Rupert whitten - From Fintech COO to CEO

There’s a belief that being a COO is a bridge to being a CEO but they’re quite different roles requiring different focus and skills. Rupert Whitten, CEO of Atrum, talked with me about what it was like to shift from COO of Fintech startup Griffin to CEO. We talked about how he got into leadership early in his career, why he left his startup to become the COO of Griffin, and what he found hardest about making the transition to CEO. 

It’s so nice to see you! We met at a Griffin offsite when you were COO. Your team did my Leadership Archetypes Experience. 

Indeed, that was an incredibly useful exercise, I have to say, as a team. Worthwhile.

Oh, I'm so glad. I wasn’t trying to prompt you but I appreciate that feedback.

I've done a lot of coaching, but I was just struck by some of the team seeing themselves on a piece of paper for the first time, so well described by an archetype. It was so enlightening. It drove home how worthwhile these exercises are and how useful they can be. 

Can you introduce yourself? 

Absolutely. Yeah, sure. So I’m Rupert Whitten, I'm CEO of Atrum in London. At Atrum, we view ourselves as the home for connection: bringing the most extraordinary people together with the goal of helping them to succeed in various aspects of their lives and business. We have a community and events operation that works alongside a team that runs our investment activity, and a philanthropic team. We invest in growth-stage markets and early-stage companies, as well as incubating partnerships with people in our network.

Before this, my career bridged or evolved over a few different parts of finance. I started in banking, moved to fund management, and then onto new bank development - first in a more traditional treasury only bank, and then Griffin, a fintech.

What was your doorway into leadership?

It was quite a young age, I guess my mid-20s. Having left Citigroup, I joined a company called Gordian Knot, where we did some quite exciting things in leveraged, fixed-income portfolio management. We invested across Europe and the US in structured finance, corporate bonds and credit derivatives. I started as a credit analyst. I got good at that job. It’s interesting, you know, as one gets good at a job, you get promoted. Instead of doing more of that job, you end up doing a job that you haven’t done before: leading, training, and managing people. So it's a whole new set of skills that you need to develop. Fortunately, it was relatively incremental. I mean, my first role was heading up the structured finance team, we were a team of three.

There was a bigger bump later on when I took over as the head of credit at that firm. We had 14 people in my team at the time. That felt properly in the deep end of management, in my late twenties, managing a diverse team responsible for $65bn of assets across a number of different domain expertises, not all of which I was entirely familiar with myself.

There was a lot of learning to be done in those areas, as well as in managing people. That was a big step toward leadership. I was quite fortunate that the business that we ran was very entrepreneurial and had a flat structure. So I had already had a lot of exposure to the people that headed it up, and was now in the room with the leaders in our business. I could observe how they worked. I had direct lines to the board, putting together papers and pitching to committees which left me relatively comfortable with what these roles would look like when I got there in the future.

Then I worked at a new wholesale bank. I was given the task, in the later stage of its authorization journey to move from being the project leader to become the COO of this bank, which was a great step up in responsibility. It was relatively short-lived as we decided the bank wouldn’t go onto a full commercial launch. We had successfully got it authorized, and operated it as a regulated bank during its mobilization, but it didn’t go on to be an independent enterprise. It was this route to being in a C-suite that established a good base from which to take on the COO role at Griffin.

Was being in a leadership role something you expected or did you find yourself there unexpectedly?

It was something I always had an eye on, and was geared towards. Arriving at a point of leadership always felt to me as part of the arc of a good career. There were some steps along the way that I worked hard to earn, along with some elements of good fortune and timing that dictated a need for me to step up. Those presented opportunities for me along the way to develop leadership skills.

You’re learning as you go through these stages. An element of imposter syndrome will no doubt kick in occasionally, and you're trying to work out – am I properly equipped to do this job? That always puts you on the back foot, pushing you to think about how you want to approach it. So a bit of both I would say.

Yeah, leadership wasn’t something I ever sought. Being asked to become a COO was surprising – something I never expected.

Yeah, and I think, certainly as my career has gone on, it's not always the leadership role that's the exciting part of a new opportunity. It's been more of a holistic thing. Who am I working with? What field am I in? Is it new? Is it going to challenge me? The title becomes less important as you've done more roles. You have that sort of freedom to be a bit more open-minded about, okay, what could be next here? I mean, I think there is a natural and unique evolution of everyone's career.

