Elliot Moss
Welcome to the Jazz Shapers Podcast from Mishcon de Reya. What you are about to hear was originally broadcast on Jazz FM however the music has been cut due to rights issues.
Welcome to Jazz Shapers with me, Elliot Moss, bringing the change-makers of the business world together with the musicians shaping Jazz, Soul and Blues. My guest today is Tim Perkins, Co-Founder and Director of Nudge, the financial wellbeing platform. While working together at an employee benefits company as Tim says, “dragging the pension industry into the 21st century”, he and friend Jeremy Beament realised there was a bigger problem than people not understanding their benefits, they didn’t understand their money. As Tim says, “When people are in control of their money, they are in control of their lives. They are happier, less anxious and more empowered.” In 2013, Tim and Jeremy launched Nudge, a global financial education platform, drawing on behavioural psychology and data and offering personalised financial knowledge and skills. Nudge now supports over 300 organisations and over a million people and they also produce white papers on consumer attitudes to finance, including the world’s first global financial wellbeing report. It’s really nice to have you here.
Tim Perkins
Pleasure to be here.
Elliot Moss
I love the name, Nudge, and when I think of Nudge, I think of the book by the behavioural economists, Thaler and…
Tim Perkins
Sunstein.
Elliot Moss
Sunstein, that’s it. Brilliant book, which was the, I think it was the informer of the Cameron era of the Nudge organisation within Government and all that.
Tim Perkins
Yep, that’s it.
Elliot Moss
Was that where your thinking also evolved from?
Tim Perkins
Definitely. Yeah, so there’s huge power behind understanding how the human mind works and using that to get people to engage in things that they otherwise wouldn’t engage with it. I remember the moment that we agreed that Nudge was going to be the name of our business, we were sat in the deckchairs in St James’s Park one lunchtime and we knew we wanted a short, memorable, ideally one syllable name and something that stood out from what was quite a traditional industry, financial services and when we stumbled across Nudge, that was it. But it’s also quite a good description of what we do as well, as I’m sure we’ll come on to with delivering proactive financial education and the way we do that is via nudges, so there’s a number of ways it works.
Elliot Moss
And back in 2013, you were a mere whippersnapper, Tim, you are still a young man and it’s all relative obviously but tell me about becoming a Founder, tell me about that transition from being, you know, a star in your old business, which it sounds like you were. Is that where you met your partner as well?
Tim Perkins
That’s right, yeah, so we met in 2002, we’d both graduated in 2000, done a bit of travelling and done a few odd jobs and what have you and both ended up at this organisation, very small at the time, there were 4 or 5 of us, didn’t really have a product but we had a vision, as per your intro to drag the pensions industry into the 21st century and pretty early on in our relationship, we realised that we both had ambitions to run our own business and soon after that we realised we’d be pretty good business partners so it was a case of just waiting for the right opportunity, waiting for the stars to align.
Elliot Moss
And in terms of you knew you wanted to run your own business, had that been something you had thought about for a long time? Was it in the family? I mean, where did that sort of thinking come from?
Tim Perkins
Not in the family at all, so my dad was a engineer, worked for the same organisation for donkeys years, my mum was a nurse and, you know, complete opposite I guess, you know, the insecurity and flexibility that comes with running one’s own business but I think I’d worked out pretty early on in my career that I wanted a job where I was in control of my success and my earnings and that started in a sales role and for me, it was a natural evolution of that, running my own business. I often say that the harder something is the more rewarding it is and I think that applies to running one’s own business.
Elliot Moss
You said, you know if something is hard, it’s sort of more fulfilling essentially. When you entered into the Faustian pact with Jeremy and you set this business up and you became, you went from employee to Founder and to Owner, do you remember feeling different about life? You said you wanted control, did that happen overnight or was it more like ‘what have I done?’ what the overriding emotion?
