What Leaders Want | Chief Product Officer – Andrew Steadman

Caroline Béguin: So before we dive in, if you had to describe your career journey using only three product names, what would they be? 

Andrew Steadman: So I think the first one’s easy. That would be Barclays Current Account because my whole sort of banking career started with Barclays Bank in the UK in their branch network, so that, you know, the traditional current account is something I interacted with on a daily basis. Probably the second one would be the Aperio product from Fiserv. So this was a new branch platform which really redefined the way branch platforms were being delivered, and that took me to a number of countries around the world to live and work and had me in the US in 2003. So that’s probably a big one. And then I think the third one was another one from Fiserv, which was Agility, and that was really the first SaaS product that I was involved with in terms of defining that for the market. 

Caroline Béguin: Banking products have changed a lot over the years. From your experience at Temenos, Fiserv, and now SBS, what’s the biggest shift you have seen? 

Andrew Steadman: I think it’s really simple. To me, it’s the mobile phone. Without the mobile phone, I don’t think banking would have evolved in the way it has. If you think about that device you carry, you interact with your bank more frequently than you used to. You check things every day. You process transactions immediately. It’s really redefined the way we interact with our bank, so branches are closing ’cause we don’t need to use them anymore. I think the mobile phone is a real game changer and will continue to be, I think. 

Caroline Béguin: You’ve been at the forefront of product evolution in banking. Can you share a moment in your career when you realized the industry was about to change forever? 

Andrew Steadman: Yeah. I think for me it was when faster payments were introduced in the UK, which was probably, what? 2008. We see instant payments now coming into Europe, but in the UK we’ve had it for a long time. And I think it’s completely redefined the way we move money and the way we pay for things. I mean, I  haven’t written a check for I don’t know how long, right? I pay the window cleaner with a faster payment. Those instant payments I just think are so ubiquitous that is the one thing I think that’s disrupted things more than ever, and I still don’t think we’ve exploited it to the fullest. I think there’s still more to do with it. 

Caroline Béguin: Instead of just talking about product evolution, I’m going to name old-school banking products, and you’re going to react with a keep upgrade, or retire answers and explain why. Checkbooks. 

Andrew Steadman: Oh, retire. I think they were a very old-fashioned mechanism of moving money. They’re inefficient. They’re slow. They’re not very green, I think most countries  have gotten rid of them. It’s only, dare I say, people like my mother in her mid-eighties who still likes writing a check. And even the US, which has struggled for a long time to get rid of them because of the way people would use it to manage their cash flow, even there, it’s going. So get rid of the check. It’s just a waste of time in my mind. 

Caroline Béguin: CD-ROM banking software. 

Andrew Steadman: I don’t think anybody would actually know what to do with a CD-ROM anymore so I’d retire that as well. I think, you know, your Apple device you’re looking at here, probably can’t put it in there, can you? So that has to go in the bin. 

Caroline Béguin: Yeah, true. ATM-only transactions. 

Andrew Steadman: Yeah, ATMs, I think, still play an important role. Cash still has a role to play in society, and we need access to cash, and ATMs are fundamentally for that. In some countries, you would have ATMs where you could deposit a check. We don’t need those anymore because we have a camera in our phone, so we do it through our phone. But I do still think there’s a role for people giving ready access to their cash and using it. So they’ll still hang around for a long time. I’m not convinced about the upgrading of them. People have tried over the years to make them do more. We’re standing outside a store. We just want to grab our money and go. We’re not gonna do proper banking there. So I’d just make them more efficient and quicker. 

Caroline Béguin: Can you name a past product you thought would succeed but didn’t, and can you explain what happened? 

Andrew Steadman: So perhaps I won’t specifically give it a name because that’s probably the wrong thing to do. But it was really the first product that I was involved with, which was a true SaaS product, and it made me realize that you can’t just take old ways of doing things and make it SaaS. SaaS requires different technology, a different way of thinking, and a different way of operating, and only then can you be successful in SaaS. And I think also to add to that, the financial side of the product is very, very different. We were still trying to deal with a SaaS product in the old-fashioned financial manner, and that was just problematic. It got in the way of decision-making. So yeah, those who know me would probably understand which one it is.But that’s probably the one I’d pick that wasn’t the success we hoped it was. 

Caroline Béguin: We’ve been talking about products, and I’d like to know what exactly you do as chief product officer? 

