In Australia ‘lay-by’ is a time-honoured system of paying for goods incrementally.
Its concept is simple. You agree to buy a product and pay for it in in regular instalments. The vendor sets the product aside and you take possession when you have paid the full amount.
It has long been a popular way for budget-conscious households to do their Christmas shopping or to acquire special purchases they couldn’t afford in one go. It’s almost a byword for caution and modesty.
It’s also the inspiration for Laybuy, a New Zealand online payment start-up that launched four years ago and is on a fast expansion track.
Operating in the ‘buy now pay later’ sector, Laybuy is a market leader in New Zealand and has a growing presence in both Australia and the UK.
It has recently entered a partnership with Mastercard to issue innovative BNPL digital cards to its customers and completed a successful IPO on the Australian Stock Exchange last September.
And this is just the beginning... “We started this business with a dream of creating a global brand,” founder Gary Rohloff told the Financial Review last year. “The big growth engine for our business right now is the UK.”
The man charged with overseeing the tremendous demands this growth is making on the technical capabilities of the company is chief technology officer, Justin Soong.
As a self-described ‘full stack developer, creating gorgeous experiences, seamless integrations and enterprise-grade solutions’, Soong celebrates two years with the company in April.
Soong joined Laybuy after a wide-ranging career that included previous fintech roles in companies like Harmoney, HP and Dovetail, as well as a stint at the New Zealand Stock Exchange.
“It’s funny how your career comes full circle,” says Soong. “But I started off in financial technology working at Hewlett-Packard, printing and designing all the mass communications to customers, ranging from bank statements to mortgage rate changes.
“I also spent a couple of years in Wellington learning the fundamentals of financial markets, and how technology plays a big part in managing modern free markets. And what better place to do that than the New Zealand Stock Exchange?”
Along the way he also spent time at Orion Health, a medical technology start-up that went global to around 80 countries. “This gave me great insights into how big data can bring out really equitable outcomes for people facing difficulty, especially in health,” he recalls.
His time at Orion Health also gave him valuable experience in a scale-up enterprise, experience that was only enhanced in 2015 when he moved into the role of delivery lead at Harmoney, an organisation that was able to capitalise on the “peer-to-peer lending phenomenon at that time”, he says.
“Harmoney was able to make a huge impact in the personal lending space, by automating its credit decisions and application process from something that could take days at a traditional finance company, to a matter of minutes. This had a huge impact for customers, because they were able to help people manage their finances in very quickly.”
Following this was a term as project lead/senior technologist at Dovetail, which was forming a partnership with Afterpay to design apps for iOS and Android at the time. This gave Soong the opportunity to continue his fintech work while also expanding his experience into government technology.
Headhunted
All of this stood him in great stead for his current role at Laybuy, which he joined in April 2019 after receiving a ‘tap on the shoulder’.
“I saw it as a huge opportunity to back a New Zealand company, in my own backyard, and to really challenge some big incumbents,” he says. “I wanted to be part of a company that was not only making a mark in New Zealand, but also growing to be a global player.”
But for someone with such a strong technical background and ambitious vision, Soong makes the perhaps surprising claim that technology is a ‘people business’.
When asked for advice for anyone in his position, he refers to the old Maori proverb: ‘He aha te mea nui o te ao. He tāngata, he tāngata, he tāngata.’ (What is the most important thing in the world? It is people, it is people, it is people.)
“This is what really supports performance and gives the people involved with what you’re doing a sense of achievement and purpose,” he explains. “Don’t drop the ball on your people.”
This explains why he nominates his proudest achievement to date as building the team at Laybuy. “To be able to build a team in 2020… to start off with just myself to now be at double-digit employee growth, all while operating in a pandemic, is nothing short of a miracle,” he says.
That miracle didn’t happen on its own, however. Like many fledgling companies with their eyes on the prize, Laybuy was facing challenges in its quest for expansion and consolidation.
While there many opportunities available in the space, Soong explains that Laybuy’s goals were originally constrained by time and the talent available. Which again comes back to people...
Roadmap to success
“The biggest challenge is taking something built by a couple of developers and scaling it out to the world. So most of my time is spent recruiting and talking to the best talent here in Auckland and New Zealand, and empowering my team to make decisions both independently and to work collaboratively across the organisation.”
Laybuy also had to improve its ability to move quickly, while giving its customers what they want, he adds.
“Our value proposition is completely hinged on making people’s lives easier. It is about having the technology that helps consumers’ manage their finances and to provide merchants with a risk-free credit option by offering a seamless instalment payment plan,” he says.
To improve this proposition, Soong says he had to navigate the more intangible aspects of his role.
“One of the unique challenges a CTO has to face is the ability to bridge the gap between the real world and the world of technology,” he explains.
“Often these two worlds don’t collide or they intentionally don’t want to meet each other. Being able to understand the business opportunities and to align them with technological advances is something a CTO can bring to the table and help solve.”
Practically perfect partnership
And to assist him in this endeavour, it was vital to partner with organisations and vendors that fully understood such intangibles, as well as Laybuy’s goals and practical tech challenges.
Looking to scale up and enter new markets and territories, the company recently migrated into the AWS cloud. In doing this, it needed on-demand support and expertise to ensure a successful move.
“We were on the path to containerisation on our journey of Kubernetes as a platform and we needed expertise,” says Soong, adding that choosing an AWS technology partner came down to three non-negotiable stipulations:
- deep expertise in AWS
- on-ground support and presence in New Zealand, and
- alignment of values and being great people.
AC3 ticked all three boxes easily, he says. “AC3 was a premium consulting partner for AWS and were just 10 minutes down the road from our home in Auckland.”
As for the alignment of company values and the ‘great people’ requirement? “From the initial conversations and meetings both over the phone and in person, it was a no-brainer,” says Soong.
Solving scale
AC3’s advice was to start with a review of Laybuy’s AWS architecture, conduct a deep dive of its environments and implement Datadog as a single pane of glass for observability.
Breaking down its approach into two phases, AC3 first supplied a solution architect to fully understand not only Laybuy’s current situation, but also where it wanted to be over the next couple of years.
This was followed by a cloud engineer executing the Datadog integration and supporting the build of Laybuy’s AWS environments.
The results have been seamless, says Soong, giving the Laybuy team its most important tool – transparency via that single pane of glass to oversee all operations.
“We can observe our systems in real time, observe scale-ups and scale-downs and be able to bring onboard new developers and new devops engineers very quickly to our business.”
When it comes to his greatest satisfaction in the partnership with AC3, though, it again comes down to ‘he tāngata’, says Soong.
“One of the biggest things I learned out of this process was that technology is a people business. Without great people behind [us], making good decisions based on great data, none of this would have happened. We're really appreciative of AC3’s people… they are so receptive to my point of view, the customer’s point of view and they take immediate action when things can be improved.
“They’re always so positive and it’s very refreshing to have a vendor like this, because it’s often not the case.”
