Beyond his role at Voalte, Duarte contributes his expertise as a corporate advisor to handprint, guiding the platform in its quest to link businesses with impactful social and environmental projects.

Join us as Duarte shares his journey, insights and the innovative strategies propelling the future of real time payments. Duarte, thank you so much for joining us today.

To kick us off, I'd like to start off with getting a bit of background information on your career, because you've had quite a varied career.

Maybe you could start by telling us how you've gone from the beginning all the way up to becoming VP of Growth at Vault.

Yes, it is quite an uncommon career, I guess. Well, I started, I guess, around ten years ago in journalism at Reuters. I was a digital producer.

And it was a journalism job, but it got me in touch with content and content was, I guess, my way into marketing and how I fell in love with marketing. It was through content, but my background was very much PR, corporate comms. I transitioned to Sky News where I was an entertainment editor.

At Sky News, something interesting happened, which was I noticed a silo between the editorial desk, or we called it a digital desk at a time, where people actually produced content and the distribution or social media desk, which were far away from each other in the room, both physically and I guess spiritually as well, because there was no communication between the two.

And what I did was I approached the social media desk and tried to have a bit more input as a producer and an editor myself, a bit more input as to how the content was distributed in our channels.

And that gave way to a new collaboration and a new way of doing things.

And it was really my first silo sort of destruction. And I enjoy that very much. I like bringing departments together.

And I think that's really the job of a marketer is it is to be that sort of center of gravity, but you need to pull a lot of different parts of the business together to cooperate with you. As a marketer, if you do it yourself and you operate in a silo, you don't really move the needle, particularly if you don't bring the commercial team on board. So I did that at Sky News and that eventually got me a sort of an invite to join the social media desk as an editor there, so I sort of manned the day to day operations.

Social media was my official start as a marketer. I did social, eventually I progressed into Philip Morris International, which, know, big tobacco.

There's an explanation as to why I joined it. There's always a Please tell. There's always a question.

I'm not a big fan of Big Tobacco. I'm not a smoker. My father was, Marlboro Redman for a long, long time.

Those are the strong ones.

I know, the real strong ones. So, know, the Marlboro Man was part of my childhood iconography, I guess, in a bad way. When I got the proposal to join PMI, it wasn't really something that I thought that I entertained. But PMI were at a very crucial point in their history where they had decided to quit selling cigarettes and transition into a sort of smoke free science and technology company. That transition was going to be hard because they made a lot of money with cigarettes, obviously. So the task was this big company who'd never done well, who hadn't done advertising for a long, long time because they couldn't legally, they were going through a transformation.

They needed to reach out to regulators, to the scientific and medical communities, and even to their own customers and convince them to stop smoking. So convince them to get off their own product because if they reached a certain threshold of sales through smoke free, a certain percentage, they could stop selling cigarettes completely.

That is huge, what a brief.

I know.

As a communicator and a marketer, it's one of those challenges you really can't say no to.

And the proof is in the pudding because with my father, I got him to switch from Marlborough into IQOS, which was a smoke free device. And after a few months, he quit everything altogether and now he's smoke free.

It was What an achievement for you and your father.

I know. Fantastic. It's something I'm actually quite proud of. And it was a great time at Philip Morris. I learned a lot.

Helped build an internal creative studio from scratch and that included editorial social media, PR, comms, investor relations, and community management, a big community management team.

And that was really interesting because we started, I guess, just starting at four or five of us and when I left, there were dozens, if not hundreds of people. And so we scaled a lot.

Eventually I felt like my job was done there and I sort of, I challenged myself all that I could. And I went on to Coca Cola HPC as a global head of social media in a more kind of B2B challenge or B2B2C. Coca Cola HBC sold to merchants and then merchants sold products to consumers. But our challenge was to operate a brand within a brand and that sub brand had in itself very big brands like Monster Energy, Costa Coffee, that's all part of the Coca Cola HBC family. So the portfolio was fantastic, the challenge was great.

And I came in just as the war in Ukraine had broken, Russia had invaded Ukraine and Coca Cola was one of the many companies at the heart of that news agenda because we had business in both Ukraine and Russia and quite a significant part of our business was there. So I helped manage the crisis comms side of things just a few weeks after joining as the hashtag boycott Coca Cola was trending heavily on social media, I was their global head of social media. So it was again, very interesting challenge, a lot of war room debates with some very senior people at Coca Cola and Coca Cola HBC.