Andrew Steadman: As chief product officer, my goal really is to set the product strategy for SBS. And what we mean by product strategy, it’s really all about identifying market problems that we can solve. By bringing our expertise as a company, we can solve those problems better than other people. To pick an example, to put it in context, Apple does this very well, and I always think back to the original iPod. They identified a market problem that we perhaps didn’t even know we had. But once they solved it, we all went out and bought one. It wasn’t the first MP3 player. It wasn’t the best MP3 player. But it solved the problem of getting the music on and off. It made it simple. And that to me is what a good company does. We identify a problem, we bring our unique abilities to solve it, as a result of which we generate value for our customers. So my job is to look at where we go. It’s also to look at what we already have in the portfolio and those things that are perhaps redundant, duplication, to optimize the investments we make.

Caroline Béguin: You’ve been here at SBS as chief product officer for a year now. How would you sum up that year? 

Andrew Steadman: Actually, I’ll use the same word that I used when Eric Biery asked me how my first six months were. And it’s really good fun. I’m really enjoying it. It’s a fun place to work. That’s not mean to say it’s easy. Obviously, there are challenges, but I’m enjoying it. It’s good fun. We have an exciting future ahead of us, I think. Obviously, with the transaction that went through last year and us becoming part of 74Software, it’s gonna enable us to operate in a different way as a software company. And I think that opens up a lot of possibilities for us. So yeah I think it’s an exciting future. 

Caroline Béguin: I’m glad that you’re talking about this exciting future because I have a question from James Powell. He wants to know how satisfied you will be in two years’ time about the difference you are making in terms of product management. 

Andrew Steadman: He did warn me that he’d fed you a question. So in response to James’ question, yeah, when I look back in two years, I will look back in a positive light and think about the impact I’ve made and that impact being positive. And the reason I’m confident in saying that we’re now six months into the adoption of a new way of doing product management, and I see all the product teams embracing it, and I see the product teams leveraging the tools we’re giving them and keen to continue that journey. And I think, yes, it was an initiative that I started, but without the enthusiasm and keenness of the product teams, it wouldn’t necessarily go as well. So yeah, in two years, I will be confident that we’ve changed the way we do product management and that we’ll be seeing a positive impact in the company as a result of that. 

Caroline Béguin: Let’s say I want to create the next big fintech product. What’s the one mistake I should absolutely avoid? 

Andrew Steadman: Not talking to the market. You can’t create a product that’s gonna resonate with the market by sitting in your room and dreaming it up. If you look throughout history, whenever you’ve got new startups, often it’s because the founder had a problem. That founder recognized other people had that problem, so they solved the problem, and that’s where the company comes from. Very frequently, the second product they bring to market is a failure, and that’s often because they believe that they can think up new products. So they think up product number two without talking to the market and understanding the problem. And so it’s, you know, anybody who does an MBA will look at this type of behavior. But most entrepreneurs, they have a problem themselves that’s frustrating them. They solve it for themselves, they solve it for other people, and that’s the success. So when we’re a company such as ourselves, it’s critical that we’re talking to our market to understand their problems, to understand what keeps the CTO awake at night. And once we understand their problems, we can solve them, but we can’t do that in a vacuum. I mean, I talked about the iPod earlier. We go back to that example. You know, the MP3 player existed for years, but it was something that sort of geeky people used because you had to figure out how to take a CD, convert it to MP3, put them on the device, all of that, which a normal person wouldn’t do. What Apple did so very well is they gave you a free piece of software called iTunes that made your life much easier. And so the obvious thing to do was to buy the device it worked with. And they gave it to Windows users for free as well. So they created this market by solving the problem that we really didn’t understand we even had, but they understood that problem very well. So it’s really getting to understand your buyer and what it is they need to make their life easier, even though they might not be able to tell you it themselves. And that, that’s the real trick.

Caroline Béguin: Can you share behind-the-scenes stories about launching new products and deciding when to retire old ones? 

Andrew Steadman: So introducing new products is always an interesting thing because you have to help people understand the value, right? Why should they spend money with you? And I think back to, it was probably the mid-2000s, working with a bank in Hawaii. And we were able to really articulate the value that we would deliver to them as a business with a product that we were bringing to market, and they were one of the early adopters. As a result of which, they went to our competitor and said to our competitor that in order for the deal to have the same value, our competitor needed to drop their price by twenty percent, which the competitor refused to do, and we won the deal. But to me, it was really interesting that by demonstrating the value that the client had, the product sold itself. We didn’t need to convince them to buy it. They understood the value it would bring them, and therefore bought it. And I think that, that to me is a key one for launching products. If you don’t understand the value you’re delivering, it’s gonna be very difficult to convince people to use it. And then in terms of sunsetting products, when I took on a role in Fiserv in the US, in the particular division, I was the first person to sunset a product. They’d never done them before. So the fear in the business was there. We had products that were still running on old Windows 95 and stuff like that. But what I found most interesting is when we were open and honest with our clients about why we were sunsetting these products and the journey we were gonna take them onto the new ones, the reaction was, “Well, it’s about time, ’cause we knew you had to do it at some point. Now we have a clear path, we can plan.” So it was rather than all of the fear that everybody expressed, what we actually found is they readily accepted what we were doing. They understood the journey we wanted to take them on, and they were willing to come on that journey with us. And so don’t ever be fearful about sunsetting a product for the right reasons. 