What made you take the COO role?

I was working on my startup with a good friend and partner at the time, developing payment devices for hospitality. We were having a great time developing hardware prototypes and writing code to support them. It was a fantastic experience. One problem we ran into though was that we needed to get it properly banked with a traditional bank to handle the payment flows. A bank wouldn’t look at us until we had a proper compliance function. They obviously want to minimize their financial risk and financial crime risk but it represented a big investment for us. It would take quite a lot of time and effort to get properly authorized, before we could fully test our products in the market. We both came from regulated businesses and we could have easily done that but coincidentally, I met David Jarvis, the brilliant founder of Griffin. 

He said, “I'm building a bank that’s designed to onboard early-stage fintechs very quickly, and we will do all their compliance for them.” Given that it was a problem I’d been butting into, the idea itself immediately struck me as very good. This was something that you could build quite a big ecosystem and platform around.

At the time, there weren't a lot of people who had built new banks from scratch, or certainly who had ever overseen the project as a whole, which I just happened to have done a year beforehand. My immediate goal was not to join Griffin, it was to see this bank succeed. So I thought, let me introduce David to anyone I know who might want to invest in this business. As I did that, he and I spent more time together. Eventually, it led sort of a few months down the line to him saying, “Why don't you join?” - and so I became employee number one. There was a difficult decision to move away from the startup that we had otherwise worked on to that point. But I felt that there was a really good and exciting opportunity to get Griffin done, and I knew that I could help him do it. Certainly, on the authorization side, I felt that was somewhere where I could help immediately build up a team and get the authorization journey to a good place. So that’s what led me to join him.

It was important not to weigh too much being a CEO and founder or a COO for someone else. It was about what would be most exciting and challenging. I didn’t care if it meant not being a founder, if I got to be a COO of a bank that offered a path to building something bigger and better. 

That’s a big decision to leave your startup. It speaks to the opportunity and David is an incredible leader. Was the decision to leave hard? 

It was a really difficult decision. I sort of relive it quite often in my mind, because the space that we played in, went on to do extremely well. We were working on payment devices, technology, and software solutions around taking tips and processing food orders in restaurants, and food carts. All the stuff that you now see quite commonplace were the things that we were working on a good few years ago. 

It was important not to weigh too much being a CEO and founder or a COO for someone else. It was about what would be most exciting and challenging. I didn’t care if it meant not being a founder, if I got to be a COO of a bank that offered a path to building something bigger and better. 

So it wasn’t an easy decision, but I felt it was ultimately the right one. One of the reasons supporting this was that we sort of concluded that the business we had started, although full of promise, wasn't particularly defensible. Building a bank on the other hand is a very difficult endeavor, with a pretty deep regulatory moat. It’s also a more scalable one, with a bigger platform to grow from. So there was a bit of both business analysis and personal analysis in making the decision. 

It strikes me as a lack of ego and being able to look at it from a different perspective rather than being beholden to the identity of Founder. 

Yeah. It felt odd the first morning I joined David. I was like, “Oh, I have a boss now and the dynamic is different.” But he's such a great guy to work with that lasted only a morning. He makes everyone feel like they’re a partner. Griffin is a very collaborative, welcoming environment that doesn’t have a sense of hierarchy. It always felt like progress. It always felt like the right step.

About a year ago now, maybe a little longer, you left Griffin to take your current CEO role. What made you make the switch? 

It was another incredibly hard decision because Griffin was a job I loved and a company I loved. While we worked incredibly hard, particularly in the early stages, it was always good fun. It was always challenging. There was a lot of new learning, which is what makes me happiest.

When I was approached, we had actually just got Griffin to a really solid point in its authorisation journey. That, along with having put a great operations team around me, made me feel that there was then sufficient institutional knowledge and continuity in place for me to even think about moving on.

As it was, I was introduced to Atrum by someone I really respect, which made me take it seriously. As conversations progressed, and I got to meet more of the team, I became impressed not just by the quality of the people on board, but also how well they had done in attracting an incredible network of people and businesses around them. There was obvious and enormous potential. In many ways, the role they offered also really suited my background and skill set and I knew, because of that, I would have something positive to add. It’s a great feeling, before starting a job, to already have ideas about areas where you can immediately make changes that you know will help the operation.