Tim Perkins
It’s exciting. I think, you know, I had been preparing for this moment for many years so I’d been saving money as I could and, you know, I’d been very open with my wife that at one point in time I’d be entirely reliant on her, had two small kids at the time and you know there’s never a good time for this stuff, you know you can always put it off but we made sure that we didn’t burn any bridges and still remain very close with the Founders of our last business and in fact, you know, they’re both now involved in Nudge and so, yeah there was a nervousness but I think to start with I really noticed that people weren’t relying on me, I wasn’t getting lots of email, wasn’t getting lots of questions and that was quite a difficult thing to adjust to and then within a few months I realised that actually, building a bit of software is not as easy as perhaps I thought and that’s where I really had to dig deep and I think had we been on our own, either of us had been on our own, it would have been easy to pack it in and go back to where we were but great thing about running a business with somebody else is that when one of you is up, the other is down and you can balance each other out so, I’m very grateful for that.
Elliot Moss
And how many people now work in the business today, sort of?
Tim Perkins
We’ve got about 60 people now.
Elliot Moss
Okay.
Tim Perkins
So, yeah, a lot of people.
Elliot Moss
And how long was it before you hired your first few people?
Tim Perkins
I think it was… it’s difficult to remember now, I guess it was about a couple of years before employee number one came in but it’s in the last year that we’ve, you know, really increased significantly off the back of some funding that we took so we’re double what we were last year so, yeah, it’s a bit of a hockey stick shape to it.
Elliot Moss
And that self-funding part and the sense that it’s your own time, as you said you put some money aside and all that and then you said you know if it’s just two of you, which it sounds like it was for a while, where do you get your strength from at that moment? You said, when one is up, one is down and I imagine that works but where else would you draw a bit of resilience or a depth of ability to cope with what’s going on from?
Tim Perkins
Yeah, I think that you know this probably goes back to my childhood so, when I was 13, my brother was unfortunately in a fatal accident and you know that as a… makes you grow up, you know, pretty early on and it gave me that almost sense of responsibility that I am now representing the family and I need to make this work and you know I need to make my parents proud and it also teaches you that, do you know what, never how bad a problem feels, you know it’s always, you know, normally solvable and it makes you realise also that you know life’s pretty short as well so you need to take every opportunity that you get and, as I say, meanwhile I had my wonderful wife who was able to support us through that period so, yeah, there’s some I guess some inner strength there that, you know, will always make a difference.
Elliot Moss
Yeah, I mean that’s, you know, thank you for sharing that, that’s pretty incomprehensible actually for most people unless you’ve lost someone and I imagine that’s given you incredibly deep perspective on everything, I mean that, doesn’t that just, isn’t there always that moment of going yeah but you don’t know what it’s, you know, what it could be like, that’s a different level of human suffering.
Tim Perkins
Yeah, definitely, definitely and you know what I always say to people and keep reminding myself is that you know when, it’s a bit morbid but, you know when you do go, you just want to be able to promise yourself that you’ve got no regrets and, you know, you never quite know what’s going to happen but if you can, on your death bed say I’ve got no regrets, you know, when I had an idea, I just went for it and you know I honestly feel like that, I’ve taken every opportunity I had so…
Elliot Moss
That’s absolutely brilliant. Stay with me for my very honest guest, Tim Perkins. He is the Co-Founder of Nudge and he’ll be talking more about not just financial wellbeing but what it’s like to run his own business. Right now, we’re going to hear a taster though for the Mishcon Academy Digital Sessions, they can be found on all of the major podcast platforms. Mishcon de Reya’s Joe Hancock and Katy Ling talk about current trends in cyber fraud and what companies need to protect against during the recovery period.