Caroline Béguin: What’s a product decision you had to make that was particularly tough, and how did it turn out? 

Andrew Steadman: A good few years ago now there was a product in my portfolio that we were being asked to do a load of development on, and it was gonna be about a million dollars worth of investment, and I didn’t want to make the investment because I didn’t think it was worth it. And rather than me not thinking it worth it, the data said it wasn’t worth it. And the sales team were obviously, “We need to do it. We need to do it ’cause without it, we can’t sell it.” All those sorts of stories. And the president of the company said, “I hear you, exactly what you’re saying, but we should do the work. We need to make the investment.” And I think as a product person, your job is to help people make an informed decision. I didn’t like the decision, but the decision was made. But I remember a year later, he walked into my office and said, “I should have listened to you because it cost me two and a half million.”  And I wish we’d listened to you in the first place.” So that was quite a nice feeling to, even though it was a year later, to be acknowledged for the work that we’d done. And I say we ’cause invariably there’s a team involved, that we’d done had, was validated eventually.

Caroline Béguin: No great product is built in isolation. Partnerships are crucial, especially in fintech. You’ve worked with some of the biggest players in banking and tech. What’s one unexpected lesson you’ve learned from partnering with big organization? 

Andrew Steadman: In a way it sounds obvious, but it’s often forgotten. People enter a partnership for a reason, right? It’s not because they’re being benevolent and they want to help you. They’re in it for a reason. So when I’ve previously worked with Microsoft as a partner their approach to ecosystem partners is very well structured. But they’re doing it for a reason, and you need to understand that reason. And if you don’t understand that you’re both sides of that, you risk conflict. And so, you know, somebody like Microsoft, you think of them, they’re a big company, they’ve got lots of money, they’re just trying to help us. No, they’re not. They’re making an investment. And when any company makes an investment, it’s looking for a return. And so being very clear about the return that’s expected for that investment is really important in order that you can actually make the partnership a success. 

Caroline Béguin: If you had to partner with a non-traditional player in banking, say a streaming service or a gaming company, what would that partnership look like? 

Andrew Steadman: It’s an interesting one, actually. I think when you have companies that come together with very different cultures which I think is what you’d get in this situation, you have to work through that. I always think back to… This is a story from a different industry. My wife used to manage drug trials for a large global pharmaceutical company, and she once was dealing with a drug trial where a Californian biotech company had created this drug, and the research was being funded by a German pharmaceutical company. So if you can imagine you’ve got guys in board shorts and flip-flops on one side of the table and suits on the other. It’s a clash of culture. That image has always stuck in my mind because I think when traditional banks start working with streaming services, technology companies, you’ve got that clash of culture, right? We’ve been here for a hundred years. We know how to do things.  And you’ve got the young upstart saying, “Yeah, but that’s old-fashioned.” And so I think you have to be open in terms of your mind to accept that there may be a new, different way of doing things. You also should recognize the expertise you bring. As a bank, you have incredible expertise in areas of, like, compliance. And if you get compliance wrong, it can be incredibly costly. So when you think of a streaming service, for example, as a partner, they want your expertise in the areas that they’re no good at, but don’t tell them how to run the tech. And so I think, again, it’s a bit like any other partnership, is realizing what you bring that’s valuable to it and that your partner values in you, and then you can actually work together. 

Caroline Béguin: So we’ve looked at the past and present of banking products. Now let’s fast-forward to the future. I’m going to give you wide industry predictions, and you have to bet on each one high chance, medium, or no way. In five years, banks will completely get rid of branches. 

