Ben Vickers: How Wombat Makes Investing Accessible

This transcript is auto-generated and lightly edited for readability, it may contain errors.

[0:00] Sammie Ellard-King: Hello and welcome to another episode of the Money Gains podcast. This is your host, Sammie Ellard-King, and this podcast is powered by Up The Gains, which is a personal finance website dedicated to helping people like you and me learn about money safely. Now, today my guest is Ben Vickers, who is a product manager at Wombat. Wombat are wicked. I downloaded them a few months ago myself, and I’ve been playing around with the app. I love the user experience and how easy it is to get into investing. So if you’re listening on YouTube, please do hit the subscribe button. And if you’re listening on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, then please do whack the follow. It really does help the show. So let’s get started on the Money Gains podcast. The Money Gains Podcast, the Money Gains.

[1:02] Sammie Ellard-King: So, Ben, welcome to the Money Gains Podcast, man. How’s it going? You well? Very good, thank you. Lovely to be here. How are you? Yeah, I’m very well. Thanks for asking. Thanks for asking, man. I am really excited to talk to you today. It’s gonna be a good episode because I downloaded Wombat uh quite a while ago to, you know, when we wrote our review on it, and I was hooked. I loved it from day one. I thought the the user experience and for beginners especially was incredible. And the way that you’re approaching it, you know, providing beginners a really great place to come and invest, but equally more experienced investors too, if they want to get into it. Um so I think it’s gonna be a really interesting chat today. So we’re gonna be talking about you and Wombat Invest. But to kick things off, could you give the listeners a little bit of a spiel about who you are and your journey today? Absolutely.

[1:54] Ben Vickers: So um I’m Ben. I’m uh a product manager at Wombat. I’ve been working with Wombat now for uh I was having this conversation earlier, actually, uh roughly five years. Um so it feels like a long time now. But uh so yeah, um I suppose my history, I was in a previous life a um I worked in a development agency um in various roles, and Wombat was one of my first major clients. So when it was some scrollings on a on a napkin, just an idea at that point, uh, I was in I was in involved in the team that we eventually built the initial idea, expanded it, and I was very fortunate eventually to move over and become a full-time Wombat employee. So um, so yeah, I suppose that was that’s kind of how I’ve got to where I am now. Very grateful.

[2:42] Sammie Ellard-King: It’s a good journey. So you worked at the development agency before that. What did you study at school? Were you were you into your money before this, or was it was it kind of just a a journey that sort of happened? So growing up, I my mum, I was um I was an only child, my was a single mum, um for for a good part of my life. Um and my mum uh I suppose she she she earned decent money, she was uh you know, she had a decent job, but obviously being by by herself, it was obviously to a certain extent difficult. But I suppose from my perspective being quite young, I never kind of realised that. Um I was, I mean, as an early child, I was I mean, I’ll say I was quite spoiled as a child, um, to a certain extent. Anything that you know I wanted for Christmas and things, my Christmas list was in reflection, disgustingly big. Uh you know, I had two A4 slides of anyone, anything anyone could ever want. Um and I got most of it, which was equally embarrassing. But I know on reflection now I see that you know that she was just trying to provide and give me the best life I could. But I think as a result of that, when I grew a little bit older, I didn’t really have the value, I didn’t understand the value of money to a certain extent, and then how that materialized was as I got to be a young adult going like into university, I was very materialistic, and I wanted I was very ambitious because I in my mind I needed a very good job to be really affluent so I could see keep spending and buying nice things and get a nice car and a really nice house in southern Italy or whatever it was. Um, and it honestly it’s only been the last few years, probably slightly pre-COVID or during COVID and kind of everything that went on after that, where you know, for better or worse, COVID put me in a different part of financial position. I was very fortunate to be able to work through COVID, and you know, I didn’t have the means to spend it in the same way I did before, and I just gained a different financial backing. And I’ve kind of had a word myself, I’ve kind of you know I’ve looked in, I’ve looked in in kind of my own motivations, and my perception of things has changed now, and instead, what I want is to build a backing, a comfort, like a safety blanket that I can build on in the future, eventually provide for a family. I can um I I know life now isn’t for me all about designer clothes and getting really nice cars and things like that. I just want to feel comfortable and I want to remove that stress of money in my life. So I suppose the end goal is still I’d like to have as much money as I can in in some respects, but I want what I want to do with it is completely different, and I suppose I value the the comfort it brings basically.