Goodness me. Yeah. That is a two challenging jobs.

It was a tough brief. Yeah. Again, very interesting. And then after that, I got an invite from colleague to join financial services, standard chartered bank, big investment bank in some parts of the world, big commercial bank in other parts of the world. So both the B2B and a B2C challenge and that immediately sparked my curiosity. I enjoy both modules of marketing, I guess.

I think there's a lot that B2B can learn from B2C, and with Standard Chartered, I got a chance to play around with both.

And I think personally I see Standard Chartered as my best work experience so far and my most Why is that?

Well, there's a human side to it because the team that I managed at Standard Chartered was a fantastic team that still hold very close to my heart still and they were a fantastic group of people and it was very hard to leave them, frankly, but I feel like I did a good job at coaching them and propelling some of their careers up before I left.

And the other side of things was that sort of silo destruction that I talked about in the beginning. That was something that I did a lot at Standard Chartered.

Okay, is there an example you can?

Definitely, yes. So I think it was the biggest accomplishment that I can be proud of. It wasn't me in isolation. I did it with a partner, a fantastic team member within the data and analytics team. But essentially what we did was we looked deep into the two bank verticals. So the B2B side and the B2C side, so the commercial bank and the investment bank. And we realized that, well, they were very different entities as in they had their own specific marketing teams, their own sort of CMOs.

And what we found out was that they were essentially cannibalizing each other's paid media spend by targeting the same people with different paid campaigns.

Going against each other essentially.

Going against each other without knowing so. So if you think about wealth management, right, that was part of the B2C side of the bank.

Wealth management targets obviously high net worth individuals. If you think about then the investment banking side of things, B2B, they target the CEOs, CFOs of very big corporations. Now, that will eventually overlap. Those people in some cases are the same people. So they would have been targeted with different ads for Standard Chartered for different products, but bidding for the same space.

So what we did was we traveled to Singapore and we rallied the different marketing teams, including senior leadership into a workshop where we designed or helped them design the bank's first integrated marketing workflow and strategy. And we brought them together and we started cooperating and acting as one bank. And I think I was quite naive when I started that. I thought, who would say no to something like that? But actually what I understood was that rallying very senior people in a big corporate bank environment is a very tough job and getting buy in and actually getting people to trust you and why should they empty out their agenda for four or five days to listen to you speak. It's a big commitment.

I'm intrigued to know how you did that. I mean, do you talk from a size of the problem type approach? Do you sort of say, look, this is a, do you put a monetary figure on that to persuade them to come along?

You use a lot of data. Yeah, okay.

Data, and a mixture I say it, data and a lot of stakeholder management, a lot of diplomacy, Yeah, sure.

And speaking to the interests of individuals. And that's the approach I take to marketing overall, especially from a B2B side and I kind of took that approach.

If you look at marketing from a B2B side, if you're trying to sell something to a buying committee member, you don't try to sell that product or service as advantageous to the company. You try and sell that product or service as advantageous to the person, right? To the buying committee member, what's in it for you? Is it gonna help you progress in your career? Is it going to make you look good to your colleagues or to your boss?

It's the same approach I took to stakeholder management, guess, that sort of, you know, we can help you be better at your We can improve your numbers. This will help you bring down your customer acquisition cost. And it did.

I'm sitting here listening to this story thinking there must be tonnes of companies like this that are doing exactly the same thing, and don't realise it or know or maybe do realise it, but don't quite know how to unravel it all. So that's a fascinating subject. That is not why we're here though. We could go into a deep dive on that, but I'm keen to move on to where you are now in your current role at Vault.

Perhaps you could tell us a little bit about Vault and also tell us about the role that you're involved to do.

One hundred percent. So Vault was straight after Standard Chartered and it was a very deliberate decision from my part.

Actually, every movement I've made in my career has been quite deliberate. I wanted to become a full stack marketer. I wanted to become a marketer that doesn't really just understand brand or PR or top of funnel, but understands how that impacts the bottom line of a business.

