125: Lot to Learn | Gerry Fahy, Andrew Quinn and PAT Fintech

On the show this week we’ve got Gerry Fahy and Andrew Quinn with the story of the PAT Group and PAT Fintech, the Irish opportunity with the growth of fintech and regtech, achieving product-market fit in learning and education, and teaching the way you would have loved to have been taught.

Show Notes
Guest Profile

Gerry Fahy is the founder of the PAT Group, who are at the forefront of online education and digitally enhanced learning in Ireland. Through Gerry’s origin story, his launching of PAT in 2017, and Andrew Quinn joining to head up PAT Fintech in 2020, we explore continuous learning and education as critical components of Ireland’s ambition to become a global center of excellence for fintech and regtech.

HIGHLIGHTS:

On one of Gerry’s earliest thoughts: “It struck me that we should be embracing technology as a medium of delivery. Should learners have to fight the traffic and come into a classroom tired after a hard day? Shouldn’t they actually consume their education, training and skills digitally?”

On Gerry’s inspiration to launch PAT: “It was governed by a conviction that the market hadn't changed very much from the chalk and talk of the late eighties, right up to the mid-teens. It was still a classroom-centric delivery platform.”

On an insight from a chat on the sideline of his kid’s football game: “If you don't like change, you’ll like being irrelevant even less.”

On the Irish industry-level opportunity conveyed to Gerry by a former student, pre-Brexit: “In a post-Brexit environment, Ireland is the only remaining English speaking country within the EU. There will be fallout in London with the displacement of financial services, and some of them will migrate to the continent, but some will come to Ireland. We needed to plan for that and build a talent pipeline for that. Fintech, regtech and cybersecurity are going to be the major growth areas in financial services. That was the catalyst for PAT to adapt to where the market was going.”

On solving adjacent problems in learning and education to respond to the opportunity: “We’ve added the whole aspect of compliance in a fintech environment, money laundering in a fintech environment, data protection, cybersecurity, regtech and data analytics - the whole suite of solutions that you bring into a potential customer.”

On what’s at the core of Andrew’s beliefs about learning and education: “It’s all about demystification - you need to break it down into a language that people can understand. Let them go down the rabbit hole, encourage people's curiosity, get them to really believe in their own potential.”

LINKS:

Episode title inspired by ‘Lot to Learn’ by Luke Christopher

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