Matthew Whetton joined Acquired.com as Chief Technology Officer in Summer 2023. We sat down with him to talk about his first year at the business, what’s next for Acquired.com and what it takes to stay ahead of the competition in the fast-paced payments sector.
Hey Matt, firstly can you tell us a bit about yourself!
I’ve been working in tech for well over 20 years now, and have spent roughly the last 12 years in fintech, mostly in consumer lending and payments. I have spent most time in the start-up and scale-up space, and working in companies with specific but significant challenges to overcome. My background is primarily software engineering though I have worked in data and business intelligence quite extensively too.
Personally I am an engineer, a techy and a creator at heart – I still enjoy coding and making things in my own time. I’ve always had a level of entrepreneurial spirit with that and have launched several projects in the past (albeit mostly didn’t work out). At any given point in time I will always have at least one personal project I’m working on to keep myself stimulated and to make sure I’m scratching that itch!
In terms of personal interests outside of that, I have collected comics since I was a kid and still do today. I collect mostly Marvel comics and artwork, and love most things around it – I actually still trade quite a lot of comics and used to have a shop / stall at some of the big UK comic cons. I used to train mixed martial arts to quite a high level and started one of the first MMA clubs in the UK (Leicester Shootfighting) – I don’t train anymore but still watch it. I also like playing games and have played a number over the last few years, favourites include Elden Ring, Breath of the Wild and more classically Final Fantasy VII.
It’s been a year since you joined Acquired.com as CTO. How has the experience been so far, and what have been some of the biggest challenges and achievements?
The last year has been great at Acquired.com, I’ve learned loads about the payments industry, met loads of great people and felt welcomed by the team. I love the pace of the environment at Acquired.com, its very fast paced and change is embraced which fits very well with my personality and what I enjoy. It’s hard to talk about achievements for what feels so early in my journey, but we’ve made some great progress in introducing some rigour into our internal processes, we’ve also launched some great products and features too such as Direct Debit and Components.
How have you shaped the technology team at Acquired.com? Have you made any significant changes to how the team operates or collaborates?
I guess I’ve made a lot of changes to how we approach technology at Acquired.com, and will continue to evolve that as we move forward. For me it’s a continuous process and one that is never ‘done’.
One of my key focuses has been more cultural around ensuring the engineering function is fully engaged in the business and the problems they’re trying to solve, and isn’t a function that just delivers code. It’s something I personally see as the biggest difference between those that are great and those that are ok at technology, but is something most often missed. Ultimately this means having highly skilled engineers that understand and contribute towards solving business and customer problems, that are actively collaborating with colleagues across the business and that use their own initiative.
More operationally I have made a number of a whole array of more practical changes – shifting towards more agile delivery practices, ensuring we’re delivering a release on a predictable schedule, introducing a real priority of quality and fixing issues, introducing data and metrics to monitor things like time in value-add vs rework and toil and many more.
I’m typically more in favour of fairly relaxed processes, but interestingly because we are working across two significantly different timezones I’ve also introduced some fairly strict practices such as our daily rhythm which aims to maximise when the teams time overlaps and ensures we keep the train moving forward each day.
What has been the most rewarding aspect of your role so far?
In general it’s where I see value being realised, change being embraced and things moving forwards. More specifically I’ve enjoyed seeing the response to some of the changes made and the impact it has on the day-to-day lives of colleagues and customers. Something simple like having clear, predictable and well communicated release cycles with a commitment to fixing bugs within that schedule has visibly improved our ability to solve problems for our customers, communicate it clearly to those customers and also removed a huge amount of stress from our colleagues lives.
How do you personally stay ahead of the curve in such a rapidly evolving industry, and what advice would you give to other tech leaders?
Staying up-to-date in technology is really hard and even more so in the advent of generative AI. Things at times can move so quickly it’s impossible to keep up with everything.
In some ways I’m probably not the best person to give advice on healthy ways to keep up to date, mostly because I’m fairly obsessive and tend to spend a lot of my time doing things, trying things and in general trying to stay ahead. It’s certainly not feasible nor healthy for everyone to work and approach things the way I do.
That said, some things that can help – finding the sources and mediums that work for you – could be blogs, books, podcasts, videos, short-form, long-form or some combination of them. Personally I use a mixture of things and have a handful of resources that I will trust and go back to.
Probably the most important thing is making sure you’re surrounded by people who are smarter than you, know things you don’t, with diverse interests and doing so in a sharing and supportive environment. There is literally nothing better than having a great team of people around you, all actively engaged and bringing different things to the table. You just can’t go and learn all of these things and know everything yourself – there is so much power in realising the value of vulnerability and a good team.
Looking ahead, what are your priorities for the next year in terms of technology and innovation at Acquired.com?
A year is a long time and I’m sure things will change but we have a mixture of some very practical things, some product innovations and some more cultural things.
Practically I’m very focused on getting us ready for scale in a number of ways whether it be in the platform itself, in the process we use or in growth of the team – it’s all about staying lean, efficient and delivering more with less. PCI DSS v4 is also another very practical thing for us to focus on given how big the change is.
On the product front we want to keep enhancing some of the bigger changes we already delivered – Direct Debit looks to be a huge area for growth and an area we will spend a lot of time enhancing our offering. Open banking payments is something else we’ll most certainly be focusing a lot of energy on, particularly as Variable Recurring Payments start to become more mainstream. We of course have several other initiatives too to enhance our offering across all of our product pillars such as ongoing improvements to payment links, improving auth rates and delivering a scheduling solution.
I also see us becoming more obsessed more about customer experience and how we can improve that for our customers and their customers too. Making our platform intuitive, easy to use and simple to integrate with.
I’d also be remiss if I didn’t mention AI – I do think some of the hype around AI and in particular generative AI is in a bit of a lull right now, but it’s clear that it’s going to be and already has been transformative. We have several initiatives underway looking to leverage AI to improve efficiency, deliver better customer service etc.