And with the move from a lot of big names in the corporate world to a scale up within FinTech, which is Vault, was deliberate. I wanted to have that startup scale up experience. I wanted to join an environment where there were less resources, but more agility, arguably more passion, and more freedom to try and test different things. Vault is a disruptor in short. It is disrupting the payments industry by coming against a duopoly of Visa and Mastercard. What we are building is the world's first open banking account to account real time payment network.

And if you think about it from a consumer standpoint, imagine you're at a checkout on your, I don't know, farfetch or asos dot com or whatever website you are, you go to your checkout and you have pay by Visa, pay by MasterCard, pay by PayPal and then eventually you will have pay by bank. And the opportunity of pay by bank is fantastic because it means the money goes out of your bank account straight to the merchant's bank account without stopping at what is essentially an analog solution, the credit or debit card, right? It is a proper digital payment method. And I know we like to think of Apple Wallet or PayPal as digital payment method, but in reality, they still have that physical card attached to them, that sort of middleman, which charges high fees and is slower for refunds, has higher chargebacks, etcetera. So we're here to fix that.

There may not be a defined time here, but how long before pay by bank we'll start to see those on the platforms?

Well, can see it already.

Right.

In a lot of different merchants, they're already pay by bank solutions.

We have a lot of big names attached to Voalte already, farfetchkiwi dot com examples, but it's very early days and you will only see this more and more as consumer adoption takes off as well.

Right now, my challenge as a VP growth marketing is that B2B2C side, right? It is bringing on merchants, but thinking how do we increase not just closed won deals, but how do we increase volume as well? How do we get the end user to choose Vault at checkout? And that's a fantastic challenge.

Two clients there. You need the merchants themselves to sign up to you, but presumably the more of their customers that start wanting to use Pay by Vault or Pay by Bank, then it's going to be easier to pull on additional clients.

It's a flywheel.

Yeah. So it's about raising the profile of Vault or the Pay by Bank as solution, is it?

Well, there are obviously several approaches to this and different marketers will have different ways of seeing a solution. My interpretation of it is that when you come into a category that hasn't yet matured, well, really hasn't yet built itself because it's not open banking, right? Open banking is a very broad umbrella category that can mean loads of different things. And our first challenge was to leave that category in a way and position ourselves differently as real time account to account payments because that's what we offer, right? Because when you say we offer an open banking solution, what does that really mean to So a positioning exercise was needed, a segmentation targeting exercise was needed, who is our ICP, who should we go after, how do we position our company, and how do we position our product.

So this is essentially, you've come in, how long have you been in Vault now?

I'd say almost six months now.

Six months, okay, so you're right in the trenches of sorting all this stuff So you mentioned a few of those things there, but let's talk through the first six months of activity, what you know, you've you've come in, you've got a big the business has a big mission, taking on some really big businesses there in the duopoly Visa and Mastercard.

You've started by saying, okay, the approach I've taken is to define our positions. Just run me through that process again.

Well, it's starting from scratch because Voalte is a four year old company that has grown tremendously without a marketing department almost or with very little marketing resources, and that's a fantastic testament not just to the fantastic product we have, but to the incredible commercial team that Voalte has built.

But when you're a company fresh off a series B, we got a sixty million funding round from the series B, the next challenge is scale. Yeah.

And the scale challenge comes with predictable revenue, it comes with automation, it comes with less effort or less of a stranglehold in the commercial team. So marketing, particularly growth marketing comes here to alleviate that pressure. It comes here to bring in leads, to warm up accounts, to create those motions that make the commercial team be a more kind of a closed one team than a demand gen team.

So, when I came in, there was no martech really.

There was no marketing, well, gross marketing processes or strategy. So the first challenge was understand the commercial team, understand the business.

I wasn't familiar at all with the payments industry, with the vernacular, with the intricacies of the products or the needs of the customers at all. So that was a good challenge.

But also within a scale up, you don't have the benefit of the thirty, sixty, ninety learning curve.

You come in, you have to start doing, you start executing.

Yeah.

And you learn by iteration, you learn by test and failure.

The positioning exercise was something that I thought needed to be done as soon as I came in.

Right.

