There is broad agreement that AI will reshape the workforce. What remains less clear is how that shift will play out in practice for workers and employers alike—which roles are changing first, where new opportunities will emerge, and how best to navigate the transition.
Matt Perault sat down with Nick Catino, global head of policy at Deel, to better understand what today’s data can already tell us. Through its HR and payroll platform, Deel works with 35,000 customers and 1.5 million workers across more than 150 countries, giving the company a broad view across employers, geographies, and job categories as AI begins to change hiring and work.
In this episode, Nick walks through what Deel is seeing firsthand. That includes a 40% increase in the share of companies opening new AI roles in 2025. Deel’s recent global hiring report also found more than 70,000 AI trainer roles across 600-plus organizations, with nearly 60% of those roles located in the U.S., and AI trainer positions emerging as the fastest-growing global role on Deel’s platform.
The conversation also explores what these shifts mean for policy. If AI is going to change how people work, Nick argues smart policy should focus on helping workers build AI fluency and new skills, supporting students as they prepare to enter the workforce, and giving startups the clarity they need as they hire and scale.
Nick brings a valuable Little Tech perspective, drawing on his experience building public policy functions at fast-growing startups. For founders thinking about why startups need a seat at the table, along with when and how to engage with policymakers, this conversation is especially worthwhile.
Topics covered:
01:02: Deel’s global hiring view
02:15: Building a startup policy function
06:40: Data as a policy tool
10:08: Early signals on AI and the workforce
12:35: Job shifts and emerging roles
15:18: Policy levers to support workers
22:10: Why regulatory certainty matters for Little Tech
24:49: Scaling Deel’s data insights
27:08: The rise of AI trainer roles
29:24: Lessons from building public policy functions at fast-growing startups
32:53: Why policymakers want to hear from Little Tech
This transcript has been edited lightly for readability.
Nick Catino (00:00)
You see some jobs go away, some jobs emerge, most jobs end up changing in some capacity. That’s what’s happening now. We’re seeing an increase of 40% in the share of companies with AI specific jobs. 70% of companies had moved beyond the pilot phase of AI integration. 91% of people told us roles have already changed within their companies.
Policymakers are hearing from big banks or even big tech non-stop, they want to hear from say, Little Tech. They want to hear from the startups. Make sure you have a seat at the table. Regulatory uncertainty or not knowing what’s coming out of Washington, if it could have a material impact on your business? That’s a pretty big problem. You need to see that coming.
Matt Perault (00:48)
Nick Catino, Global Head of Public Policy at Deel. Thanks so much for coming on the a16z AI Policy Brief.
Nick Catino (00:54)
Hey Matt, thanks for having me. I’m excited to be here.
Matt Perault (00:56)
So first things first, it would be great to have a sense of what Deell is. So tell me a little bit about the company.
Nick Catino (01:02)
Yeah, Deel is a payroll and HR platform. We help companies hire, manage, and pay their workforce globally. We have 37,000 and counting companies on our platform and 1.5 million workers. Customers include tech and AI companies like Anthropic, Reddit, Shopify. We have enterprise customers like Coca-Cola and DuPont. But a real bread and butter are startups and SMBs, those that are expanding globally to new markets for the first time.
And then we’re sitting here in Washington, D.C. as foreign companies that want to invest here, hire American workers. That’s really the value prop we offer. And what makes us unique, and particularly why I’m excited to have this conversation, is the real-time employment data that provides. We have access to seeing how companies are expanding to new markets, their hiring trends, lots of stuff very relevant right now as we sit in Washington and talk about AI and its impact on jobs and society.
Matt Perault (01:59)
I’m sure there’s a ton we can talk about on the business side, but this is a policy podcast. So, I’m really interested in understanding why Deel would hire a policy person? What is the value that you’re providing to the firm?
Nick Catino (02:15)
Well, we’re growing fast. So I joined two and a half years ago. We’re only six years old, going on seven now. As a company, you already hit a billion in revenue and lofty valuation, but really it’s because of the scale of the problem we’re solving. Historically, it was really hard for companies to expand to new markets and hire and manage their workforce on a single platform. They would have all these different systems all around the world. Now, because of Deel, they can use us for everything.
