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Building A Money App For Muslims - A Potential ~2 Billion People Niche
Areeb Siddiqui
Kestrl
The BAE HQ welcomes Areeb Siddiqui, the CEO & Founder of Kestrl, a money management app for Muslims.
Areeb grew up wanting to be a wildlife photographer but ended up working in finance.
Yet he felt like he didn't fit in and the needs of people like him weren't being met.Together with a friend from his Cambridge MBA, he set about making an app which people could trust to help Muslims manage their money.
They've already raised several million and have been through TechStars.
This is their story and how they were able to grow when so many in the community didn't think it was possible!
Show Notes
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Full video of episode
Areeb Siddiqui: [00:00:00] They see the word Islamic and they run a mile. Either saying, well, it's not for me, or saying it's too niche. Which I always found weird 'cause it's like there's 2 billion people who are Muslim on the planet. That spark like somewhere deep down inside of me went off, which was like, imagine I could do this for someone like me where you know, I'm a Muslim, a practicing Muslim, what do we combine?
Areeb Siddiqui: What I know in FinTech, what he knows in Islamic banking? Try and do something. And that's how it began. And that's where the idea of the Muslim of money management came from. Help people budget. Save and then eventually invest without compromise.
Amardeep Parmar: We're live. So today I have with me Areeb from Kestrl, who's the CEO and founder. Kestrl is a Muslim money app that helps Muslims to manage their wealth. So if you're joining us for the first time, I'm Amar and we're THE BAE HQ. We're all about inspiring the next generation of British Asians to chase their dreams and build what they want to build.
Amardeep Parmar: If you enjoy this episode, make sure you leave us a five star review and also subscribe on YouTube. So let's dive in to the story straight [00:01:00] away. So, when you were growing up, what were your ambitions? What did you want to be like? What did you think one day I wanna be that when I'm older.
Areeb Siddiqui: Well, definitely not what I'm doing now.
Areeb Siddiqui: When I was, when, what I really, really wanted to do was I wanted to be a a researcher studying big cats, especially tigers, making nature documentaries, which hopefully I will get to do one day. But that was absolutely a hundred percent what I wanted to do. Like I used to watch people like Steve Owen, crocodile Hunter, or even now, Steve Bax Shaw.
Areeb Siddiqui: Deadly 60 and think that's really, really what I want to do. Like being out there in the rainforest, grappling big snakes and tracking down tigers. Yeah, that, that was really what I wanted to do.
Amardeep Parmar: Why didn't you do it?
Areeb Siddiqui: Honestly, I'm the eldest of. of three boys, children of of immigrants, my parents from, from Pakistan.
Areeb Siddiqui: And when you are the eldest, I dunno if you can relate to it yourself, there's like a lot of pressure on you to go down the beaten path, stick with the safest route possible, which is, you know, my dad's in finance, you should stick to finance. So there was definitely that steering almost throughout my education that, okay, this is always where you're gonna end up.
Areeb Siddiqui: And I did try and [00:02:00] rebel against that a little bit at uni with what I ended up studying and you know, different things. But one day, one day I could still go down that rate.
Amardeep Parmar: What did you study in the end?
Areeb Siddiqui: Oh, I did physics. Okay. Yeah, I did physics, which was a compromise.
Amardeep Parmar: That's, that's a rebellion.
Areeb Siddiqui: So what, what I wanted to do was, I wanted to do, uh, zoology.
Areeb Siddiqui: Well, my parents were like, this is madness. Right? What would your aunts and uncles say? What would your grandparents say? Like, what, how are you gonna make a job? You know, how are you gonna support your family? Uh, what, what's happening with that? Which I wish I had like an older sibling or someone who could just say, it doesn't matter what you do at uni, it doesn't even matter if you go to uni.
Areeb Siddiqui: Right? Like all that matters are just the advantages, which you're given and what you, what you do with it. But anyway, my compromise was, look, a lot of people do physics and go into finance. Rather than just going into doing business or finance or economics, let me do this. I'll study astrophysics for a little bit, a little bit of material science, nuclear physics, and then can go off and
Areeb Siddiqui: be the financial zombie, which they wanted me to be.
Amardeep Parmar: And is that what you did in the end?
Areeb Siddiqui: I [00:03:00] did. Yeah. So I started, uh, you know, I did a few interviews at consultancies, investment banks, and I took an offer at, uh, Deloitte, my grad scheme, which was really good time actually. Yeah, an amazing time.
Amardeep Parmar: And so you, you were in the corporate world for a little while as well, right?
Amardeep Parmar: Yeah. How did you find that experience? Did you still have that yearning to be in the jungle with the big cats?
Areeb Siddiqui: It was always there and I used to do things like wildlife photography, you know, had an Instagram page, which still up to date, still updates every now and then. And I would write, you know, about, about science and everything from, from dinosaurs to, you know, immune therapy, to cancer research, all that, that kind of thing.
Areeb Siddiqui: I was trying to keep that dream alive. But it was always this idea that what I was doing was nice, and you know, I was being paid very well, thankfully, and I was learning. It just wasn't fulfilling and it wasn't what I really wanted to do, and it didn't feel like I was making a difference to anyone. It just felt like I was working.
Areeb Siddiqui: So in Deloitte, I was, uh, working really for banks and wealth managers, helping them to navigate regulations, get around big fines or investigate people for fraud and stuff like that. It didn't feel like I was actually doing [00:04:00] anything that materially impacted people around me. So it wasn't that fulfilling.
Areeb Siddiqui: I stayed for, at Deloitte for three years and. Then moved out to a little boutique consultancy, Deloitte, big company. Uh, thousands of people. Then moved to a little consultancy with only about a hundred people at the time, which was a really, really different experience. And that's where I started to learn about FinTech.
Areeb Siddiqui: 'Cause a lot of their clients were wealth managers who were looking to digitally transform. Uh, have you heard of Nutmeg?
Amardeep Parmar: Yeah.
Areeb Siddiqui: Um, people like that. Robo-Advisors were my first clients, so I gotta see what worked strategically, what didn't work. But what was great about it was, okay, these are fintechs startups, although they were very big at the time, you know, with millions in funding.
Areeb Siddiqui: They were helping real people. They were here helping the, the mass market to actually learn about investing and, and get ahead in that and grow their wealth. And that's where a kind of, not a light bulb, but a tiny little spark, like somewhere deep down inside me went off, which was like, imagine I could do this for someone like me where you know, I'm a Muslim, a practicing Muslim, and for many [00:05:00] Muslims because of the requirements put put down by our faith, we cannot use conventional financial products.
Areeb Siddiqui: We can't invest or use normal banking products because of the prohibition on interest, which makes it very difficult to do anything from savings accounts to mortgages. To investing into a fund. So I was like, why doesn't this exist for someone like me? Right. And there's 2 billion of us on the planet.
Amardeep Parmar:Only a few of you.
Areeb Siddiqui: Yeah. Yeah. Just there's a few. So why, why doesn't that exist? But you know, that was like the tiny, tiny, tiny little bit of an idea that's that formed when I was working there. Yeah.
Amardeep Parmar: Yeah. And like looking at that as well, when you're using these for different products, and like you said, so the main, obviously I'm, I'm not with myself, so if I'm trying to understand the limits you had in terms like with the religion, like how that means you can invest your money.
Amardeep Parmar: So it's the key thing that you can't lend that money and receive interest in it is that the?..
Areeb Siddiqui: You can't receive interest or, or pay interest in any way, shape or form. So interest is a big, big no go in our holy book, the Quran there, there are many verses saying how interest is, you know, very bad.
Areeb Siddiqui: Generally it's tantamount to a major sin. So you can't receive interest on a savings account. I [00:06:00] can't be paying interest in a mortgage. Otherwise they're effectively, um, you know, sinning. So that was something which a lot of Muslims grapple with. Many people end up going with conventional accounts and dealing with interest just because there's not a lot of conventional, you know, good alternatives out there.
Areeb Siddiqui: So it's like a real, real thing, which many Muslims deal with. Yeah. The, the interest is like the first bit to it. There's many other things like, okay, you can't put anything into, uh, weapons. You can't invest into drugs, alcohol, gambling, things like that.
Amardeep Parmar: Yeah. And so with that, what would you invest, like how would you invest your money in other ways?
Amardeep Parmar: So like before Cashew was invented? What were you able to do or what could you, what were your options?
Areeb Siddiqui: There's a couple of Islamic savings accounts in the uk. People like Orion Bank or Gatehouse Bank, and there are some Islamic funds, but the common denominator between all of them was really poor customer service.
Areeb Siddiqui: If you walked into a branch of one of these banks, it felt like you were going to another country 30 years ago, you know, where sometimes people were rude to you and you know it. Nothing really worked on time. It would take months to take out a mortgage, [00:07:00] weeks to open a savings account. So customer service, Paul.
