Re:Wire Episode 03 – Arun Subbiah on Zero-based Redesign, the Art of the Possible and the Speed of Execution

Re:Wire, the Experience Haus podcast
Episode 03

Host: Amit Patel, Founder, Experience Haus
Guest: Arun Subbiah, Founder of Meteor; portfolio manager and investment professional with 15 years’ experience

Watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=myfGTG6qLlk&t=1783s
Listen: https://open.spotify.com/episode/1idmRT80np2GOQPTkqwIxI

In this episode of Re:Wire, Amit sits down with Arun Subbiah. Arun spent 15 years as a portfolio manager, entrusted with other people’s pensions and wealth, before leaving to found Meteor, a platform sitting at the intersection of investment research and governance.

The conversation covers why AI has, for the first time, made it possible for a non-developer to build a real financial platform, the friction regulation adds to an adviser’s day, what “good enough” really means and why it has to be unlearned, the coming shift to direct-to-consumer investing, what should stay stubbornly human in financial advice, and the cultural shift the finance industry needs if it wants to properly embrace experimentation. It closes with Arun’s vision for Meteor over the next year.

Please note, this transcript has been lightly edited for clarity and length.

Fifteen Years as a Portfolio Manager

Amit: Welcome back, everyone, to this latest episode of Re:Wire. I’m Amit Patel, founder here at Experience Haus, and welcome to episode three. It’s great to have Arun with us today, who’s going to explain a lot of what he’s doing, what he’s up to, and the challenges he sees in the industry. Before we get into all of that, tell us a bit about who you are and what you’ve been doing over the last ten to fifteen years of your career.

Arun: Sure. I’ve been a portfolio manager for the last 15 years. Effectively that means people give me their money, their pensions, to invest, and I have the great privilege of being able to put that to work in the stock market and grow it for them. I really do call it a privilege, because it’s about people entrusting you with their wealth. Money to them is more than just a number, it’s a feeling, it’s what they can do with it, it’s a generational thing. They’re giving you that power and saying “help me achieve what I want to achieve.” I see portfolio managers and financial advisers as a bit of an unsung superhero, honestly.

Amit: I picked up on two words there that we’ll come back to, especially once we get into AI: trust and feeling. You’re now working on a startup, building your own platform. Tell us more about that.

Building Meteor: Where Investment Research Meets Governance

Arun: It goes back to that idea of knowledge. As a portfolio manager I was looking after a few hundred clients, and that was great, but I’ve always had a passion for sharing knowledge, and I started thinking about how I could democratise what’s in my head and make things easier for the industry, and maybe the wider public. That’s what became my startup, Meteor. It sits at the intersection of investment research and governance. Regulation is great, it protects people, it’s really important, but it adds friction that takes away from an adviser or portfolio manager’s ability to add value, whether that’s the client relationship side or the research side. Meteor is designed to tackle that friction.

Why AI Made This the Moment to Build

Amit: I’d love to explore how you’ve approached building it, because that’s really at the heart of what we do too, helping organisations use AI as an orchestration layer across their workflows. The Treasury has just released its adoption plan, and the Mills Review talked about what needs to happen to help organisations adopt this. Going back to your platform, what has AI actually enabled you to do in building it?

Arun: I’d say I couldn’t have started this without AI. Not necessarily because AI runs through the whole platform, but because of where else in history has there been this kind of shift to democratise an industry? I can now create a legal document, not a perfect one, but I couldn’t do that before at all. Coding is the perfect example. I’m not a developer. I have a fair, decent knowledge of coding and developer tools, but I’m not a full-time coder, and AI has completely democratised that for me, to the point where I can prototype something, wireframe it, conceptualise the idea, and then hand that off and say, “this is what we’re aiming for, this is what I think it should look like, let’s build it together.”

Amit: It’s funny you say that, because four or five years ago I used to talk about this being the perfect time to build something, purely because of access to knowledge, more platforms putting out industry knowledge, more people on YouTube sharing their journeys. But what’s changed now is the execution layer exists. You’ve touched on something important there: you don’t need to be technical, you don’t need to be overwhelmed by the technology stack, you just need the vision, the judgment, the clarity, the rigour to put into these tools, and they do the heavy lifting alongside you.

The Biggest Challenge: Data

Amit: What are some of the biggest challenges you’re facing with the platform, before we talk more broadly about the industry?