You can delight in all our former Business Shapers on the Jazz Shapers podcast and indeed you can hear this very programme again if you pop Jazz Shapers into your podcast platform of choice or if you have got a smart speaker, I should say just ask it to play Jazz Shapers and you should be rewarded with a taster of our recent shows. But back to today, it’s Tim Perkins, Co-Founder and Director of Nudge, the financial wellbeing platform. When you were talking earlier about your brother, you talked about responsibility and obviously people feel responsibility regardless of what’s happened in their lives when they become an entrepreneur. Tell me how that’s played out for you over the last few years in terms of that responsibility to build something and I mean it on a couple of levels, firstly with the people but secondly with your purpose because your purpose is an incredibly honourable one, which is anxiety is derived from many things, one of those things is a sense of being in control of your finances and you’re wanting to address that and on the other side of course you are bringing people into your own, you know, your orbit. So, let’s just take one at a time, tell me about the people first. When you bring them in, how do you inculcate that sense of responsibility into them?
Tim Perkins
Yeah, I think that you know recruitment is a tough thing but I think we’ve got a model that now works. A lot of that comes down to our MD, so a few years ago we brought a Managing Director in which was probably a bit ahead of our time, you know, we wouldn’t normally see an organisation of our size with two Co-Founders and an MD but we’d worked with him previously and we knew that he was just a brilliant judge of character, one of the brightest people I know but every bit of intellect that he has, is about understanding people and communicating with people so we’re very reliant on him helping us really get to the core of people’s motivations, you know, Nudge is not just the job, we are changing people’s lives, you know, money you know can be a great thing but it can be a very dangerous thing and so we do hold a huge responsibility for our users and so we need people who’ve got that deeper motivation, not just people who are just looking for the next pay rise, you know the next opportunity, social enterprise, on their CV, people who are actually driven by something deeper.
Elliot Moss
And just tell me, give me an example, if I’m a customer of Nudge, what am I going to receive on a regular basis to help me manage my world of money?
Tim Perkins
So, money is really complicated, right, and it’s getting worse and so our job is to translate all of that noise that’s happening in the world of finance, whether that’s legislative updates, whether that’s you know, market updates, whether that’s the latest scams or whatever it might be, all of that noise, to translate that down to very personalised, in the moment, financial education for you and so the way that we deliver that is through a neat app that allows you a safe space to learn about, you know, various elements of money but also this proactive notification service so you’ve got that peace of mind that when something happens that you need to know about, whether that be that the Government’s changed the tax code that affects you or there’s a change to mortgage legislation and you’ve said that that’s something you are interested in, you’ve got that peace of mind that Nudge is going to tell you about it, it’s going to tell you what’s happened, how it impacts you and any action you need to take and what makes this different from the rest of the market is we’re completely impartial so we’re paid for by sponsors which is employers or organisation so there’s no commissions, you know there’s no managing transactions or you know any of that type of stuff, it’s just purely focussed on making sure people understand their money.
Elliot Moss
And so just on the sponsorship point, the point is that if you are… you can register through the company that subscribes but you can register as an individual as well?
Tim Perkins
No, no, not currently, so there’s always a sponsor.
Elliot Moss
So you’re never actually paying for the advice is what you are saying?
Tim Perkins
Correct.
Elliot Moss
As an individual.
Tim Perkins
So, absolutely. So, wellbeing is obviously now a very hot topic in the world of work, corporate employee benefits, I think there was, off the back of Covid there was a big focus on mental wellbeing, bit of a kneejerk reaction in terms of some of the solutions that organisations introduced but what we’ve seen is people now looking upstream a bit and saying well actually what’s causing these challenges that people are having and aside from biological conditions, the biggest problem is money so actually if we can get people to have more open, proactive relationship with their money, we can stop a lot of people getting into those devastating cycles of poor mental wellness. So, in that model, that work model, then the employer is paying for it and making that available to their employees for free.
Elliot Moss
You mentioned you’ve been funded which means that for many years you were self-funded. What’s it like having external partners? There was a significant injection of money. Does it change things dramatically or is it just more, we’ve got fire power, we can now realise the ambitions we had or does it shift more than I am referring to?