[5:38] Sammie Ellard-King: That’s lovely to hear say that. So you had this kind of moment during COVID, and that’s when you was your let’s say your aha moment, and you’re like, right, new Ben, I’m going forward in this way now. Um, you know, a lot of I can relate to that a lot. You know, I was very much similar in my 20s and had that materialistic mindset, um, and it’s just the way that I was brought up, similar to you, you know, was didn’t want for things, and it doesn’t install the value of a pound into your head into your head. Yeah, you can go off on the pathway. Um, but it’s great to see that you know you’re you’re you’re moving forward and you you’ve got some new long-term goals. So um talk to me about this kind of development agency you’re in. What were you doing there?

[6:24] Ben Vickers: What wasn’t I doing there? I was so I’ve had a very winding road to get where I am, as most product managers have. You if you the more you speak to you realise everyone’s got to where they are in some really strange way. So I actually, before that, worked in the NHS as a management graduate as an operational manager, and I loved the management side of things, like the project management side of things, but yeah, despite me now having a really newfound respect for anyone who was involved in the NHS, um, I realised that that wasn’t exactly where I wanted to be. So I moved to a project management position up in York, which is really close to where I am in Leeds. Um, and it was something that I was inherently interested in, which was like tech. So that is the thing that throughout my life I’ve always had an interest in. So started off as a project manager. We were involved in clients and businesses in every industry. So one bat in like in the fintech space, we worked in like health tech space, we worked with schools and charities and big brands like trainline and everything in between. So I had like a really eclectic um experience there where I was working with you know over 10 different clients in 10 different industries. Um, and it was fantastic for me because from you know, from a now product manager, I had this really wide scope view of how everything ticks and what makes a good app or a good website good and what are things to avoid. Um one back then kind of you know sunk its hooks into me. Uh, and now I’ve kind of got the experience and the and the view of everything, and now I hopefully can make that count in the in the company I work for, which is great.

[8:01] Sammie Ellard-King: So, what does a product manager do? What what what does that mean? So, in the simplest way of putting it, we are the voice of the user in the company. That’s like the simplest way of putting it. So we focus on essentially two things. We want to solve user problems and add value to the user while um facilitating all the things that make the business tick. So all of the business’s goals, we need to marry those things up. So in a little bit more granularity, we’re speaking to users on a really regular basis, uh, either directly in surveys or just looking at the underlying data, um, we understand where pain points might be happening or where we can add more value, and then by diet with the direct conversations, we can say, okay, these people are typically going through this in their life, or they’re aiming to get here in their like financial position. What can we do to facilitate that? What can we do to make that easier? So we’ll you know, we’ll work closer with those people, with a big wide group of people, and then we’ll look to try and present that in the app that can get them from A to B, solving those problems, adding more values, and then facilitating the business goals.

[9:13] Sammie Ellard-King: Wicked, that sounds super cool. So you’re kind of like the bridge between the commercial, marketing, business goals and the user, really. So you’re trying to kind of make that a seamless journey, feeding back the information that you’re getting from the users into the team, and then vice versa. Yeah, absolutely. And sometimes it, you know, sometimes it’s you skip the step of the user depending on the situation. Sometimes there is an opportunity, and you can see how you could potentially solve a problem or create value with that. Um, and then that’s when like the creative element comes in, and that’s particularly why I thoroughly love my job. Um, is because uh I’ve got quite a creative family of artists and of dancers and all these other things. And I think as soon as I found my little niche in product, I was like, oh, this is actually the thing that’s been missing in all these previous roles because I can create something from nothing, and we always say it’s like taking something from zero to one, which is a skill in itself and something you have to learn towards, but it’s really rewarding doing that, and then seeing on the other side it add value to the user, just it’s just a really good job.

[10:18] Sammie Ellard-King: It’s it sounds really cool. Um, what is there a big team? Are you part of a big team there? No, we’re actually a really lean team. So we’re we’re a startup, so we have to be economical, we have to try and do things as efficiently as possible. So we have many people wearing different hats to a certain extent. Um, so I like head up the product team. Um at the moment, the head count is I suppose two full-time product managers with people coming in and assisting in various parts of the flow. Um but I suppose within the development in the product team, we have full-time designers and business analysts and uh members of the marketing team that assist with uh a lot of the research we do, and then a larger development team. So we’ve got lots of people running in and out of different kind of little subsections, so to speak. Um, but you know, as a sign of the times, the way these kind of fintech and tech companies in general become successful is you you try and keep the headcount to a relatively lean amount, and then you have more runway and you can put more um money into actually creating something that’s valuable. So we just have to be efficient and until you know positions change basically.