Areeb Siddiqui: Terrible user experience if they did have an app, big if it wasn't really worth speaking of. The website was really poorly designed. It felt like you were getting into a black hole of information that didn't really mean anything to you. And the final thing was price. A lot of these things were priced more expensively just because there is a smaller market.
Areeb Siddiqui: They felt like they were, you know, in order to make money, they had to, they had to charge, charge higher. So all of these things were quite prohibitive for people out there. So there were solutions. Most people were not using them.
Amardeep Parmar: And then so once you had the idea, well, you could see the problem was right.
Amardeep Parmar: When was the idea that like, actually, maybe I can do something about this and like actually trying to make that into a reality? Like what was the first steps you took there?
Areeb Siddiqui: It came a little later. So I was at Deloitte for three years. I moved to a consultancy called Alpha, where suddenly I wasn't just like, one of the only brown people there.
Areeb Siddiqui: I was one of the only Asians there. Oh, sorry. One of the only Muslims there. So that really, I dunno, it just, it really affected me. I didn't [00:08:00] feel at home, I didn't quite feel myself and, you know, the people there were amazing, but it was different. I didn't like socializing in a, an environment where there was loads of alcohol and to get ahead, it's kind of felt like you had to do those things and go out the late nights and go to the pub, or go to the club or whatever it was.
Areeb Siddiqui: Um, so I never quite felt at home and it really came around where I just decided I want to take a year out to focus on myself. So almost on a whim, I just started to apply to different, different master's courses, M B A specifically. So I applied to Cambridge, to Oxford, and to London Business School. I took the, the GMAT exam, which is like the entrance exam for
Areeb Siddiqui: for MBAs in like a to week period and just sent off applications, not expecting anything, and I didn't tell anyone I was doing this. I just thought, let's see what happens. And then I started to get interview calls and I was like, okay, okay, this is suddenly becoming real. I didn't tell anyone until I started getting the offers, and that's when I was like, okay, to my parents.
Areeb Siddiqui: I think I really, [00:09:00] really wanna do this and I dunno why, but I just need to take some time out to figure out what's going on, where I want to go. I dunno if I wanna stay in consulting, maybe I wanna go do something else. And for them it was kind of a hit like, wait, you're taking a year out of work. But also when I said, you know, I'll, I'll go to Cambridge.
Areeb Siddiqui: That really kind of softened the blow. A little bit.
Amardeep Parmar: I was about to say. Yeah. Were they okay? 'cause it was came..
Areeb Siddiqui: They were Okay. Yeah, they, they were very happy with it. So I took a year out to kind of find myself, and that's where I met my co-founder. And we thought, okay, why don't we combine what I know in FinTech, what he knows in Islamic banking, he worked out in Malaysia and try and do something.
Areeb Siddiqui: And that's how it began.
Amardeep Parmar: And even like then, so you've got the idea, you've got here's, you've got the FinTech background. Here's got the like Islamic finance background. What was the actual, like, how did you start, like what was the, 'cause obviously building an app for a lot of people is very intimidating, right?
Amardeep Parmar: Obviously there are no code tools and all these different ways of doing it. Yeah. How did you start off was like an M V P you started off with, or..
Areeb Siddiqui: Yeah, we started with a survey, right? So we just thought, okay, I think I want this and I think you want this. How do we [00:10:00] know people actually care about this?
Areeb Siddiqui: So we started off just interviewing people and asking them some very simple questions like, do you care about Islamic finance? Do you use any products today? Would you use one? You know, why aren't you using the ones which are, which are out there today? And this started as a small thing. We would just stand outside the mosque in Cambridge.
Areeb Siddiqui: Then we went to London and did the same thing. Then we made it an online survey, and before you knew it, we had about 1,500 responses. So that, that's how we, we found it and tried to validate the idea. The original version of Kestrl was a debit card, like, let's do Monzo for Muslims. That was really fashionable at the time.
Areeb Siddiqui: It was 2019 and a few other people were trying a similar thing. So there was Nia and Riz and my, ah, all of these guys were like, we're gonna be the Monzo for Muslims. We were like, why don't we throw our hat into the ring and see if we could do it right? With our background, we discovered something really interesting from the survey was 95% of the applicants, and this is people from Cambridge all the way to Edinburgh.
Areeb Siddiqui: So I, I do care about Islamic finance. I do wanna avoid interest. I care about not going to help. Right, basically, but [00:11:00] fewer than 5% were actually using the, the existing solutions out there. And the reasons they cited were what I said before, poor customer service, terrible user experience, high fees, and ultimately people didn't trust them.
Areeb Siddiqui: So they were like, if you can start to solve those things, that's something I would do. But when we, we had a final question at the end, which I'm so glad we asked, which was, of these products, which is the most interesting to you, and we had debit card investment account. Personal finance, all this kind of thing.
Areeb Siddiqui: And only about 2% of people picked debit card. And we were like, wait, like what, what? What's going on? Because we've got all these people out here who are launching debit cards. What, why are we going down this route? And that's when our first kind of idea pivoted. I hesitate to say pivot 'cause we hadn't built anything.
Areeb Siddiqui: But we were like, okay, let's, let's go back to the drawing board and let's figure out what we're doing here. And that's where the idea of Money management, let's help people, budget, save, and then eventually invest came from. Yeah.
Amardeep Parmar: And where does the actual name come from?
Areeb Siddiqui: What, what does mean? Oh, so Kessel is the name of a bird.
Areeb Siddiqui: It's a little falcon that lives here in the uk. And it started off as a joke because Kestrels eat, uh, starlings. [00:12:00] Uh, and the idea, we were like, oh, we're gonna take down Starling Bank and then. The name just kind of stuck. So, so that's why I,
Amardeep Parmar: because I, I thought it was a bad, it's like I don't, I, I wasn't quite sure the connection now.
Areeb Siddiqui: Oh yeah. That, that's kind of, and some people think it's like, oh, is it because like you Muslim and Middle East and falconry is big there? And we're like, yeah, sure, yeah, if you wanna go with that, we can go with that.
Amardeep Parmar: But it's good to have the mystery sometimes, isn't it as well? I guess so.
Areeb Siddiqui: I guess so. And there's also studies which
Areeb Siddiqui: say that words beginning with K stick in the mind more like Coca-Cola or Kodak, or, it was just a happy, uh, happy coincidence.
Amardeep Parmar: And so did you actually start the company when you were in university still or was it the research phase then and you started..
Areeb Siddiqui: End of 2019, we actually like came together, formed the business, but we needed something else.
Areeb Siddiqui: We realized 'cause Daeng and I had been going out and speaking to potential investors and it, we were at best, people weren't taking us seriously. At worst, people were like getting very aggressive and angry at us. Uh, so we were speaking with like Islamic banking experts and some of them, I remember one meeting, the worst meeting was a guy, you know, we had a pitch deck.
Areeb Siddiqui: We [00:13:00] put it up on the screen. We got to like slide to, which is like, this is Kestrl Muslim money app. Healthy Muslims grow their wealth through that compromise. And the guy lost it. He was like, I've been in this industry since you were in diapers, right? Like, what can you teach me about this? What are you gonna tell me if there's anything new?
Areeb Siddiqui: You guys are like to 20 somethings. You're never gonna do anything in this space. You're never gonna raise any money. You know, you've been nowhere. You've done nothing, you, you've got nothing going for you. And Daeng. You know? He is, he is a, a good guy. He was just like taking it big smile on his face. I lost it and I started shouting back at the guy and I was just like, why did you call us up here?
Areeb Siddiqui: What was the point of this? Right? Because he asked for the meeting, right? Yeah. So it was just like a bizarre kind of thing. And I remember leaving that meeting and it was so, so, so heated. My dad's office was around the corner, so he wanted to know how the meeting went. So we stopped by and then he was like, you know, we took him through the business plan and basically sold him on the idea.
Areeb Siddiqui: So my dad, for context, he has over 30 years of experience of financial services. He. [00:14:00] He was the global head of Audit and compliance at Bank of New York, then Royal Bank of Scotland and you know, has worked with the F C A Financial Conduct Authority. So we were like, do you wanna come on board as like a co-founder as well?
Areeb Siddiqui: Equal part, I think people are less likely to shout at us. If they think you were in the room as well. You can be CFO, Ill be CEO and Daeng is the chief operating officer. And we did it. We shook hands then and that that was it. They were, we were the original founding team and that, that's kind of how it started.
Areeb Siddiqui: So with, you know, Daeng's knowledge of Islamic finance, what I knew about FinTech and my dad's just kind of presence as well, as well as being our C F O and knowing everything he does about that. Uh, we've managed to make a go of it.
Amardeep Parmar: For like people in the audience, I guess, who haven't like pitched before.
Amardeep Parmar: It's funny how often that kind of thing happens. Yeah. So, for example, people who will message me or like cold email me to be like, I wanna come on the podcast. Or sometimes they'll email me quite a few times, they're not, okay, sure. Come on. And they're like, oh, can you tell me that? Why I should come on, like, you messaged me.
