In This Episode
What connects jumping out of airplanes, surviving a $200k tax mistake over a single weekend, and turning gift cards into financial infrastructure? In this episode of Mighty Finsights, Alex Preece, Founder and CEO of Tillo, joins Rory Holland to share his path from British paratrooper to leading a global fintech engine.
Alex breaks down how Tillo pioneered API connectivity in a legacy industry, turning simple branded currency into a tool that helps consumers pay down mortgages, fund pensions, and combat the cost of living. Along the way, he reflects on losing control, the therapeutic nature of horror movies for founders, and why true business endurance comes from treating your company like an evolving entity rather than an exit strategy. It is a candid conversation on resilience, trust, and expanding your vision beyond arbitrary ceilings.
Key Takeaways
- Embracing the Unpredictable: The adrenaline and lack of control found in a great horror movie closely mirror the early days of founding a business, where unexpected market curveballs require immediate calm under pressure.
- The Power of Proving Yourself Right: Passing grueling physical military training provided a foundational sense of self-belief that no initial startup failure or financial setback could erase.
- Repurposing Gift Cards as Financial Tools: As a gift card API provider, Tillo transforms one-dimensional presents into a genuine financial tool, letting consumers direct gift card cashback straight into mortgages, 401(k)s, and everyday savings.
- Removing Ceilings on Growth: Early-stage founders often limit their trajectory by aiming for quick acquisitions rather than building an enduring global enterprise with no artificial cap on scale.
- Trust as a Core Business Metric: High-stakes military experience reinforces the value of implicit trust among core team members when navigating high-friction periods and economic downturns.
- Turning Cost Centers into Profit Centers: By using digital branded currency instead of traditional money movement rails, platforms eliminate transfer costs while offering immediate value to users.
- Reinventing the Founder Role: Sustaining a business over a decade requires a willingness to constantly audit your own performance, adapt to new governance, and hand over control as the organization matures.
Transcript
Hook – The £180k Weekend Loss
Alex Preece: And we set the rules of the pricing incorrectly and we were effectively we set them up over a really busy time. I think it was around peak time of trading, so like around Christmas time and we were selling these cards at a twenty percent loss. We didn’t put the VAT rate, the VAT rate, the tax rate correctly over the weekend. and we’d lost about a hundred and eighty thousand pounds, I think, that we owe to the VAT man, to the HMRC. The tax office in the UK. And I think I just remember the sinking feeling of just like, how do we get out of here?
Introduction
Rory Holland: Hi, I’m Rory Holland, CEO of Customer and the host of Mighty FinSites. Every year I talk with hundreds of financial leaders and innovators. We unpack the highs and lows of working in financial services in FinTech. Today, Alex Priese, founder and CEO of Tillow, joins the show.
Our conversation led to some really great moments, including:
- How losing 180,000 pounds in a weekend taught him what control really means.
- Why the military helped him develop a sense of achievement and purpose.
- The rule he lives by to ensure his business is built to last.
Join me as we get to know the people behind the brands we trust. Let’s dive in.
Welcome to Austin (And a Texas Welcome)
Rory Holland: Alex Priest, co-founder, CEO, Tillo. So excited to talk with you. We’ve been wanting to do this for a bit. So glad you’re in Texas, in Austin specifically. So we could do this in person. Okay, so before we jump in, I wanted to bring you something. I know you’ve got something to drink, but you gotta…
Alex Preece: A superstar. We love it.
Rory Holland: You can’t live in Texas and not have a Yeti, particularly in Austin. Yeah.
Alex Preece: That is very kind. I appreciate that one.
Rory Holland: My pleasure. Thank you very much. My pleasure. Appreciate it.
Alex Preece: Especially in the moment where it’s a hundred degrees and we can keep the cool keep the drinks cold.
Rory Holland: Yeah, for sure. Even with air conditioning. Exactly.
Horror Movies: Disconnecting to Focus
Rory Holland: All right. So I wanna get a lot into Tillo and all the cool stuff you guys are doing. But before we do that, we were just talking off camera, talking about exercise. So like you like to recharge, we both like to work out, great way to like reduce stress, obviously stay fit. but you said something else I thought was really interesting. You love horror movies.
Alex Preece: As a kid. Actually shouldn’t have been. I mean, my son’s taken after me a little bit, although you forget like how real they look now. Like they are properly scary now. Even a fifteen rating or whatever, you know, that they are quite they can get really in your brain, especially at twelve years old. I mean, I started watching them when I was sort of nine, ten. Being allowed you know, finding the VHSs and just putting them on and then just being addicted to Halloween and freaking Freddy Krueger and Hellraiser and all of those things. I do like my wife hates them. but my son and I, my sister absolutely loves them. I think my sister and I are probably the only ones in the family that really do my mum my mum as well, to be fair, but yeah, I do like them.
Rory Holland: I like the old ones. So that’s what I was gonna ask you. Like were there particular horror movies? One that like when the credits rolled you were just like, Wow, this is the best movie I’ve ever seen.
Alex Preece: I just have this I don’t know, I find it really therapeutic. Weirdly that sounds weird even saying it. I enjoy turning lights out, getting into bed or on the sofa and just putting something on that I don’t know, it just takes you to a place that you can’t you disconnect, you’re not thinking about anything. Whereas I find I don’t know about you, but there’s some programmes obviously there’s some amazing classics like the Sopranos and like the the Wire and you know, other series that you can sort of dig into. But I find quite often I’ve got my phone near me and those things I can drift off and start playing my phone. Yeah. Whereas horrors, you don’t do that. You are you’re in you’re watching it because it’s the music’s hot you hooked. You’re I mean I get hooked on what the plot’s gonna be, the twists, the turns. I watched Echo Valley, which is a bit of a thriller to be fair, at the weekend. My wife absolutely hated it ’cause it is a psychological thriller, but it’s just twisted. It’s like some gr and then it all unravels at the end. I love it.
