Origin of NIUM Labs

Before I tell you the story of NIUM Labs I need to tell you the story of how I met Joaquin.  Finextra ran an article on how Denizens a NEO Bank under the BBVA Umbrella was shutting down. I took this opportunity to reach out to Joaquin via LinkedIn 

https://www.finextra.com/newsarticle/34605/denizen-shuts-up-shop 

 I was in San Francisco in couple of weeks and Rajesh Venkatesh and I caught up with Joaquin for a coffee. It was an amazing conversation and it transcended into NIUM acquihire Denizen team and enabling Joaquin and Geof (CTO of Denizen) to re-build their dream under the NIUM umbrella. We reached out to BBVA with an offer but they declined. 

Our intention was to build Rayo.com a migrant bank for immigrants coming to the US. Joaquin and I were super excited with the idea and agreed that we will build it under the NIUM umbrella using a lean team hired by Joaquin with the plan to spin it out and seek investments once there is some scale. Joaquin went about building the team from scratch and being super hands on built the team, design elements and App and so on. It was progressing super smoothly and slated to launch in the US Q2 this year. 

As NIUM was scaling rapidly in its core products as founder I felt the unrest that we didn’t have a team looking at future revenue products. Bain has a great concept of insurgent brands, if you don’t know what it please do read about it. NIUM today is an insurgent brand -brand - Small company but Big disruption out-placing older and legacy platforms. As a founder my worry was also that can in 5 years NIUM become an established brand i.e. we start getting displaced by new insurgent brands.  

This thought was seeded in my head that we need a separate team to our Core team looking at future revenue sources. Joaquin and I had grown to mutually respect each other, and I was a big fan of how he and his team were able to build things in a low budget but of great quality.  One of the reasons I believe future looking products should be looked by a separate team is to ensure focus and avoid any distraction. The core team should be 100% focused to deliver revenue targets for the next 12 months.  

 I reached out to Joaquin and asked him what excites him and though building a new product excited him a lot he also felt NIUM was a Rocketship and within the LABS concept he can be Entrepreneurial as well as deliver massive returns to the company on a long-term basis. We jointly discussed and agreed goals for building NIUM Labs 

• Forward looking revenue products with a capability to deliver annual revenue of 50m in 24-36 months 
• Same core tech stack as existing NIUM platform. Simple to integrate 
• Independent team with retained Entrepreneurial spirit but working with Core NIUM team for e.g., Geoff will have a reporting line into NIUM CTO 

Once we established these principles Joaquin shared them with his core team and everyone agreed. It was a great outcome for everyone involved and I can't be more excited to have Joaquin, Geof, Marta and his team join on this journey. As part of LABS we are going to bundle complex products in a simplified API to impact our 130mn end customers. More from Joaquin on what we are building soon.