Amardeep Parmar: Like, and I think that happens quite often where people [00:15:00] have these. I think something that's automated or something like that, they get somebody in their team to do it. But I've had that a few times now and it's same thing with investment or things like that where you, somebody's like, oh, it's really interesting, like I wanna talk to you.
Amardeep Parmar: But then they want you to then prove and it's like, yeah, it's a weird. Cycle sometimes.
Areeb Siddiqui: And I, I dunno, and I, I think, I dunno if it's PC to say this on this podcast, but I think. Sometimes in some British Asian communities, we just like become quite passive aggressive or even just full on, actively aggressive towards other people.
Areeb Siddiqui: And I dunno if that's what was happening here, but we were just speaking to other people in this community and like British Pakistanis and Indians and Bangladeshi. And not all of them were like ex respectful. right. But that really changed when my dad was in the room. So I think age and seniority is still weighted really, really heavily over ideas.
Areeb Siddiqui:
Amardeep Parmar: I think it's an important point. It's part of the reason why we're doing what we're doing, guys' trying to change this attitude of like getting people together and get people to build each other up. It's easy to pull people down. Right? That's easy. But how can we build something [00:16:00] that action makes a difference, like what you're doing now, and it's obviously your, your dad's experience obviously really helped.
Amardeep Parmar: It's a shame that if your business was the same before and after him, in terms of what you're talking about.
Areeb Siddiqui: He just sit in the room silently. Yeah, right. He wasn't saying anything, but we raised money because my dad was on the pitch deck. Like, I'm not joking. We raised our first pre-seed round. It was like 150 K within three months of that, because someone was like, look, I see hundreds of pitch decks, right?
Areeb Siddiqui: I see a lot of people saying that they're gonna do this. Some of the other competitors I mentioned earlier with all fundraising at the same time, but they were like, you know, I trust you because your dad's sat there watching you guys. You're not just gonna go and take my money and burn it all. So it helps massively.
Areeb Siddiqui: So that is an unfair advantage, I guess.
Amardeep Parmar: Yeah, and it's, it's interesting. What I like is that you are able to openly admit that. Some people have that different advantages, like you said, unfair advantages from family backgrounds, things like that. But they don't openly say it. So it's good for people to know, for example, that that's helped you on your journey.
Areeb Siddiqui: Oh no, absolutely. Right. I've, I've, I'm so, you know, embroiled with way, way more founders. I meet so many where we're part of the Techstars portfolio [00:17:00] office, so we sit around others and I've, I know exactly like where, what's been an unfair advantage because we've, we've needed it so much. When we walk into a room and we say, Oh, we're an Islamic FinTech.
Areeb Siddiqui: Usually most people like the light goes out in their eyes and I see it and they're like, oh, it's not for me. I'm not interested. I'm not doing that. So we really need to go for every advantage we can.
Amardeep Parmar:So you, you've raised more capital since then.
Areeb Siddiqui: Yes.
Amardeep Parmar: What's your current like fundraiser? Whereabouts are you now?
Areeb Siddiqui: So our first round was one 50, the second one was about 500 k. We're in the middle of a 2 million raise at the moments, which we call pre-series A or c plus. Which is what we're doing right now. And we're being backed by Y Invest, which is the largest Islamic FinTech in the world. They're leading our round.
Areeb Siddiqui: They have a venture capital arm as well, so they're, they're leading the round. And we've got Techstars and, and some other people, angel netorks as well, coming on board too.
Amardeep Parmar: Really good as well. But some people might not know what Techstars is.
Areeb Siddiqui:Oh, sorry. Yeah.
Amardeep Parmar: Techstars fits into it. Like how they've hoped you on your journey of.
Areeb Siddiqui: Textiles was huge. So, look, I, I suppose before we, before we get to textiles, it was an interesting journey 'cause we raised our first [00:18:00] pre-seed round. We launched our app and it was, it was really interesting. It was a money management tool. We kind of thought, okay, what do people need and what's the easiest to build?
Areeb Siddiqui: So we went with, okay, open banking was this new regulation, which meant that all banks had to have open APIs. So anyone who wanted to could draw down their information, their data from their banks transactions, your income, everything you're doing with your bank account. You could pull it into a, a third party app, in this case, Kestrl.
Areeb Siddiqui: So we were like, people have told us they don't want to switch accounts. It's really hard to get someone to switch into a new digital bank, Monzo, you know, even with all of their money, it was tough for them to get to where they are today. Installing everyone on the same, let alone a Muslim debit card.
Areeb Siddiqui: Right? That's even harder. So we went with open banking, plug in your bank account, you'll see all yourself in one place. We'll create a budget for you. Then we'll help you to auto save into pots to your goals. Maybe you're saving for a wedding, a car, or a house, or just in general. We'll save that. That was relatively easy for us to build.
Areeb Siddiqui: And it was going okay. It was growing nicely, organically, and we had a little office and doing all that. But then [00:19:00] this interesting thing happened, a big Islamic bank reached out to us in from Malaysia, the biggest Islamic bank there called, uh, bank Islam. Uh, and they said, we like what you're doing. We wanna white label this tool and use it to power our own digital bank, which we're launching.
Areeb Siddiqui: So we said, yeah, well let, let's go with it. But then there was this kind of back and forth period. 'cause the sales cycles take a long time when you're. Selling B to B business to business as opposed to directly to consumers. And in that period was like one of the scariest times for us because we were bleeding money, right?
Areeb Siddiqui: We're like, okay, we've, we've grown a tech team dying. Went back to Malaysia, formed a big team over there of about, at the time it was like 10 people and we were bleeding money and we had this consumer app and we kept thinking, is this bank taking us for a ride or are we actually gonna sell it to them?
Areeb Siddiqui: And it got to the point where I hadn't drawn a salary in like six months and Daeng hadn't andDeang had like four kids right at the time. I had just got married and had a baby on the way. So I was like, okay, this is really tough. Why have we done this? And those were some [00:20:00] really dark moments. And then literally we had one month of runway left and then Bank Islam came and said, let's sign this.
Areeb Siddiqui: Let's do it. And I was like, thank God. Right? Thank God that this how it was the scariest. Probably one of the darkest moments there. And you know, like my mental health took like a real, real hit. I learned the connection between your mental health and your physical health. But once that happened, things changed.
Areeb Siddiqui: We reached out to Techstars. Now Techstars is a..
Amardeep Parmar: Just before we go into Techstars, a moment there. So I think like you made such an important point there because with the B to B cycles, It's really tough, like. 'cause sometimes take a really long time. Yeah. And even the conversations we're having, right?
Amardeep Parmar: People can seem really enthusiastic, but it's not them making the decision or even the person making the decision. Then somebody above them does something else or the budget changes, and then even though they had the right intention, You are then cut and that's so scary. And it's something which I like that you're able to just admit that as well because you always see what wins, right?
Amardeep Parmar: So some you could just come on here and just say like, yeah, we run this massive deal with like bank Islam, right? But that misses up a bit of all that scariness that was underneath it. [00:21:00] And a lot of people be in that scary moment right now and be like, okay. It's normal and it's working out how to mitigate their right because, so it might not have come through.
Amardeep Parmar: Who knows? What would you have done then?
Areeb Siddiqui: And we'd be dead. Yeah, without a doubt. We would be dead. And a lot of people were dying, right? Our competitors were going under 'cause they had bet entirely. Well not bet gambling is haram, but the, they bet on B to C and the debit card and that's tough. 'cause you need a lot of money to make that work and make that growth loop actually turn.
Areeb Siddiqui: So we were like, maybe this is a way out. Away from the B to C thing, which is hard. B to B, there's good money. It's regular money. The contracts are longer, but it's hard, right? It takes a long, long time. And like you said, you may not be talking to the decision maker, right? You dunno who's actually going to be doing that.
Areeb Siddiqui: And sometimes conversations just die like that. So we didn't know. And I was like, the stress wasn't just on me because I was like, okay, I knew the risk, Daeng, my co-founder in Malaysia, he knew the risk. My dad was gonna be okay, but we've got employees. Right ?Who I sold this vision to. [00:22:00] You're not just pitching to investors or customers.
Areeb Siddiqui: You're pitching to all the, the people who join you on, on that journey who are like giving up their day jobs and coming to work with you often at a, at a cut. To, to what their previous salary was. So it's like, I might've just screwed up all these people's lives. Right? So that was like, The kind of thoughts that were going through my head, and then thankfully it hap, and that's when things started to take off for us.
Amardeep Parmar: And then joining the Techstars program, what happened there and how did Techstars help you accelerate further?
Areeb Siddiqui: So, so Techstars is a, a venture capital firm and an accelerator. So what that means is they invest into you, but they also make you join a program where they're teaching you. You go, you attend lectures every week, every day, basically, uh, over a three month period.