Rory Holland: What you know, I’m kinda curious is in some ways I think when you watch a horror movie, it brings out something in us like the survival thing, right? And curious, like, is there any correlation between when you think about that and you think about like running a company, being a founder of a company? Like because in some ways I wouldn’t say that you’re in a horror movie when you’re founding a company necessary, but in some ways.
Alex Preece: I think I think sometimes, I think quite often, maybe there’s a correlation between like not being in control and that is part of the reality with a company in some respects. You’re not always in control. You you that’s the real the market can change. You know, you know, in the early days, like any small business, there’s always things that come along, these curples I always talk about that you can’t You know, I rem I’ll give you a f I’ll give you a flavor of you know, back when we started the business, there was you know, put our own money in, me and my business partner, Gareth, we we funded ourselves, and we were relying on engineers to set a lot of the concepts and the rules around the billing and sending and issuing gift cards for B to B rewards and incentives in all these huge programs. And one of these the sort of buyers or partners of our platform was a bit of a bad actor.
and we set the rules of of the pricing incorrectly and we were effectively we set them up over a really busy I think it it was it was around peak time of trading, so like around Christmas time and we were selling these cards at a twenty percent loss. We didn’t put the VAT rate, the V A T rate, the tax rate correctly in over the weekend. and we’d lost about a hundred and eighty thousand pounds, I think, that we owe to the VAT man, to the HMRC. the the tax office in the in the UK. And I think I just remember the f the s the sinking feeling of just like, how do we get out of here? I mean, I don’t I can’t we we put all our money and we don’t have any more money. And then I’m negotiating with the Vatman saying that like if you don’t well, we managed to get out of it and we had a payment plan we put together, but they were just, you know, we don’t do payment plans. We don’t do these things. And I think having not having that control is the reality. But so I and I think there’s this sort of playing with that that idea when when watching a a really good horror movie that you don’t have control of the outcome. You don’t know if it’s gonna have a nice ending. You for all you know everyone could get slaughtered. And I think that’s the the appeal of it in some respects. There’s a bit of an addictive nature of it.
Rory Holland: Yeah, and that experience as a founder. boy. Well that experience as a founder, having that happen over the course of a weekend be like, my, when your early days like had that’s well, that’s terrifying. That’s a bit of a horror movie.
Alex Preece: Absolutely. Everyone’s got these stories of just how they got started, how they got talking to someone, and then they thought, Wow, you got a bit of a knack here, or there’s a bit of a niche here, or there’s something going on here and then before you know it, the idea is snowballed somewhat. You know, you start thinking, actually I could maybe make a bit of money here and there’s maybe of an opportunity. We might be to solve a problem. and then, you know, it just sort of grows into something that you can’t quite fathom and You know, we’re just scratching the surface of what we’re doing, but I can’t even imagine what it’s like for some like Mark Zuckerberg or some of the companies that are around today that sh probably changed the world. yeah.
The Parachute Course & Building Confidence
Rory Holland: The early day stories. Yeah. Well, talking about control, you you told us that I’ll quote it directly because I gotta read this. Apart from being shot in a at in Iraq, the scariest thing you’ve done is completing the parachute all arms course at the age of nineteen. So okay. Two great things there, talking about control or lack thereof. take me back. Like when you when you were nineteen and you also said that it was the first thing you ever really properly completed, like How me take me back to that nineteen w and what does properly mean? Yeah.
Alex Preece: So I think like you know, I don’t mind telling anyone that I’m pretty ashamed of like the way I behaved at school. I look back and I’m not proud of the fact I didn’t try. I didn’t try because there was a bit of a traumatic stuff going on with mum and my dad and our family life was not you know, it wasn’t cookie cutter, it wasn’t two point you know four for sort of family sort of cookie cut style. It was quite emotional. And I think that didn’t enable me to understand fitness, competing. It didn’t really matter I didn’t have a competitive nature really around me.
but what I did do is I hugely admired my granddad, who had been in the army for twenty four years. and that is going back quite a long way. So my mum’s side, British, you know, her dad was in, my granddad, and then going back a long way, like a really long way. in fact I’ve got the hoof of my great great great grandfather who was an Irish guard who rode into battle and I’ve got it sort of saved on my my office desk and it’s an inkwell now and it’s got the Irish guard battle cry on there which I just love that historic piece of of history of my my family history. On my dad’s side, he’s Iranian. He came to the UK, met my mum at college and then they got together and his dad was in the Shah so they go back in a military sort of sense. So when I left school it was I sort of lasered in on I need to do this. I started to get fit, ready for the army. I ran a mile and a half. And you’ll sort of notice like there’s some basic tests. They’re quite easy tests to do. They’re not you need to you need to you know, not be grossly overweight, but you you know, t to do twenty push ups, to do I think it was like four pull ups or something. It w you know, not not game changing things. The mile and a half run was ten minutes thirty and I ran it in like ten twenty eight. I can run a mile and a half significantly quicker than that now. That’s like borderline. And I was a slim lad. Like I should not be running ten thirty. I should be running like a a flipping, I don’t know, like a sub eight minute mile or something. Some yeah, some are a mile and a half. So I should be running around eight minutes. I was significantly off that.
Anyway, I joined the military and I got super competitive. It just brought the best out of me. I just loved it. I wanted to win. I wanted to do well in everything I did, from maths, English. We did like the equivalent of some college sort of education stuff there in the military. It was like a junior leader’s school thing that I managed to get into. and then I just had you know, you remember these people that sort of say something or take you under their wing that help you give you that. Sense of purpose. And one of them was my first troop, my first troop leader. And he was the one that said, Listen, you know, have you thought about doing P Company? Have you thought about doing the all arms course to be airborne trained? and I was like, No, I don’t want to do that. I don’t like heights, I don’t want to do it. He’s like, I’m not even listening to what you’re gonna say, I’m gonna sign you up to it. And he took me on his wing, he was para trained. There weren’t that many of us in our regiment paratrained, and I picked up running. I was good at running with weight on my back. I was good at running. I w I got quite strong. and then decided to go for it. And you know, you just see all of the boys together, you know, in hell on earth, trying to get this maroon machine beret to put on your head and to have the right to wear your wings on your shoulders. It was the first thing that I’d actually accomplished in my entire life, really, up until that point. That I just felt this huge sense of achievement for me, making myself proud.