That, along with the fact that I found the prospect of a new challenge exciting, particularly as it would allow me to broaden my skill set a little bit, and build on elements of management, strategy setting and business development.

Also, while at Griffin we had the wonderful Maria (Campbell), who you know well, doing the People function. We don’t have that dedicated function at Atrum so it gives me more of a chance to get involved in hiring, recruiting, and working with people which I quite enjoy.

Yeah, the COO role is quite different in a regulated company, less people-oriented. I assume as a CEO you’d get to do more of the people/culture stuff. 

Yeah, you're right. Within a bank, it's quite prescribed. I mean, there are certain aspects that you're responsible for. You're very much in the building stages behind the scenes of what the bank can look like and how it will operate. You know, there's payment rails, customer service, operational resilience, technology, and all sorts of different aspects of what a bank needs to get up and running. As well as doing anything the CEO throws your way!

The COO role is very much about execution. It's about being able to listen to a strategy, look at your constraints, and execute within that. The most obvious difference, I suppose, in being a CEO is there isn't there isn't a boss, there isn't anyone to tell you what to do.

Was becoming a CEO something you aspired to early in your career? 

I wouldn't say per se. I think what inspired me or what's driven me has been working in fields that are going to challenge me. I’ve always had an eye on where do I want to work? What sort of industries do I work in? What sort of people do I work with? What my role is has never really been sort of front of mind, I guess. And I think that's kind of, again, allows me to be a bit more flexible about where I look and what I do with the next step.

I get that. I ask because there’s this perception that people who are CEOs want power and control. I’ve interviewed loads of CEOs who are not like that. I want to dispel the myth that the media portrays that every CEO seeks control or power.

Yeah, I'd like to think that's true. The people I've been fortunate enough to work with have not been of that type. In my mind, there’s far more reward in the challenge than there is in the control.

I’ve been in the room with leadership teams from early in my career, and recently got the privilege of working alongside David for quite a long time. He’s a great CEO. So I wasn’t intimidated by the role itself. It felt like a natural step because I’d seen it first hand. I felt I had enough visibility of what it looked like and the comfort that my skill set aligned with it.

How is your role as CEO different from being COO at Griffin? 

The COO role is very much about execution. It's about being able to listen to a strategy, look at your constraints, and execute within that. The most obvious difference, I suppose, in being a CEO is there isn't there isn't a boss, there isn't anyone to tell you what to do.

So that's an immediate change. The other one is sort of aligned with that. If there isn't anyone to tell you what to do, you are the one who's forming the strategy. You’re directing people, trying to get people lined up behind you, behind a consistent story that they feel is valid and will lead you all to a better place. So there's a bit more storytelling involved. Another big one is culture, which is something I enjoy. Culture setting is an important part of a business working well. That’s a change but something I’ve enjoyed and relished the challenge of doing.

The company you went to is smaller than Griffin, right? 

We’re about 14 people, whereas Griffin was about 50 when I left. So it's a much smaller group. The other key difference is that Griffin was fully remote, whereas our firm is fully in the office which is quite a different way of working. When you've done one extreme to the other, it actually feels very nice. At Griffin, we were building a relatively big operations team so the number of people that are immediately in my orbit is not a dissimilar amount so the scale hasn’t made a massive difference to me. We do an awful lot with just 14 people here. An impressive amount is going on at any one point in time, in a good way! There are lots of different context-switching challenges for the team. The people are wonderful. Again, one of the reasons I was attracted to the job was the chance to work with very nice and brilliant people.

Listen a lot, engage a lot. Make sure that people are alongside you, whatever exercise you’re doing whether it’s culture, strategy, changing operations, or changing workflows. Make sure people understand what you’re doing and why.

How is being a CEO different from what you expected? I don't know. Maybe you didn't walk in with a lot of expectations.

One of the biggest differences is that things don't move quite as fast as you think they might in your head. There were obviously areas where I had immediate convictions – let's do this right here and now. Like, this is the change that I think is going to work very well for us. But not all of those are possible to implement quickly. Culture is an example where perhaps I was slightly naive in how quickly you can make a change to culture.