Areeb Siddiqui: So it's a pretty intense and pretty intense time. And the idea is that you enter the accelerator is one thing, and you'll come out as like big company that knows what they're doing and is able to go away and, and fundraise. Now as a Islamic FinTech or Islamic anything, it's pretty hard to get mainstream recognition, like doing what you're doing.
Areeb Siddiqui: So we'd approached venture capital firms before. In the uk, in the us but [00:23:00] most people, they see the word Islamic and they run a mile either saying, well, it's not for me, or saying it's too niche. Which I always found weird 'cause it's like there's 2 billion people who are Muslim on the planet. What do you mean we're niche?
Areeb Siddiqui: But textiles was different. And a, a lot of credit goes to, I think Sali Chadri, who's the managing director of Textiles London. So he's from a Muslim background himself, British Bangladeshi. Understood what we were doing immediately. And the first person in textiles who actually saw our application immediately just passed it over.
Areeb Siddiqui: And then I just DMed Saalim on LinkedIn, 'cause I saw he was posting like, oh, there's like three spots left in our, in our cohort, just like, uh, apply now. And I DMed him and said, Hey, I submitted an application like six months ago. Never heard back, just wondering. And then he just said, let's, let's jump on the phone.
Areeb Siddiqui: Let's, let's have a chat. He found the application and was like, someone discarded it. I'm taking another look at it, especially in light of the B to B deal that we'd landed. He's like, this is interesting. Let's, let's try and take this further. And I'll always owe him for that because he took a chance on us.
Areeb Siddiqui: And as soon as the textiles brand was behind [00:24:00] us, a big conventional brand, they're kind of like y combination. Not as quite as big as Y Combinator or as well known, but they are, they're known, they're well known. That changed things for us.
Amardeep Parmar: And like, where are you today now? Like you've had all this progress, you've had the big fundraise.
Amardeep Parmar: You're raising more money now. What's your, been your progress? So you've obviously had that big deal a while ago. What's happened since then?
Areeb Siddiqui: So we, we landed that deal about 11 months ago. So what we've been doing is as soon as we made that deal public, and we also went public with Techstars, many, many more banks have been reaching out to us and wealth managers from Malaysia, Indonesia, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Emirates.
Areeb Siddiqui: So we've been talking to all these guys and pitching to all of these guys. And the sales cycles take a long time, 12 months to 18 months. But we're at a point now where we think we're hopefully, or in Charlotte, I'm gonna sign a, sign a deal with a few people, some out in the uae, some in Saudi, some in, uh, in Malaysia.
Areeb Siddiqui: So that's where we're going down this B to B angle. But my heart is still with our consumer app, which is still here. It's still growing. And what I want to do is make enough money that we can stand on our [00:25:00] own to feet as a company without needing more and more funding, and then really invest into why I started this, which was to help the Muslim community here in the uk.
Areeb Siddiqui: To invest, to save to bank without compromise.
Amardeep Parmar: I thought you were gonna say, my heart is still with the wildlife photography
Areeb Siddiqui: It's no, no, it's still there. It's still there. And eventually, yeah, eventually, when all this is done, that's where I wanna go.
Amardeep Parmar: When, when, when characters made it and you retire earlier, like 30 years old, like,
Areeb Siddiqui: I missed that boat, unfortunately, but yeah.
Areeb Siddiqui: Yeah, yeah, yeah. One day.
Amardeep Parmar: And like for people like listening right now, potentially gonna use the app or looking at that. So you said that it's about managing people's budgets and what's the kind of model there? So is it, do they pay a monthly subscription and then they get access to these speeches? Yeah.
Amardeep Parmar: Or how does that side of things work?
Areeb Siddiqui: There's a freemium tier where you can just plug in your banks and get the budget. But if you want to do the auto saving part or if you wanna do the stock screening, if you wanna invest into Apple or, or Microsoft and see whether it's compliant or not. Islamically, there's, um, some subscription to to that.
Areeb Siddiqui: We're still playing around with that. A lot of it is still free. So you can of course check it out now, [00:26:00] but we do want to start monetizing that more and more. But we're in a nice position where the majority of our money comes from B to B, so we can experiment and, and do more stuff without having to put a big formidable price tag on our consumer.
Amardeep Parmar: I think that's one of the nice things about the B to B side is that you're then working with companies which have huge amounts of money. Yeah. Which means that when you are looking at the average consumer who may be struggling a bit financially, you can give them quite a lot for free because it's not, you're not dependent on them.
Amardeep Parmar: For the income of the business.
Areeb Siddiqui: Exactly.
Amardeep Parmar: So I think that's quite a nice way to do things. Which I think I've seen a few people do now. And it's also a way to think about things for people who want, often people in the starting a business, they think really about B to C because it's easiest for 'em to relate to, but sometimes B to B can really help you get their funding in place.
Amardeep Parmar: To be able to experiment with the B to C side and really help the people that you want to help
Areeb Siddiqui: It's an interesting thing, 'cause it, they can work really nicely together as well where B to C becomes like this innovation arm, which you can't really do in the B to B world, 'cause if you're working with a big bank or like you'll know from your consulting background, they're not really about innovation.
Areeb Siddiqui: They wanna play it safe. They just wanna, you know, don't do anything that, that's going [00:27:00] against the, going against the curve. So B to C lets us just do what we want, but that's also been a great form of marketing for our B to B. Business 'cause banks are looking at what our consumer app does and says we'd love to be able to do the same thing.
Areeb Siddiqui: So yeah, it's a weird, and I wanna just stress this was a complete accident. We didn't join, set that out with B to B in mind. It just happened. So I can't take credit for that. For, you know, that plan or we just followed it through when the opportunity came our way.
Amardeep Parmar: So it's been great to chat. We're gonna have to go to a quick fire questions now.
Areeb Siddiqui: Sure. Sure
Amardeep Parmar: So the first one is, who are three British, Asian entrepreneurs? That you do love to shout out and you think people should be paying attention
Areeb Siddiqui: So one is, I think he's already been here, Navjot Sawhney, he's founder of, of the washing machine project, which is amazing. I think the humanitarian version of, of Dyson, where they create hands turning washing machines which have been helping refugees, asylums, uh, anyone who needs it all the way from Afghanistan over to, to Ukraine.
Areeb Siddiqui: So definitely , Definitely Nav. Uh, second Sadiq Dorasat. Um, so he's the [00:28:00] founder, the CEO of Muslim Census, which is the largest independent organization collecting data on Muslims here in the UK and beyond, which helps to inform better decisions all the way from politics to business. He's doing amazing work.
Areeb Siddiqui: He's also a product manager at Whitehead Invest, which is friendly, uh, Islamic FinTech. And the final one we mentioned him before, is Saalim Chowdhury, managing director of Techstars. Amazing guy. Look, he gave us our platform. He took a chance on us when no one else would, and he. Should be more well known in the venture community.
Areeb Siddiqui: So I keep telling him to do more and more branding, but he's uh, he's gonna get out.
Amardeep Parmar:We'll get him on here as well.
Areeb Siddiqui: Definitely. He's a good good guy. Yeah.
Amardeep Parmar: And next question is people listening right now want to learn more about you, learn more about Kestrl? Where should they go to? What could they reach out about?
Amardeep Parmar: Yeah,
Areeb Siddiqui: you can check me out on LinkedIn, uh, or Areeb Siddiqui. Check out our website, kestrl.io or kestrl.co uk if you want to talk about anything from starting a business. If you're just in an idea mode, if you wanna fundraise, should you be fundraising? Come and chat to me. The more basic things like personal finance, investing as a, as a Muslim, if you're trying to avoid [00:29:00] interest, chat to us.
Areeb Siddiqui: You know, we're more than happy to talk to you.
Amardeep Parmar: And then on the other side is anything that the audience might be able to help you with?
Areeb Siddiqui: Yeah, we're always looking for B to B introductions. Anyone who's happy to share their B to B sales process, 'cause it's a learning learning curve, we're, we're still trying to figure out how to make that process work.
Areeb Siddiqui: So we need help with that. And yeah, fundraising as well. Fundraising is a, is a journey. We're still going on. We're still figuring out angel investing versus VC investing. So if anyone has any tips or has been through that before, please do drop me a message.
Amardeep Parmar: So thanks so much for coming on. Have you got any final words to the audience?
Areeb Siddiqui: Final words, if you have a dream when you were a kid, don't think it was, you know, stupid. Like, I still want to get into the wildlife thing, it's just I'm taking a bit more of a longer route to get there. Life gets in the way, but just, I didn't wanna do financial services, but I took that and I used it to do something which I found fulfilling.
Areeb Siddiqui: You know? So you don't need to throw away your experience. You can still use that in a way, and that becomes your advantage. What makes it you [00:30:00] unfairly advantage compared to your competitors? So you never know what's going to you know where you can draw strength from.
