Heather-Anne Hubbell, Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Phundex, is passionate about facilitating and accelerating strategic company change, especially when it comes to integrating digital tools, processes, and apps to boost productivity. She works with a variety of clients, including international financial institutions, small and medium-sized businesses, and digital start-ups.
Heather-Anne’s goal is to an integrated ecosystem that allows businesses to manage transactions and processes with their stakeholders more efficiently, no matter where they are located Wherever one is within the investment lifecycle, she wants Phundex to be the de facto platform for managing transactions, fundraising, due diligence, investment management and administration, and reporting.
The following excerpts from the interview with Heather-Anne Hubbell reflect her leadership abilities, financial sector knowledge, and efforts to change the industry:
Heather-Anne, please briefly describe your professional journey for our readers. What challenges did you face along the way?
I describe myself as a “reformed” lawyer, banker, and risk manager. I’ve spent years working in financial services, often juggling family responsibilities with extensive international travel. I’ve worked for and with global financial institutions to help them leverage technology and improve processes to transform the way they do business—not always an easy task for them or for me, considering I started my career before computers and mobile phones existed.
One of the biggest challenges has been adapting to a myriad of modern technologies and helping clients and colleagues understand that technology is a tool to leverage and improve the way we do business, not just a project that we need to get through.
What significant impact have you brought to the fintech industry?
We’ve developed a unique collaboration platform for people, process, and technology. It’s highly secure, with detailed user and data permissions that are integral to the flexibility of the platform. For the user, it’s an easily customizable workflow with unique data and document due diligence rooms that helps close transactions faster and streamline processes without needing a technology team to implement or support it. Underneath, it’s an incredibly complex data model, allowing users different permitted activities depending on whether it’s their own business or they are a member of another business’ team. The workflow can be adapted to your particular business needs, and we are constantly evolving the functionality to meet client requests.
Tell us about Phundex and its foundation pillar.
We spent years working globally on large deals with many different stakeholders. We decided there must be a more efficient and secure way to manage these than emails, spreadsheets, and project plans. Our solution? A secure central collaboration platform with workflow and data management built right in. It’s even suitable for regulated businesses. More importantly, because it is delivered as a service, it is simple to set up, user-friendly, and highly customizable. This means you can streamline and standardize the way you do business, coordinate activities across teams and jurisdictions, and see the status of all transactions and processes at a glance.
How does Phundex promote workforce flexibility, and what is your role in it?
As the founder, I wanted Phundex to help businesses coordinate transactions and processes with stakeholders around the world. Being able to see the status of deals no matter where you are is fundamental to promoting workforce flexibility. Our team is located across multiple countries and being able to coordinate on Phundex makes that quite easy to do. That means our team (and our clients) can work around their other commitments, no matter where they are. Importantly, it means that clients can have completely remote teams catering to digital nomads while maintaining control and governance around their business operations.
What is your take on technology’s importance, and how are you leveraging it?
Technology is fundamental to improving how we work, but it’s broader than that. To stay competitive, we need to leverage smoother, more efficient processes and digital opportunities to deliver our products and services. We believe in it so passionately that we built a platform to make it easier for businesses without needing a technology department to support it. We’ve even created more efficient processes and transaction management to help clients get started more efficiently. The key is not to think of technology as the single solution, but rather as an enabler to increase efficiency and productivity.
What will be the next notable change in the fintech industry, and how are you preparing for it?
Blockchain will become more mainstream, and we look forward to embracing it. It’s a great way to protect data and ensure it is tamper-proof, and we look forward to partnering with more blockchain-enabled partners. Artificial intelligence will also keep expanding, and we are constantly looking for new ways to integrate it into the Phundex platform. Keeping up with not just new tech changes but also how and why they work, is key to being able to consider how fintech solutions can be successfully integrated into your business. We are watching the new technology coming into the marketplace to see how we can connect with it to increase seamless functionality for our clients. Leveraging a consolidated platform to access all of your technology solutions in one place will provide you with the most effective way to operate your business without drowning in a sea of individual technical solutions.
What are your goals in the upcoming future?
We want to develop Phundex into the go-to platform to manage transactions and processes across multiple stakeholders. We continue to investigate ways to integrate more innovative functionality into Phundex, working with other FinTech providers to make Phundex a convenient place to manage your business. That includes a full API suite to integrate with other platforms, as well as a full reporting suite. We also want to add new transaction and process workflows to provide our clients with more efficient ways to run their businesses without having to start from scratch.
What advice would you like to give the next generation of aspiring business leaders?
Dream big—and then expect the unexpected. Whatever your goal is today, the world will change, so you need to be ready to shift your goals and timelines to keep your business growing. Don’t just be reactive. Proactively think about how changes in the world or your business environment can be leveraged to meet those new challenges.
From a leadership perspective, look at those who inspire you and consider why. Understanding how great leaders work allows you to adopt your style and become more like those you admire. It’s important to remember that leading by example and inspiration is, in my view, one of the most effective ways of leading your team. At the same time, be sure to encourage your team to develop new skills and provide them with challenges to encourage their growth. Give your team the freedom to come up with solutions; you’ll be pleasantly surprised at how creative and effective those solutions will be.