And ultimately, we’re helping them with compliance and how they hire, manage and pay that workforce and there’s a realization within the company that we have responsibility not just to tell our customers what the law is in markets, but we can actively partner with governments sometimes to shape it, but also to help answer questions for our customers and just be ever present. So really it’s a reflection of our growth and the problem we’re solving.
We recently expanded to having two people on the policy team. So someone in Europe, myself here in the U.S. I’ve had the opportunity here during my time at Deel to travel the world and talk to governments and introduce them to the company, share with them what we’re hearing from customers, our employment data, trying to be a resource and a partner to them.
And then ultimately, I do joke internally sometimes that everyone at the company actually works in policy. Because everything we put out, our product, the services, if you use that, and that’s true for any of your portfolio companies, you’re ultimately putting yourself in front of those external stakeholders like the government. So everyone has a role when it comes to policy or government affairs within your respective company because you’re creating what people are seeing and using and that ultimately has an influence on policy making.
Matt Perault (04:02)
I’m curious about how you decide how to allocate your time. Because I think when people hear like a billion dollars in annual revenue, that sounds like a large company. We’re focused at a16z on Little Tech companies. And I think obviously when you’ve had the success that you’ve had, you’re sort of growing out of a little phase.
But you’re still really different from lots of Big Tech companies, some of the ones that are typically in the front page of the newspaper. When you think about tackling policy issues, how are you deciding what you have bandwidth to do? One example is there’s a lot of activity now at the state level, like more than 1,000 AI bills. Are those the kinds of, is that something that you’re able to track with a lot of depth and closeness, or is that something that is really hard when you’re a team of the size that you are?
Nick Catino (04:48)
Prioritization is the right question. I often talk about ruthless prioritization. You need to focus on where you can drive the most impact. That’s not always necessarily tracking. There’s a lot of people that do that. But I view my responsibility and a policy function’s responsibility as building strategic relationships with policymakers and regulators and governments in tier one markets. And you’re explaining to people internally, because they often ask, what is policy? Do you write internal policies for the company?
No, our responsibility is to build those relationships, proactively shape our brand, and ultimately influence laws and regulations and policymaking on behalf of our customers and the broader ecosystem. And the way I organize my time, I try to think about proactive, reactive, and thought leadership and content.
The proactive is where we identify opportunities to work with governments, like we signed an MOU, a strategic partnership with the US Commerce Department a year and a half ago because they recognize that Deel helps facilitate trade and investments. We did a series of events around the world and here in the U.S. with the Commerce Department.
Reactive is when there are some regulatory challenges that emerge and you want to go meet with governments and explain the role you’re playing and how you operate and just be open and honest.
And in the thought leadership and content, I started my career in journalism, actually. And so that’s always one of the most fun parts of the brand building, like the AI and Workforce Policy Report we did in the fall, and the research and data-driven storytelling that we’re doing. Media, like what you and I are doing right now. And so I try to prioritize my time in tier one markets with the right stakeholders. it’s really important that you’re ultimately an external rep of the company so you don’t spend too much time internally.
Matt Perault (06:40)
So let’s talk a little bit more about the report that you were alluding to. Before we get into the meat of it, I really want to understand the specifics. Let’s talk about it in the context of prioritization. Why was a report on workforce trends something that you thought was a good way for you leading policy at Deel to spend your time on?
Nick Catino (07:00)
Yeah, it’s a conversation driver and it’s important to note the prioritization point that smart companies work with governments. I think there’s often a hesitancy to talk to regulators or governments too early when a company’s founded because you’re scared of what there is and that’s part of, to the point of why Deel created my role. It’s a recognition that we’re larger now and we want to be a proactive positive partner.
Matt Perault (07:24)
The phrase that I always heard was, “break into jail.” You don’t want to go and reach out when you don’t have an issue. But it seems to me like that’s kind of a mindset that’s shifting a little bit, that companies are now saying the risk is outweighed by the benefit of showing that you want to be a responsible player, you want to be in dialogue with government, you see the opportunity for companies to sell to government. It sounds like that’s what you guys are saying.