Tim Perkins
I think it depends on the partners that you’ve got. So, we were very fortunate in that to have achieved what we had self-funded meant that we had a choice of investors to work with, you know, not many organisations get as far as we did self-funded. So, we had a choice and therefore we could be quite picky and I think that our needs were quite specific so, a big area of expansion for us is the US, so there’s a lot of organisations who are based in the US and they are thinking about the wellbeing of their people globally and they tend to buy global solutions from the US so, we needed somebody who could help us with that expansion over to the US and so we chose a partner who had a presence in the UK and the US.
Elliot Moss
And did they approach you or did you approach them?
Tim Perkins
Err, they approached us originally so the first conversation was the last meeting I had actually before Covid lockdown but we went through a process with advisors and it turned out that they came back to the table and, yeah, it felt like fate I guess that so, yeah it’s been a great relationship so far and, yeah, long may that continue.
Elliot Moss
And the fun bit, Tim, for you, obviously you’ve built something from nothing, there was two of you and now there’s 60 of you, there’s over a million people enjoying the benefits, mostly self-funded, you don’t look like you’re racked with stress although I imagine it is stressful. When are you at your buzziest?
Tim Perkins
When we sign a new deal. Love it, just absolutely love it.
Elliot Moss
The sales guy comes out.
Tim Perkins
Yeah, exactly, We announced a, internally, a big deal just before Christmas and a few of us were having lunch and the deal confirmation came through and I was apparently running round the room like a mad man, shaking my hands, screaming and shouting so, yeah, that’s just when it all comes real when, you know, these big global organisations are showing their commitment to the cause and trusting, you know what is a very sensitive topic for their people, trusting us with that is massive. Love it.
Elliot Moss
And the other buzz I mentioned is, I just want to come back to it and close that off, the running as a tree, the running for charity, you did I think marathon in 2018 in London in 3 hours and 40 minutes.
Tim Perkins
Ish.
Elliot Moss
Ish, 3 hours 42, what was the actual time?
Tim Perkins
Do you know what, I’ve got…
Elliot Moss
Tim, you know the time, I know you do. You can’t pretend.
Tim Perkins
I’ve got the certificate in my kitchen, the Guinness World Record certificate and it’s got the number on there. I think it was 3.46.
Elliot Moss
There you go, I knew he knew. 3 hours 46 minutes dressed as a tree.
Tim Perkins
Yes.
Elliot Moss
Yes. And you raised £5,000 for?
Tim Perkins
For the Money Charity so, yeah, an organisation who are quite close to our heart so they help vulnerable people better understand their money, whether that is people who are disabled or people in prison or you know whatever it might be and I’m based in south London, they were based just up the road in Clapham and we formed a great partnership and I could see that their success was based on donations and I thought well what can I do, I like running and I think I can raise some money and the best way for me to raise as much money as possible is to do something significant and a Guinness Book of Records entry was it so, yeah, 2018, fastest marathon dressed as a tree.
Elliot Moss
We’re in the presence of a world record breaker. His actual PB is around 3 hours 2 minutes, which is tantalisingly close to obviously the 2 something mark which I believe he’s going to try and break this year. Final chat coming up with Tim and we’ve also got some brilliant music from Robert Glasper, that’s in just a moment, don’t go anywhere.
I’m with Tim Perkins just for a few more minutes. We’ve been talking about all sorts of things, from trees that run, through to having a really strong sense of purpose in the business. So, you’re 8 years in, you know, you’re an infant, we’re in year whatever it is, school year three or something. What’s this business going to look like when it goes into its eleven plus era, which I know you are familiar with from a familial sense yeah.
Tim Perkins
Yeah. Quite topical right now.
Elliot Moss
What’s it going to be and then what happens when it graduates, you know, how do you see this business evolving? Is it to your point about the US about scale and touching, reaching more people? Are there other things you want to do with it? What’s the vision?