Arun: Data. My platform is very data-heavy because it’s financial, there’s a huge amount of market data I need to get hold of, so that’s probably my biggest bottleneck. We’re working through it, but challenges also present opportunity.

Amit: Going back to execution for a second, because it’s such an important point: a lot of people have ideas, but being able to execute them is another thing entirely. This is actually how I think we found each other, because if people know the tools exist, and you hand it to them and say “here’s what this can do, and it doesn’t have to be the best tool, just the one that works for you,” and let them get on with it, it’s incredible what they can build, and they’ll come up with ideas you’d never have thought of yourself.

Zero-Based Redesign and What Needed Unlearning

Amit: I want to follow on from that and take it inside organisations, because a lot of our work is helping companies redesign workflows that have legacy data and legacy structure. You can hand people the tools, or hand them the belief that redesign is even possible, but what did you personally need to unlearn to build Meteor the way you have?

Arun: Great question. For me, it was starting from scratch on what a financial platform should even look like. I looked at every other platform out there and asked myself, what’s missing here, or what’s actually stopping me from getting straight into my work? Why am I getting distracted the moment I’ve logged in to do something? So I decided to completely redesign the interface to not look like a finance platform to begin with. Instead, focus on the outcomes I want to achieve and work backwards, so the interface fits those outcomes and people can get straight into what they came to do. That’s where the AI layer comes in too, taking someone from zero to 75% of what they want to achieve in a very short period of time. That’s Meteor, in a sentence.

Amit: I think you’re absolutely right, and that’s what we call zero-based redesign, starting completely from scratch, outcome-oriented, North Star-oriented. What tends to happen with organisations or teams is they get stuck with legacy thinking, the way they run processes, the way they input data, and all of that has to be redone. At some point people settle into “well, it’s good enough.” But actually, we need to unlearn that. There are new ways of doing things, and the technology is enabling it.

Arun: That phrase, “it’s good enough,” really resonates with me. Sure, there are things we build that are good enough for the time they were built for. But if you look at where the industry is going, where the world is going, is good enough still going to be enough? I love the idea of taking a step back and not constraining yourself with that thinking. Let’s take on the big challenges if we can, and ask what this could really be, rather than what’s tied to the current data, or the current way of thinking.

What Excites Him: The Shift to Direct-to-Consumer Investing

Amit: Looking five or ten years ahead, what excites you most about the space you’re working in?

Arun: The big push to direct-to-consumer. In the US there’s roughly a fifty-fifty split between institutions and retail investors, think Robinhood and similar apps. In Europe it’s closer to twenty-five, seventy-five, so seventy-five percent of the money is still controlled by pension funds and large institutions. What could the world look like if you had the power to control your own wealth, if the whole industry gave you the education and the frictionless experience to invest your own money? I’m drawing a clear line between investing and trading there. Fiscal policy has supported this too, greater allowances for tax-free accounts like ISAs in the UK, and there’s a push for people to take more ownership themselves. The industry is catching up and starting to educate people properly. That really excites me, especially alongside the fact that over the next ten years there’s roughly seven trillion pounds of wealth set to shift in the UK from baby boomers to millennials and Gen Z, generations that grew up on smartphones and the web, not the old way of doing things.

What Should Stay Human

Amit: What do you see as the biggest blockers to the industry progressing? There’s a lot happening already, adoption plans, reviews, sandboxes, deals being signed with the likes of Anthropic and OpenAI to help organisations start experimenting.

Arun: The easy answer is regulation, and it is part of the answer, regulation is important, it really does protect retail investors. But I think it’s more a cultural shift around ownership of the problem. If you’re talking about reinventing a workflow used by thousands or millions of accounts, huge amounts of data, an education piece, a product and distribution piece, you need someone who wants to take on that talent and say, “I want to really tackle this, I can make a change here.” That ownership of the problem is probably the biggest blocker.

Amit: Ownership has come up a lot in conversations I’ve had recently. When you’re dealing with legacy workflows, there are different owners at different stages, and sometimes the owner of one stage doesn’t even know what happens in the stage before it. They just know something comes in, and something needs to go out to the next part of the workflow. Having ownership of the whole, holistic vision, and systems thinking, becomes even more important once you stop working in silos, it’s an actual shift.

Amit: You mentioned earlier what should stay human. As this shift plays out over the next five to ten years, what do you think should stay human, and where shouldn’t we be relying on AI?