Andrew Steadman: No way. I don’t think they’ll be allowed to. Regulators around the globe still want to preserve some access to branches, particularly for people who can’t use a mobile phone or there are certain things that we as humans want to talk to a person about because it’s important to us. Buying a home, planning for our retirement. We want to be comfortable that what we’re doing is the right thing, and so more frequently, we want to interact with a person who we feel we can trust. Normal day-to-day transactions, I’m doing them on my phone. I mean, my daughter, she doesn’t understand why she should ever need to go to a branch of a bank. Makes no sense to her. Why should she ever go? So when they ask her to come in for some reason, she’s like, “I don’t understand why I need to do that.” But I think there are certain things that you will want to do, and I think there are certain segments of society who need access. And so we will see branch networks diminish considerably. I think we’ll start seeing shared locations, so you’ll have one bank branch, but shared by multiple brands because they’ll spread the cost. But ultimately, I think they’re here to stay because we’ll always have a need for them. 

Caroline Béguin: Yeah. I like human connections. 

Andrew Steadman: That’s another element, right? 

Caroline Béguin: AI will replace product managers in banking. 

Andrew Steadman: No. Don’t think that’ll happen. AI is a really powerful tool to be used to support doing things. But when I’m trying to uncover problems that even you don’t realize you’ve got as a consumer, AI is gonna struggle with that because AI learns from what it knows. We’re trying to uncover potentially the unknown. And so I think AI is a very useful tool, and I think product managers will use it more and more to make their daily jobs easier, but I don’t think it’ll ever replace a product manager.  Fingers crossed on that one. 

Caroline Béguin: We’ll see a Netflix-style subscription model for financial services. 

Andrew Steadman: So I think in many countries we do already. I think in many countries, the idea of a current or checking account being free is gone. It’s no longer sustainable. So I do think more and more you will pay for the level of service you want. And you think about Netflix, you’ve, you’ve got the basic service that they push ads into. You’ve then got the next one up, which gives you a better picture quality, and two or three of you can share it, and then you pay the most, you get the highest quality picture and the whole family can share it. I think we’ll see models like that, whereby I am willing to pay for the level of service I receive. And I would argue in instances we do already. If you look at American Express as a charge card, it has its green one, its gold one, its platinum one, and its black one, the Centurion card, and each carries a different price, and each carries a different level of service. And people are willing to pay now for the service provided they can see the value in what they’re receiving, and I think that’s the key thing. They’re willing to pay for a service if they can receive the value. 

Caroline Béguin: Big Tech will own more financial products than traditional banks by 2035. 

Andrew Steadman: No, I don’t think so. Because I think what we will see is tech distributing bank products, but banks will still be the bankers, they’ll have the product. And I think we’ll see more and more of that. I mean, in the UK this week was it National Westminster Bank, one of the big players in the UK, is now enabling the Automobile Association, which is the national company that when your car breaks down by the side of the road, they’ll send a truck out to repair it. They’re now offering savings accounts and loans. But NatWest is providing the banking because you need a banking license, you need to understand compliance and risk, and that’s the expert domain of banks. So I think what we’ll see is technology companies becoming the distributor of banking products more and more, and perhaps the brand of the bank is gonna be less prominent. But ultimately, somebody has to have that banking license. 

Caroline Béguin: Cash will be completely obsolete in major economies within ten years. 

Andrew Steadman: That’s an interesting one. I don’t think so. I think much that governments would like that for the reasons of cost, the reasons of taxation, because of course, I can see all transactions, therefore, I have the opportunity to tax them all. The cost of producing money and handling money, it’s very expensive, so banks would like to get rid of it from a cost security risk. I think governments would like to. I think consumers, there are still a lot of the global economies that have a portion which is cash-based. Whether it’s I’m paying for the guy who mows my lawn or, you know, whatever. Those cash-based economies, I don’t think will ever really give up. So cash is always going to be there. And if they tried to pull cash, I would suggest something else would become a medium of exchange in place of cash. So, I’d be really surprised if it ever completely disappears. 

Caroline Béguin: To be fair, I don’t really need cash. If it was just for me I would get rid of it because it’s always annoying when I go to the butcher and he tells me, “No card under fifteen.” And I’m like “Oh, no.” Because I never carry cash. 

Andrew Steadman: I mean, so here I am in France. I’ve not had a euro in my wallet for I don’t know how long. I never bother getting cash when I go overseas. I can’t remember the last time I went to an ATM. I really can’t. For me personally, I probably have got a twenty-pound note in my wallet. I’ve no idea how old it is. It’s there just in case. But I think the segments of society still deal in cash. There’s an accessibility issue, particularly where you’ve got aging populations or people who are more vulnerable, that the technologies they’re not comfortable with, they want to pay with cash. We see certain places in the world who are now legislating that shops must receive cash. I mean, I remember the first time I went into a sandwich shop in London, and they accepted no cash, and I thought, “Oh, that’s a surprise.” But then you’ve got some cities in, I think it’s in California, who’ve been legislating to say you must still accept cash because by excluding cash, you’re excluding part of the population. 