At Griffin, David was focused from the first day on defining culture and setting that out in a programmatic sense. I remember joking with him at the time: like, it’s day one, there's an awful lot to do in front of us. He's like, no, absolutely not. We need to first think about this quite carefully and lay out a good framework for culture. It was absolutely the right thing to do because when we got to 50 people, the culture had become a beautiful thing. People had lived and breathed it, and they knew exactly what to expect and how we wanted things to operate. It’s somewhat different when you're coming into an existing firm. Ours is five, six years old already. Even though it's small, it obviously has an established culture already, and that's not something that you can just come in and change on a dime. 

I’ve done a lot of listening about how people have enjoyed operating. There's a period of reflecting, before making sure that you can impart what you think is going to work successfully going forward. In a similar vein, we set those out in a programmatic sense, and we've held them out and put them in place. It's something that we're going to live by going forward. I put myself up as the standard bearer for doing that. But it was probably unrealistic of me to expect that everyone was going to change very quickly. Once we had finished this exercise, you know, fast forward a year or so, and I think we're in a great place. It took a year to fully embed it into the way people make decisions. I think that's a perfectly natural thing, but it was different than what I had expected.

Another area I would say was different was how, when operating in a new role, it’s very tempting to tuck into what you already know how to do and focus on things that are in your typical wheelhouse.

As I said, like the COO of a bank, okay, well, my typical remit is technology and operations. I can clearly do banking relationships, and how we are working. These are all things that I can immediately get tucked into again, but then you have to sort of take a step back and think, am I doing the job that I was hired to do or am I doing the job that I already know how to do? So you just check in now and again to make sure that you're focusing on the broader set of things that people have asked you to take responsibility for. That took a little bit of time for me to fully clock.

I love that you’re teasing out the culture part, it’s incredibly hard to shift. I think a lot of us find it harder and slower than we expected. So you’re not the only one.

What are some things you’ve had to develop for the CEO role? You talked about storytelling, was that something you had to develop?

I’ve always enjoyed storytelling to some extent. I've been in lots of deal pitches and fundraisings so there's been a lot of storytelling throughout my career, but probably never to the extent that I think is required in this role. Building a story around culture is one example. Building a story around strategy is another. 

I played a decent-sized role in setting our strategy at Griffin, within the constraints of David's vision as a whole. But actually putting that strategy out, with measurable OKR frameworks and so on, was something that I had to develop and push a little bit further than I already had. 

The key learning point for me was that whilst you start the process collegiately, canvassing input from the team, you ultimately have to go away and construct that final story yourself. In moving from COO to CEO you go from editor and publicist to author. I worked hard on refining it, along with a wall of post-its, to narrow down and focus on what I thought made sense for us. I learned that the second half of that exercise is telling a story that others will believe in. 

Even if you did a part in isolation, you have to make sure that everyone relives the journey with you, after the fact. In your mind you might have formed a clear picture of how you want to operate. You've got to go back and explain to people where you've been mentally, why you've explored various things, why you think this position is good for us as a company, and why these are things that we should now be focusing on over the next three or six months. The importance of finishing work and then taking people on that same journey was a learning point for me.

What advice might you give someone who's moving from a COO to a CEO role?

Listen a lot, engage a lot. Make sure that people are alongside you, whatever exercise you’re doing whether it’s culture, strategy, changing operations, or changing workflows. Make sure people understand what you’re doing and why. 

Another is making sure that you properly carve out a little bit of what you are directly responsible for and plan to do yourself, versus what this great team of people that you've just inherited are capable of doing. Make sure that there is stuff that they can be doing, that you've given it to them and they can work alongside you on it. I think that's always more fun. It gives people a greater sort of stake in what you're doing and why.

Another tip I would say is that you need to understand every facet of the business quite quickly. I was fortunate before I joined, I got to spend quite a bit of time with people beforehand but, when doing so, you're receiving information as it currently exists. Ultimately, what you want is information that makes sense to you. I think post joining a new firm, make sure you can ask for every report, every slice and dice of a balance sheet, P&L, and management report, in a way that makes sense to you, and that it’s in the format that you need it to be in. Customize everything that's given to you so that it's readily digestible. Those were the key lessons for me, some of which I wish I had known earlier on.