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Areeb Siddiqui: [00:00:00] They see the word Islamic and they run a mile. Either saying, well, it's not for me, or saying it's too niche. Which I always found weird 'cause it's like there's 2 billion people who are Muslim on the planet. That spark like somewhere deep down inside of me went off, which was like, imagine I could do this for someone like me where you know, I'm a Muslim, a practicing Muslim, what do we combine?
Areeb Siddiqui: What I know in FinTech, what he knows in Islamic banking? Try and do something. And that's how it began. And that's where the idea of the Muslim of money management came from. Help people budget. Save and then eventually invest without compromise.
Amardeep Parmar: We're live. So today I have with me Areeb from Kestrl, who's the CEO and founder. Kestrl is a Muslim money app that helps Muslims to manage their wealth. So if you're joining us for the first time, I'm Amar and we're THE BAE HQ. We're all about inspiring the next generation of British Asians to chase their dreams and build what they want to build.
Amardeep Parmar: If you enjoy this episode, make sure you leave us a five star review and also subscribe on YouTube. So let's dive in to the story straight [00:01:00] away. So, when you were growing up, what were your ambitions? What did you want to be like? What did you think one day I wanna be that when I'm older.
Areeb Siddiqui: Well, definitely not what I'm doing now.
Areeb Siddiqui: When I was, when, what I really, really wanted to do was I wanted to be a a researcher studying big cats, especially tigers, making nature documentaries, which hopefully I will get to do one day. But that was absolutely a hundred percent what I wanted to do. Like I used to watch people like Steve Owen, crocodile Hunter, or even now, Steve Bax Shaw.
Areeb Siddiqui: Deadly 60 and think that's really, really what I want to do. Like being out there in the rainforest, grappling big snakes and tracking down tigers. Yeah, that, that was really what I wanted to do.
Amardeep Parmar: Why didn't you do it?
Areeb Siddiqui: Honestly, I'm the eldest of. of three boys, children of of immigrants, my parents from, from Pakistan.
Areeb Siddiqui: And when you are the eldest, I dunno if you can relate to it yourself, there's like a lot of pressure on you to go down the beaten path, stick with the safest route possible, which is, you know, my dad's in finance, you should stick to finance. So there was definitely that steering almost throughout my education that, okay, this is always where you're gonna end up.
Areeb Siddiqui: And I did try and [00:02:00] rebel against that a little bit at uni with what I ended up studying and you know, different things. But one day, one day I could still go down that rate.
Amardeep Parmar: What did you study in the end?
Areeb Siddiqui: Oh, I did physics. Okay. Yeah, I did physics, which was a compromise.
Amardeep Parmar: That's, that's a rebellion.
Areeb Siddiqui: So what, what I wanted to do was, I wanted to do, uh, zoology.
Areeb Siddiqui: Well, my parents were like, this is madness. Right? What would your aunts and uncles say? What would your grandparents say? Like, what, how are you gonna make a job? You know, how are you gonna support your family? Uh, what, what's happening with that? Which I wish I had like an older sibling or someone who could just say, it doesn't matter what you do at uni, it doesn't even matter if you go to uni.
Areeb Siddiqui: Right? Like all that matters are just the advantages, which you're given and what you, what you do with it. But anyway, my compromise was, look, a lot of people do physics and go into finance. Rather than just going into doing business or finance or economics, let me do this. I'll study astrophysics for a little bit, a little bit of material science, nuclear physics, and then can go off and
Areeb Siddiqui: be the financial zombie, which they wanted me to be.
Amardeep Parmar: And is that what you did in the end?
Areeb Siddiqui: I [00:03:00] did. Yeah. So I started, uh, you know, I did a few interviews at consultancies, investment banks, and I took an offer at, uh, Deloitte, my grad scheme, which was really good time actually. Yeah, an amazing time.
Amardeep Parmar: And so you, you were in the corporate world for a little while as well, right?
Amardeep Parmar: Yeah. How did you find that experience? Did you still have that yearning to be in the jungle with the big cats?
Areeb Siddiqui: It was always there and I used to do things like wildlife photography, you know, had an Instagram page, which still up to date, still updates every now and then. And I would write, you know, about, about science and everything from, from dinosaurs to, you know, immune therapy, to cancer research, all that, that kind of thing.
Areeb Siddiqui: I was trying to keep that dream alive. But it was always this idea that what I was doing was nice, and you know, I was being paid very well, thankfully, and I was learning. It just wasn't fulfilling and it wasn't what I really wanted to do, and it didn't feel like I was making a difference to anyone. It just felt like I was working.
Areeb Siddiqui: So in Deloitte, I was, uh, working really for banks and wealth managers, helping them to navigate regulations, get around big fines or investigate people for fraud and stuff like that. It didn't feel like I was actually doing [00:04:00] anything that materially impacted people around me. So it wasn't that fulfilling.
Areeb Siddiqui: I stayed for, at Deloitte for three years and. Then moved out to a little boutique consultancy, Deloitte, big company. Uh, thousands of people. Then moved to a little consultancy with only about a hundred people at the time, which was a really, really different experience. And that's where I started to learn about FinTech.
Areeb Siddiqui: 'Cause a lot of their clients were wealth managers who were looking to digitally transform. Uh, have you heard of Nutmeg?
Amardeep Parmar: Yeah.
Areeb Siddiqui: Um, people like that. Robo-Advisors were my first clients, so I gotta see what worked strategically, what didn't work. But what was great about it was, okay, these are fintechs startups, although they were very big at the time, you know, with millions in funding.
Areeb Siddiqui: They were helping real people. They were here helping the, the mass market to actually learn about investing and, and get ahead in that and grow their wealth. And that's where a kind of, not a light bulb, but a tiny little spark, like somewhere deep down inside me went off, which was like, imagine I could do this for someone like me where you know, I'm a Muslim, a practicing Muslim, and for many [00:05:00] Muslims because of the requirements put put down by our faith, we cannot use conventional financial products.
Areeb Siddiqui: We can't invest or use normal banking products because of the prohibition on interest, which makes it very difficult to do anything from savings accounts to mortgages. To investing into a fund. So I was like, why doesn't this exist for someone like me? Right. And there's 2 billion of us on the planet.
Amardeep Parmar:Only a few of you.
Areeb Siddiqui: Yeah. Yeah. Just there's a few. So why, why doesn't that exist? But you know, that was like the tiny, tiny, tiny little bit of an idea that's that formed when I was working there. Yeah.
Amardeep Parmar: Yeah. And like looking at that as well, when you're using these for different products, and like you said, so the main, obviously I'm, I'm not with myself, so if I'm trying to understand the limits you had in terms like with the religion, like how that means you can invest your money.
Amardeep Parmar: So it's the key thing that you can't lend that money and receive interest in it is that the?..
Areeb Siddiqui: You can't receive interest or, or pay interest in any way, shape or form. So interest is a big, big no go in our holy book, the Quran there, there are many verses saying how interest is, you know, very bad.
Areeb Siddiqui: Generally it's tantamount to a major sin. So you can't receive interest on a savings account. I [00:06:00] can't be paying interest in a mortgage. Otherwise they're effectively, um, you know, sinning. So that was something which a lot of Muslims grapple with. Many people end up going with conventional accounts and dealing with interest just because there's not a lot of conventional, you know, good alternatives out there.
Areeb Siddiqui: So it's like a real, real thing, which many Muslims deal with. Yeah. The, the interest is like the first bit to it. There's many other things like, okay, you can't put anything into, uh, weapons. You can't invest into drugs, alcohol, gambling, things like that.
Amardeep Parmar: Yeah. And so with that, what would you invest, like how would you invest your money in other ways?
Amardeep Parmar: So like before Cashew was invented? What were you able to do or what could you, what were your options?
Areeb Siddiqui: There's a couple of Islamic savings accounts in the uk. People like Orion Bank or Gatehouse Bank, and there are some Islamic funds, but the common denominator between all of them was really poor customer service.
Areeb Siddiqui: If you walked into a branch of one of these banks, it felt like you were going to another country 30 years ago, you know, where sometimes people were rude to you and you know it. Nothing really worked on time. It would take months to take out a mortgage, [00:07:00] weeks to open a savings account. So customer service, Paul.
Areeb Siddiqui: Terrible user experience if they did have an app, big if it wasn't really worth speaking of. The website was really poorly designed. It felt like you were getting into a black hole of information that didn't really mean anything to you. And the final thing was price. A lot of these things were priced more expensively just because there is a smaller market.
Areeb Siddiqui: They felt like they were, you know, in order to make money, they had to, they had to charge, charge higher. So all of these things were quite prohibitive for people out there. So there were solutions. Most people were not using them.
Amardeep Parmar: And then so once you had the idea, well, you could see the problem was right.