Like I there’s a few athletes here locally in Austin that sort of proudly sort of shout, you know, prove yourself right. And I think then I prove myself right that I could do something for myself if I work really hard and I try really hard mentally to get over the line. and yeah, it was like six weeks of fucking hell. And I look back and I think just everyone was in the same boat. I was in there with a few colleagues that didn’t pass and I was in there with a few that did. And I remember coming out of it and just thinking, No one can take this away from me now. Even then, like it was the first thing. I just remember thinking, No one can take this away from me. I’ve done it. I’ve this is the source star something something bigger, maybe, in some respects.
Rory Holland: Yeah, so that built gave you some confidence.
Alex Preece: Yeah. A hundred percent yeah, exactly.
Rory Holland: Basically, if you were scared you were scared of height and you went up in an airplane and you actually jumped out.
Alex Preece: Yeah, and they do these you they they don’t just put you in an aeroplane. Like they beforehand, they have these apparatus that is designed to test when they’re tr when the aircraft is traveling 180 miles an hour, pfft three hundred foot above the earth, that you are capable of actually jumping out the damn thing because if you hold up the stick, the like you’re you’re effectively you’re gonna miss the DZ, which means everyone else behind you is gonna miss the DZ, the drop zone. So they’re like they’re training you to see if you can actually under fright, fear, buckle. And they’re designed that you know, the courses are designed to sort of do that. You’re climbing this p you know horrendous apparatus that’s I don’t know, hundreds of feet high, scaffolding, you’re climbing up it, you’ve got big bolts on the end of these two tracks, you know, you’ve got hands above your head, legs are like wobbling, you’ve got to go up to the bolts. One step over, one step over, shout your army name, pause. If there’s any hesitation, you’ve got to do it again. They only give you twice to do it. It all these little things are designed.
Then you’ve got another thing you do in an indoor hangar where you actually have to jump out of a mock aeroplane with a wire attached to you, to simulate you jumping out a plane, see if you can sort of do it. And they’re you know, these are the fittest people, you know, around. And you see them work so hard and they get to that one thing. One of my friends was one of them. You know, he could not do it. He got to the apparatus, saw it, saw the guys going up there, and was like, I’m I’m I can’t do it. I can’t physically make myself get up there to do that. but yeah, I don’t want to do it again.
But yeah, I’m actually in Sydney next week and my son and I are doing the Sydney Bridge climb. So we’ve booked in to climb the bridge. And every time I go up something that high, I don’t really enjoy it.
Rory Holland: You’re not jumping off of the I was gonna say there’s not a bungee bungee thing or anything, right?
Alex Preece: No, don’t pretend to be doing that. gosh. But yeah, it was a sense of achievement though and I thoroughly I although I look back and I you know, I know how much it hurt, I also know how much it meant to me personally, because it like I said, it was the first thing that sort of I was able to properly put my name to that I managed to do. I had to wait nineteen years to do it. But
Bankruptcy, Welfare, and the First Big Exit
Rory Holland: That’s awesome. No, that’s such a cool story. And how coming out of the army you started one of the first of UK’s daily businesses.
Alex Preece: True. Yeah, so a bit of a w a windy road really, very rocky. I decided to leave the army, I decided to set up a an online retail store, selling just merchandise and things to do with sort of luxury candles and and and and and getaway bags and things. Started the business. Unfortunately, I ended up going bankrupt about a year after setting up. So I took a £25,000 bank loan from the bank because the banks love folk from the military because you were guaranteed to get paid every month. So they would they would lend money accordingly to your earnings, but you would you could borrow money. It wouldn’t it didn’t really matter what part the military you’re in, you were able to buy. So I pretended to the bank that I was gonna buy a car. I used that money. I then left the military. I started a business with that money. real shock to the system, spent all my money on stock, couldn’t get rid of the stock. I ended up selling the business, my wife and I managed to get rid of it, girlfriend at the time, and I ended up having to go on the dole, so your equivalent of welfare here.
Rory’s Commentary
Bankruptcy hits entrepreneurs just like it does everyone else, and it really hurts. All the more if you have to go on welfare just to live. Those social welfare systems were put in place for a reason till people get back on their feet. And Alex definitely got back on his feet. In a minute, he’s going to talk about his eight-figure company exit that came less than two years later. Whether we’re in the middle of a failure or success, we still need love and support to help us move forward.
Alex Preece: Fuh.
Rory Holland: They it the do the doll going on.
Alex Preece: Don’t actually know what that means. D D O L E Dole. I don’t know what that is, but it’s a s it’s just it’s a slang word, I think, for welfare or benefits. I was on that for six months and then I I sort of start I worked for a couple of startups. managed to get a job, cash in hand, doing some bits, and then ended up working in a start up incubator in Brighton and Hove, which is where my wife and I were living at the time. I met my business partner there, best friend, business partner.
We saw this amazing business on TechCrunch called Groupon that was doing really well in Chicago. They don’t need to start getting going. And we knew a friend of a friend was an investor in that business through T C V, technology crossover ventures. And we just couldn’t believe how innovative that business model was that these these consumers were giving you all their money up front on the premise that they get this amazing deal If it can pass through. And we thought we could easily start that. So we we ended up we scraped together some money from ourselves. My wife supported me through that time, my girlfriend at the time. So she was sort of paying for everything while I buried, I don’t know, I think I put ten thousand. We managed to borrow a little money. This was the the banks were a lot some of it was quite relationship led back then. So they’d like hear what you’re up to and they would they’d sort of back it for five, ten grand. So we managed to get five or ten thousand from the bank. Gareth put five or ten thousand up a bit. So we had a bit of money to sort of do payroll. We had two founding members effectively, they gave, I think, ten percent of the business away or something to that to those guys. And we got going.