And then it was a question of really, being really focused as to what it was that I could deliver and that I wanted to deliver at that specific moment in time and then gradually scale. Start lean, start focused, not try to do everything because if you try to do everything with a limited team, limited resources, you'll be stretched too thin. So, there's different motions that you can put in place. There's inbound, there's outbound, there's ABM, there's a classic demand gen or lead gen function. So what I did was realize, okay, how can I best be of use to Vault in the short term? And then what are the things that I can gradually scale after that?

Sorry, when you say short term, are you sort of thinking of like, you know, the next twelve months?

The next twelve months.

Yeah, okay.

And that's another thing, and it's an internal educational process, which is with growth marketing, there are some quick fixes that we can do immediately, and as soon as you onboard the Martech, you can start cleaning pipeline, figuring out your lead scoring, your lead grading, all of that, that's great, but long term effects is the real effects of marketing are really sort of medium to long term, especially when we're talking about inbound. If we're putting an inbound motion in place, inbound requires you to have a perfect product market fit to your ICP.

So it takes a degree of self awareness as well. And that's always a tough exercise, particularly within a startup scale up, it's who are we now and who do we want to be in the future is not necessarily the same thing, but you have to work with both. Yeah. You have to prepare the company for what they want to become, but you have to be active in bringing in leads on your current ICP for the product that you have today.

You said you went through the positioning and the segmentation, so presumably the segmentation part of the exercise identified, okay, this is where we are now. This is the customer types that we're going after first. We will get to these in year two and but I'm starting here.

That's exactly right. Okay. That's exactly right. It changes the priority.

And obviously it's not just me, it's me in the commercial team who has that focus, who has that sort of discipline, and it needs to be a constant collaboration and two way conversation between marketing and Out of interest, when you started segmenting the market from from a marketing perspective and you're speaking to the commercial team, how did that go down as the look, I, you know, I'm recommending that we focus here on this segment.

Was there support there? Was there challenges?

You have to be a facilitator. You can't come in as a decision maker. That's my advice to any marketer. Particularly coming into what is essentially still a relatively small company, with two hundred and something people now, think, the founders' vision is essential.

The founders know where they want to go. They were the ones that built the product. They were the ones that built the company. You have to respect that and be humble.

So anything that you do, you do as a facilitator. You speak to them and try and understand, okay, what is the end goal? What is the five year, ten year plan? Where do you see the company going?

And then you look at the data.

Who are we now? You speak to the sales team. Sales team is almost like a counter to the founder vision because the sales team know who they're winning now.

Yeah. And then you speak to product and you understand what the product roadmap is. And then you bring all of that data together and you put something together to facilitate.

Because you need oxygen to keep moving on to stage two, don't course.

And oxygen is current client base.

One hundred percent. Yeah. One hundred percent.

Yeah. So you've that lot of planning that goes into the first first period of first six months, and that's that's what you've been up to. You're now presumably starting to move into the execution and developing that you're halfway through, so probably your year one activity is is in mind.

Does this now Where are we going to now?

Well, scale. Yeah. Like I said, predictable revenue, try and, you know, a mixture of ABM and inbound.

I guess those are the two main motions that we're really focusing on for now. ABM is something that we can quantify the effect of in the short term. We can do it if we're disciplined, we can do it quarter by quarter in strict collaboration with the SDRs and the AEs.

And we can, our job as marketers becomes almost to warm up leads and accounts for sales effectiveness.

And then inbound is something that we put together and we wait. Yeah. We put together, we perfect, we learn as we go, but the effects will take a while to start being noticed.

Putting the ABM approach and the inbound approach together, I'm guessing it must be challenging that because the budgets in the startup world are probably very different from the experience that you had in your well, in all of your previous roles. How how are you it looks as you said it when in the beginning and when you said I was seeking that start up opportunity, you were obviously walking into this with your eyes wide open. So you knew about this, but I'm I'm just intrigued about the tactics that you've used and has there been frustrations? Are there some things you'd like to do but aren't able to?

I'd say there's wins and losses in everywhere which way you go, really, but You mentioned agility already as being a Agility is definitely a plus.

Agility is a plus, culture is a plus, at least there. And definitely the kind of, although the budgets are relatively small when you compare it to Fortune fifty or Fortune one hundred companies naturally, there is a lot less red tape and there is more predisposition to test and learn.

Also there's less waste.

And that's a good thing as a marketer. The focus on effectiveness and efficacy is definitely there.