[11:27] Sammie Ellard-King: I love what you said there because a lot of fintech companies they come in, they get the they get the capital, venture capital investment, yeah, and they hire the 100 people team, they go for it big time, they hemorrhage money, and then it doesn’t take off, and suddenly they’re left, you know, holding holding the bag. And those I think that’s testament as well to when you go onto the Wombat app, which we’ll get into in a short while, you can see the love and devotion that goes into the user experience and the way that it feels, and so it just makes you feel like it’s run by people who actually know what they’re doing and they’re they’re they’re clearly thinking ahead. And so to hear you say that internally that you think like that, you know, just kind of cements it all for me. So let’s get into it. I’m glad you’re saying that because that is my job, so that means I’m doing something right, at least. So thank you. Okay, good. Well, um, yeah, let’s talk about Wombat then. Where what is it and where does it come from?

[13:09] Ben Vickers: Yeah, so we’ve been we’ve been kicking around now for a few years since um uh 2019, um, mid-2019. So it all started long, long time ago. Uh Kane, uh one of our co-founders who’s um who’s Australian, he uh grew up in a fairly affluent um, he had a fairly affluent upbringing. His father wanted to instill the same kind of principles he had. So uh when he was like 15, 16, he encouraged Kane to go and get his first job, saved his first a thousand pounds, I think it was, or a thousand Aussie dollars, um, and then basically go and get exposed to the stock market. So he did that. That was kind of his initial investment journey. He then you know eventually went to university in Melbourne, came over to the UK and was working in um investment banking um with some of his new colleagues and friends he’d met over in the UK who was in a similar industry. Um they were basically trying to find new investment opportunities for themselves and and other things. Um so he you know he’s had that kind of history of it. And then around a similar time when he was getting involved in in that career, fractional shares came around. So I suppose what they are is a long time ago, you if you were looking to invest in a company, you had to buy whole shares. So take Tesla, for example, before the the company split its price, it was trading for around 1200 US dollars a share. So if you want to invest in Tesla at all, you’d be investing at least, well, a thousand pounds, give you know, give off take the case of fluctuations, uh probably close to like twelve hundred now. Um but yeah, so the fractional shares allow you to basically invest a much smaller amount and owed uh and own a fraction of a share instead. So you can invest as little as a pound in Tesla, basically, theoretically, and you could the same could be said true for for every stock and fund. So basically, this new trend came around, and it was just the start of the time where um these types of uh microinvestment platforms were coming around, and he just saw an opportunity there where the the older kind of behemoth company investment companies that were typically targeted at higher net wealth users um who could afford to invest in these like whole um shares. Kane basically combined his upbringing, the guidance his father gave him, and I suppose this new opportunity to reduce barriers of entry and make it something that’s widely accessible. And that’s kind of where the idea came from. He he met Mike our other co-founder who um had a very similar upbringing, weirdly enough. Um, and they just thought, do you know what there’s a gap there? There’s something that we can we can help with. Um so I suppose, yeah, that that’s kind of what kicked us off basically.

[15:54] Sammie Ellard-King: The rise of the retail investor, you know, people like me and you has been you know astronomical, it’s huge. And so giving people access to the stock market by doing these fractional shares, you know, a lot of the old guard look down on it, but what it’s done is changed the world of finance now. Retail investors, as we’ve seen with like the Wall Street Bets craze back in COVID, where you know people are making stocks from their bedroom, do what you know the the the institutions couldn’t, and uh the power of that is insane. And it’s it’s great to see that that they they believe that they could go out and create something like that. And uh so how long so they’ve they’ve they’ve they’ve come up with this idea. What how long did it sort of take to get into fritition and the app just start sort of kicking on?

[16:51] Ben Vickers: So obviously the idea kicked around for a little time, and then when I worked for the development agency, it it came eventually knocking on our door. Um and you know, make no bones about it. It takes a while to get something as complicated as a fully blown fintech app off the ground. You know, there’s a lot of planning, you need to kind of you know dot the i’s, cross the t’s fully understand exactly what you want to do and how you want to present yourself, and then you know, you’ve got to go through designs, you’ve got to find developers, you’ve got to then start building it. And you know, building an app of any scale is is awfully complex business. So we probably initially uh started development um the back end of 2018, and like I say, we launched around July 2019, so we were in development for like nine months, and then probably there was a further say six to nine months before that of properly planning and getting everything sorted. Um, and then put initially post-launch in 2019, it’s just exploded. You know, the app is probably pretty unrecognisable from that point because it’s more than double in size since we’ve got his own team and you know, learned listened to the customers and built exactly what they want.

