We asked Lolke to sit down on his very first day to answer a few questions. He said yes before we could finish asking.
Lolke joins us from Adyen, where he led Payments Growth for North America, and brings over 20 years of deep fintech experience at companies like Adyen and PayPal. Here's what he had to say.
I liked what I saw spending time with the Aeropay team. The culture, the people, the belief in where pay by bank is going. And beyond where Aeropay is playing today, I see a lot of runway.
I wasn't a stranger to the team either. So when the opportunity came up around the holidays, it didn't take long to decide to work with them. One thing led to another, and here we are.
I strongly believe that five or more years from now, we'll look back and say this was the time where it all changed. Think about how Buy Now, Pay Later was an afterthought six or seven years ago. People said it was going to be nothing. During COVID, people thought it would die. And now it's mainstream.
Payments are expensive in the United States. Because of the dominance of cards and the rising costs associated with them, there's significant demand for lower-cost options. We see it in our daily lives all the time. My car was in the shop recently and there was a sign right at the front desk charging a 3% fee for card payments.
And then for consumers, there's a whole demographic growing up differently. I see it at home with my own kids. The challenge is still adoption, but the conditions are aligning. When the experience is as easy as a card and the ubiquity is there, that's when pay by bank becomes the norm.
When product and engineering aren't aligned, you feel it immediately. You get friction, delays, teams pulling in different directions. I've seen it in large companies where those functions are so siloed that you literally can't connect with someone across the org without going up the chain first. That slows everything down.
What it comes down to is rallying the teams around both the "why" and the "how." The "why" is product and the "how" is engineering. When those two things are in sync, you can move fast and build something that actually solves the right problems for customers. That's what I want here.
A couple of weeks ago, I came in and walked around, talking to people on both the product and engineering side. I almost felt like Bob from Office Space, this unknown person who just showed up. But everybody was so open and transparent, and that made the choice to join very, very easy.
What I saw was a team genuinely driven by what we're doing and what we're trying to achieve. My first goal is to get under the hood and see what we're working with. I want to get back into the code and see everything.
From there, I want to make sure we're set up to go from good to great. There's a book I've carried throughout my career, Jim Collins' Good to Great. The question it asks is how do you make a good team exceptional? That's the energy I'm bringing.
And a big part of that is communication. One thing I want to do is make sure we're leveling up how product and engineering share information, align on priorities, and stay connected to where leadership is taking the company. A well-oiled machine moves fast. That's what I’m focused on right now.
Finding solutions that actually move the needle for our users. With today's technology, the options are pretty much unlimited.
I'm also excited for the opportunity in front of us. There are so many more use cases for pay by bank than people realize, from everyday recurring bills to e-commerce and beyond. That's where pay by bank can really take hold.
We've already seen it work in Europe and markets around the world. The US is next.
I grew up in the Netherlands and while working at Lucent Technologies after college, I had the opportunity to move to Chicago and never went back.
I've been based in San Jose for a while now, but my family and I are heading back to Chicagoland in the coming months to be here with the team. Engineering runs in the family, so I'm surrounded by it at home too.
Getting to be part of something with this much potential was genuinely on my wish list. I'm glad I'm finally checking it off.
