Last week I blogged about ageing rockers and the growing number of septua- and octo-genarian musicians still touring and recording. Perhaps they never got The Who‘s memo about hoping to die before they get too old? Anyway, it’s enough to make you think Jethro Tull should update the lyrics to their 1970’s song….
Over in the world of sport, it seems ageism is still a thing. At the Australian Tennis Open in January this year, there was much media commentary (even surprise, disbelief and incredulity) that a 43-year old player reached the men’s doubles final, and had the temerity to win. In doing so, he become the oldest Grand Slam winner, and oldest to achieve a #1 ranking. Goodness knows what those same sports writers will make of a 41-year cricket player becoming the first fast bowler to claim 700 Test wickets.
Meanwhile, the US Presidential election looks like it will be fought out between an increasingly frail 81-year old incumbent, and an erratic 77-year old challenger, who has the audacity to say his adversary is not fit to stand on grounds of age and cognitive impairment. (To say that this contest will be far from elegant or dignified is an understatement!)
However, very few of us ever get to run for President – but most of us will experience something akin to the Grey Ceiling. We will reach a point in our working life when we are considered too old for promotion, or too old to hire, or too old to be retrained, or too old to be kept on.
In some roles and industries, there are compulsory retirement ages. And I get that.
What I can’t understand is the notion that just because someone is in their 50s or 60s, they are on the scrap heap of their career. The last time I was made redundant from a corporate role in a multinational organization, I had just turned 50. I can’t prove anything (because that would be age discrimination), but I had sense that it was “easier” for the company to let me go than a younger colleague: I had no dependencies, I hadn’t quite reached the full entitlement of long service leave, and I was not an expat so there were no relocation costs to consider.
At one job interview following that redundancy, the interviewer had the audacity to suggest that due to my age, experience and seniority, I would be less likely to “get my hands dirty” with day-to-day business operations and commercial decisions, and more likely to sit back and “direct traffic”. There was also a suggestion that I would be less willing/able to adapt to new technology, giving the overall impression he thought at my age, I was simply looking for an easy life.
Thanks to such attitudes which I also encountered elsewhere, I am glad I went to work as a freelance consultant and contractor with smaller businesses, start ups, owners and founders, and also in the cutting-edge technology of blockchain, crypto and digital assets – I have learned so much more in the past 10 years than I probably did in the previous 20 years of my career.
One thing I definitely don’t miss from corporate life is office politics!
And if neither ageing rock stars, nor 40-year old sports people at the peak of their careers, inspire you in your own journey (or as you hit the Grey Ceiling), perhaps some of the stories in The Guardian’s “Life After 60” series will inspire you.
Taking its cue from some of the economic effects of the current pandemic, the latest Startupbootcamp Melbourne FinTech virtual demo day adopted the theme of financial health and well-being. When reduced working hours and layoffs revealed that many that people did not have enough savings to last 6 weeks, let alone 6 months, lock-down and furlough have not only put a strain on public finances, they have also revealed the need for better education on personal finance and wealth management. Meanwhile, increased regulation and compliance obligations (especially in the areas of data privacy, cyber security and KYC) are adding huge operational costs for companies and financial institutions. And despite the restrictions and disruptions of lock-down, the latest cohort of startups in the Melbourne FinTech bootcamp managed to deliver some engaging presentations.
Datacy allows people to collect, manage and sell their online data easily and transparently, and gives businesses instant access to high quality and bespoke consumer datasets. They stress that the data used in their application is legally and ethically sourced. Their process is also designed to eliminate gaps and risks inherent in many current solutions, which are often manual, fragmented and unethical. At its heart is a Chrome or Firefox browser extension. Individual consumers can generate passive income from data sales, based on user-defined permissions. Businesses can create target data sets using various parameters. Datacy charges companies to access the end-user data, and also takes a 15% commission on every transaction via the plugin – some of which is distributed to end-users, but it wasn’t clear how that works. For example, is it distributed in equal proportions to everyone, or is it weighted by the “value” (however defined or calculated) of an individual’s data?
Harpocrates Solutions provides a simplified data privacy via a “compliance compliance as a service” model. Seeing itself as part of the “Trust Economy”, Harpocrates is making privacy implementations easier. It achieves this by monitoring and observing daily regulatory updates, and capturing the relevant changes. It then uses AI to manage a central repository, and to create and maintain tailored rules sets.
Mark Labs helps asset managers and institutional investors integrate environmental and social considerations into their portfolios. With increased investor interest in sustainability, portfolio managers are adopting ESG criteria in to their decision-making, and Mark Labs helps them in “optimising the impact” of their investments. There are currently an estimated $40 trillion of sustainable assets under management, but ESG portfolio management is data intensive, complex and still emerging both as an analytical skill and as a practical portfolio methodology. Mark Labs helps investors to curate, analyze and communicate data on their portfolio companies, drawing on multiple database sources, and aligning to UN Sustainable Development Goals. The founders estimate that there are $114 trillion of assets under management “at risk” if generational transfer and investor mandates shift towards more ESG criteria.
MassUp is a digital white label solution for the property and casualty insurance industry (P&C), designed to sell small item insurance at the consumer point-of-sale (POS). Describing their platform as a “plug and sell” solution, the founders noted that 70% of portable items are not covered by insurance policies, and many homes and/or contents are either uninsured or under-insured. MassUp is intended to simplify the process (“easy, accessible, online”), and will be launching in Australia under the Sorgenfrey brand in Q2 2021. For example, a product known as “The Flat Insurance” will cover items in and out of your home for a single monthly premium. As MassUp appears to be a tech solution, rather than a policy issuer, underwriter or re-insurer, I couldn’t see how they can achieve competitive policy rates both at scale and with simplicity (especially the claims process). Also, as we know, vendors love to “upsell” insurance on tech appliances, but many such policies have been seen to be redundant when considering existing statutory consumer rights and product warranties. On the other hand, short-term insurance policies (e.g., when I’m traveling, or on holiday, or renting out my home on AirBnB) are increasingly of interest to some consumers.
