange 24:07

And I think from looking at some of the stuff you share on LinkedIn, and some of the blogs you've published, you've also brought some of that thinking internally, some of us I know you don't like the word startup, but some of those, what we would think of as startup approach to the way you build your teams and run your teams, you know, referencing terms like deep work and the slow meeting culture that you're building there. So what is it like to work within Uno Loans?

Vincent Turner 24:31

I like that question, because I mean, I, to be honest, I probably had an awakening only a few years ago about the nature of culture in businesses, and maybe not everyone will agree with me on this.

So this might be contentious, and some people might throw me under the bus on this one. But my original understanding of culture was cultures, the unifying force was this idea that you're all values aligned and you're all want to end up in the same place. So you have some overarching external locus of control or purpose or vision or mission of where you want to end up.

And whilst I think that's still important, I think if you've got a bunch of people who are super cutthroat and other people who are really homely, and you try to put them in the same room and make them successful, I don't think it'll work. But I don't think it's enough. I think what has changed in the last few years? And you touched on some of the points for is that not? Why are we here, but more of this idea of what is it like to work here, because the nature of work and how work gets done and how decisions get made. This is actually what we experience at our jobs on a day to day basis. And I observed this even five or six years ago, and you know, where we would have wonderful people. And I thought that they were here because of the values alignment. And then they would leave and go and get jobs at companies that had no higher order mission or purpose, or one that I thought was pretty flaky, but they liked the nature of the work. They like doing complex work with a players and you know, having plenty of time to do work and being autonomous and how they work.

And so it few years ago, we made some large changes to the business generally. And at the same time, I got far more intentional about what type of culture do I want day to day in the business to design was a big one, this idea that good design takes time. And then if you've got to give people time to do design, and when I say design, I don't mean how it looks.

I mean, how it works, how it operates the thinking that goes into enabling it to work in the future, when conditions change that one big aspect of our culture and attracts people then who are very keen to design and articulate if you talk to an engineer and talk about something being done elegantly, not only did you produce the outcome, but the code was readable, it was beautiful, was able to be reused in the future, or, or extended. So this elegant code idea.

But the other one is that I observed as people who are incredibly good at any particular thing, whether it's being a mortgage broker, writing code, doing testing, writing content, whatever it is, are in their happiest moments when they're deep in their in what it is that they do when they're able to do large blocks of uninterrupted work in the zone. And so one of our big cultural norms is this idea that we have to create opportunities to do deep work. And that not only means attracting people who want to do deep work, who like having three to four to eight hours a day where they're just at the tools, but also getting people who are in roles like mine, as a CEO, where I have to be talking to a lot of people to understand how to operate, such that I'm not interrupting other people's deep work or a lot, lot less.

And so actually training and coaching people around how to operate more asynchronously, and how to touch more lightly. So for example, rather than ringing a person, which is massively synchronous, massively interruptive, maybe dropping a note on a JIRA ticket that says, here's my solution and here's a loom video. And if it's not clear from my video, then let's have a one on one huddle when you're next free. The difference in interruption between option A and option B, 10 or 15 times a day with even 10 people is massively multiplying.

So that's one of the other ones. And then low meeting cadence comes out of this idea that the vast majority of meetings that we have, don't need to be run more efficiently. They don't need to happen at all.

And the easiest way to get to that, honestly, is to look at every recurring meeting you have and have it every second period. So if it's weekly have it every two weeks, and if it's an hour, make it half as long.

I look at my diary, my diary today, I think I have six hours of meetings, which is an unusually heavy day. But most of the people on my team have less than six hours of meetings a week. In fact, some of our engineers have less than two hours of meetings a week. The important caveat is it doesn't mean that they're not talking to other people, they are absolutely talking to other people. It's just that that conversation is happening when it's needed for how long it's needed between the people, it's needed. And very rarely do we need to bring eight people into a room and have two of them talking while the other six listen times 10 on a weekly basis.

Brendan Le Grange 29:05

Yeah, I love that. I mean, I think we all have sat in, in many meetings. We you're just there in backup, just in case just in case. There's a question, as you say, that happens over and over and over again.

But I also love that deep learning my wife is an early years teacher, trained in the Montessori and one of the philosophies is very similar to this about giving the kids these big blocks of concentration. And even for very, very young kids can sit there for two hours working on something if you don't interrupt them, and I should have listened more carefully to what she said to me because there's a whole lot of brain science behind that as well and how long it takes to reestablish once you are interrupted.

Vincent Turner 29:39

And one of our other values, by the way is improve things and it talks to this idea that you can continuously incrementally improve things and that will ultimately lead to a step change.