[18:00] Sammie Ellard-King: And what kind of products is it that one that offers? So we offer lots of things really. So we the core of it is we offer some investment accounts. So we offer two different general investment account options, and we offer a stocks and shares ISA. So stocks and shares ISA gives you the um the tax relief up to £20,000. Uh, and then the general investment accounts, um, you don’t get the same tax relief as a uh instant ISA, but a great place to get started, and you don’t have to pay capital gains into a certain point. Um and we have that bifurcated into two uh like account options. So we have like a what we call a standard offering, and then we have an instant offering. In plain English, what we’re basically doing there is creating an environment for a newer, less and less experienced investor to get started, and then something for them to progress into, or someone who is more experienced, uh we have an account type for them that has different tools and a slightly different feature set to facilitate everything they might want. Um, so like within the actual um accounts themselves, we have obviously lots of functionality. We have um over 30 curated themed funds, which we’ve touched on slightly. Um we’ve got over how many at this point? I think probably over 500 curated US, EU, and UK stocks. Um we have uh functionality being uh round up’s functionality, which basically allows you to invest your spare change when you’re making transactions like every day. So you link it to like a bank account, your card, and as you go and go to the shop and buy your your weekly grocery shop, or you go to the cinema, or you go for a you know a couple of drinks on a Friday or whatever. Um say that Friday round is £7.50. It probably isn’t nowadays, but £7.50. The extra 50p to make that a whole pound is basically we um like keep track of that and then basically take that back as a direct debit. So it’s a really nice way of like invest our uh saving, like our investing without actually realising because they’ve got a lot of the roundups thing, like you know, you can’t like McDonald’s now. If you go and go through a drive-thru, you it offers you to round it up. So there’s that, and then there’s the auto investments and deposits, which basically do the same thing but more structured. So you set the amount you want to save each month, and then it’ll invest it in all the different things you’d like to. Um we have a referral scheme, so you can refer friends and both earn a reward from it. Um, we have uh different investment categories, so you can basically help you understand uh different investment opportunities which are performing well, which aren’t, which ones are paying dividends. And then I suppose the other thing that is I suppose a pretty standout thing for us is our learning hub. So as you kind of mentioned around the structure of our accounts, we want to welcome people of any experience level. We were happy being your first investment journey, and to facilitate that, we have a learning hub which is filled with learning articles, um, how-to guides. Basically, we want to help you go from never invested in your life, not really not sure what you’re doing, to eventually becoming somewhat of an expert. We want you to take you on that journey, and we have all that under under one hood. Um, you know, there’s plenty of other things as well, but I suppose they’re the key ones. Uh, and the learning hub and those things are what really critical to our mission and our values that I mentioned at the top of the call.

[21:29] Sammie Ellard-King: That’s why when I first logged in and started having a play around, the the two things that struck me was the funds, which we’ll touch on again in a sec, but the learning hub is excellent, and it’s it just makes you feel safe. Um, you know, I’ve been investing for years, so I you know, I I don’t have those same worries, but I took myself out of the frame, looked at it from an outsider’s perspective, and the content within there, you can walk away from your phone as well. You don’t need to do anything, you can literally sit there on your phone, on your commute, and learn um all through the one bat app without having to go anywhere. And I just thought that was brilliant. Um, and you know, a lot of these other apps they do have academies, but you have to log into the to the web version, they’re not all uh always accessible. Some of them are YouTube channels rather than in-house, and I just I just thought that housing everything in one place was a really, really great move. We’ll just touch back on the funds because they’re a bit different to um to a lot well to most of the providers out there I’ve ever come across. So, you know, I love them. You’ve got the techie, the adventurer, and do you want to talk a little bit about those? Absolutely, yeah.