Arun: I’d split that into two elements. On the client-facing, relationship side, humans still want to talk to humans, we’re doing exactly that right now. Once you’re dealing with a real level of need around your wealth, having someone to talk to matters, there’s real value in that tone of voice, in really understanding someone’s situation, and I think that will always stay. There are some great companies genuinely tackling that well, credit to them. What we’re building is different: we still think the human element is essential, but it’s about freeing that human to do the valuable part of their job. Give AI the heavy, critical-thinking-adjacent lifting, but the human judgment about what’s genuinely best for the person in front of you stays with the adviser. That’s also why, at this stage, there’s no plan for Meteor to give the end client their own login. We want the financial adviser to keep ownership and responsibility for their client, not take that away from them. And it goes further than the direct relationship too, the choices an adviser helps someone make, renewable energy versus something else, for instance, ripple out and shape the wider world. It’s all interconnected.

Inspiration: Lovable, and Just Choosing a Tool

Amit: What I love about this conversation is you’ve got two things running through it, you’re building something, and you have a vision for where the industry is going, plus this third layer, the ability to actually execute, which still needs ideas, judgment and clarity of thought behind it. Let’s talk inspiration. What’s inspired you, whether that’s your vision for helping people, or another company or platform?

Arun: The education piece is what really inspires me, being able to democratise investment knowledge into something digestible and personalised. In the UK, we teach trigonometry and calculus in maths lessons, but nothing about how to get a mortgage or use a credit card properly, things that are arguably far more useful to most people. That really pushes me, thinking about what the world would look like if people were properly educated on personal finance. Maybe one day I’ll end up in an education secretary type role and try to do something about that directly. For now, we’re the next layer up, helping people who are trying to invest and grow their wealth.

Amit: Timely too, given we’ve got a new prime minister and there’s been news this week about technology courses from age fourteen, but personal finance still isn’t on the table. Everyone says the same thing, “I wish I’d learned this earlier,” but it’s platforms like yours that start to close that gap.

Amit: Any companies you think are doing things the right way, particularly with AI?

Arun: Big shout out to the team at Lovable. It’s a brilliant app for someone with no code, not particularly technical, to get started, and they’ve made some incredible improvements over the couple of years I’ve used it. You can prototype real apps on it very quickly. There are others too, Dan Gold’s building something called Stratify, fairly new, similar territory around people investing and growing their own portfolios. But honestly, for anyone thinking about building, whether it’s Cursor, Lovable, Windsurf or anything else, people spend far too much time comparing the pros and cons. Just choose something and go, especially when the tools are changing so fast, you’ll waste more time comparing than building. The best camera is the one you actually have in your hand, not whatever’s sitting in the cupboard. I’m building a small side project myself, a journaling app for the mental side of golf, started in Claude Code, then moved into Lovable once I needed things Claude Code couldn’t quite simulate. We have the ability to engineer things so quickly now, but the real blocker is over-engineering your thinking before you’ve even started, trying to pick the “best” platform from day one.

Domain Expertise Meets Workflow: The Art of the Possible

Amit: Let’s connect the dots, because you’ve talked about your own domain expertise, and separately about workflows, how everything’s stitched together. That stitching is the value, bringing people and workflows together and showing an organisation, “here’s what you already have.” How do you unlock that? A lot of it is the unlearning and unlocking we talked about, but also, what’s the North Star, what’s the outcome we actually need to deliver, whether that’s to a consumer or a client, and how do we use that to redesign around it. It’s exactly what you’re doing with fifteen, twenty years of knowledge, it just needs the unlock, the relearning, and then the right tools to make some of those ideas real.

Amit: Are there other organisations out there you think have really picked up on this and are doing well?

Arun: In the startup world, the ones that stand out are relentless about continual feedback, talking to customers constantly and feeding that straight back into what they’re building. The tighter that feedback loop, the better your chances. There are too many good examples to single one out. With larger organisations, I won’t name names, but the ones getting it right are shortening their cycle of red tape, using sandbox environments, letting people experiment quickly, which ties into the adoption plans and sandbox thinking the regulators in Europe are leaning into.

Amit: That resonates with what we’ve seen too. The organisations that stand out to us are the ones who came to us a year or two ago and said “show us what’s possible,” the art of the possible, before they’d even properly set up a sandbox, before they had people working outside the normal environment playing with tools. Those are the ones now leading on wider adoption, the training they’ve built out, and the work they’re doing on actual workflows.