And then how on earth we managed to effectively get a tiny bit of traction, get with the world’s biggest comparison website, money supermarket.com, who’s a FTSE 250 business. It’s like a Fortune 500 here sort of thing. and they did a trial with us. We started to outsell Groupon in the UK because of their enormous database that they had. And then they acquired the company within eight months of us starting the damn thing. And it was a ridiculous ride. I couldn’t believe it. It was like the figure to the city, we didn’t get all this money, by the way, but you know, it was eleven million pounds reported to the city.
I went for dinner the night before with one of my best friends. His name’s Alex and we went for some chicken and I had to ask him to pay for that bill because I I didn’t have literally any money Today before the money kind of hit the bank account. I had nothing. I literally had g we had gone all in. We needed that to w to kind of work out. so it was a huge learner in just scaling. Corporate marriage didn’t really work. Boom and bust. You know, employing lots of people, doing a you know, creating something locally in Brighton Hove, corporate contracts with like Herbert Smith, it was a huge lawyer firm in the UK. And everything in between. It was a great learning curve.
Rory Holland: Goodness. man. So you were on the brink of well, no money. You had no money. Yeah. And it was literally like, I can’t afford to do anything right now. Your wife had or your girlfriend at the time had been supporting you. God bless her.
Alex Preece: Yeah, but
Rory Holland: How would going back to your military experience and the confidence you built and completing what you did and accomplishing what you did, how much of that carried forward into what you were doing now? Like was that a touchstone for you to say I you know, I’m gonna stay stick to this?
Alex Preece: I always think that it’s sometimes some kind sometimes it’s I think it’s a subconscious feeling a lot of the time that I’d been bankrupt before that acquisition. So and then before bankruptcy, I’d been, you know, on the moors of Scotland, freezing cold, raining in a ditch, all muddy, waiting for the morning to hit to kind of not be on stag, looking out into the middle of nothing. And then before that it was, you know, not my no money being, you know, in a council sort of estate in the UK. There’s always been something worse, if that makes sense. Like I didn’t there there’s n there’s always a there’s always been something worse or s there’s always someone worse off. And I always just put my mind to the cards I’m able to deal in front of me.
And I think I think when I look back at some of the lessons that I’ve taken from the military, it is, you know, the ultimate trust that you play place in your peers around you. And when I’ve got colleagues I work with today that, you know, I trust implicitly. And trust is earned, but, you know, ultimately they’ve been along the journey for a long time, a lot of these people. And that helps you get through a lot of hardship. It’s never as bad as what it seems. I always sort of play that card to myself that it’s all right, it doesn’t it doesn’t really matter. It’s you know, I’ve I I’ve been here, I’ve done that, I’ve been in Iraq, I’ve been shot at di they’ve I’ve had horrible cards dealt in other areas, health as well, that make things never as bad as what they seem. Someone’s negotiating a new contract or someone’s someone’s just decided to leave. It’s never really that bad. It’s never it’s it You know, I think we’re very fortunate in this part of the world that we don’t have to worry about that you know, the real fundamentals of life, like in in in some respect.
so those principles unconsciously that I’ve sort of gathered along the road, probably like yourself, you well, I’ve been managed to I I use them all the time today. And I and it’s those it’s those guiding principles of not Always being aware that curveballs are always gonna come along. They’re always gonna try and throw you off track. the the guiding principles of it’s never as bad as what it seems. there’s always something worse off to deal with.
I think the the un like a child growing up, you know, your son sort of doing something quite dangerous in in his pro sport that that he loved and enjoyed and gave up, I think as And I I’ll refer it back into into the the question a bit more i in that like my children are quite spaced out. I’ve got a twelve year old, a ten year old and a nearly five year old. And seeing them all together is it’s super interesting comparing them when you’re on holidays and the d the needs that they all want. But then knowing that this little beautiful creature that looks at you is so intently at five or four, look they look at you very differently when they’re twelve. And they look at you different when you’re 20 and 30 and all the rest of it. And I think a company’s no different.
And I’ve it it’s taken me a really long time to understand that. And it might sound a bit weird, but the first company was gone and gone. The first one was gone because it went back, it w kind of went bust. Second one, there was success there, but I didn’t really see it through for that long. It was only for a few years. It’s only two years. This one I’ve been p I’ve built now for 10 years. And seeing the evolution of something like a child is It’s quite scary actually, seeing this thing get much bigger than you can you can control, like a child. It’s gonna go off and do its own thing. It’s gonna become there’s gonna be a lot more governance in it. You can’t behave like you did in the early days, like you’re doing these days now. and I think those principles of that I put on myself to just try reinventing myself every year, trying to just constantly p perfect, look at it, admit that you’re you are winging it a bit of the time, most of the time, trying to figure out the what the right thing to do is as long as your your core principles are always in line and you’re able to revisit them to try and perfect them, three sixty reviews, all these sorts of things, I think they ultimately help you grow and adapt to the marketplace you’re operating in.
Building Tillo: Infrastructure as a Financial Instrument
Rory Holland: Yeah. I love that. I definitely want to get into the three sixty review because you shared some interesting stuff there. so ha transitioning, I want to talk about Tillow. So tell the audience, what does Tillow do? And then coming out of those experiences you just talked about, what inspired you and Gareth to stay together and then start Tillow?
Alex Preece: Yeah, so we saw this market that was a huge market and growing. So at the time I think it was f six hundred billion or something. It was so it was some stupid number. the weird thing with this market was that almost nearly sixty percent of it was B to B, meaning that a large proportion of the market was sort of owned by very large businesses that were issuing these rewards and incentives as a way for consumers to get more. Now I’m we’ve I’ve always been in businesses really that give consumers something back. There’s value, there’s a discount a lot, there’s a commission a lot, there’s a there’s making something go further. so I I we love the nature of the consumer being at that one part of it.
we’d been used to working with very big b brands in it in our previous business and this was certainly part of that, you know, 30 brands in the UK anyway, it’s a bit like the US. Thirty brands in the US, I think, make up two point two trillion of spend. Same sort of values, not value, same sort of economics work the same in the UK. and we had relationships with a lot of those retailers. and we also knew some of the B2B buyers, but they were all buying these vast quantities of rewards, gift cards, incentives in fixed denominated stock in a fragmented way. That typically did not unlock a lot of value for the consumer.