[22:39] Ben Vickers: So themed funds, you know, under the hood, what they are is a is a fund, is an ETF. An exchange-traded fund. And what that is in its in its purest sense is a collection of loads of little companies and holdings, all within one wrapper. And then the why these are quite attractive are that when you’ve got say 50 different companies within one holding, the price can change individually for those things, but it’ll smooth out the volatility. So the intention is that you’re exposed to slightly less risk depending which fund you select. So it’s somewhere to kind of house your money for the longer term, I suppose. So what we did was we wanted to make that understandable because I’m not sure if you’ve seen the name of just a normal fund. It’s just a bunch of letters and numbers, and you don’t really get much from it. You have to really research it, you have to see exactly how it’s broken up. And uh most of these companies you’d never heard of if you just picked a random one. So we were to make that understandable. We basically uh curated funds that were in specific industries. Um so you mentioned a few there. One of my favourite ones, um, kind of happening back to my um my materialistic kind of upbringing is the fashionista. So it’s like a high-end fashion fund. So like Louis Vuitton and Gucci and all these um all these traded companies are all within this one fund, um, and we’ve called it the Fashionista. So, you know, we haven’t necessarily manipulated the fund in any way, we’ve just given it a name, we’ve given it an image that is understandable, and that is what we’re actually trying to achieve. We’re we’re trying to make it understandable, and um the user can associate themselves with it. So, what we found in our like research, and for me as well, because before Wombat, I wasn’t an investing expert. This is something that I’ve grown to have a passion of. But you know, when I got started and I started seeing these funds and where we’re discussing the concept of them, um you start investing in one and then you’re exposed to the market, and then you can see, okay, I’m gonna put £10 in this and see what happens. And that £10 goes to £10.50. So you put in another £10 and you start growing it, and then you’ve got it in for a few months, and it’s you’re up 10%, and you’re like, okay, I understand how this works now. And then it might go down, and you’re like, okay, right, this is normal, this is why it’s happened, and it’s just a really good entry point to understand the behaviours of the market, and you know, it’s not just an entry point. I have funds in my portfolio now that I’ve had for like two years and that um are made up of like tech giants um that’s performing like really well, but it’s just a it’s just a really nice way of getting started, and we just want to take the edge off the intimidation that kind of goes around with investing because I think there’s a there’s like a nuance around investing, and understandably so, because you are risking your own money to a certain extent, is um we need to make it a little bit, we need to remove some of the jargon, make it a little bit more understandable, and give people a place to start because that is ultimately what we want to do. We want we want to help people start their investment journeys. So um, yeah, from what we’ve seen and when we’ve spoken to people, it seems like it’s working. So, yeah, that’s one of the many things, but it’s um it’s definitely I’m proud of having it on the app for sure.

[25:54] Sammie Ellard-King: What I love there is that you know, when I talk to people and they say, How on earth do I start investing? Um one of the things I say to them is if they want to be an individual stock picker, is just look around your house and what and what do you buy and what do you associate yourself with. And that’s often a really easy way. You can go and I can 20 you know, 20 seconds I can go and write 30 products down, um, and you’ll start to see you know correlation between all right, cool, I uh you know, I like I like my high-end fashion or I like my tech or you know, I like my cars, whatever it is, then you can then come on to Wombat and relate that and have a really good crafted fund made by you know BlackRock is houses a lot of them, right? And which is you know one of the biggest investment firms in the world. So you can you have the trust there that you’re in good hands and and you’re immediately associating yourself with you with your investment, which I I personally believe is how people will stay motivated and stay doing it, you know, if if they have a bad year or something goes wrong, if they’re invested in these companies because they like them, makes a big difference, right?

[27:06] Ben Vickers: Yeah, and what what I found is that when you’re passionate about something, you tend to just know more about it as well. So, like, you know, for me, I’ve got lots of different interests, and when I was getting started, a bunch of these things, you know, I follow a bunch of different accounts and influences and things on Twitter, for example, or Instagram, and you just start picking up little bits and bobs, or you might be reading the news and you might just pick out something because you’re interested in it, and without really knowing, you’ve kind of built this like knowledge base of things you care about, and then when you come to invest it, you’re like, oh, that makes sense because I know this and the other, I know the kind of you know, it’s just one of those natural things you kind of pick things up without realising, and then giving people the opportunity to like put an action on those passions, it just makes sense. Why not make money out of it if you can? Completely agree. You mentioned this with T as well. Uh, in terms of your users that go on there, how how many do you you know, what’s the kind of correlation between the people that individually stop picking the people that use funds? Is there any percentages you can say?