Amardeep Parmar: When was the idea that like, actually, maybe I can do something about this and like actually trying to make that into a reality? Like what was the first steps you took there?
Areeb Siddiqui: It came a little later. So I was at Deloitte for three years. I moved to a consultancy called Alpha, where suddenly I wasn't just like, one of the only brown people there.
Areeb Siddiqui: I was one of the only Asians there. Oh, sorry. One of the only Muslims there. So that really, I dunno, it just, it really affected me. I didn't [00:08:00] feel at home, I didn't quite feel myself and, you know, the people there were amazing, but it was different. I didn't like socializing in a, an environment where there was loads of alcohol and to get ahead, it's kind of felt like you had to do those things and go out the late nights and go to the pub, or go to the club or whatever it was.
Areeb Siddiqui: Um, so I never quite felt at home and it really came around where I just decided I want to take a year out to focus on myself. So almost on a whim, I just started to apply to different, different master's courses, M B A specifically. So I applied to Cambridge, to Oxford, and to London Business School. I took the, the GMAT exam, which is like the entrance exam for
Areeb Siddiqui: for MBAs in like a to week period and just sent off applications, not expecting anything, and I didn't tell anyone I was doing this. I just thought, let's see what happens. And then I started to get interview calls and I was like, okay, okay, this is suddenly becoming real. I didn't tell anyone until I started getting the offers, and that's when I was like, okay, to my parents.
Areeb Siddiqui: I think I really, [00:09:00] really wanna do this and I dunno why, but I just need to take some time out to figure out what's going on, where I want to go. I dunno if I wanna stay in consulting, maybe I wanna go do something else. And for them it was kind of a hit like, wait, you're taking a year out of work. But also when I said, you know, I'll, I'll go to Cambridge.
Areeb Siddiqui: That really kind of softened the blow. A little bit.
Amardeep Parmar: I was about to say. Yeah. Were they okay? 'cause it was came..
Areeb Siddiqui: They were Okay. Yeah, they, they were very happy with it. So I took a year out to kind of find myself, and that's where I met my co-founder. And we thought, okay, why don't we combine what I know in FinTech, what he knows in Islamic banking, he worked out in Malaysia and try and do something.
Areeb Siddiqui: And that's how it began.
Amardeep Parmar: And even like then, so you've got the idea, you've got here's, you've got the FinTech background. Here's got the like Islamic finance background. What was the actual, like, how did you start, like what was the, 'cause obviously building an app for a lot of people is very intimidating, right?
Amardeep Parmar: Obviously there are no code tools and all these different ways of doing it. Yeah. How did you start off was like an M V P you started off with, or..
Areeb Siddiqui: Yeah, we started with a survey, right? So we just thought, okay, I think I want this and I think you want this. How do we [00:10:00] know people actually care about this?
Areeb Siddiqui: So we started off just interviewing people and asking them some very simple questions like, do you care about Islamic finance? Do you use any products today? Would you use one? You know, why aren't you using the ones which are, which are out there today? And this started as a small thing. We would just stand outside the mosque in Cambridge.
Areeb Siddiqui: Then we went to London and did the same thing. Then we made it an online survey, and before you knew it, we had about 1,500 responses. So that, that's how we, we found it and tried to validate the idea. The original version of Kestrl was a debit card, like, let's do Monzo for Muslims. That was really fashionable at the time.
Areeb Siddiqui: It was 2019 and a few other people were trying a similar thing. So there was Nia and Riz and my, ah, all of these guys were like, we're gonna be the Monzo for Muslims. We were like, why don't we throw our hat into the ring and see if we could do it right? With our background, we discovered something really interesting from the survey was 95% of the applicants, and this is people from Cambridge all the way to Edinburgh.
Areeb Siddiqui: So I, I do care about Islamic finance. I do wanna avoid interest. I care about not going to help. Right, basically, but [00:11:00] fewer than 5% were actually using the, the existing solutions out there. And the reasons they cited were what I said before, poor customer service, terrible user experience, high fees, and ultimately people didn't trust them.
Areeb Siddiqui: So they were like, if you can start to solve those things, that's something I would do. But when we, we had a final question at the end, which I'm so glad we asked, which was, of these products, which is the most interesting to you, and we had debit card investment account. Personal finance, all this kind of thing.
Areeb Siddiqui: And only about 2% of people picked debit card. And we were like, wait, like what, what? What's going on? Because we've got all these people out here who are launching debit cards. What, why are we going down this route? And that's when our first kind of idea pivoted. I hesitate to say pivot 'cause we hadn't built anything.
Areeb Siddiqui: But we were like, okay, let's, let's go back to the drawing board and let's figure out what we're doing here. And that's where the idea of Money management, let's help people, budget, save, and then eventually invest came from. Yeah.
Amardeep Parmar: And where does the actual name come from?
Areeb Siddiqui: What, what does mean? Oh, so Kessel is the name of a bird.
Areeb Siddiqui: It's a little falcon that lives here in the uk. And it started off as a joke because Kestrels eat, uh, starlings. [00:12:00] Uh, and the idea, we were like, oh, we're gonna take down Starling Bank and then. The name just kind of stuck. So, so that's why I,
Amardeep Parmar: because I, I thought it was a bad, it's like I don't, I, I wasn't quite sure the connection now.
Areeb Siddiqui: Oh yeah. That, that's kind of, and some people think it's like, oh, is it because like you Muslim and Middle East and falconry is big there? And we're like, yeah, sure, yeah, if you wanna go with that, we can go with that.
Amardeep Parmar: But it's good to have the mystery sometimes, isn't it as well? I guess so.
Areeb Siddiqui: I guess so. And there's also studies which
Areeb Siddiqui: say that words beginning with K stick in the mind more like Coca-Cola or Kodak, or, it was just a happy, uh, happy coincidence.
Amardeep Parmar: And so did you actually start the company when you were in university still or was it the research phase then and you started..
Areeb Siddiqui: End of 2019, we actually like came together, formed the business, but we needed something else.
Areeb Siddiqui: We realized 'cause Daeng and I had been going out and speaking to potential investors and it, we were at best, people weren't taking us seriously. At worst, people were like getting very aggressive and angry at us. Uh, so we were speaking with like Islamic banking experts and some of them, I remember one meeting, the worst meeting was a guy, you know, we had a pitch deck.
Areeb Siddiqui: We [00:13:00] put it up on the screen. We got to like slide to, which is like, this is Kestrl Muslim money app. Healthy Muslims grow their wealth through that compromise. And the guy lost it. He was like, I've been in this industry since you were in diapers, right? Like, what can you teach me about this? What are you gonna tell me if there's anything new?
Areeb Siddiqui: You guys are like to 20 somethings. You're never gonna do anything in this space. You're never gonna raise any money. You know, you've been nowhere. You've done nothing, you, you've got nothing going for you. And Daeng. You know? He is, he is a, a good guy. He was just like taking it big smile on his face. I lost it and I started shouting back at the guy and I was just like, why did you call us up here?
Areeb Siddiqui: What was the point of this? Right? Because he asked for the meeting, right? Yeah. So it was just like a bizarre kind of thing. And I remember leaving that meeting and it was so, so, so heated. My dad's office was around the corner, so he wanted to know how the meeting went. So we stopped by and then he was like, you know, we took him through the business plan and basically sold him on the idea.
Areeb Siddiqui: So my dad, for context, he has over 30 years of experience of financial services. He. [00:14:00] He was the global head of Audit and compliance at Bank of New York, then Royal Bank of Scotland and you know, has worked with the F C A Financial Conduct Authority. So we were like, do you wanna come on board as like a co-founder as well?
Areeb Siddiqui: Equal part, I think people are less likely to shout at us. If they think you were in the room as well. You can be CFO, Ill be CEO and Daeng is the chief operating officer. And we did it. We shook hands then and that that was it. They were, we were the original founding team and that, that's kind of how it started.
Areeb Siddiqui: So with, you know, Daeng's knowledge of Islamic finance, what I knew about FinTech and my dad's just kind of presence as well, as well as being our C F O and knowing everything he does about that. Uh, we've managed to make a go of it.
Amardeep Parmar: For like people in the audience, I guess, who haven't like pitched before.
Amardeep Parmar: It's funny how often that kind of thing happens. Yeah. So, for example, people who will message me or like cold email me to be like, I wanna come on the podcast. Or sometimes they'll email me quite a few times, they're not, okay, sure. Come on. And they're like, oh, can you tell me that? Why I should come on, like, you messaged me.
Amardeep Parmar: Like, and I think that happens quite often where people [00:15:00] have these. I think something that's automated or something like that, they get somebody in their team to do it. But I've had that a few times now and it's same thing with investment or things like that where you, somebody's like, oh, it's really interesting, like I wanna talk to you.
Amardeep Parmar: But then they want you to then prove and it's like, yeah, it's a weird. Cycle sometimes.
