Denholm, the executive search, recruitment and employer brand agency, is running a high-profile keynote address and Q&A event next week in Edinburgh as part of the 3-week Scotland Fintech Festival organised by Fintech Scotland.
Steve Tigar, CEO of personal finance app Money Dashboard, who recently secured a record £4.6 million crowdfund (one of the largest fintech raises on equity crowdfund platform Crowdcube in 2019), Darren Cairns, CMO of Edinburgh-headquartered fintech lending platform LendingCrowd, Ilana Munckton, VP of Growth of Care Sourcer and Bruce Walker, CEO and co-founder of FutureX will discuss strategy, scalability, growth and success at Whitespace in Edinburgh on Wednesday 18th September.
The Q&A panel is being organised and hosted by Gareth Glen, Denholm’s recently appointed Principal Consultant. Glen, who brings a strong working knowledge of the UK tech and fintech sectors, joined Denholm from Reed in June. Gareth Glen comments: “We’re excited to have brought together some of the very top people from Scotland’s tech sector to talk about product, market strategy, lessons around scaling and growth and, ultimately, what success looks like throughout the cycle.”
Money Dashboard CEO Steve Tigar will outline what a full-stack growth team looks like in his talk around “getting scientific about marketing”; LendingCrowd’s CMO Darren Cairns will consider “the changing demands of the marketer”, “the importance of customer experience and content” and “scaling the marketing team”; Ilana Munckton, who joined Care Sourcer from Skyscanner at the beginning of the year, is set to focus on growth lessons from startups and scale-ups and scaling including “finding Product Market Fit” and “when and how to scale repeatable acquisition” and; FutureX CEO Bruce Walker’s “empowering the purposeful” talk will concentrate on “building sustainable and scaleable companies with purpose” and “understanding the power of networks and internationalisation”.
Money Dashboard CEO Steve Tigar said: “Scotland’s fintech scene has moved towards a critical mass in recent years, has been pioneering in its approach to the future of finance and that’s evident when you consider some of our success stories to date – including FNZ, Nucleus, FreeAgent, Float and Castlight Financial. The more we can share our experiences in scaling, the greater chance we have to build on these successes going forward.”
LendingCrowd CMO Darren Cairns said: “While the fundamental principles of marketing haven’t changed in decades, the skills required by marketers today have moved on considerably. Marketers now need to be much more commercially and technically rounded professionals, as comfortable with numbers and data as the latest technology.”
Care Sourcer’s VP for Growth Ilana Munckton said: “Growth requires data-driven thinking, customer-focussed experimentation and value creation, and successful cross-functional collaboration. Demand for these skills in Scotland’s tech scene continues to increase. That means we need look at how we develop home-grown expertise, while also attracting a high calibre of talent from London and further afield.”
FutureX CEO and co-founder Bruce Walker said: “The great thing about the tech and fintech companies being founded today is they have the chance to incorporate purpose and a genuine business for good ethos from the outset. It’s much harder to build this in retrospectively. The rationale is now clear for all founders and corporate leaders to see, with industry research almost exclusively showing that companies who take this approach will be the biggest winners in the future. If we can be a shining example in Scotland, we can truly build an ecosystem that will attract worldwide talent.”