[28:02] Ben Vickers: Um it completely depends on the user, to be fair. We we try and encourage it having both. So, one of our key values as a company, uh one of the Kane’s key values our founder um when he was setting it up is we really wanted to allow people to invest in the long term, to invest regularly, and then to diversify. And it’s that diversification that’s really important. So funds do that inherently because there’s a collection of different um uh companies, but we try and promote in a lot of our articles that having a widespread of um different uh companies and funds within different industries basically exposed to different pressures that might be going on with the world, you uh you reduce your kind of overall risk. If you’ve kind of got all your eggs in one basket, in one industry basket, and something really negative happens, you can be exposed to all that risk. So um we try and encourage everyone to do that, and we we do see that we see that um funds are really well uh taken up as are individual stocks across the different markets, and I I’m I’m I like to believe that that’s because a lot of the uh learning material are put out there and a lot of the like say investment categories we do to promote a lot of those different things that are performing well or not so well.

[29:16] Sammie Ellard-King: Your app developer deserves a pat on the back because the user experience is is wicked, like you can get to where you need to get to quickly, everything is super visual, which you know in the past with some investment apps has been really difficult to navigate and understand what the hell’s going on, but you’ve made everything and you’ve placed things and on the page in a way that is really it makes it fun, it is quite fun to use the app, which is rare, um, especially when with an investing app for sure. Um, you know what what do you feel like is the next phase for Wombat? Is there any nuggets you can give us? Um in short, there’s lots of things we’re working on. It’s like a super exciting. I had to try, I had to try, man. I know. Well, um I can get I can give something because I suppose my when I’m typically asked like what my favourite feature is, I would say it’s the like auto investments and roundups, and I can explain why in a second. But that’s maybe shifting because we’re work we’re about to work on something or we’re in development with something that um I absolutely love, like how we’ve executed it, and that’s uh um real-time alerts for price changes and news articles. And this is the first like our first iteration of this, and it will expand and grow um over the coming months. But essentially what that’ll mean is we can give people uh real-time information as stocks and and funds um shift price to a certain to a certain extent. So if if Apple goes up five percent within a certain time frame, you will be the first to know that that’s happening. And then on top of that, we will give you an article that expla that’ll um so if if that price fluctuation is due to something that’s going on that’s potentially newsworthy, you will also receive a news article that explains why, or explains kind of what’s going on within an industry or within a certain company. So you just you feel really in the know. Like I say, we’re we’re in development with this, so it’s not exactly ready, but it’s going to be ready really soon. Um, and seeing all the prototypes and exactly how we’re gonna build it, it’s just it’s just really good, it’s really exciting, and it’s um it’s kind of a way of kind of upskilling our users. And I think you can probably read into that with a lot of the things I mentioned, and that’s it’s not just giving you people a platform to to invest, it’s about upskilling them, either upgrading their financial backing themselves, or upskill it upskilling their knowledge base to understand how to get more out of the savings they do have. Um, so yeah, but you know, that’s just one nugget, probably because it’s really, really fresh off the press.

[33:04] Sammie Ellard-King: Hot off the press there, thank you. Hot off the press has an exclusive screen. Um but there’s there’s lots. We um we’ve kind of really turned the screw with a bunch of things we’re working on, um, you know, and I think the next six months are gonna be extremely exciting. Um, yeah, it’s really good to see what we’re we’re producing. And we have, as you mentioned, we have an absolute stellar design team and a stellar development team, and um, I know what they’re gonna produce is gonna be top of class, so yeah, you can see the love, and that’s uh that’s you know it’s evident across the app for sure. So what you you mentioned about the roundup feature there, that was one of your favourite bits. Um, did you want to touch on that? Yeah, so I mentioned it at the start as well. The reason why I love it is because it just it just works in my life. So when you say as a product manager, how you know you’re producing something that you actually is is good is when it’s something that you actually want to use, and they are things that it’s very difficult now for me to imagine not using them. I think as most people are now, like now, like today’s age, everyone is most people are inherently lazy, they want things to be done for them to a certain extent, and you know I’m no different from that. Um, and like the auto investments and roundups, basically, I just set up at like a couple years ago now, I basically did some research and I identified a bunch of different funds and stocks that I thought, okay, I think there’s a good opportunity here, um, this and the other, and built them into my portfolio. I basically started off and I had like £100 going in a month um as an auto deposit. So I set it up as a direct debit, never thought about it again, and broke that down into all these different investments in different stocks and uh funds that I like the look of. And then I basically forgot about it. And six months later, um it was going really, really well. So then I went from 100 to about 250, and then basically looked at different things. I took a couple out that won’t that weren’t performing too well, or I thought we were going to kind of reach a bit of a peak soon and then visit on the other. Um, and I’ll say that as I was kind of doing this when I came to doing the research, it was only because of the performance and like starting to get excited because I was making like my profits up like 10%. I was like, this is amazing. I’ve just made like 10% over like you know six six months of £100. I’ve made an extra like 60 quid for doing nice nothing. Like it’s money that would have just gone into my account, into my savings account, that I usually would siphon a little bit for an extra night out a month or something. And now instead I’m kind of it’s keeping me wet, it’s keeping me well behaved because it’s like not in my account ready to spend immediately at least. And um and I can just kind of set and forget it. And I’ve never looked back from there, and it’s that’s been like really like pivotal to just to me is like how I’ll now live my life. Like I just have you know, when you when you look at your start of your month and you’re budgeting, you look right, this is gonna my car’s gonna come out that much, my rent, my bills, you know, this and the other, I need this much amount for food shops, and then without thinking, I now have X amount that goes into my Wombat account. Um, and that’s just part of my life now, that’s part of my savings. And then, you know, like last year went on a really nice holiday and I took some out, but instead of just taking out your savings where you don’t really think about it, I’m now thinking, well, if I take that out and then you know, all these things go up another 5%, it’s not only the money I’m taking out, I’m actually losing out on the potential five percent. So it’s like it’s just this switch that changes in your head, and you just appreciate the journey a lot more and the value of it, and um that’s why I love those things. But I do think the new alerts functionality is gonna potentially compete with it because it’s gonna it’s just gonna feel like I have the stock market in my hand, which is gonna be really cool. Um, but between those things, I’d say they’re my favourite, I’d say.