Areeb Siddiqui: And I, I dunno, and I, I think, I dunno if it's PC to say this on this podcast, but I think. Sometimes in some British Asian communities, we just like become quite passive aggressive or even just full on, actively aggressive towards other people.
Areeb Siddiqui: And I dunno if that's what was happening here, but we were just speaking to other people in this community and like British Pakistanis and Indians and Bangladeshi. And not all of them were like ex respectful. right. But that really changed when my dad was in the room. So I think age and seniority is still weighted really, really heavily over ideas.
Areeb Siddiqui:
Amardeep Parmar: I think it's an important point. It's part of the reason why we're doing what we're doing, guys' trying to change this attitude of like getting people together and get people to build each other up. It's easy to pull people down. Right? That's easy. But how can we build something [00:16:00] that action makes a difference, like what you're doing now, and it's obviously your, your dad's experience obviously really helped.
Amardeep Parmar: It's a shame that if your business was the same before and after him, in terms of what you're talking about.
Areeb Siddiqui: He just sit in the room silently. Yeah, right. He wasn't saying anything, but we raised money because my dad was on the pitch deck. Like, I'm not joking. We raised our first pre-seed round. It was like 150 K within three months of that, because someone was like, look, I see hundreds of pitch decks, right?
Areeb Siddiqui: I see a lot of people saying that they're gonna do this. Some of the other competitors I mentioned earlier with all fundraising at the same time, but they were like, you know, I trust you because your dad's sat there watching you guys. You're not just gonna go and take my money and burn it all. So it helps massively.
Areeb Siddiqui: So that is an unfair advantage, I guess.
Amardeep Parmar: Yeah, and it's, it's interesting. What I like is that you are able to openly admit that. Some people have that different advantages, like you said, unfair advantages from family backgrounds, things like that. But they don't openly say it. So it's good for people to know, for example, that that's helped you on your journey.
Areeb Siddiqui: Oh no, absolutely. Right. I've, I've, I'm so, you know, embroiled with way, way more founders. I meet so many where we're part of the Techstars portfolio [00:17:00] office, so we sit around others and I've, I know exactly like where, what's been an unfair advantage because we've, we've needed it so much. When we walk into a room and we say, Oh, we're an Islamic FinTech.
Areeb Siddiqui: Usually most people like the light goes out in their eyes and I see it and they're like, oh, it's not for me. I'm not interested. I'm not doing that. So we really need to go for every advantage we can.
Amardeep Parmar:So you, you've raised more capital since then.
Areeb Siddiqui: Yes.
Amardeep Parmar: What's your current like fundraiser? Whereabouts are you now?
Areeb Siddiqui: So our first round was one 50, the second one was about 500 k. We're in the middle of a 2 million raise at the moments, which we call pre-series A or c plus. Which is what we're doing right now. And we're being backed by Y Invest, which is the largest Islamic FinTech in the world. They're leading our round.
Areeb Siddiqui: They have a venture capital arm as well, so they're, they're leading the round. And we've got Techstars and, and some other people, angel netorks as well, coming on board too.
Amardeep Parmar: Really good as well. But some people might not know what Techstars is.
Areeb Siddiqui:Oh, sorry. Yeah.
Amardeep Parmar: Techstars fits into it. Like how they've hoped you on your journey of.
Areeb Siddiqui: Textiles was huge. So, look, I, I suppose before we, before we get to textiles, it was an interesting journey 'cause we raised our first [00:18:00] pre-seed round. We launched our app and it was, it was really interesting. It was a money management tool. We kind of thought, okay, what do people need and what's the easiest to build?
Areeb Siddiqui: So we went with, okay, open banking was this new regulation, which meant that all banks had to have open APIs. So anyone who wanted to could draw down their information, their data from their banks transactions, your income, everything you're doing with your bank account. You could pull it into a, a third party app, in this case, Kestrl.
Areeb Siddiqui: So we were like, people have told us they don't want to switch accounts. It's really hard to get someone to switch into a new digital bank, Monzo, you know, even with all of their money, it was tough for them to get to where they are today. Installing everyone on the same, let alone a Muslim debit card.
Areeb Siddiqui: Right? That's even harder. So we went with open banking, plug in your bank account, you'll see all yourself in one place. We'll create a budget for you. Then we'll help you to auto save into pots to your goals. Maybe you're saving for a wedding, a car, or a house, or just in general. We'll save that. That was relatively easy for us to build.
Areeb Siddiqui: And it was going okay. It was growing nicely, organically, and we had a little office and doing all that. But then [00:19:00] this interesting thing happened, a big Islamic bank reached out to us in from Malaysia, the biggest Islamic bank there called, uh, bank Islam. Uh, and they said, we like what you're doing. We wanna white label this tool and use it to power our own digital bank, which we're launching.
Areeb Siddiqui: So we said, yeah, well let, let's go with it. But then there was this kind of back and forth period. 'cause the sales cycles take a long time when you're. Selling B to B business to business as opposed to directly to consumers. And in that period was like one of the scariest times for us because we were bleeding money, right?
Areeb Siddiqui: We're like, okay, we've, we've grown a tech team dying. Went back to Malaysia, formed a big team over there of about, at the time it was like 10 people and we were bleeding money and we had this consumer app and we kept thinking, is this bank taking us for a ride or are we actually gonna sell it to them?
Areeb Siddiqui: And it got to the point where I hadn't drawn a salary in like six months and Daeng hadn't andDeang had like four kids right at the time. I had just got married and had a baby on the way. So I was like, okay, this is really tough. Why have we done this? And those were some [00:20:00] really dark moments. And then literally we had one month of runway left and then Bank Islam came and said, let's sign this.
Areeb Siddiqui: Let's do it. And I was like, thank God. Right? Thank God that this how it was the scariest. Probably one of the darkest moments there. And you know, like my mental health took like a real, real hit. I learned the connection between your mental health and your physical health. But once that happened, things changed.
Areeb Siddiqui: We reached out to Techstars. Now Techstars is a..
Amardeep Parmar: Just before we go into Techstars, a moment there. So I think like you made such an important point there because with the B to B cycles, It's really tough, like. 'cause sometimes take a really long time. Yeah. And even the conversations we're having, right?
Amardeep Parmar: People can seem really enthusiastic, but it's not them making the decision or even the person making the decision. Then somebody above them does something else or the budget changes, and then even though they had the right intention, You are then cut and that's so scary. And it's something which I like that you're able to just admit that as well because you always see what wins, right?
Amardeep Parmar: So some you could just come on here and just say like, yeah, we run this massive deal with like bank Islam, right? But that misses up a bit of all that scariness that was underneath it. [00:21:00] And a lot of people be in that scary moment right now and be like, okay. It's normal and it's working out how to mitigate their right because, so it might not have come through.
Amardeep Parmar: Who knows? What would you have done then?
Areeb Siddiqui: And we'd be dead. Yeah, without a doubt. We would be dead. And a lot of people were dying, right? Our competitors were going under 'cause they had bet entirely. Well not bet gambling is haram, but the, they bet on B to C and the debit card and that's tough. 'cause you need a lot of money to make that work and make that growth loop actually turn.
Areeb Siddiqui: So we were like, maybe this is a way out. Away from the B to C thing, which is hard. B to B, there's good money. It's regular money. The contracts are longer, but it's hard, right? It takes a long, long time. And like you said, you may not be talking to the decision maker, right? You dunno who's actually going to be doing that.
Areeb Siddiqui: And sometimes conversations just die like that. So we didn't know. And I was like, the stress wasn't just on me because I was like, okay, I knew the risk, Daeng, my co-founder in Malaysia, he knew the risk. My dad was gonna be okay, but we've got employees. Right ?Who I sold this vision to. [00:22:00] You're not just pitching to investors or customers.
Areeb Siddiqui: You're pitching to all the, the people who join you on, on that journey who are like giving up their day jobs and coming to work with you often at a, at a cut. To, to what their previous salary was. So it's like, I might've just screwed up all these people's lives. Right? So that was like, The kind of thoughts that were going through my head, and then thankfully it hap, and that's when things started to take off for us.
Amardeep Parmar: And then joining the Techstars program, what happened there and how did Techstars help you accelerate further?
Areeb Siddiqui: So, so Techstars is a, a venture capital firm and an accelerator. So what that means is they invest into you, but they also make you join a program where they're teaching you. You go, you attend lectures every week, every day, basically, uh, over a three month period.
Areeb Siddiqui: So it's a pretty intense and pretty intense time. And the idea is that you enter the accelerator is one thing, and you'll come out as like big company that knows what they're doing and is able to go away and, and fundraise. Now as a Islamic FinTech or Islamic anything, it's pretty hard to get mainstream recognition, like doing what you're doing.
Areeb Siddiqui: So we'd approached venture capital firms before. In the uk, in the us but [00:23:00] most people, they see the word Islamic and they run a mile either saying, well, it's not for me, or saying it's too niche. Which I always found weird 'cause it's like there's 2 billion people who are Muslim on the planet. What do you mean we're niche?
