Authority Magazine: Guy Saxelby of Earlytrade On 5 Things You Need To Be A Highly Effective C-Level Leader Of A Fintech Company

As a part of this series, we had the pleasure of interviewing Guy Saxelby.

Guy Saxelby is the Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of Earlytrade, which he launched in 2018 to transform working capital and liquidity in the construction industry. An accomplished entrepreneur and company director, he has a track record of scaling technology disruptors in the UK and Europe, including digital challenger bank Monese, now backed by PayPal, and The Exchange Lab, acquired by WPP. Guy also brings prior experience as a senior advisor at KPMG and remains active as an investor and advisor across fintech and venture capital.

Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series! Thank you so much for your time! I know that you are a very busy person. Our readers would love to “get to know you” a bit better. Can you tell us a bit about your ‘backstory’ and how you got started?

I grew up as the son of a contractor, literally dropped at school early in the morning while my father went off to the project. What I remember most is him on the phone with his colleagues, always the same conversation: cash. Who owed what, when it was coming, how to rob Peter to pay Paul. That planted a seed early.

I went on to study finance and economics, became an accountant, then moved into technology. I worked for a startup in the UK that scaled fairly quickly, and we had a business development team knocking it out of the park, hitting targets for a couple of quarters running. But the company hadn’t collected from its customers, so the bonuses didn’t get paid. I had to cancel a couple of European holidays and lost some good people because of it. That was the first time I felt that pain point personally.

That experience sent me down a rabbit hole: what solutions actually exist for early payments? Everything I found was debt-based. Someone was always lending money and taking risks. I came back to Australia with a different thesis: what if you could connect the two parties directly, let price be driven by supply and demand, and cut out the middlemen entirely? That’s when I met my co-founder Piers Symons, who was at the Australian Stock Exchange bringing advanced data analytics and product expertise, and together we built what became Earlytrade. Earlytrade is a dynamic discounting marketplace, enabling general contractors and subcontractors to negotiate early payment discounts on approved invoices. We are headquartered in Denver, CO and have operations in Australia, New Zealand, Canada, the US, Ireland, and the UK.

It has been said that our mistakes can be our greatest teachers. Can you share a story about a mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?

Early on when we were just getting started, I hired a friend. My favorite barbecue buddy. We’d sit in Sydney, drink red wine, cook up a storm, and I’d talk his ear off about the business. He was financially sophisticated, enthusiastic, and I’d been bouncing ideas off him throughout the whole build-up process. So naturally, I hired him.

He just wasn’t ready for the operational chaos of a very early-stage startup. It didn’t work out, we had to part ways, and the friendship took the hit. I think about that one sometimes. The lesson is simple: don’t hire your friends. Or at least, be brutally honest with yourself about whether the role actually fits the person, not just whether you like spending time with them.

Are you working on any exciting new projects now? How do you think that will help people?

We’re deep into building agentic AI into our payments ecosystem, and it’s incredibly exciting. We interact with hundreds of thousands of subcontractors every month, from large businesses with millions of dollars in invoices right down to small family operators with a few hundred dollars due. We’ve been capturing data across that entire ecosystem for years, and now we’re using AI agents to help us manage those relationships more effectively and at scale.

A big piece of it is what we call rate optimization. We already have algorithms that offer different rates to different users based on volume and frequency of use. AI is building a smarter layer on top of that, getting the best possible rates to our users faster and reaching more of them. The alignment is clean: the more users participating, the better the rates, the more value for everyone in the marketplace. We’re investing heavily into this and it’s the direction we’re going.

The fintech industry is known for its fast-paced and ever-evolving nature. How do you lead your team through periods of significant change or disruption? What strategies do you use to maintain team morale and productivity during such times?

Be direct, be open, and be honest. It is really as simple as that. I’ve learned over the years that the more context you give people, the better decisions they can make. There’s no point holding the painful stuff at the senior level. I’d rather have multiple people thinking through a problem and collaborating on a solution than trying to shield everyone from it.