[37:00] Sammie Ellard-King: I love that though, what you said. You know, it doesn’t have to be with one bat, it’s about the habit and the you set it up, you didn’t look at it, you came back in a in a six-month time and were really pleasantly surprised to see that it’s gone up. But what you had done is you’ve forgotten about it, it just became part of your monthly budget, you set it and you forget it. And then once you’re you know, they say it habit takes three, four months to to really kick in, or three, four times of doing something for it to really kick in, and so you you you you are over that period, and then you’re away, and actually then suddenly you become really, really interested in it, and you’re like, Oh, yeah, you know, I’ll sell this or maybe I’ll buy this. Because uh, you know, you know, you start thinking like that. Exactly. And it’s changing how the journey changes. Like my other half, Charlotte, she um she she loves it now. She’s literally asking me, she’s like, How’s how’s my account doing? How’s my account doing? What what do we need to do? Because I saw this in the news. Now I’m thinking about this, and so honestly, if you put her in the room, she’d be the last person to think about this type of stuff. But we’ve set her up, she direct debits 150 pounds in each month, and now she’s like wants to put it up because she’s like in and it changes in people, and you know, you it you were just talking about that journey there, and I I love it, man.

[38:22] Ben Vickers: Well, the the best the best example for this is going back to my mum. Um, and when we first launched it, uh I think my mum, this shows how you know proud, proud mum she is. I think she’s the 35th user on Wombat ever. So she was the second it was available, she was scrambling to get it downloaded. And um, you know, when I started it doing the auto investments and getting it set up um and saw you know it was going well, you know, a few months then it’d be like down, and you’d be like, okay, this isn’t panic stations, this is why this is happening. But if you’re in it long enough, you could hopefully see it come out. But you can under it just helps you your understanding and experience with it. And my mum did the same. Um, she could afford to put a little bit more in than I could, and she basically did the same thing. She had like a collection of different funds and stocks, left it for so long. Um, and now, like about a year ago, she started her own business. Um, funny enough, she she basically built a spa in her in her garden. She’s got quite a bit of land. It’s really when she pitched it to me, I was like, it seems a bit odd, but it went really well, it’s going really well. But um, she was basically only able to do that because of the money she’d basically saved from Wombat. So she basically put all this money aside every month and got it to a point where she was she knew she had that nest egg there. And then when the time came and she was, you know, discussing with my stepdad, being, you know, I want to do this, I think we can do it. And then they’re like, Oh, but you know, you’re coming out of this job and you know, we earn this much money, and if we take that away, it’s gonna be difficult. And then she’s like, But we’ve got this, which which buys us, you know, like three or four months, um, and we can afford to do it, we can afford to take the risk. And if she wouldn’t, if she hadn’t done that four, four years ago or so now, I don’t think she’d be in the position she is now where she’s got this really successful business, and it doesn’t always work out that way, but it just goes to show that you know, if you can budget properly, and that’s like I say, that’s with one bat or without one bat, if you can just budget properly and understand your incomes and outcoming uh incomings and outgoings, and you can be sensible and you can most importantly be exposed to the stock market for the long term, it’s not about short-term gain, it’s for the long term and riding out ways of volatility and things that go on in the world that you know is crazy right now. You know, you should come out on the other end with something that otherwise you wouldn’t have had. Um, and that’s my fate, that’s my favourite like testimony with that because it’s just nice that you know, I don’t well, I shouldn’t take credit to this, but I feel like in a weird way, like that bus that business is basically mine, is what I’m trying to say.