And I think, you know, how do we kind of figure out how to get involved in this and add value in the ecosystem? Fundamentally, it was very rewarding and incentive heavy. And we had f we’d found a couple of opportunities just by being busy in this industry that needed and wanted to put gift So gift cards effectively in their ecosystem to keep it in their retail ecosystem. So this was one of the largest cashbacks or is one of the largest cashback channels in the UK and in Germany. and these guys were helping consumers save vast quantities of money on everyday spend and on holidays. And they the money that was being collected as cashback, they wanted to Instead of paying out of people’s bank accounts, they wanted to make it a no-brainer for the consumer to make those funds that they collected go even further and to keep it in retail.
And that’s where gift came in. So we were able to enable these brands that wanted to go into this application. And the only way you could make it work was via APIs. This was ten years ago. They weren’t really the thing back then. You couldn’t do it with fixed denominated stock. You couldn’t do it in the fragmented way that was That was pretty much standard back then. And we just didn’t we you know we backed ourselves. There were two American incumbents that were in the market at the time that were very much focused on physical retail. And we just sort of pioneered the ability for these sorts of applications, cashback, rewards, incentives, crypto, open banking financial technology, FinTech, enabling these applications to innovate off the top of our platform. And effectively, you can probably say that I’ve said that a few times, we’ve created a f a stripe for gift or rewards.
Rory’s Commentary
Unless you’re building the so-called rails or plumbing, it’s hard to get excited about that layer of financial services. But like indoor plumbing for clean water, the pipes aren’t where the magic happens. It’s what you can do with the water that really matters. In the case of gift cards, Tillow has engineered a way for gift cards to quietly become part of a mortgage payment or cash back for people without premium credit cards. Alex is giving underserved, underbanked people the same advantages as everyone else. The best infrastructure disappears. It feels effortless, like turning on the tap.
Alex Preece: made it super simple for all these amazing innovat innovators really to innovate off the top of our infrastructure to create something very meaningful to the consumer.
Rory Holland: Yeah, and you s you said something, I make sure I got this right, that gift cards as a cost of living tool. Yeah. Like what do you mean by that?
Alex Preece: So more often than not, a lot of the applications that we power or or behind, they’re offering something really meaningful for everyday spend to their either member or employee, in so much that by enabling them to these consumers to buy a gift card with a level of rebate or commission there enables their paycheck to go further instead of using their debit card or credit card. Because remember, not everyone is eligible for these premium level credit cards that are on the market. There is a huge population UK, Europe, Australia, India, all these countries who operate in America, Canada, that don’t have access to those cards. And that’s where gift sort of really comes into its own.
So we’re using our infrastructure to enable brands to offer a commission or a rebate or an incentive to the consumer because they want the new customer on incremental spend. The buyer, the partner, so the person the the the the the business that connects the two is often turning a a cost center into a profit center because if you move money, there’s a cost to it. Now moving gift, there is very little cost at all. So that it turns from a pr cost center to profit center. And then the consumer is thinking, Well, I’m going to go to Walmart anyway. I’d l and I and I’m going to get a reward for doing that.
And that’s where that’s where this is this we call it the Tillow p power triangle, but ultimately each party in the ecosystem’s winning. and quite a lot of the use cases that we are unlocking and enabling are the most innovative use cases to help people’s money go further. An example, we’ve got a prov a a partner today that is enabling the margin that’s on that’s being acquired by the the consumer, that’s on the gift card. So the consumer buys the gift card. The margin that’s in there, the far four, five, six, seven percent, is by being directly attributed to that consumer’s mortgage. So it’s paying down their mortgage.
There are applications on that that pay towards their pension, their four or one case, instantly. It’s amazing. This everyday spend is being unlocked by the power of this branded currency, this gift card, and the mechanics behind it. It’s not just there is no gifting in our world really. There’s mu there’s it’s all self-use and it’s these innovative self use use cases that are being born out of the power of this financial instrument that we call a gift card.
Rory Holland: God, that is so cool. So can you give me like maybe a couple of examples? Like you mentioned employer, but maybe start with the consumer one first. You mentioned Walmart, pick any brand, but maybe describe the triangle and then give me a real world give us a real world example.
Alex Preece: So you’ve got, you know, these incredible businesses, credit card companies, financial techno companies, they’re all struggling to keep loy you know, these consumers, the emplo these employees, or let’s say use consumers. They they they’re struggling to keep these consumers loyal to their application. Their banking app, their cashback app, their reward app, all these different applications. And they’re using gift as a mechanic for that consumer that’s a part of that application. that finan that that let’s just take a a banking app that wants to enable that consumer to pay into their pension via the integrations that they’ve got to the pension providers. The buyer, the partner there, that that bac that that application is win it it is offering something unique to the consumer because they’re offering a Walmart card as in this example that we’re gonna do now. let’s say four percent off or four percent cash back or four you know, we’re we’re we’re we’re using the margin there, the sort of the commission as a is the tool to enable that consumer to go shopping to actually redeem their their card.
And that four percent, that hundred dollar card that they’ve paid ninety-six for, that four dollars, is being directly attributed to something that’s very meaningful to that consumer. And it could be a pension, it could be a mortgage. It could be a savings pot. It could be you know, the the more one dimensional ways of doing it are just giving them cash back, just giving it instantly to the consumer. Other innovative apps that we’re seeing are using it to buy stocks and shares instantly with the margin of gift. So that four dollar example in that Walmart card is directly being attributed to by potentially Walmart stock through the integrations that app, the application’s providing to that consumer has the integrations back into the other applications needed to push that value back into the stock market for those brokers. Yeah.
