Coworking in the Countryside with QPQ

As part of our new blog series on coworking in the countryside, we’re interviewing members at the Business Barn to understand more about what they do, how they work and what attracted them to working remotely here at the Barn. This week we interview Aidan Finn, a co-founder at QPQ. Stay tuned for more interviews from our diverse community.  

• So you work with QPQ, tell us more about what the company does?

We are creating a solution that ultimately will save anyone dealing in B2B transactions a lot of money and in turn add to their bottom line. We are doing this by building a multi-faceted technology solution that uses an enterprise-grade distributed ledger technology platform that integrates using a lot of other innovations to “pull it all together”.

• What’s your background and how did you end up working with QPQ?

My background is that of general business management, operations, managing director and similar leadership roles in business. My interest in technology has always been down to two things: 1. A pure hobby interest. 2. Out of absolute frustration at the untold scale of inefficiencies in general business to business trading. Usually, this inefficiency stems around what I have always believed to be unnecessary steps that could be countered by better use of technology. When I got talking to Greg, our founder at QPQ in late 2017, I could resonate entirely with his frustrations, albeit in different industries and at a different scale internationally to my own in an Irish to Uk context mainly. The QPQ solution struck me as brilliant, ambitious, large scale and entirely necessary, hence I joined forces with Greg as the first co-founder pretty quickly thereafter.

• What does a typical day look like for you at the office?

08:00 – 08:30 start.. these days usually a late evening finish… That is a bit of a moving feast, depending on what needs doing. Currently, there’s lot’s of research and admin on my side as we are building and expanding. This involves a UK company registration and additionally, a United States Inc also looming… That means a lot of not too exciting but necessary work ongoing for me right now. The office base suits what I am doing just now. We use a project management/task manager tool. I update my to-do list on an ongoing basis and refer to that consistently. I try to spend some time each day reviewing articles or LinkedIn updates to ensure I keep up to speed with what’s ongoing in the Fin-Tech (or Tech-Fin) space. We try to help each other out on that front and copy links to useful articles, provide summaries and update these to our research libraries and share with the growing team.

Some weeks, I will have to travel to London for meetings and that breaks up the week and lets me catch up with our two UK based team members additionally.

• What brought you to the Business Barn and how have you found working in this environment?

We don’t need a city centre base. I hate the idea of having to endure that Dublin city centre commute, whether by public transport or by driving or cycling. Every day, it seems, we hear radio news bulletins around more problems with the city centre heaving at the seams. For me, that is unnecessary. For QPQ right now and maybe always for our Irish base, we don’t see the need to join that rat race. Having a space that has ease of access to get to, a sense of peace and a view as “green” as we do along with the option to clear the head with a walk in the field is something different to the norm and we certainly like and value that.

• What exciting projects are you working on over the next 12 months?

It is pretty mind-blowing sometimes for me, not just the people and entities we are talking to and dealing with, but the calibre of people internationally who have joined the QPQ team. There are very many really exciting pieces we are working on, but can’t disclose just yet. One really exciting piece generally, however, is our first product that will go to market soon. That is a distributed digital investment banking service. For an “issuer” seeking an alternative way to raise finance, we will provide the technology to digitalise a fractionalised piece of a real-world asset of theirs and provide that as a digitally distributed investment opportunity for a much wider demographic than usual channels. For an investor, we will provide an on-line “serving” of investment opportunities that are accessible in real-time digitally, through an on-line link. The digital trading of securities as Security Token Offerings allows so many asset classes to be distributed at a fraction of the normal cost to do so. The ease of classifying and accessing the appropriate class of investors digitally and directly also really disrupts how such investment opportunities are normally accessed.

• Where can people find out more about you and QPQ?

www.qpq.io is our website and check me or any of the team out on LinkedIn