[41:02] Sammie Ellard-King: I don’t know who you say. No, no, I’m I won’t be sending a link to this podcast, don’t worry. Well, what I love though, mate, about what you said there was a really, really good point. Um, apart from the fact that you’re part owner of your money’s business, is that uh she used the money, and like that’s what I think people think, like, oh, you know, it’s for retirement, it’s for retirement. That’s that can be further from the truth. If you’re if you’re saving for a house deposit, if you’re saving for you know a new car or something that is gonna provide value to your life, that is why you’re investing. So it the goal doesn’t have to be a comfortable retirement, the goal can be to big life purchases. And I I this changed my mindset when a friend of mine um he turned around and said, Well, yeah, I’m gonna buy this house that I wanted to buy. And I’m like, Oh, right, oh, okay. Well, you’re gonna take your money out of your investment. He said, Yeah, damn right I am. I’m gonna take the money out of here because I don’t want to have this bigger mortgage and I want to use the money and I want to get the make make my payments easier. And I was like, Oh sh, you know, makes a lot of sense, really, actually. And your mum did the same. So I think that’s important and people to realise that it’s not just necessarily the goals that they’re like 30, 40 years ahead, it can be for something that’s that’s a little bit quicker on the horizon.

[42:24] Ben Vickers: Yeah, you still have access to it, and it it’s not like putting money into an ISA, for example, where you kind of locked off or like a you know, a help to buy scheme. It’s like, and you know, when I was putting the money in every month, I mean, there were there were times, you know, where you have those months where it just seems to be like everybody’s birthday all the within like two weeks. And it’s like, what was going on? Like, why do I have so much outgoings? But and you know, in those times I would sell a few things down and I would withdraw it back, and that would just help me. But I had that buffer there, and you know, the if I could afford it, you know, when I got paid again, I’d be like, right, I’ll I’ll put in an extra 60 quid because I took a little bit out this time and I’ll top it back up. If I couldn’t do that, oh well, that’s just the nature of life. Like it’s not perfect all the time. Um, but that’s what it is, and you know, it’s pretty much an account you can be on. If the market’s open, you can sell down and the money can be in your account within five minutes. So it’s like it’s not like it’s this locked away. Yeah, it’s there, it’s just a it’s just another account on a you know, not on your banking app, but in Wombat.

[43:24] Sammie Ellard-King: So but if you don’t touch it and you do keep gr adding to it too, then you know, then it’s going to go up over time. It will, it’s just hopefully. Yeah, that’s the intention. Yeah, but if you’re gonna say it goes. Well, never say never, hopefully not. Let’s not get that one. Um then it’s been a real big pleasure to chatting today. I’ve absolutely loved it. Um me too. What’s the um what’s the next yeah, if people want to check out Wombat, where can they go and um what’s the best next steps for them? So um go to the app store, the Apple App Store, or the Google Play Store, um, type in Wombat or Wombat Invest. We should be pretty high uh for both. Even Wombat, you’d be surprised here, because there’s lots of Wombat apps, weirdly enough. Um, or just go to uh your normal search engine, Google or whatever you use, and just type in Wombat Invest, and from there you can um you can download a link and you can uh you can create an account from downloading the app to having your investment account in less than three minutes. So it’s super simple, and then basically you can get straight in and start checking it out and starting your investment journey basically.

[44:36] Sammie Ellard-King: Wow, that’s amazing. We’ll leave a link as well in the show notes for anybody that wants to to check that out here while they’re in the app. Um, but yeah, Ben, thank you so much. Um really enjoyed this and uh yeah, look forward to getting you on in a couple of years and talking about how the you know Wombat’s taking over the investing game. Brill, I’ll look forward to it. Alright, man, take care. Cheers, bye bye.