Pros
None that I can think of honestly. No advantages over any other lousy small company.
Cons
1. All the problems of Aspire stem from the C-suite (the ''Clown Suite''), who are all highly inexperienced, who not only have ZERO experience in tech, finance, investments, payments, nor risk management, they also don't have experience in the function they are supposedly leading. This then leads to the multitude of problems that the company is experiencing. The CEO - Who lacks vision, strategy and charism and is prone to shouting at the rest of the Clown Suite to get his way and views across. The Co-founder - A mild-mannered clueless dude, who prob is in charge of commercial functions (like growth, sales, business development marketing, etc), but it's hard to tell because he has zero commercial sense and his way of growing the business is to accept dodgy clients and deals and bending backwards to accommodate these dodgy clients, even when they are clearly in the wrong. No wonder the GP of the company is super low and not increasing. The CTO - has prob never written a line of code in his entire life and asks the most inane irrelevant questions in meetings. The COO - who has never worked a day in Operations his whole life. The CFO - Who actually has very little clue about Finance, investments, tax, accounting, financial risks, but likes to micromanage to makeup for his inadequacies. The CSO - a Chief Marketing Officer turned Chief strategy officer, who has no strategic views on anything, least of all the industry that the company is operating in. The CPO - Supposed to be the Chief People Officer, but is no more than a mouthpiece for the CEO. He and his team of equally inept HR personnel has zero regard for employee welfare, as well as for country-specific HR rules. 2. This leads to a very bad corporate culture where most people have no clue what they are doing, as the instructions from the top are from even more clueless people. 3. They try to hire experienced people from bigger firms, but many of them leave - some even before they start work (yes, Aspire, your bad reputation precedes you) and many within a few months. This is because these are experienced people who can smell trouble from miles aways and so they cut their losses by fleeing quickly. 4. It's not surprising that these high turnover rates (contributed by employees with short tenures) are more apparent in functions where the "trouble visibility" is the highest (think Legal, Compliance, Risk, Finance, Tech). 5. The product itself sucks. The app is full of bugs, - with new ones very created all the time, as no one in the tech team is incentivized to stay long time to make things work. The UI is poorly done, with bad English, syntax and punctuation, and just generally poorly thought out. Nothing works the way its supposed to and everything is manual in the back-end (and so error-prone). 6. And because the product is so bad, the only clients Aspire gets are the rejects who cannot open accounts with the likes of Wise, AirWallex, Revolut (i,e the bigger players with much better offerings). Think about, if a company products are bad and FX rates are worse than its competitors, what kind of Clients would still use the company's products. Answer: the kind of clients who cannot be onboarded with the rest of the world. 7. No true innovation. Or rather no innovation at all. Aspire's strategy seems to be just copying its bigger competitors. Which may be an Okay strategy, if you can do it better that your competitors. But Aspire falls flat in its attempt to copy. 8. Appallingly, this lack of innovation is embraced fully by the CEO who dared to declare in the townhall that the above strategy is a good one because only then can the company have (role) business models to copy from and benchmark itself, *roll eyes* 9. In addition, Aspire is suffering from a serious lack of strategy, for e.g about a year ago, it wanted to focus on Asia and local payouts and collections and named Indonesia as a strong growth area (where it had made an acquisition). Less than a year later, it's strategy is to focus on developed countries (because it thinks small companies in the developed countries are more willing to pay for services, as opposed to small companies in Asia... *roll eyes* ) instead, blindly applying for licenses in these highly regulated countries. 10. Poor risk culture and awareness, which means the problems are mostly snowballing. And I mean all kinds of risks, from IT risks to fraud risks, to AML risks, to financial risks. It is no wonder that the company has been struggling to get licensed in its home country for years to NO AVAIL. 11. The company also treat its employees badly. Right on the onset, even the way they grant the ESOPs (the value of your ESOPs) is designed to screw employees to their advantage. This is something most employees are not even aware of, because A) you need to first join the company first before you find out B) no training to educate employees C) everything is in fine print. 12. Pay is bad. Yes if you are a recent hire from a bigger company, your pay may be decent. But the pay increment is so bad (mostly because a) the company screws over employees, b) it is NOT growing.) And the bonus for most people is less than 1 month and likely to be less than 0.5mth going forward as the company is struggling to grow. Advice: 1. Those considering to join, you should not waste your time and risk your mental health, for zero upside. Do not believe those 5-star, 4-star reviews. They are written by the management team and the People team. One of the People team's OKRs is literally Aspire's Glassdoor rating. So they take turns to write put in fake reviews. Think about it, a happy employee will never go into Glassdoor to put in a good review. Legit reviewers on Glassdoor are always those who are looking for their next role . 2. Those still in Aspire, better jump ship fast. It's the Titanic.