Areeb Siddiqui: But textiles was different. And a, a lot of credit goes to, I think Sali Chadri, who's the managing director of Textiles London. So he's from a Muslim background himself, British Bangladeshi. Understood what we were doing immediately. And the first person in textiles who actually saw our application immediately just passed it over.
Areeb Siddiqui: And then I just DMed Saalim on LinkedIn, 'cause I saw he was posting like, oh, there's like three spots left in our, in our cohort, just like, uh, apply now. And I DMed him and said, Hey, I submitted an application like six months ago. Never heard back, just wondering. And then he just said, let's, let's jump on the phone.
Areeb Siddiqui: Let's, let's have a chat. He found the application and was like, someone discarded it. I'm taking another look at it, especially in light of the B to B deal that we'd landed. He's like, this is interesting. Let's, let's try and take this further. And I'll always owe him for that because he took a chance on us.
Areeb Siddiqui: And as soon as the textiles brand was behind [00:24:00] us, a big conventional brand, they're kind of like y combination. Not as quite as big as Y Combinator or as well known, but they are, they're known, they're well known. That changed things for us.
Amardeep Parmar: And like, where are you today now? Like you've had all this progress, you've had the big fundraise.
Amardeep Parmar: You're raising more money now. What's your, been your progress? So you've obviously had that big deal a while ago. What's happened since then?
Areeb Siddiqui: So we, we landed that deal about 11 months ago. So what we've been doing is as soon as we made that deal public, and we also went public with Techstars, many, many more banks have been reaching out to us and wealth managers from Malaysia, Indonesia, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Emirates.
Areeb Siddiqui: So we've been talking to all these guys and pitching to all of these guys. And the sales cycles take a long time, 12 months to 18 months. But we're at a point now where we think we're hopefully, or in Charlotte, I'm gonna sign a, sign a deal with a few people, some out in the uae, some in Saudi, some in, uh, in Malaysia.
Areeb Siddiqui: So that's where we're going down this B to B angle. But my heart is still with our consumer app, which is still here. It's still growing. And what I want to do is make enough money that we can stand on our [00:25:00] own to feet as a company without needing more and more funding, and then really invest into why I started this, which was to help the Muslim community here in the uk.
Areeb Siddiqui: To invest, to save to bank without compromise.
Amardeep Parmar: I thought you were gonna say, my heart is still with the wildlife photography
Areeb Siddiqui: It's no, no, it's still there. It's still there. And eventually, yeah, eventually, when all this is done, that's where I wanna go.
Amardeep Parmar: When, when, when characters made it and you retire earlier, like 30 years old, like,
Areeb Siddiqui: I missed that boat, unfortunately, but yeah.
Areeb Siddiqui: Yeah, yeah, yeah. One day.
Amardeep Parmar: And like for people like listening right now, potentially gonna use the app or looking at that. So you said that it's about managing people's budgets and what's the kind of model there? So is it, do they pay a monthly subscription and then they get access to these speeches? Yeah.
Amardeep Parmar: Or how does that side of things work?
Areeb Siddiqui: There's a freemium tier where you can just plug in your banks and get the budget. But if you want to do the auto saving part or if you wanna do the stock screening, if you wanna invest into Apple or, or Microsoft and see whether it's compliant or not. Islamically, there's, um, some subscription to to that.
Areeb Siddiqui: We're still playing around with that. A lot of it is still free. So you can of course check it out now, [00:26:00] but we do want to start monetizing that more and more. But we're in a nice position where the majority of our money comes from B to B, so we can experiment and, and do more stuff without having to put a big formidable price tag on our consumer.
Amardeep Parmar: I think that's one of the nice things about the B to B side is that you're then working with companies which have huge amounts of money. Yeah. Which means that when you are looking at the average consumer who may be struggling a bit financially, you can give them quite a lot for free because it's not, you're not dependent on them.
Amardeep Parmar: For the income of the business.
Areeb Siddiqui: Exactly.
Amardeep Parmar: So I think that's quite a nice way to do things. Which I think I've seen a few people do now. And it's also a way to think about things for people who want, often people in the starting a business, they think really about B to C because it's easiest for 'em to relate to, but sometimes B to B can really help you get their funding in place.
Amardeep Parmar: To be able to experiment with the B to C side and really help the people that you want to help
Areeb Siddiqui: It's an interesting thing, 'cause it, they can work really nicely together as well where B to C becomes like this innovation arm, which you can't really do in the B to B world, 'cause if you're working with a big bank or like you'll know from your consulting background, they're not really about innovation.
Areeb Siddiqui: They wanna play it safe. They just wanna, you know, don't do anything that, that's going [00:27:00] against the, going against the curve. So B to C lets us just do what we want, but that's also been a great form of marketing for our B to B. Business 'cause banks are looking at what our consumer app does and says we'd love to be able to do the same thing.
Areeb Siddiqui: So yeah, it's a weird, and I wanna just stress this was a complete accident. We didn't join, set that out with B to B in mind. It just happened. So I can't take credit for that. For, you know, that plan or we just followed it through when the opportunity came our way.
Amardeep Parmar: So it's been great to chat. We're gonna have to go to a quick fire questions now.
Areeb Siddiqui: Sure. Sure
Amardeep Parmar: So the first one is, who are three British, Asian entrepreneurs? That you do love to shout out and you think people should be paying attention
Areeb Siddiqui: So one is, I think he's already been here, Navjot Sawhney, he's founder of, of the washing machine project, which is amazing. I think the humanitarian version of, of Dyson, where they create hands turning washing machines which have been helping refugees, asylums, uh, anyone who needs it all the way from Afghanistan over to, to Ukraine.
Areeb Siddiqui: So definitely , Definitely Nav. Uh, second Sadiq Dorasat. Um, so he's the [00:28:00] founder, the CEO of Muslim Census, which is the largest independent organization collecting data on Muslims here in the UK and beyond, which helps to inform better decisions all the way from politics to business. He's doing amazing work.
Areeb Siddiqui: He's also a product manager at Whitehead Invest, which is friendly, uh, Islamic FinTech. And the final one we mentioned him before, is Saalim Chowdhury, managing director of Techstars. Amazing guy. Look, he gave us our platform. He took a chance on us when no one else would, and he. Should be more well known in the venture community.
Areeb Siddiqui: So I keep telling him to do more and more branding, but he's uh, he's gonna get out.
Amardeep Parmar:We'll get him on here as well.
Areeb Siddiqui: Definitely. He's a good good guy. Yeah.
Amardeep Parmar: And next question is people listening right now want to learn more about you, learn more about Kestrl? Where should they go to? What could they reach out about?
Amardeep Parmar: Yeah,
Areeb Siddiqui: you can check me out on LinkedIn, uh, or Areeb Siddiqui. Check out our website, kestrl.io or kestrl.co uk if you want to talk about anything from starting a business. If you're just in an idea mode, if you wanna fundraise, should you be fundraising? Come and chat to me. The more basic things like personal finance, investing as a, as a Muslim, if you're trying to avoid [00:29:00] interest, chat to us.
Areeb Siddiqui: You know, we're more than happy to talk to you.
Amardeep Parmar: And then on the other side is anything that the audience might be able to help you with?
Areeb Siddiqui: Yeah, we're always looking for B to B introductions. Anyone who's happy to share their B to B sales process, 'cause it's a learning learning curve, we're, we're still trying to figure out how to make that process work.
Areeb Siddiqui: So we need help with that. And yeah, fundraising as well. Fundraising is a, is a journey. We're still going on. We're still figuring out angel investing versus VC investing. So if anyone has any tips or has been through that before, please do drop me a message.
Amardeep Parmar: So thanks so much for coming on. Have you got any final words to the audience?
Areeb Siddiqui: Final words, if you have a dream when you were a kid, don't think it was, you know, stupid. Like, I still want to get into the wildlife thing, it's just I'm taking a bit more of a longer route to get there. Life gets in the way, but just, I didn't wanna do financial services, but I took that and I used it to do something which I found fulfilling.
Areeb Siddiqui: You know? So you don't need to throw away your experience. You can still use that in a way, and that becomes your advantage. What makes it you [00:30:00] unfairly advantage compared to your competitors? So you never know what's going to you know where you can draw strength from.
Amardeep Parmar: Hello. Hello everyone. Thank you so much for listening. It makes a huge amount to us and we don't think you realize how important you are because if you subscribe to our YouTube channel, if you leave us a five star review, it makes the world of difference. And if you believe in what we're trying to do here to inspire, connect, and guide the next generation of British Asians, if you do those things, you can help us achieve that mission and you can help us make a bigger impact.
Amardeep Parmar: And by doing that it means we can get bigger guests, we can host more events, we can do more for the community. So you can play a huge part. So thank you so much for supporting us.
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