Caroline Béguin: Banks will no longer offer their own products, just marketplaces for third-party financial services. 

Andrew Steadman: I think by definition, a bank will always offer its own products because it has a banking license, and therefore it’s in a unique position to offer products that others can’t. However, I think what we’ll increasingly see is that banking products are embedded in a broader offering. You don’t want a mortgage, you want to buy a house. So you have to get a mortgage to help you buy the house. If you think about that process of buying a house, if your bank could help you do that really easily and they do a mortgage at the same time, you’ll go, “Well, yeah, I’ll work with them. They’re making my life easier.” Whereas you have to go and find a solicitor, you have to find the removal firm, you have all those things. So I think what we’ll see is banks will continue to offer banking products because they’re in a unique position to do that because of their banking license, and they’re not cheap. I mean, last time I saw a valuation of a banking license in the UK, it was sixty, seventy million sterling was the value of the license. But those banking products will be embedded in an offering which is more attuned to what you are actually trying to achieve as an outcome for your personal gain.

Caroline Béguin: So before we wrap up, let’s do a quick fire round. Short answers no overthinking. A product you wish you had invented. 

Andrew Steadman: If it could be any product, the iPod. Just genius. Simple and genius. For me, that was such a good example of really understanding the problem that people had, even though we didn’t realize we had the problem. Solving it in a very simple way, and we all went out and bought one. In terms of banking products, if I were to look and say, “Is there a banking product that I would like to have thought about inventing?” Buy now, pay later lending. I think buy now, pay later lending is a very different take on that traditional loan that a bank would provide. The monetization approach was very different and I think that is a great example. Yes, it’s had some bad press because it’s been sort of unregulated. It’s sort of flown under the radar a little bit, but I think that’s not the fault of the product, that’s the fault of the legislative framework. It just wasn’t ready for that type of innovation. But that, I think as a product because it solves a real problem. I don’t want to loan, but I can’t afford to buy it now. But yeah, over three months I can buy it, and that’s fine. And I think that’s a real, you know, it’s just making it simpler, making it easier for people to buy things. 

Caroline Béguin: One non-work thing that helps you be a better CPO. 

Andrew Steadman: Charity work because it puts a different perspective on things. You can’t help but have a different perspective when you get involved in things which are outside of your norm. And I think it also makes you realize the things that are worth worrying about. So I’ve always tried to find something to get involved with just because I think it grounds you a bit. It gives you a sense of reality and it’s always good to give back. 

Caroline Béguin: What is harder, convincing a boardroom or explaining fintech to your family? 

Andrew Steadman: Both my wife and daughter are mathematicians, so probably the boardroom because they’ve got logical minds that make life easier. So yeah, both of them, maths degrees and like their numbers. So the boardroom’s probably harder. 

Caroline Béguin: Okay. What do you think a leader truly wants? 

Andrew Steadman: It varies by leader. Different leaders want different things. If I look at myself and what I think makes me a good leader, is my ability to make the people around me the best that they can be. You know, I feel immensely proud when I look at somebody who’s worked for me previously, who I’ve perhaps mentored or nurtured, who’s gone on to greater things, and I think, “Yeah, that’s good.” So I think as a leader, it’s about getting the best from the talent around you. Because if I look across SBS, we’ve got a lot of talent in the building. Do we let that talent do the best that they can? Probably not always. And there are various reasons for that. But I think as a leader, it’s about encouraging that and enabling that because much that I’d love to think I can always come up with the best ideas, in reality, I know I can’t. But if we can, as a group, foster those brilliant ideas and get people to do their best, then I think as a leader, that’s what you should strive for. 

Caroline Béguin: One final question. Delphine Bossu is my next guest. So if you were in my shoes, what’s the one question you would ask her? 

Andrew Steadman: I would probably ask Delphine, as an organization, as we move into SaaS, we’re trying to simplify the adoption of our products, make them more easy to consume, quicker to consume, which by definition reduces the dependency on services. But how do you help the organization understand that while we’re doing that, services themselves are a critical element of any success? 

Caroline Béguin: Okay, great. So thank you, Andrew, for being with us and sharing your time. 

Andrew Steadman: No, thank you very much for having me. It’s been good fun.