I work on our Go-To-Market motions here at Yonder - primarily on outbound and SEO. We’re still in the first few innings of building out our sales and marketing functions, but if the team and I do a good job, hopefully more people will get the benefits they deserve!What’s the best thing about working for Yonder?

What’s the best thing about working for Yonder?

There’s so much to be excited about at Yonder - it’s an innovative and badly needed product that customers seem to really love. But I’d have to say the people are the best part of working here. Since joining in May, I’ve been really impressed by the quality of talent across the board - plus we just announced some exciting new hires so things are only getting better.

What is the biggest problem you want to solve within Yonder?

Jeff Bezos has this great phrase “focus on what makes your beer taste better.” What he means is that companies should focus exclusively on the attributes of their product that customers care about and outsource / automate the rest. Instead of racking their own servers, for example, founders should just use AWS and re-allocate that time back into the product and customer experience. These days, this is common practice - to the extent that there is a B2B SaaS solution (or multiple) for pretty much every task involved in running a company. To me, employee benefits are the logical next step in this trend and long overdue an update!

It’s really exciting to me that we can abstract away some of the headache involved with running a company - hopefully so that we get more people starting companies and spending more time focused on product when they do (instead of on administrative overheads).

Will | Go to Market intern

Meet our team: GTM intern, Will Robbins

I spend most of my time focusing on Product in one way or another. I’m responsible for our financial services, define high-level requirements for new products and features and generally look to enable our amazing team wherever I can.

Outside of working directly on products, I look a bit into the future for planning, making sure Product stays on-track for commercial needs, working closely with our insurance and pension partners to get them live, and generally working with of our Head of Compliance to implement strong controls, policies and procedures that helps Kota move quickly while staying compliant.

What’s the best thing about working for Kota?

I love what we’re doing on Product. We’re taking this huge, complicated and incredibly important suite of products and adopting a long-term view on how they should work.

From spending time with customers, engaging with great providers and running product sessions with our incredible team, we’re constantly seeing ways to make these products work better for everyone and then delivering that vision.

What is the biggest problem you want to solve within Kota?

Global, instantly accessible core financial benefits.

Access to these products, as an employee, an employer or a service looking to operate in this space, is either impenetrably opaque or non-existent unless you’re willing to pay a comical amount of money to a third-party firm - I can’t wait to see the change in this space enabled by what we’re doing.

Patrick | CTO + cofounder

Meet our team: CTO and co-founder, Patrick O'Boyle

 I’m Viktor. I’ve spent the last 8 years working in .Net tech startups of various sizes. I’ve been involved in the design and development of a wide range of features and projects in the Healthcare and Food industry in both frontend and backend engineering roles. In the four years preceding my time at Kota, I’ve assisted an Irish Startup in its transformation into a unicorn, helping them grow from under 25 to over 250 employees.

I’m a Senior Backend Engineer responsible for the architecture and development of our backend platform. I’ve been here for a year now, and in this short time, we have developed a scalable and testable platform with multiple third-party integrations. I love to tackle new challenges that come our way and drive further progress.

Most of the work that we undertake is incredibly demanding and involves tackling problems that have never been solved before in our industry. Working alongside my brilliant colleagues to solve these challenges is not only enjoyable but also highly rewarding. I find it exhilarating to leverage my varied experience from previous jobs to solve new and complex problems while helping the workforce of today and the future.

Interacting with financial software, usually does not have the best user experience in mind, I have a firm belief that receiving benefits should be more understandable, educational and enjoyable. My goal is to help build the backend infrastructure of the future, to allow users and businesses to use the platform in a more scalable, educational and informed way, thereby helping them make rational financial decisions tailored to their needs.

Viktor | Backend engineering

Meet our team: Backend Engineer, Viktor Zolin

 I’m Aine. I've spent the last 6 years working across sales, marketing and customer success from Australia to Ireland to Portugal. For the last 4 years prior to Kota, I worked directly with startups managing their end to end customer experience at global tech events.