Ontrack provides B2B white label digital retirement planning solutions for financial institutions to help their customers in a more personalised way. There is a general consumer reluctance to pay for financial advice, but retirement planning is deemed too complicated. Taking an “holistic” approach, the founders claim to have developed a “best in class simulation engine” – founded on expected retirement spending priorities (rather than trying to predict the cost of living in 20 years’ time). Drawing on their industry experience, the founders stated that a key challenge for many financial planning providers is getting members comfortable with your service. I would also add that reducing complexity with cost-effective products is also key – and financial education forms a big part of the solution.
In Australia, the past 10 years has seen a major exit from the financial planning and wealth management industry – both at the individual adviser level (higher professional qualification requirements, increased compliance costs, and the end of trailing sales commissions in favour of “fee for advice”); and at the institutional level (3 of the big 4 banks have essentially withdrawn from offering financial planning and wealth management services). At the same time, there have been a number of new players – including many non-bank or non-financial institution providers – offering so-called robo-advice and “advice at scale”, mainly designed to reduce costs. In addition, the statutory superannuation regime keeps being tweaked so it is increasingly difficult to plan for the future, with the constant tax and other changes. Superannuation (a key success story of the Keating government) is just one of the “pillars” of personal finance in retirement: the others are the Commonwealth government aged pension (means-tested), personal wealth management (e.g., investments outside of superannuation); and retirement housing (with the expectation of more people opting to remain in their own homes). I would also include earnings from part-time employment while in “retirement”, as people work longer into older age (either from choice or necessity) – how that aligns with the aged pension and/or self-funded retirement is another part of the constantly-shifting tax and social security regime.
This product describes itself as a customer data platform that powers stored value, and was described as a “Safe harbour” solution (I’m not quite sure that’s what the founders meant in this context?). According to the pitch, consumers gain a fair and equitable outcome (consumer discounts), while retailers get targeted audiences. The team have created a vertically integrated gift card platform (working with MasterCard, Apple Pay and GooglePay), and launched JamJar, a cashback solution.
Similar to Harpocrates (above), RegRadar is a regulatory screening platform that helps companies “to set routes and avoid crashes”. The tool monitors regulatory changes (initially in the financial, food and healthcare sectors) and uses a pro-active process to developing a regulatory screening strategy, backed by analysis and a decision-support tool.
Having worked in legal, regulatory and compliance publishing for many years myself, I appreciate the challenge companies face when trying to keep up with the latest regulations, especially where they may be subject to multiple regulatory bodies within and across multiple jurisdictions. However, improved technology such as smart decision-support tools for building and maintaining rules-based business systems has helped enormously. In addition, most legislation is now online, so it can be searched more easily and monitored via automated alerts. Plus services such as Westlaw and Lexis-Nexis can also help companies track what is currently “good” or “bad” law by tracking court decisions, law reports and legislative updates.
This week I turned 60, which in the Chinese Zodiac means this is my Golden Year (I’m a Metal Rat, to be precise). Despite the global pandemic, and the challenges of having spent the best part of the last 7 months in Melbourne lock-down, I would say that this year I have been more fortunate than many others. For which I am grateful.
But with more time for reflection on what this milestone might signify, I have been thinking about the circumstances in which I find myself – whether it’s true that “60 is the new 40”, or is it all downhill from here?
My own father left full-time employment before he was 60. And although he had planned to do some part-time consulting work in his semi-retirement, he ended up volunteering for numerous not-for-profit organisations, for the next 25 years. This included lengthy stints serving on various boards and committees, at times almost a full-time job in itself. I’m sure he found this work to be fulfilling and rewarding, alongside his U3A classes and other social activities, but I’m not certain it’s how he intended to spend his retirement. It seems like he fell into this type of role, and since he was good at it, people kept asking him to do more, and he couldn’t always say no.
On the other hand, my paternal grandfather, who ran a small building company, died before he was 50, so I never knew him. While my maternal grandfather had an erratic employment history (not helped by the 1930s depression and war-time disruption), and was still working in manual jobs until he passed away in his late 60s.
I left my last corporate job when I was 50. At first, I thought I would look for a new full-time role, but the combination of the fall-out from the GFC and an implicit age barrier made that less likely the longer I looked. Some of the job interviews I attended revealed a significant prejudice towards older candidates: either their experience represented a threat to incumbents; or their past seniority meant they were unlikely to be hands-on, and/or less adaptable to new technology and new working practices.
Realising I was heading into self-employment (comprising part-time, contract, temporary, casual, freelance and consulting roles) I decided to reorganise my affairs, in order to sustain this new lifestyle. A key reason for seeking another full-time corporate gig would have been to service my mortgage, which didn’t really make sense. I was fortunate that I was able to restructure my finances, and effectively live debt-free. This gave me the flexibility to do some retraining, and to venture into the start-up world, which is where I was able to apply my skills and experience more creatively than in a corporate environment. This is how I came to encounter new technology and new opportunities in the form of FinTech, Blockchain and Cryptocurrency. And the rest is history (thus far…)
I appreciate that not everyone has the same opportunities; and working in disruptive industries or joining a start-up is not for everyone, either. But I also know that if I hadn’t made similar or significant career changes (and personal choices) over the past 35 years, I wouldn’t be in a position to be enjoying a golden period of my life right now.
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