Which I think is just so cool. I mean it’s like instead of you using your, you know, I don’t know plug names, but like Chase card today, you get three percent back. Great. That goes back into my credit card point wallet. First off, not everyone has access to those cards. Two, it’s very transactional. And that’s the difference, like here. You are creating an ecosystem, which in turn is creating this caught up value that’s very transactional to be very personal. And I think that’s the the really exciting thing in this ecosystem is we’re seeing applications using the I suppose the brands that people love to shop at and the commissions and rebates that are there to attach something very meaningful to that consumer, either investing, saving for later, paying something meaningful down that you’re thinking about all the time, and fundamentally getting access to rewards that they may not be eligible for anyway, because they might be blue collar workers and actually their income threshold is not enabling them to get those cards anyway.
Rory Holland: That’s awesome. So thinking about what you said about like watching your children at the different ages and then being a part of your first business and then your second one lasted a couple of years, so much different than ten years now plus the mature like what you’re describing sounds really complex. Like I did it start that way in your head in sixteen?
Alex Preece: Yeah, no, yeah, no, no, no. I think it sounds like it’s super technical. it is a complicated architecture under the hood to some extent. But if you just think like a brand new has a gift card program, how do they beyond the gifting element of it, how do they distribute and grow that program? We enable that to happen in all these different channels. So we need to plug into those brands and of which we’ve got thousands and thousands of them now, like over four or five thousand brands. and all the brands that you can think of that have programs. And then we’re bringing new ones in like Gymshark and all the ones that are sort of digitally native and much more newer in the ecosystem.
But at the heart of it, it’s just APIs and connectivity. and I think at the start it was just about solving this one cashback apply this huge cashback application in the UK. It was enabling them to fulfill their one RFP need that that they couldn’t fulfill. That they went out to market. No one had the connectivity. No one had the brands that they wanted. And we were just trying to solve that one thing. So we just needed, I think it was like twelve retailers. Weirdly, all the retailers we had, it was like the brands you probably wouldn’t have heard of. There was there was a big ones. There was Starbucks on there was a few others. But there was some very small ones. And we we just managed to fit the RFP and make it work, it solved a huge problem for these guys.
And actually under the hood, it that was quite simple. Taking that and then moving it into different geos and then doing settlement in different geos and then enabling money flows to work seamlessly across all these different retailers, all these different aggregators across the world, that is complicated. There’s a whole You know, there’s nearly three hundred people now and you know, by the end of the year we will be anyway. And it that like there’s that’s a lot of problem solving. But at the heart of it, one geo, certain retailers, few appr applications, it wasn’t that difficult. Finding a price for it was because we there was no pricing for this stuff. We had to make up a SAS model, we made up all this stuff and saw what stuck. We just started really high and then came down to what was more easy. Yeah.
The Enduring Business: Patience & Expanding Horizons
Rory Holland: Yeah. Quite an evolution. You had you know, I wanted to talk a little bit about what I’ve heard you say publicly, I think I’ve read you say this, is you quoting you, enduring businesses are built through resilience, patience, reinvention, and great people. Those things compound over time in ways that are difficult to appreciate in the early years. So ten years ago, Tillow was was a vision solving a problem, and then now it’s compounded in ways that you just described like you didn’t see coming. Like tell me a little bit about like your thoughts on the enduring business and what you built so far and
Alex Preece: Yeah. I Yeah. I mean Well f first off, I neither of me or my business partner had an idea that we could get to I think we w I think I think the conversation had in the coffee shop and we were talking about, you know, it’s gonna be very difficult to get beyond, you know, twenty, fifty thousand a month in sales to pay the payroll and do all these things as we were growing a bit. We all had like a few people, maybe 10, 15 people or something. and then it started to grow. And I think, you know, it’s one of the reasons why, you know, my business partner and I sort of came to the he wanted to move on and to do something completely different, move out of industry. But I think knowing what ceilings to put on things, well, knowing that ceilings effectively limit your vision i is something that’s resonated to me quite massively over the last four or five years.
you know, I’ve been on my own for four years now as CEO, doing you know, built a new team around me, went back to platform play. We we confused it, we you know, we’re entrepreneurs, we’re trying to do everything at once and, you know, wherever something’s shiny, we were running off doing it. and that did limit the business a lot and it did needed focus. And I think, you know, if I look back over the years, the enduring of trying to do a Series A failing. The enduring of trying to raise money at certain times didn’t work. We had to go back to doing it ourselves. Meaning Garf PG’d our houses. You know, we went all in. We went in before COVID. We thought COVID happened. Our sales started to come off a cliff. We felt it w the sales were I think we went twenty percent under what we were expecting things to happen overnight. And until the government initiatives were sort of announced we thought we’re gonna have to let people go, like really drastic measures.
But thankfully, all these things along the way led to having more control, building out our destiny the way we wanted it to be. and I think in those early days, I think it probably is quite fair to say that we were looking to solve a problem, get going and sell it. and that was a huge limiting factor actually when I look back now, because we would have so I mean we’d have checked out, done very well. But that’s the classic thing in Europe and Britain. We always sell up. I feel like a lot of the time. Not so much now, but like back in the day when we were going, it was that was the common theme. It was people who sell up too early, they sort of give up on their destiny, they make enough money for themselves and that’s sort of it.
Whereas moving to Texas, is a you know, in the link in the American dream, it’s like, why would you sell? Why would you, why would you limit your ability to just take it as far as you can go? And that rubs off on you when you’re here. And I think that has enabled me over the last two and a half years living here to sort of think a lot bigger. You know, we can be as big and as I say as big, we can fulfill the full opportunity of what we’re destined to do ultimately. I don’t really have a size of employee count or revenue or anything in my head. I mean we have targets, but actually, you know, now we’ve got quite a large sizable team in Cape Town. We’ve got quite a sizable team here and we’ve got team in Australia and it’s like well actually we could do some really cool things all over the world and there’s no end to what we can achieve if we just keep the same philosophy, working to partners, creating value and th th that that sort of thing.
Rory’s Commentary
If you’ve ever faced the choice of selling your company or continuing to build, you know how hard this is. Starting, growing, and running a business is an unbelievable amount of work. And the buck always stops with you. When someone offers to buy you out, it can feel like the fulfillment of a dream and the chance to recover from all the stress. Alex almost did that with Tillow. Instead, he decided to keep building and change his perspective. I don’t think Tillow got more ambitious because the opportunity got bigger; I think the opportunity got bigger because Alex finally let himself believe it could.