I make sure customers are happy from the moment they engage with us and throughout their journey with Kota. Ultimately, our customers are the people who guide our product development.

It’s a challenging and exciting feat balancing customer requests with product build, and our strategy is heavily data focused. Luckily I have the team’s trust to bring in relevant customer feedback, so we can create a product that customers truly love.

I really enjoy the high pace that we’re working at. As a team, we’re constantly brainstorming and iterating. Everyone gets stuck in and if we look back at how far we’ve come in just over a year, it’s incredible.

It’s fantastic to see such interest in the market too. With a waitlist of companies eager to use Kota, it means day in day out I get to speak to customers and dig deep into what problems they need solved, and how we can create the best experience possible.

In my opinion, the biggest problem in this industry is education. We’re taking something complex, and making it simple. This is a huge and demanding part of building a novel product like this in a traditional field. 

We want to change how people perceive financial benefits and tap into customer psychology to revolutionise how people will engage with these products. In this day and age, with working trends changing rapidly, it’s so important to understand how you can control your own finances and empower yourself with these tools.

Aine | Customer success

Meet our team: Head of Customer success, Aine Kavanagh

👋 I'm Alan, a seasoned software engineer. After my degree in Computer Science, I co-founded a startup in the consumer space, where I led a team of developers, and built a strong mobile app focused business. From there, I worked at a product agency building, managing an engineering team, dealing with industry agnostic projects, incl. finance, travel, health, retail, and property management.

I have expertise in mobile development, and backend systems including Ruby on Rails. I also have a keen interest in data analysis and business intelligence.

I'm primarily the mobile product manager at Kota. My role is to ensure that our mobile products align with customer needs, while meeting the latest UI and UX standards. I often create and facilitate the product and system design for each product and feature, taking the problem back to basics, to simplify the experience for our customers.

I manage the mobile team, but help with other projects across the company. My key responsibilities range from ensuring our mobile designs meet product requirements, code reviews, quality assurance, and packaging each mobile release.

I find it fulfilling to work on projects that simplify complex financial products, like health insurance and pensions, making them more accessible to everyone. At Kota, we are working hard to optimise our services to be helpful for each individual's particular situation, without the need to go through frustrating hoops.

I’m happy to be working with such a great team, including three of my old colleagues & co-founder from my earlier startup days + so many talented people and founders from other startups & industries.

I’m personally pumped to remove this industries ancient shackles.

A big challenge we're taking on is simplifying the health and pension enrolment process for people in every stage of life, while also educating them. From Kota customers to friends & family, I've gathered many different personas and their varying understanding of what they can or should be doing regarding their financial benefits. Simplifying the checkout process for a wide range of people, and educating them, will make a huge difference in their financial lives.

Another challenge we face is optimising our service to be helpful for each individual's particular situation. It's a really interesting but challenging problem to solve. At the moment, to get from 0 to pension, you'll likely need to fully rely on an advisor (if you’re lucky to have the time or access to one) before you can even get started.

At Kota, we’re taking on this challenge and working towards a simple solution that meets the unique needs of each of our customers.

Alan | Product manager

Meet our team: Product manager, Alan Haverty

In short, I lead the engineering team at Kota, with the best set of people anyone would want to work with. I wake up every morning looking forward to getting stuck into solving problems and building the product with the team. I love hiring and developing the best talent in the industry, and dealing day in day out with the people who can contribute to Kota's journey by making it their own.

The best thing about working for Kota is the problem domain. We’ve now cracked it in 30 countries and the amount of pride that I take in it is insane. It's now time to scale this throughout the globe.

Another great thing that I have to mention again is the team, and the empathetic culture that we have built. People are always ready to take on more responsibility and make a greater impact than you would have to in a larger, more bureaucratic organisation. It’s a fantastic atmosphere to work in. Everyone is here to give their best and that's what makes you want to push yourself further, and as a group, we push each other to achieve our absolute best.

I love the latest and greatest tech stack we use across our systems and how we are constantly challenged to innovate, learn, and grow.