But I think a big chunk of what makes an early stage company or any company really visit you ultimately do need to find step changes in the business and step changes by the very nature for them require doing a large, not necessarily large, but a decent piece of work that is far removed from what you do on the day to day it's not Bau. And I think it's hard to conceive and execute on those bits of work without large blocks of uninterrupted time. Do you know, you know, right now we're working on, this won't be live for a couple of months. So don't tell anyone, we're working on a set of calculations, that will actually kind of do a loanScore but looking forward and say, assuming that you have this loan, you have it for three years, you pay it at this amount. And these are the fees. And these are the interest rates, this is actually what your total cost of loan is projected to be over a period that you can make sense of which is, you know, in your case, three years, that's a much more useful number.

But to do that piece of work, we have to imagine how the whole thing is going to play out, someone has to then go deep and do all of these calculations, and then make sure they all work. And then we have to work out how to weaponize it, put it in production. I don't think we can do things like that without giving people time to do deep work and deep thinking.

Brendan Le Grange 30:59

I think a lot of Australian listeners might be intrigued by this. And they may want to reach out looking to work with you know, but I think anyone listening can take a lot of lessons, obviously, especially in the mortgage space. But your approach and what you've been doing there is applicable across the board.

So there's obviously www.unohomeloans.com.au but if they wanted to reach out, they want to do see what the team's doing, where some good places they could go online to find more about your work?

Vincent Turner 31:27

Yeah, I mean, we've got if it's purely looking at home loan stuff, there's obviously a bunch on our website, if it's trying to understand a little more about how we are I think and how we're actually operating the company, LinkedIn is probably my main channel.

Now, I was pretty active on Twitter for a while, but I haven't been of late. And I get so many kind of recruiters and all the offshore VAs and BPOs contacting me that you can't actually connect with me on LinkedIn. But if you follow me and you don't look like one of those three, I'll usually connect back with you.

But also like, if someone's got a very specific question, then they can always email customer.care@uno.com.au and if they direct a question to me, it will get to me. And if it's not a question of I'm trying to sell you something, then I will universally try to get back to that person.

I've had a lot of people helped me over the years and been really generous with their time. And I think I tried to do the same. I mean, obviously, if you're in Australia, and you do need a home loan, or if you've got a home loan, you need to get it taken care of. And I would suggest we're really great group of people to do that for you as well.

Brendan Le Grange 32:27

Vincent, you and I both started an accounting degree about a year apart, right? That's not our only similarity. You also a podcast host with shape the system. And like my listeners who are fed a diet of 99% lending and 1% astronaut's you find your guests from from all fields with the commonality there being that they're all rethinking society solutions to global problems.

So tell us more about your show about where listeners can find it and about what you're trying to do with it.

Vincent Turner 32:59

Yeah, sure. I mean, it came about me and a friend decided to start a show four years ago, just because we were scratching our own itch. You know, a new sort of my response to the word startup actually came from having spent enough time both in San Francisco and the Bay Area and in in Sydney and being around early stage startup culture. I observed that most of the material that I was at least seeing I'm sure there's more out there, but at least I was seeing was around how much money did you raise? What was it like when you ran out of money? And how much did you exit for? I just don't find this interesting.

Obviously, occasionally, you want a bit of startup porn, if you want to call it that - OMG, they raised $100 million - but what I was more interested in is what is the problem you're solving? What is the nature of that system today in which that problem exists? And tell me about this innovation that totally turns that on its head.

And ultimately, whilst I think the work we do is important, in terms of it being humanity changing in terms of the way you might think about the UN Sustainable Development Goals, and addressing poverty and sustainability and equality, Home loans just wasn't scratching that itch for me. And so I kind of wanted to be talking to founders and companies that I thought were doing impact-led work rolling up to one of those UN Sustainable Development Goals.

I mean, I've literally this morning got off a call with a gentleman who's running a company that totally reimagined the way hydrogen could be attached to natural gas. I know nothing about hydrogen. I know very little about natural gas. And I know a little bit about chemistry to be dangerous. And being able to talk to someone and have them explain how the system works and how their innovation makes it high carbon emitting to zero carbon a meeting with this other massive bonus which you could listen to the show to find out.

For me, it's just interesting content. And I think people who are empathetic and curious naturally aren't bound by particular verticals. They kind of they're interested in, in food and they're interested in energy. They're interested in equality they're interested in in education. And so if we could find founders who could explain the system and then explain their innovation inside that system, it would make for greater listening.

And then secondly, because I have no commercial objective in doing it, if we could create a format for the show where we created a really strong platform that was really supported the founders to allow them to tell their story, not in a, here's my product, amazing go and buy my product way. But here's why we exist. Here's the problem we set out to solve, then we would be a great platform. In fact, most of the people who come on the show, at least half of them are like this is one of the better shows that I've been on because it's allowing me to tell story the way I would love to tell it if I had the time. And we don't often get the time.

And yeah, if you'd like it, then obviously go check it out. I'd love to get more listeners. And more guests!

Brendan Le Grange 35:37

I'm one of those people, I think curious love to hear about these things don't have the time to try and understand at depth but to see somebody explained it. It's what makes those good TED talks before TED Talks became swamped. But you know, what makes those interesting is somebody from a field that's passionate and can explain why they're doing what they're doing is always going to be worth listening to.