Tim Perkins
Yep. I think ultimately everybody in the world needs Nudge, you know, who doesn’t need to better understand their money and at the minute, we’ve got an effective channel which is through the workplace but not everybody is lucky enough to work for an employer who is able to invest in these types of programmes, you know, it’s amazing, you know, what a gap people have in terms of their financial knowledge, their financial literacy, the recent research that we launched that you mentioned at the beginning, we found that three-quarters of people are relying on their family for advice with their money. Well that’s great if your family are financial advisors but if they’re not, where do you turn? A huge number of younger people, Generation Z, now are relying on the likes of TikTok which isn’t necessarily a safe place to be learning about money so, I think the future of this business is about expanding beyond the workplace, finding another way to connect with people but doing so in a way where we protect that impartiality. It needs to be a safe space where we don’t have any motivation to sell products or services, we’re just purely helping people better understand and manage their money.
Elliot Moss
And that’s a long haul isn’t it, I mean as the world of media changes, you know there’s a new contact point as it were, pretty much on a weekly basis and that’s also going to require a lot of thought and investment, as you said TikTok may be fine, depends on the content, I guess having bite sized 15 second videos, if you only watch one of them, probably won’t be enough to work out exactly what you do in your financial situation, that’s the issue.
Tim Perkins
Yeah, definitely, definitely.
Elliot Moss
And the research that you do, I was thinking about that, there’s a lot of rigor that goes into it, I imagine the plan is more white papers, more thought but if that’s true, to get to a wide audience often that’s great for a you and a me who might be really super interested, how does that penetrate the market that you are talking about which is much wider? Because that research is for, almost for journalists and specialists who are looking at themes but it’s not necessarily about actually helping those individuals.
Tim Perkins
It’s amazing how many organisations there are out there who not only have an opportunity to help their communities better understand their money but some would say a responsibility as well so, for example, the ‘buy now pay later’ industry which you know I think an extraordinary number of people are now relying on, currently unregulated, looks like regulation is going to come later this year. Wouldn’t it be great if that regulation included some kind of insistence that in order to use those products, you’ve got that financial education, you really understand the impact so, it’s thinking a few steps ahead as to you, know, how is society going to exit in a few years and who can we therefore use as a channel to get people to think about their money more proactively.
Elliot Moss
Education, education, education. You should run for some kind of office. Tim, it’s been great talking to you and thank you again for your honesty. I’m sure a lot of people listening to that will know how hard it is to set something up and know what it’s, and know what it takes and then to actually make it grow so, and it’s a great thing that you are doing so, fantastic, congratulations.
Tim Perkins
Thank you.
Elliot Moss
Just before you disappear, running off as you will, probably at a pace, what’s your song choice and why have you chosen it?
Tim Perkins
So, the song choice is So Much To Learn by Joe Stilgoe. My wife and I married in 2008 and we were very fortunate that Joe Stilgoe and his band at the time played at our wedding. I think he was probably beyond wedding gigs by that time but my wife had been to Uni with him so he was definitely doing us a favour and I think this is appropriate, I think that, you know, it’s an ode to my supporting wife, without whom, you know, Nudge wouldn’t be where it is now but it’s just so apt, you know, we are constantly learning, you know, by building and running a business there’s always something else to learn and there’s one line in particular which really resonates, which is “In a hole, I think I need a gin and tonic for the soul” and there’s certainly been quite a few of those moments over the last few years.
Elliot Moss
That was Joe Stilgoe there with So Much To Learn, the song choice of my Business Shaper today, Tim Perkins. He talked about the importance of perspective and how your life’s experience can absolutely give you that and boy is it important when you are running your own business and indeed setting one up. And really importantly, he also talked about purpose and how that purpose has informed the way his people are driven internally and of course the positive impact of thinking about people’s financial wellbeing can impact the world more broadly externally. Fantastic stuff. That’s it from me and Jazz Shapers, have a lovely weekend.
We hope you enjoyed that edition of Jazz Shapers. You’ll find hundreds of more guests available for you to listen to in our archive, to find out more just search Jazz Shapers in iTunes or your favourite podcast platform or head over to Mishcon.com/JazzShapers.