Alex Preece: Fortunately I have had to take some liquidity along the way, which is to live life and you know, enjoy life at the time. And I do sort of have a bit of an envy in the back of my mind of what it would be like if we do this business we couldn’t do that with. There was no way of being able to achieve that. That being said, I’m still massively enjoying the ride.
Rory Holland: Yeah, it’s a ride. It is. It is kinda like jumping out of a plane sometimes. so God, there’s so much good stuff in there. the fact that you guys have endured and gone through so much, you and Gareth, a great hear I think you’re still friends, right? I think you say that right. yeah, finding a good partner, kinda like marriage, very important. Yeah. It makes all the difference. And it sounds like you’ve got a good one in him. And well, congrats on the success. That’s really, really neat.
Fantasy Headhunting: Michelangelo
Rory Holland: So I wanted to to shift gears a little bit. We like to ask this fun question about fantasy headhunting. So you shared if you could hire anybody of all the people in human history, you could bring in Attilo. You chose Michelangelo. Yeah. Curious. Why is that? Why him?
Alex Preece: Do you know what I’ve a bit of a blast on apart. I was in New York. I was in a a museum. This is a really short story, but I I would we were really I was in New York with a colleague of mine and we were we were going around this museum and Michelangelo had a travel well, they had a travelling Michelangelo muse sort of all his some artifacts, then they had pieces that were given to this travelling museum that was in Noma Is it Noma in the
Rory Holland: New York? In New York. Yeah. No yeah. Yeah.
Alex Preece: And it wasn’t there that long. We just happened to be there. We’re in the museum, and there’s pieces being given by Queen Elizabeth II, there’s pieces being given by private collectors of the world, and there were drawings of Michael that Michael Andrew had done when he was like twelve years old, thirteen years old. I couldn’t even. These drawings were like world class sketches that you’d put up and just think that they were real. It was incredible. And I just think having an afternoon, dinner, having someone work working with someone like that, with that mindset vision, would just be profound. Like properly profound.
I mean, it’s just the skill that some people have. I do sort of feel sorry for bit you know, in it nowadays, I don’t want to go down a rabbit hole here of just though that old workmanship of like stonemasonry. Carpentry, creating, drawing. And maybe not drawing so much, but there’s some skills that Thatch Roofs, for instance, like there’s people that just don’t want to take that stuff on anymore. But it’s a beautiful craft. And we can all admire it when we see it. I think that was the thing seeing this like this child effectively drawing what is the most incredible sketches and thoughts and ideas would just be mind boggling, let alone
Speed, Fear, and Flying
Rory Holland: With someone like that. That would be cool. That would be cool. all right. So going a completely different direction. So w we asked you a question. If you could clone yourself and take it on a completely different path, you would you said I would be a fighter pilot or Apache helicopter pilot. And you already mentioned jumping out of airplanes, paratrooper, the military being shot at in Iraq. but you’re scared of heights. So connect the dots for me on that.
Alex Preece: I don’t know, I’ve just always admired and I know when I’ve seen pilots and been in planes and not just commercial but military too. I just think it’s the frickin’ best thing ever, like travelling that sort of speed. And I remember seeing and hearing some of the stories in Iraq and you know, power going down, map reading with a mag like torch in their mouth with the map on the cockpit like windscreen shield. being told coordinates on how to drop fast air bombs on stuff. I’m like, what the f like that is so cool to be able to do something so alien to my world. I think that’s the thing, it’s just so different. Being able to get up in the morning, check your plane over, go for a that and do amazing amazing stuff. I just think that is something I would love in an ultimate I’d love to think I could do. I think I could ever could do it. But yeah.
Rory Holland: Think yeah, it makes me think of the new Top Gun movie. I remember that came out, I think, in eighty six, the first one and I wanted to to be a pilot. what do you think that says about you? So you love horror movies. you overcame fear of jumping out of plane, becoming a paratrooper, which is you know, just amazing. And now you’re talking about this, like you like to go fast, you like to do things that scare you. What do you think that says about you?
Alex Preece: I like to I am fairly organized. I like to have rigid routine, all these sorts of things, you know, n nothing sort of out of the ordinary or or surprising there. But I think I do I don’t know what you’re like when you go f to like catch a plane and stuff. Like I like to just get there as the plane sort of you know, you’re ready to get on the plane. Like that’s what I I like to do. You know, just getting here. I left it exactly the right time to get here exactly five minutes before. I’m very much like that. My wife, on the other hand, is totally different. She likes to get there two or three hours before.
But I do feel as if I always like I perform better on the spite. Yes, you can bomb. I’ve done talks and speeches and things. I’ve just gone that’s not my best performance there at all. But more often than not, you get the real feeling underneath when you’re being pushed. like I never would have dreamt in my wildest dreams I’d be doing the things I can I’m doing at the minute and I feel it as I’m not just grateful, I’m super appreciative and I feel very privileged to to do the things I’m able to do now because they’ve not always been the case. and I think that that in itself I don’t take for granted But I think I don’t know what I think. I think that you do. I like to not take things too seriously. I think maybe that is how I look at most challenges ahead of me, if that makes sense.
Rory Holland: Does I think we can all take ourselves a little too seriously. You mentioned control early on, and I think we’re all like subject to and prone to think that we can control things until we can’t. and that just comes with age and maturity and learning that no, there’s no such thing as control, really. Yeah.
Alex Preece: Exactly.
Rory Holland: It’s nice to be organized and keep your life in some order, right? And to have routines, and I think that’s really healthy. But I also love the fact just your hair on fire flying in a fighter jet and I mean, same thing. If I could be Tom Cruise Someday. Maybe my brother flies. So flying in his plane, a Cirrus SR twenty two is just so cool.