And I remember anecdotally, I'm not gonna specify in which company this happened, but anecdotally, I do remember coming into a company and within the first three or four days being offered quite a substantive budget and asking, okay, how did you get to this number and where is the ROI on that? So what am I supposed, you're giving me this budget, what are you expecting in return?

Yes, yeah.

And not having an answer to it. Because the mentality was, at the time, before my team and I changed it, the mentality was it's a budget spend, right?

You have this money to play with and play with is actually an expression that I've heard a lot throughout my marketing career and that I profoundly am allergic to.

I don't like playing with money, it doesn't really fit my personality and I rejected that budget and I said I don't really want to play around with such a significant budget without having specific calls and return on investment.

And I remember telling my team, it's okay to be known as the team that doesn't spend money.

It's okay to be known as the lean team, the ones that push back on budgets because there will come a time where questions will be asked to every team and we will be in a good position. And I prepared us for that and it happened. There was a time when the CEO came in a few months after I was in and said that there was now a need for every team to justify return on ads and return on investment essentially. And I saw a lot of panic, a lot of pushback.

Presumably not from your team though.

Not from my team.

No, fantastic.

My team we had our homework done and that left us in a very good position and with a very good, I'd say reputation inside the Yes, yeah, yeah, fabulous.

So when you're in Vault and you're at the beginning, did you put your plan in place and then go to the team to request budget?

Well, it was slightly different at Vault because budget had kind of already been decided for me, but it's something that is always being discussed, and like I said, there is that flexibility, that agility.

And also we have a new CMO now that came in, a great CMO, she's working on that side of things, potentially to be our representative within the C suite. So when it comes to budget, it's different, it's not that sort of static start of the year, here you go, that's it.

Make it last.

It is about spend with return on investment in mind.

We won't spend money without knowing that we can bring more, Yeah, I mean, I think the sort of setting out the strategy, setting, you know, based on what the business is looking to do, And almost I think many organisations just come up with the number first, and they say, there you go.

And it's that's always inherently felt the wrong way around. It should be, I'm gonna this is my plan, but I need this amount of budget in order to enact the plan.

And I know why that is. And that's why in my sort of quest to become a full stack marketer, it was because I saw those big brand budgets come in. And it's always brand that pushes the biggest slice of the budget. And it's always brand that is incapable of demonstrating ROI.

It brings us back to those madman days where you only really knew the effect that a TV ad or a newspaper ad had if a few months after it went live, sales went up. Sure. And it was an assumed effect. It wasn't direct attribution.

I know there's a lot of pushback nowadays to direct attribution.

I like attribution, direct when possible, when not possible indirect. But as a marketer, I think it's our responsibility to build attribution models and ROI models to everything that we do from a full funnel perspective. And if that means limiting yourself to specific targeted full funnel campaigns and not spend an always on budget, so be it, leave always on to organic maybe, but you do have a responsibility to the business to justify that the money that you spend is bringing more money. If you can't do that, I don't think you should call yourself a marketer.

You can be a corporate comms person. You can be a PR person. And even PR in my opinion and corporate comms should be quantifiable. They should enter that funnel because there is an effect.

That's going to be a very polarizing opinion. But I think it's just as well in the sense that the tools that you now have available to you at your disposal to measure the effectiveness of marketing, not everything.

But as you say, I don't think you're saying you should measure everything. You're saying you should always prescribe to measure if you can improve effectiveness. I think that's your central point.

It is. Measure what matters. Don't measure everything, and especially be very careful with what you report back to senior leadership. Don't get caught up in marketing metrics. We as marketers, that's a big trap for us.

I do have a lot of work within investment trusts and I often work with clients who then have to report to board members. And I think that there's a challenge sometimes with with marketing teams of of almost trying to report too much. And I think from my side, I always think it's if you get the very beginning of a project or a campaign, you decide what's the most important measurement for you to report on and manage to take the team on board with you like that, then it makes that kind of communication much easier.

So the way I structure my strategies is you've got goals, then you have motions that gets you to those goals, then you have tactics that help you with those motions, and then you have metrics and key metrics. Metrics are marketing metrics.

Those are the ones that you use to self police, to keep yourself On the straight and narrow.

