FinTech Awards Wales – Exclusive Interview: Sonovate

Matt Hyde, Director of FinTech Awards Wales meets:

Damon Chapple,

Managing Director i Sonovate.

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As part of our new interview series, Matt Hyde, Director of Recruit121 and FinTech Awards Wales, talks to a range of professionals in and around Wales’ thriving FinTech sector. This week Matt caught up with Damon Chapple on Sonovate.

Tell us about your main focus at Sonovate

Sonovate, is a leading provider of embedded finance and payment solutions for the contingent workforce. The company was founded as an alternative to traditional invoice financing products provided by traditional financiers and the main banks. We deliver technology-driven finance and workflow solutions to recruitment agencies, online freelance marketplaces, consultancies and other businesses of all sizes that work with contractors and freelancers. Almost a decade later, Sonovate is now one of the fastest growing businesses in the UK.

We believe the future of work is the ability to work anywhere, and in the way you want. Our mission is to help individuals work independently, and businesses of all kinds – from recruiters and consultants to technology-driven freelance marketplaces – to get easy funding and cash flow to scale and grow.

What impact do you feel the FinTech Awards Wales are making in the FinTech sector in Wales?

The awards go a long way in raising awareness that there is a healthy and growing fintech industry in Wales. Such awards and programs help to gain visibility for companies like us who are headquartered in Wales. Crucially, they also send a strong signal to Welsh talent, showing them that there are many opportunities here locally. As an employer, this is important to us. At a time when talent is hard to come by, particularly technical talent, such programs encourage young people and workers in Wales to enter the technology sector. This means that we can have a wider pool of talent to recruit from. We take part in many recruitment activities in Wales, such as the careers fair in Cardiff which is coming up this month (August 2022).

Why have you chosen to support the awards and especially the Best Place to Work award?

Both co-founders of Sonovate come from a background in recruitment. Most of our customers are also recruiters. Therefore, we are well placed to understand the importance of good hiring practices and a thriving corporate culture to attract and retain the best talent. In today’s world, employees look beyond the paycheck and job title. The large resignation has highlighted the need for traditional employment to evolve. For example, young people today look at a company’s purpose as much as anything else when deciding whether to accept a job offer. In addition to that, flexible working is here to stay and companies need to embrace it. At Sonovate, we took a consultative approach with our employees, asking each team to discuss which arrangement works best for them; when people want to work from the office and when they would rather work from home. As a result of this, employees have felt bought into the process and have set up the working pattern that suits them best. This took into account their own work preferences, but also what is best for their teams and those they interact with across the organization. We have adapted our policies to promote employee wellbeing and retention. We’re not alone, our research shows that over 66% of businesses find that young people aged 18-30 have a strong desire to work flexibly – suggesting that this trend will only continue to grow as more younger people enter. the workforce. The Best Place to Work award is an example of how companies can be encouraged to understand their employees’ needs more deeply and fine-tune their policies.

What is Sonovate doing today to support FinTech in the future?

Perhaps our biggest contribution is that we have established a model where fintech helps specific sectors, in our case the contingent workforce, to go beyond what traditional finance has been able to offer them and get tailored solutions to grow and thrive.
Another important point for us, when it comes to fintech, is to really take part in the industry’s ecosystem. In today’s market, partnership and collaboration are key. The formula here is openness, and the ability to utilize open finance and initiatives such as Open Banking to integrate our own platforms into collaborative solutions. This is a very important concept – one that has been around for decades with different technological approaches – because it means that open systems (from multiple vendors) can be brought together in flexible arrangements to offer greater value to the end user. Compare this with closed systems from one supplier that have limited flexibility and can rarely offer everything the customer needs in one solution. We offer built-in finance and payment solutions. “Embedding” is simply the process of integrating third-party technologies into another technology. While a fintech like Sonovate may embed banking or payment or regulatory technologies into our products, we also extend and specialize them for the recruitment and workforce supply chain industries. In turn, our financing services will be offered as APIs for embedding into partner products, as well as being made available as web applications. Embedding finance like this means that financial services happen in the most frictionless way in real operations, for example workers getting paid on time, or a business having an HMRC return automatically and the tax bill paid from reserved funds.

Finally, what is the best advice you have received and what advice would you give?

The best advice I have received, both personally and professionally, is to treat others as you would like to be treated yourself. This has always resonated with me and I feel plays a big role in my interaction with the team at Sonovate and how we have built our culture. To build a great business, it’s no lie that it takes a lot of hard work, but if you have the right team around you, it makes it a lot easier! So it’s important to look after your team, treat them with respect and provide them with the right working environment to enable them to thrive and develop.