Alex Preece: or I think it’s because it’s quite it’s alien to where I’m at today. You know, you get in your car and you go to work and you have, you know, meetings and you’re leading, you’re doing things, but like flying a plane is quite a serious thing. Like it’s y you know, if you mess things yeah, y you mess things up in a car, it’s yes, you can get hurt, but it’s not the same as flying a plane. Like it’s serious. I think that the disconnect from my world. It’s so disconnected that it has such an appeal. I think. And it’s like the horror movie, like, I’m not, you know, you never you do put yourself in their shoes a little bit, you do think, what would I do in this thing? But actually it is quite a disconnect, but you can relate it to the same time because everyone gets everyone has the feeling of being a bit scared or what’s gonna happen here. And I think that’s the feeling I like. probably the same with starting c starting companies. taking risks, testing out new things, not being afraid to fail.
I think, you know, I’m the first one to say that I don’t like failing. I don’t enjoy doing it. I don’t like wanting to fail. I don’t set out to do that ever. I have huge admiration for anyone that sort of just keeps on going and going and going and going and doing that thing. I think it’s amazing, keeps on betting on themselves. And there’s plenty of entrepreneurs and people that keep on doing that. Sports, entrepreneurs, whatever it might be, and huge credit to them ’cause it’s not easy doing it.
The Next Chapter: Partnering with Tenzing
Rory Holland: No, it takes well, it takes a lot of courage to found a company and you’ve done it now multiple times and you’ve endured, which is wonderful to hear. And talking about enduring, I read last year that Tenzing came in, a new institutional partner. So tell me a little bit about that and then what’s the next chapter?
Alex Preece: Big change, yeah. So prior to Tenzing, who’s a private firm, very down to earth, very much like a line to where we want to take the business, we acquired a company pre Tenzing. So I did this sort of myself with my team. And we learned a lot doing that ourselves. We funded this acquisition off our own balance sheet. You know, I think the earnings of the business, it was like four or five million pounds offered management to acquire this company and it enabled us to have some great tech and some flagship brands that you know, that we would be managing and looking after, exclusive in our ecosystem.
And as I was looking pre moving to America, I thought the only way to really prove that we want to go global is by taking the leap of moving to America and trying to convince my wife and kids to do the same. I couldn’t do that, unfortunately. I wasn’t able to do it, but Matthew McConaughey and Greenlight’s book managed to convince my wife to take the Green Light to do it.
but yeah, we moved here and ultimately as we were growing, there was one my best friend, Kenny, who actually helped me buy my business partner Gareth in the early days, super grateful for him being able to help over the last two years. And then we had the co-founder of Indeed.com, Paul Forster, who’s a big name here in Austin given I think they had their founding technical office here. They like Indeed Tower and everything here. and then we had a very small fund and it was me and that was it.
And I felt like the guys were right to get some liquidity now. It’s quite the right time for them to move on. And actually to bring someone that could help us grow a global sort of powerhouse. So that was a big change, big governance change, in the way that we run and look after the business. but very welcomed. We’ve got a new sort of energy within the company that’s super focused on international expansion. And that’s sort of our plan at the minute. So still feeling super pumped ten years in. job hasn’t changed. It’s just on the cap table, it’s just me and this firm, as well as management. and we’re all incentivised and driven and motivated to be able to keep on fulfilling what we’re able to do in this market.
Rory Holland: I love what you’re doing, man. It’s such a cool story. Green lights, yeah, great book.
Alex Preece: Yeah.
Rory Holland: It’s a great book. Inspiring for those of you listening haven’t read it or listened to the audio. McConaughey covers the audio. I I did both. I couldn’t put it down and then listen to it on some road trips. But yeah, very, very inspiring. So for folks who want to get in touch with you, how can they do that?
Alex Preece: So, you know, I like to I’m quite proactive on LinkedIn. I do enjoy that platform. There is a lot of crap on there but I think behind it is some amazing stories and people professionally being able to connect and look after you know, comment and and and follow people’s stories as they’re growing businesses. and actually working in amazing companies too. So LinkedIn, Alex Priest on LinkedIn and then Alex Priest on Twitter I do have to use it X a bit. and then email, I don’t mind people reaching out on email. There’s my emails online, alex@tillo.io. If people want to sort of feel free to send me some abuse, give me some feedback on this on this podcast and whatever else. But appreciate the opportunity to be talking to you today, Roy. Thank you for your time. I know you’re a busy man, so
Rory Holland: I appreciate you, man. Like yeah, op open invitation. Anybody that’s listening wants to come to Austin, Alex and I’ll take you out. We had nice a dinner, what, a couple months ago? so good to get to know you and to have sit down with you here. So congrats on the success. Thanks for the time today. It’s good to have you.
Alex Preece: Thank you.
Outro
Rory Holland: Matthew McConaughey’s best-selling book, Green Life, revolves around a simple premise. Sometimes life is telling you to stop, sometimes it’s telling you to slow down, and sometimes is telling you to put the pedal to the metal. McConaughey calls that last one a green light, and they’re usually disguised as something uncomfortable or scary. Alex Brees knows the feeling. Jumping out of a plane at 19, despite being terrified of heights, Watching 180,000 pounds disappear over one bad weekend and staying in the fight anyway, packing up his family and betting that a bigger version of the business existed on the other side of the pond.
In retrospect, those were green lights, but at the time they felt like fear with no escape, like a moment in a horror movie trapped in a corner with doom staring you down. Alex kept building and looking for a way through. As he said, maybe that feeling of being a little bit scared is what makes life exciting and worthwhile. I love that Green Lights convince Alex’s wife to move to Austin. That book is a testament to the idea that big achievements in life don’t come from an absence of fear or certainty about the outcome. Some people get paralyzed by fear. Others use it as fuel. Maybe the difference between a horror movie and a green light is your willingness to keep saying yes.
Thank you for listening to Mighty FinSites. You’ll find all of our episodes on our website, cstmr.com, including more one-on-one interviews with fintech and financial leaders, as well as deep dive episodes on specific topics like branding and marketing. This show is produced and distributed by Customer, a financial marketing agency, all rights reserved. Our production team includes Zach Garver, Kathy Logan, Axel Reyes, Brad Jurger, and Romina Gomez and Belen Ancurio.