On the straight and narrow. Yeah. But the key metrics, those are the ones that mean something to the business. Those are the ones that have an impact in the bottom line and that the board and the senior leadership team is actually interested in looking at. And they have to all be connected.

They have to, it's almost like a funnel of its own, but it's about being very selective with how you report on progress and success.

Fascinating. Thinking about the space that you're in right now and for me, it sounds like that the core piece that you're putting in place to support the business at the moment after determining your segmentation is building up account based marketing. That sounds like the priority, is that right?

I would say it's one of the priorities, I'm a big fan of ABM. I know that there is this new kind of trend, I would call it, of saying that ABM is just marketing and that we shouldn't really be putting a new name to it.

I disagree. I think marketing has for a long time, particularly since the advent of digital marketing, not been ABM.

It has been a very sort of spray and pray approach a lot of times. ABM is, in my opinion, and we marketers again, we fall into the trap of sometimes over complicating what we do, a lot of jargon, a lot of acronyms, a lot of funnels and flywheels and but really what ABM gives us is a way to focus.

Okay.

It's an opportunity to focus on what matters and to show our impact in a very real way.

And that's, I think it's a very comfortable position for a marketer personally. That's why I like it because with a spray and pray approach, you know, or with marketing influenced pipeline, sure you can make a dent, you can report on progress, but it's not that impressive as when you say we just won this sort of lighthouse merchant because we warmed them up for a whole quarter with a mixture of content marketing and outreach and whatever it is that we used, but it helped. And then you have things like self reported attribution, which is again, it's just very basic marketing right it's almost like a return to the roots instead of having a software based attribution where different martech solutions say how effective your marketing spend is or isn't, or the effect it had on that closed one deal, which is usually skewed towards, I would say last click attribution, which is usually means that Google takes most of the credit.

And we now know that it's not completely merited because there's loads of touch points before someone goes into Google search.

So it's almost like a step back and saying, okay, maybe we keep direct attribution, software based attribution, but we also go back to asking the closed won deal or the opportunity, how did you first hear about us? Did you read our white paper? Did you ever see one of our ads?

When you start to build this vision of what this system essentially looks like. And you've got, presumably you're starting from scratch, none of this was in place.

So how do you move from there to where you are now? Bring the sales team with you.

It was easy, frankly, because we have a sales team that I've never seen a company and a team so open to try new things. So thankful that marketing was coming in to help.

Was It's part of the culture as well, isn't It's part of the culture.

They were already bought into marketing before I came in. So there was no real, I don't think there was no stakeholder management exercise there. It was the first company I've been where I didn't really felt like I had to convince anyone that we needed a marketing strategy or that what we were doing was right.

So it made everything easy.

I must say I haven't broken a sweat so far.

No, no. Well, sounds like you're flying. It sounds like Volt is flying. Duarte, thanks for talking us through the ABM approach. But earlier you said that your role at Vault was B2B2C, and ABM is very much as you described about the B2B.

Is there anything you can tell us to wrap us up about the to see part? That sounds like the next part.

I think it is, yes.

It would be, if anything is in sort of the pipeline, is that consumer proposition and not just at Vault, but to myself as a marketer, I want that C exposure. I'm quite keen on having a bit more contact with that. I had it already a little bit in my career, but for the past, I'd say at least year and a half, I was definitely more B2B than B2C. So now I want to, and that's what I'm focusing on right now is thinking, okay, it's not just about close one deals. It is about that volume piece.

It is about getting that customer adoption. And that is a mixture of excellent partnerships with merchants, because ultimately, if you think about it, if you think about, say, a marketplace as a merchant, right, You win that deal.

How do you then work with that marketplace to educate the consumer as to the benefits of Voalte? Well, first of all, what is PayPay Bank? So it's an educational piece. So it's almost like you go full funnel within one single platform with one single partnership.

And that's what gets me really excited right now is thinking, how do we think about a full funnel customer journey within one single partner or within one single platform?

That sounds an intriguing problem to start grappling with. We'll have to get you back in a in next year to see how you handled that and what insights we can learn.

So, Duarte, thank you so much for joining us today. That's yeah, I wish you and Volt all the success. I'll be looking out for pay by bank on every transaction that I do from now on. So thank you very much.

Fantastic. Thank you.

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