Practically, that means good recurring communication, not being afraid to talk openly about what’s not working, and asking people what they think rather than telling them what to do. We’re not a big company, so when things are tough, pretty much everyone knows it anyway. Being vulnerable and transparent, and just asking for help. That’s not a weakness; it’s how you actually get through it.

How do you come up with goals for your area of responsibility within the organization?

We’re a technology company, so revenue growth is the headline. But growth at all costs is not a sustainable model, and the macro environment right now makes that point pretty clearly. So the framework I work from is: grow the ecosystem, find and retain the right people, and don’t run out of money doing it. Those three things need to be in balance.

Within that, we’re always pushing on product and engineering to innovate and adopt new technology to better serve customers. The structural case for what we do isn’t going anywhere. Businesses will always need cash to grow, so the question is always how do we serve more of them, faster and better?

How do you manage reporting to your board?

Transparency is the principle I apply internally, and it doesn’t change because there’s a board in the room. I try to give directors the full picture: what’s working, what isn’t, and what we need to solve. Boards are most useful when they have real context to advise from, and you don’t get that if you’re only presenting the polished version.

Practically, we keep reporting structured around the metrics that actually matter for our stage: ecosystem growth, customer retention, unit economics. And I try to bring specific decisions or trade-offs for input rather than just updates. A good board relationship is a two-way thing, and the CEOs who treat it as a one-directional reporting exercise are leaving a lot of value on the table.

Do you have any specific strategies that you use to manage your teams?

I try to give people context and then get out of the way. Micromanaging is a trap: it signals distrust, it slows everything down, and frankly it’s exhausting for everyone. What I’ve found works is making sure people understand the ‘why’ behind what we’re doing, giving them room to figure out the ‘how’, and then being available when they hit something they genuinely can’t solve.

I also try to ask more than I tell. “What do you think?” “How would you solve this?” Those questions do more for someone’s development and ownership than a direct answer ever does. We’re a small team, which means everyone’s work is visible and matters, and that’s actually a gift if you build the right culture around it.

Fintech companies often disrupt traditional financial services by focusing heavily on customer experience. Can you describe a customer-centric initiative you spearheaded at your company and the impact it had on your business?

One of the earliest and most deliberate product decisions we made was to give subcontractors free access to the platform. They’re not our paying customer (the general contractor is), but they’re the ones who decide whether to take an early payment. If the experience for them is clunky or opaque, the whole marketplace stalls.

So we built out visibility tools: approved invoice status, rate cards, and analytics. Things that genuinely help a subcontractor run their business, not just transact with us. The impact was adoption. When subs actually understand what’s available to them and it’s easy to use, participation rates go up, which improves the value of the platform for everyone, including the GC. Serving the non-paying user well turned out to be one of the highest-leverage things we did.

Decision-making in fintech involves assessing various risks, including technological, financial, and security risks. How do you approach risk assessment in your role, and can you give an example of a tough decision you made that involved a significant risk?

We made a very intentional decision early on not to touch money, not to process payments or take custody of funds. On the surface that might sound like leaving revenue on the table, but the risk calculus was clear: the moment you handle payments, you inherit credit risk, fraud risk, settlement risk, AML and KYC compliance requirements, and a completely different legal and banking relationship with every customer. That’s a lot of friction for something that wasn’t our core value creation.

Keeping payments as business-as-usual between the GC and their subs meant we could focus on the marketplace mechanics and the data layer. It made us faster to deploy, easier to sell, and currency-agnostic. The tough part was having the conviction to stick to that model when there was pressure to expand into adjacent revenue streams. Risk assessment for me isn’t just about what could go wrong. It’s about what you’re choosing not to do, and whether that constraint is actually protecting the core of what you’re building.

Based on your experience and success, what are the “5 Things You Need To Be A Highly Effective C-Level Leader Of A Fintech Company?” How have these 5 things impacted your work or your career?