We started Kota having seen first hand the pain of setting up employee benefits for a distributed team or even a local team. These benefits should be easily accessible to everyone in the company with a few clicks, like how you’d add your team to Slack or Notion, irrespective of where they are based.

Also, HRIS platforms, gig economy companies or even traditional insurance brokers will be able to leverage our APIs. Building out this structure, and these relationships is powerful. We’ll be able to make health and pension easily accessible by offering an easy and custom experience to their end customers, with an easy embed solution without the regulatory overhead.

I’m really glad to be building a product, and a team, for problems that are worth solving. And we’re only getting started!

Deepak | Director of Engineering + cofounder

Meet our team: Director of Engineering and cofounder, Deepak Baliga

👋 I’m Cillian. For the past 7 years, I have worked in tech as both as an employee and as a founder of my own company. During this time, I have been involved with the development of a wide range of projects, from online bidding platforms to health and fitness marketplaces, in both full stack and front-end engineering roles.

I’m a senior frontend engineer responsible for designing and developing our employer platform. I have been here for a year now, and the system we have built in that time is nothing short of incredible. I’m excited to show the world what we have in store for the next 12 months.

Working on challenging problems with a team of skilled and fun colleagues is definitely a highlight!

At some point in their career, everyone wants or needs health/pension benefits, so having the opportunity to positively impact so many people is very exciting to me.

Whenever I have had to interact with benefits software, whether on the web or on my phone, I have come away feeling frustrated and underwhelmed. The processes are opaque and can be confusing to those who are unfamiliar with them. Additionally, the applications themselves are hard to use and missing basic features. The software that is out there at the moment is woefully under equipped to meet the needs our our generation.

My goal is to help create something that is easy to understand, educational, and enjoyable to use. By doing that we will help people make informed and rational decisions about their finances.

Cillian | Frontend engineering

Meet our team: Senior Frontend Engineer, Cillian Barron

👋 I’m Elaine & I have spent the last 20 years working in various Compliance roles in Financial Services, with the last 10 years in the Insurance industry.

I lead the Compliance function and have been building our Compliance Framework for the last 7 months. Compliance is a number one priority in Kota, and nothing happens unless we are 100% sure we are in compliance with the relevant laws and regulations.

It’s quite a challenge but the culture we have embedded here is one of Compliance and to do the right thing at all times by the customer.

I really enjoy working with the team, everyone works hard and everyone is committed to making Kota great. We all step outside of our comfort zones and challenge each other on a daily basis so that we can build something new and unique.

Working in a highly regulated industry can be challenging for innovation and new ideas. What I am trying to do, with the help of the team, is to ensure we stay compliant while also offering a service that is is fast, streamlined and gives a great customer experience.

Our target market want to buy products in a different way - they are not so keen on traditional processes that involve lots of forms and paperwork, so we are filling this gap to make sure that no customer is left behind. Importantly, we’re staying compliant in the process so customers know they can trust us with their money and their benefits.

Elaine | Compliance

Meet our team: Head of Compliance, Elaine Kinsella

I’ve spent the last 7 years building new products and bringing them to market within the insurtech and fintech space, both as a founder, consultant and employee.

I lead Go To Market at Yonder, more specifically focused on building strategic partnerships with leading HR and Finance stacks across the globe.

(Other than the Irish patriotism 🇮🇪 ) I love working on novel routes to market that add multi-party value and Yonder is this unique product that touches the full spectrum of that value chain.

On one hand, we’re helping employees get access to the financial products they need wherever they are from leading financial institutions, and on the other hand we’re helping employers cut costs and simplify the admin of running a local or global benefit program and HR/Finance tool.

I think for me it’s about financial protection and making these key products like health and pension accessible and affordable to everyone.

Particularly for my generation (as a millennial and my siblings as Gen-Z) we’re entering our first era of austerity and having the right financial buffers working for us is incredibly important, even though it’s the last thing we’d ever think of.

Meet the Team