Seems like a “Pump and Dump” All of the changes over the last several months appear to reveal a strategy to increase bottom line growth in the short run to improve the stock price while sacrificing the long term success of the company. Here are several examples of this strategy being deployed:
1) Deprioritizing Talent: the CPO left the company and instead of hiring a a talented experienced CPO we promoted the highest ranking department member to run the team. The fact that the People Team no long has a seat at the table is scary. As a result, much of the people team has left or is leaving including the recruiting team which is going to make it really hard to backfill. Also, how can you recruit anyone to a company who has several issues with litigation, is originating unsecured debt to sub prime customers at the start of a recession, has tons of negative feedback from employees while facing a catastrophic fall in stock price? Who would sign up to work here? In this job market, why would someone go to work for this company? For future stock that will likely be worth $0?
2) Zero focus on tech. I am not sure how much of the tech team is still here, but the fact that they brought back a former CTO after explaining his prior termination was due to his inability to effectively run the team, is scary especially since the tech has been questionable for the last several years. How you could not be afraid of a Fintech without any focus on tech or customer journey is beyond me.
3) The CFO announced that he was leaving and instead of hiring someone with experience running a public company, they just promoted the next warm body.
4) CEO has no vision for the future. The most obvious sign that the focus is not on the future is no one can explain what the future looks like. They are literally telling us they don’t know what the future should or could look like, because the CEO hasn’t thought about it. At one time we were focused on rescue, repair and graduate, then we focused on building an eco system to help sun prime customers. Now?? We are creating a debt trap for customers? You are not creating financial inclusion by offering a 160% loan to the same customer 15 times in a row. It’s not an emergency loan at that point, it is a dependency on a crutch.
5) The best people are leaving, no one is coming and all the work is falling in the few remaining people with talent which is a sure fire strategy to get them to leave as well.
6) Finance manages and approves all new hire and promotion compensation decisions. They clearly have a goal to keep expenses down and they are doing that by sitting on requests to delay spending money on promotions and new hires and are trying to low ball offers and raises.
7) There is no more focus on development of staff. You will not grow or feel supported here and it’s obvious. It’s literally not a thing here anymore and clearly that is not a good long term strategy.
8) The CEO is a first time CEO, it shows, but he doesn’t know it. I have never met anyone with san EQ so low that they don’t even know that they are not fit to do their job. He is living a rich kids worst nightmare and doesn’t recognize it. He is surrounded by two types of people: (1) Yes (wo)man who are afraid to get fired so they agree with everything he says (2) People that are using him and the company to get first time titles for a year or two so they can move on to get the job they really want.