1. Emotional Intelligence

You need to be good with people, full stop. In fintech you’re dealing with a lot of smart, driven individuals: engineers, sales people, finance people, regulators. None of them respond well to being managed like a spreadsheet. Emotional intelligence to me means being self-aware, self-regulated, motivated, empathetic, and knowing when to push and when to listen.

2. Investor Thinking

You need to be very good with numbers and think like a good investor. Not just your own P&L: the macro trends, where capital is flowing, how your product sits in the broader value chain. Earlytrade exists because I looked at the supply chain finance market and saw that every solution involved someone taking on debt and credit risk. Spotting that structural gap required a kind of investor lens. That same thinking now drives how we approach AI investment, not chasing hype, but identifying where the leverage actually is.

3. Delusional Self-Belief, Grounded in Reality

You need to have a kind of delusional self-belief: the conviction to keep building something that hasn’t existed before, when there’s no proof yet that it will work. But that belief has to be testable. You have to constantly pressure-check it: is this actually creating value? Are we reaching the right customers with the right message? I’ve had moments where I had to hold two things at once: genuine conviction in the model and real willingness to adapt how we were executing it. That tension is uncomfortable, but it’s productive.

4. Problem Prioritization

Building a company from zero to one is really just solving a continuous stream of problems. The skill isn’t solving them, it’s working out which ones to solve now. At any given point there are sixty things that need attention. Some are existential. Some are noise. As CEO, you tend to get the problems no one else can crack, which means you’re always working at the edge of your capability. You have to be clear-headed enough to triage fast and find the right people around you to tackle what you can’t.

5. Tolerance for Uncertainty

Elon Musk has a line about starting a company being like chewing glass and staring into the abyss. I wouldn’t be quite that dramatic, but it’s not far off. We founded Earlytrade in 2018. That’s a long stretch of uncertainty: lives change, markets shift, the thing you thought would work doesn’t, and then something else does. The people who win, in my observation, are the ones who can sit with that uncertainty for long periods of time without it breaking them. You don’t have to enjoy it. You just have to be okay with it.

Looking ahead, what do you believe are the key trends that will shape the future of the fintech industry? How are you preparing your company to adapt to these trends, and what role do you see your leadership playing in this adaptation?

Three big ones: tokenization via blockchain, regulatory change, and AI. Tokenization: 24/7 trading of any asset, real estate, private companies, crypto. That is going to be a major structural shift. AI is already changing how financial technology is delivered and that’s only accelerating. And on the regulatory side, you can see the Genius Act and the soon-to-be-codified Clarity Act in the US bringing stablecoins and ultimately broader crypto into mainstream use. New infrastructure is being built right now that’ll become the rails of finance going forward.

For Earlytrade specifically, we’re investing heavily in agentic AI across the platform and the business. The goal is to become natively AI, not just a product feature, embedded across the entire company. On blockchain, we don’t process payments so we’re not dependent on those rails, but we welcome it if our customers can pay faster. The core thing we do, connecting counterparties in a supply chain and letting them opt into early payment at rates they set, is fairly well moated against disruption. Construction supply chains aren’t getting simpler. If anything, the complexity is what creates the opportunity.

You are a person of great influence. If you could start a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be?

I’m passionate about ADHD. I was diagnosed with it as a child, I was medicated for it, and I’m not convinced that medicating kids into compliance is the right answer, certainly not as the default. The diagnosis rates are climbing significantly in both Australia and the US, and I think we’re reaching for a pharmaceutical solution to what is often just a different kind of brain.

I genuinely believe people with ADHD have a superpower. The same traits that make a kid hard to manage in a conventional classroom (the restlessness, the non-compliance, the inability to sit still and do what they’re told) can become enormous assets when channeled into the right environment. There are schools doing genuinely interesting things with dynamic, non-conventional teaching methods that work with these kids rather than against them. I’d want to build something that takes that to scale: educating, inspiring, and creating different pathways for kids with ADHD, rather than just medicating them into fitting a system that wasn’t designed for them.

Thank you for sharing these insights!