The Cultural Shift Finance Needs

Amit: I want to round off with this idea of cultural shift, because building a startup and getting your product into people’s hands to gather feedback constantly is itself a cultural shift that never used to happen. We used to work in waterfall environments, build something for six or eight months, then show it to people. Now you can get feedback daily and make incremental improvements constantly. What cultural shifts do you think the industry needs to make to get closer to that vision?

Arun: I love “art of the possible” as a tagline, by the way. Speaking from my experience in finance specifically, it comes back to ownership again. In banking and finance, there’s a tendency to default to projects that are commercially obvious straight away, things that will visibly affect the bottom line within twelve months. What I’d like to see more of is organisations taking a moment to experiment quickly across four or five smaller projects and seeing which ones actually have traction, rather than unpacking a committee, a viability study, a market survey, and all the process that sits around a single big idea before anyone’s allowed to touch it. If someone says “I’ve got this idea, I want to take ownership and tackle it, even if it’s a big problem,” organisations should let them. Team-building exercises are good, and worth doing, but when someone inside the organisation is already saying “I want to drive this, help me do it,” that’s the moment to let them run.

Amit: That’s come up a lot in conversations I’ve had recently too, giving people space within a team to experiment and see what’s possible. It benefits the whole organisation, because that knowledge gets shared afterwards. One bank we’ve worked with took twenty or thirty people out for a couple of days purely to explore the art of the possible, and they’re now genuinely leading the way, not just on broad AI adoption, but on getting employees comfortable using it day to day, and starting to build out things like digital employees to handle some of the heavier lifting.

Arun: I agree completely. I think one of the biggest blockers is simply the bottom line, needing to hit certain delivery measurables, and experimentation being the first thing that gets dropped when that pressure hits. But it’s exactly the companies that embed experimentation into how they work that end up leading.

The Vision for Meteor

Amit: What’s the future for Meteor? What’s the mission, and where would you like to be in the next year?

Arun: A lot of it is about people’s day to day. Everyone has their own way of doing things, even inside an organised, organisational workflow, there’s a minute, personal version of that workflow specific to you, taking a couple of hours a day, that you don’t even register as separate from your job. Imagine someone took a day out with you and said, “let’s find the tools, AI or otherwise, that could genuinely help with this,” and then put you back into your day, but with that unlocked. It feeds into the wider workflow, but for the individual it’s incredibly powerful.

Amit: That ties right back to what we were talking about earlier, workflows and jobs to be done. What’s the core job that person actually needs to get done? It’s unlocking something for someone, in service of the wider workflow, but you need that focus, and ownership of the whole vision, to make it work.

Amit: Without going into too much detail, what does the next year actually look like for you?

Arun: Meteor is a real passion project for me, democratising investment product data, portfolio construction, and, just as importantly, the governance around it, for portfolio managers and financial advisers. In the UK we have Consumer Duty, and there are similar regulations across Europe, and that takes time away from the valuable work advisers should be doing. The two feed each other though, if you can do more valuable work, you can mitigate some of the governance burden that comes with it. For the next year, it’s really about building that out, getting close to our customers, understanding their pain points, and empathising with them. Having done this job for fifteen years myself, I completely understand it, and we’re learning as much as they are. We want to use whatever resources we have to build something genuinely for them. It should always be about the end consumer, and that’s exactly what I want to make happen.

Amit: What I love about that is two words jump out immediately, empathy, really understanding who the end user is and making sure you deliver value to them, and rigour, staying disciplined about a clear mission. That’s the real challenge now, when almost anything you can imagine can get built quickly, staying focused enough to say “no, that’s not what this platform is about, we’re not adding that just because we can.” When you start from a blank page, a million branches open up along the way, and you have to keep checking which ones are pulling you toward where you actually want to go, which are pure distraction, and which are worth a note for later.

Arun: It is so easy to drift from the mission in this world. Which is exactly why leading with outcome, the way you do, matters so much. And prioritisation sits right alongside it, because rapid feedback gives you more ideas, other companies inspire you, you’ll have your own ideas too, and constant prioritisation is what keeps you focused on where you’re actually going.

Amit: Hopefully we get you back on next year to hear how the journey’s gone. Thank you so much for joining us today, really enjoyed hearing your story, and I’m sure we’ll be collaborating soon, maybe some labs and hackathons together.

Arun: Exciting. Thank you so much for having me.

Arun Subbiah is Founder of Meteor, building AI-native tools for portfolio managers and financial advisers. Follow Re:Wire for more conversations on zero-based redesign, unlearning, and the future of work.