Building And Growing

#95 - Leveraging AI to build an intelligent operating system for retirement and wealth providers

About Michael Watkins Michael Watkins is an internationally recognised leader in pensions, savings, and retirement technology, with more than two decades of experience spanning operations, product, governance, and technology. He has built, launched, scaled, and sold award-winning platforms across four continents, and is regarded as one of the foremost innovators reshaping the future of workplace wealth and benefits. About Aurem Aurem is the intelligent operating system for retirement and wealth providers. They deliver a full service technology platform that brings together providers products, data and processes into a single AI-native platform.

#94 - Transforming health and safety performance in high risk businesses

About Matthew Taylor Matthew Taylor is a seasoned business leader and transformation specialist with more than two decades of experience in high-risk industries. He is known for guiding organizations through complex challenges, enhancing safety, building stronger systems, and unlocking sustainable growth. As founder of Meta Transform, Matthew created the MetaSense 7D tool—a pioneering framework that enables organizations to transform across seven critical dimensions: leadership, culture, systems, safety, sustainability, innovation, and growth. By integrating culture and consciousness with operational excellence, the tool reveals untapped potential and drives measurable results. In his current role as Interim COO in the heavy lifting and transport sector, Matthew continues to apply this expertise to business transformation. Beyond the boardroom, he’s a devoted father of five—including two sets of twins—who brings the same passion for resilience and growth to family life. His mission is to empower C-suite leaders to align values with action, strengthen operational maturity, and achieve long-term performance and profitability.

#93 - Building institutional grade tokenisation infrastructure

About Matt OngMatt is the CEO and Founder of Ctrl Alt. Matt spent the first part of his career in investment banking, working across fund structuring, alternative investments and trading at Morgan Stanley and Credit Suisse. Drawing on this experience, Matt has developed extensive knowledge of building financial products, structuring, regulation and asset raising.About Ctrl AltCtrl Alt is a leading tokenization infrastructure platform, combining blockchain technology with expert financial engineering to deliver tailored, compliant solutions in the alternative assets space. As of August 1, 2025, Ctrl Alt has tokenized over $325 million in assets, spanning real estate, private credit, funds, litigation finance and more.For further information, visit www.ctrl-alt.co or contact info@ctrl-alt.co.

#92 - Transforming auditing for the modern era

About IanIan Mitchell began his entrepreneurial journey in a modest double garage in East London, with little capital and while still recovering from a serious car accident. Despite the challenging start, he built a business that grew to employ over 1,000 people and earned multiple awards for growth and service excellence. Throughout this journey, Ian discovered the critical importance of building high-performing learning cultures—ones that are aligned, capable, and effective. After selling Direct Response, he turned his focus to his true passion: reimagining how organizations understand and improve performance using next-generation auditing techniques. This led to the co-founding of DeepFathom, a technology company at the forefront of audit innovation.About Deep FathomWith more than 25 years of experience in systems thinking, auditing, service innovation, and business process outsourcing, Ian has worked with global brands to design quality, risk, and compliance systems that go far beyond box-ticking. At DeepFathom, Ian leads the development of digital tools that blend behavioral science with data analytics, transforming audit from a backward-looking compliance exercise into a proactive driver of performance. He continues to explore the evolving role of quality in the age of AI, ESG, and agile organizations. In this podcast, Ian will challenge conventional audit thinking and share a bold vision for how quality professionals and business leaders alike can unlock greater value in fast-changing, complex environments.

#91 - Seed strappping to life changing outcomes

🎙️ Matt Williamson founded Vizzly (acquired by WPP) to help B2B SaaS companies build customer-facing analytics dashboards quickly, without compromising on flexibility. Traditional embedded analytics solutions were rigid and slow, forcing companies to choose between speed-to-market through no-code tools or spending months building custom solutions. Vizzly bridged this gap with a hybrid approach that enabled rapid deployment while maintaining developer control. 🚀 Vizzly demonstrated that founders can achieve significant exit outcomes without chasing headline fundraising numbers. The company maintained strong revenue per employee ratios with a minimal team, proving that raising modest seed funding and focusing on profitability can create attractive acquisition opportunities. This approach offers a middle path between bootstrapping and traditional venture scaling, enabling life-changing exits without the extended timelines and dilution of aggressive growth strategies. 🤖 WPP acquired Vizzly in October 2024 to integrate analytics technology into their comprehensive service offering for enterprise clients like DoorDash, HSBC, and Airbnb. As the world's largest advertising company, WPP's acquisition strategy focuses on building complete solutions that address every client need through in-house capabilities or strategic acquisitions. This enables them to deliver integrated marketing effectiveness and attribution platforms that individual agencies cannot match.