And clearly, sustainability is a passion of yours. It's also a theme that's woven right into Yoku, the belt project that I teased upfront. So I'm delaying my own purchase, I went online, they look fantastic. I'm gonna buy one, I've just tried to do my weight loss a little bit more before I can commit to a bell. Tell me more about that project.

Vincent Turner 36:22

Yoku was born out of this frustration that I had belt that I really liked. And I couldn't find it when it started to not fall apart. I actually still got it on the shelf here, but it certainly needed replacing, and it had a good run.

And I couldn't find a belt that I wanted to wear predominantly because they were either made poorly, or they were covered in branding. And so I originally set out to design a belt that I wouldn't put any branding on, that would be made beautifully, but I kind of want to be able to wear it all the time.

And you know, this isn't for everyone. But I think a good chunk of men especially look at a belt as a utilitarian purchase, I want to buy this thing, I want to buy it once and I want to wear the One Belt with everything that I wear predominantly, maybe I've got one for some special occasion with a novelty buckle. But outside of that it's kind of a thing, not dissimilar to a good white t shirt or leather jacket or a favourite pair of jeans right. And what I observed in fashion was that the belt was inevitably an add on to another brand right Tommy Hilfiger, sell a belt, Hugo Boss sell a belt, but it isn't their core business. And so how do you solve for all of those things was where Yoku was born.

And I started doing some sketches and some designs. And the design problem was that if you want to make a belt go with everything, it actually needs to have more than one colour, because you can't wear a black belt with everything. But belts that have multiple colours are typically reversible belts.

And when they're reversible, it's two bits of leather bonded together. And that is a stress point, that then means that leather comes apart, it's around a part of the body that gets warm that gets humid. It's how do you make an interchangeable belt with no moving parts that would last a long time with no brand. And I thought I'll just learned 3D design, you know this, how hard could it be, and obviously took some 3D design lessons and realised it's way beyond my skill set right out of the gate.

So I sketched a few things up. And coincidentally, the lady who I started the podcast with, it had a friend of hers, who was an amazing 3D designer, and just happened to be in between things during COVID. And he decided to get stuck into the real design challenges. And he came up with the mechanism that is the core Yoku mechanism. In fact, we've patented the mechanism. And it allows for this idea of a completely interchangeable belt with no moving parts.

And what we did was layer on no branding and producing it with 3D printed stainless steel and full grain Italian vegetable can letter. And the ethos of this belt is this belt will outlast you. But it will look good the entire time that you've got it. But if for some reason, you lose a bunch of weight, right? For example, in your case, or you lose it at a box party like I lost a really good pair of shoes at a birthday party once then you will always be able to go back to this brand and buy this product because it is the only thing that makes themselves and that's a really important part of it as well.

So it has not only physical durability, but there is persistence in the in the nature of the brand and what we call emotional durability. You want it for a long time.

People often ask Where did the name come from? It sounds very Japanese. And it's actually a derivation of the Japanese word 'kyokusen', which I think I'm probably not pronouncing correctly, but essentially means curve. And if you look at the build, it's got this beautiful curvature to it, which actually means that it's quite flat on your stomach. At the moment, it is a project that I've finally managed to solve all the manufacturing challenges of last year. So I'm doing limited runs for people like yourself who who want it and then taking my time to scale it built aren't going anywhere. It's not a startup doesn't need to be funded. It's the antithesis of everything else I'm doing put it that way.

Brendan Le Grange 39:46

I love it. I love it encourage everyone to go to www.yoko.co to have a look at that design, the simplicity of it, the elegance of it a bit of philosophy in the bed to come up with something simple and durable building that one thing well it also want to know The Design Award to by the way, I'm not surprised. I'm not surprised. It really is worth checking out. And yeah, I'd love to hear from somebody who's expressing themselves in many ways, from the business side of things, but also keeping their design alive in in a very physical way. Also doing a bit of DJ'ing on the side, you are somebody I think that many of us who maybe feel like they're very busy and caught up in day to day it should have on LinkedIn just to check up every now and again and inspire us to try those passion projects. We've maybe got on the back burner. But yeah, Vincent, thank you so much for your time. It's been an absolute pleasure. I had given mortgages I think too little thought in the past and starting to realise just how much is happening in the background of a mortgage.

Vincent Turner 40:42

Wonderful. Thank you so much for having me.

Brendan Le Grange 40:45

And thank you all for listening.

Please do look for and follow the show on your favourite podcast platform and share the updates widely on LinkedIn where lending nerds are found in our largest concentration. Plus, send me a connection request while you're there.

This show is written and recorded by myself Brendan le Grange in Brighton, England and edited by Fina Charleson of FC Productions.

Show music is by Iam_wake, and you can find show notes and written transcripts at www.HowtoLendMoneytoStrangers.show and I'll see you again next Thursday.