Twin Brothers Building a FinTech Venture: Stephen Roche and Gabino Roche, CoFounders of Saphyre (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: Would you now call yourself an exchange where there is a lot of inter-financial institution stuff happening?

Gabino Roche: I think that’s a fair analogy. It’s voluntary, because you don’t have to participate. If you do, there are a lot of carrots that come along with it. I like to call it an operating system for finance. The reason I say this is Stephen mentioned it earlier. Everyone had their own on-premise database. They would take Polaroid snapshots of the data, email them together, and then these spreadsheets will upload to our respective systems.

Guess what? It quickly changed since we sent pictures across. It’s no longer in that same state. Then cloud technology helps synchronize a lot of that. Having encryption helps. COVID, believe it or not, accelerated our business. It’s not more important to embrace these cloud-based technologies.

Stephen Roche: I do want to say one thing on transitioning from POC to full-blown subscriptions. Our platform, from the beginning, was looking to be agnostic and interoperable with existing technologies. We also have press releases about all the partners and technologies we connect to. We want to pass the data and reliable information and not impede anybody’s business.

Symphony is one of our partners. We give the full Saphyre experience within the chat system. Think of it like Salesforce popping up within your chat. It’s very seamless and very easy to use. That’s a key thing. We also allow firms to keep their nomenclature. We will translate in the back, so they don’t have to conform.

Sramana Mitra: Is the target market all financial institutions?

Gabino Roche: We are global. We’re in the major regions. The difference here is, it’s all institutional to date. The technology applies to financial retail. It’s just opening our business to that. You’re going to need a lot of foot soldiers. The good news is a lot of the institutions we work with have that retail business.

Sramana Mitra: But you haven’t done that yet?

Gabino Roche: We’ve shown it. Once a client tells us they want to start, then we’ll open the door. There’s nothing that prevents us from scaling on that side. We’ve offered it.

Sramana Mitra: How many customers do you have now?

Stephen Roche: We’re probably close to 40. We’re working with a lot of smaller investment management firms on their POC. It depends on the number of funds that they have, but they’re working with the same broker-dealers that are already on our platform. We expect that to grow in the next 12 months. We’re looking at tier two banks. Instead of hiring 200,000 employees to compete with the likes of JP Morgan, they can just upgrade the subscription on Saphyre. That’s the massive advantage that they’re realizing.

Sramana Mitra: I want to do a few minutes on your team strategy. Is your entire team in New York?

Gabino Roche: We got some folks in London. Most of the folks are based in the New York City area. There are a few people who’ve moved and are a little bit remote. We do have some quality assurance folks in Bangalore. Everyone we hire, they’re not contractors. We teach our technologists the business. A lot of the employees have an equity stake. Part of our secret sauce is that everyone’s focused on building the business together, and that’s why we can deliver a superior product.

Sramana Mitra: My last question is about the two of you working together. My dad is also an entrepreneur. He’s in container shipping. He tried to work with his brother in his first company. They were building a great company. It was a real, absolute, unmitigated disaster working with this brother. I can tell that you have great love and respect for each other. I’m very happy to see that. It’s a pleasure to see that.

Stephen Roche: You just don’t know.

Gabino Roche: There’s a fight every day. We get over it very fast though. We are very passionate. We are yin and yang. We complement each other very well. My strength is in product development. Stephen is doing the marketing and working with the sales strategy. That’s a lot for one person to take.

For the record, we have a whole team. These folks compliment us. We double down on people’s strengths and now worry about their weaknesses. If there’s a weakness, we’ll hire somebody to fill the weakness, so everybody is passionate about what they’re doing.

Stephen Roche: Even though we want to be right in our fights, sometimes we just have to swallow that pill, especially in business. Outside of that, we may fight about who the better dancer is. That might be different.

Sramana Mitra: Fabulous. Great story! Thank you for your time.

This segment is part 7 in the series : Twin Brothers Building a FinTech Venture: Stephen Roche and Gabino Roche, CoFounders of Saphyre
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