Leaders In Tech: NewDay Director of IT and Digital, Bernhard Kainz
Bernhard Kainz joined NewDay in 2017. He had been the CIO of a prestigious Austrian bank, but left it all behind — a high-status job, a large office and all the perks that went with it, to work at NewDay, a significantly smaller company.
Why would he give all that up? The answer, says Bernhard, our Director of IT and Digital, lies in big aspirations. At the time he joined us, everything about our digital technology was external. Nothing was run or developed internally — and in any case, we had no in-house experts to do anything.
However, we intended to build a team, build our own technologies, and bring everything that has to do with digital in-house. All this is with the end goal of being the UK’s best digital financial services company by 2020.
It was too good a chance — and too audacious a plan — for Bernhard to pass up. With his own background in programming and banking, it appealed to his passions. He also knew that the chance to lead this change was a very rare opportunity.
One of the clinchers for his decision was that NewDay is in a ‘sweet spot’, as he describes it. Long-term funding is in place, and we have established a profitable customer base. The owners and management are clear about their ambitions and they want people to succeed. The business is small enough that we can unify people around goals and progress. At the same time, there’s great governance and a structure which can evolve as the products and platforms develop.
This makes for a fast and agile place to work. Everyone interacts all the time, working together to create value. Projects are speedy, iterations are short, and successes are frequent. There’s a real sense of helping to achieve our purpose — to help people be better with credit, which is brought to life through our Manifesto.
In many organisations, the mission statement evaporates very quickly as you drill down. But here, we take decisions guided by our Manifesto. We want to embed our purpose into our technology. Our retail partners are major beneficiaries of this. We can onboard, issue a new branded card in their name, with an app that consumers can use and a website to support it — and we can do this quickly and with high quality.
As a result, we’re at number 25 in the Sunday Times Grant Thornton Fast Track of fastest growing companies. And we’re going to keep up our growth story by continuing to build a world-class in-house digital team, and by using it to build innovative new products and services for our customers.
Innovation at NewDay
Bernhard quotes an Austrian saying: “It’s easy to follow footprints in the snow, but to do something great, you have to make your own path.”
Well, we love a challenge. We’ve recently started rolling out a new service: NewPay. This is for online retailers wanting to sell to people who want to affordably spread the cost of their purchases, and who want to borrow responsibly. The service combines our deep experience of credit and risk with our expertise in technology.
If you want to buy something on credit or by installment from an online retailer, NewPay can make the approval decision and set up the credit arrangement within seconds. This is an unparalleled innovation for retailers. There are other companies who may be able to match the technology, but they may not be able to offer the same deep insight into credit and risk that we have.
The retailers also appreciate our professionalism and our concentration on outstanding customer service. We place great emphasis on fairness and respect and live those values every day.
What’s it like to work at NewDay?
When developers come on board, they join the digital lab. They’re given a task, and a few weeks to produce something cool. Then after they’re fully immersed in the business, they have innovation time where they can work on whatever project they want.
NewDay doesn’t try to tell them what to do with that time, and there’s no heavy-handed corporate approval process to slow them down. It’s not just about finding things we can use. We’re hoping that everyone has fun with it — and we ask them that specific question every month.
For example, Bernhard recently saw two young developers take part in a very successful hackathon with Microsoft on their chatbot technology. They’re now developing chatbots for us and making rapid progress.
These two developers are from very different parts of the world, and Bernhard has been struck by how diverse the NewDay team is — not just in demographics, but in the huge diversity of skills. Free from silos and assigned desks, and working in close co-operation across teams, our people are able to use their expertise and imagination to the full.
The market for great people is highly competitive. Bernhard firmly believes the work opportunities we offer are unparalleled, with the chance to learn new things literally every day. Our aim is that if and when people leave, they have a really powerful experience to put on their CV.
So if you’re hungry for that powerful experience — if you want a company with big aspirations for itself and for its people — give us a call. We’d love to hear from you.
Find out more about working at NewDay or browse current vacancies now.