Nick Catino (07:46)
You put it great. It can be an opportunity driver, a growth driver, and it can help mitigate risks by being proactive with governments. Another phrase that used to hear a lot was, it’s better to ask for forgiveness than permission. And I think that flips a little bit as a company grows to a certain size, they realize governments are already paying attention to you. You’re already on their radar, so you might as well engage proactively.
And so right now, every government around the world is talking about AI and they want to understand how it’s going to impact their workforce among other things, and that’s really the role we can play. And so our policy report that started as a passion project, I was in Singapore about a year and a half ago, spoke at their AI summit, and I had a talk track on some of the changes that were happening in AI regulation and policymaking from 2024 to 2025. My premise was that a lot of that was driven by a change in the US administration and their approach and it resonated really well. I could feel the audience at that event during my presentation, during the panels I did, just really hanging on to my words. And so that’s what kicked off on my flight home, couldn’t sleep, I’m on my laptop, and I started jotting down some of the things I had been saying, some of it off the cuff, and that led to not just the narrative, we can get into some of that, but also then pulling Deel’s data, and what are we seeing? What are the trends that are happening? How are jobs being created, being eliminated, what are the new roles we’re seeing, and then what were some of our policy recommendations?
It started off as a passion project, but it ended up as a pretty comprehensive report we were able to take to governments and use that to lead conversations. As much as we can, kick off some data-driven partnerships where we would love to be a resource, seeing how AI companies are expanding and hiring, how industries are changing jobs, say less entry level hiring, how they’re creating new roles, and we’re sharing that productively.
Matt Perault (09:47)
So obviously there’s lots of anxiety about the potential disruption in labor markets. And that can come in a lot of different forms. But I think the general idea is that AI is coming for our jobs. It’s coming for your job. You won’t be employed in the future because of AI. What were you seeing in the data? How does it give you hints at how to think about answering that question?
Nick Catino (10:08)
Yeah, I don’t buy that premise and you may not either. I think ultimately we’ve seen throughout history there are technological changes from automation to even the impacts of global trade and you see some jobs go away, some jobs emerge, most jobs end up changing in some capacity. That’s what’s happening now. The difference may be the time scale. Automation may have taken many decades. It might be what automation did over 100 years, what trade did over 50, AI could do in the next 10. So that is scary to a lot of people and rightfully so. And so we understand, you see announcements coming out that you have those entry-level, repetitive tasks that can be automated or starting to be automated pretty quickly by companies. You see new types of jobs emerging, AI tutors, AI trainers. And so we commissioned research. We have our own data and lots of interesting stuff we’re finding in that.
But we also commissioned research into 22 different countries. We surveyed 5,500 business and IT leaders about the impact of AI on their companies and their workforce. And this was the end of last year, which already feels stale, by the way. Here we are a few months into the year because everything’s moving so fast. But what we found was pretty astonishing.
We found 70% of companies had moved beyond the pilot phase of AI integration and so now it was actually embedded within their companies in some capacity. 91% of people told us roles have already changed within their companies. That was probably the stat that stood out most to me. And then we also saw two thirds of entry level jobs are being impacted. So again, this was 5,500 business leaders across 2,200 countries. Country by country, the results were pretty consistent there. AI is now within their companies. They’re widely using it.
91% told us roles were changing and two-thirds says it’s probably going to impact or slow their entry-level hiring. The changes from AI are here.
Matt Perault (12:12)
And then, I mean, you said in general, you sort of think of the story that we will tell ourselves at some point in the future about the impact of AI on the labor force is that it will be a positive one. This is some preliminary data you’re seeing that there will be a change. Are you seeing things in the data that suggest to you that your positive outlook will actually be borne out?
Nick Catino (12:35)
I think so, the types of jobs that are emerging, I mentioned earlier, AI tutors, AI trainers, we’re seeing an increase of 40% in the share of companies with AI specific jobs.
Matt Perault (12:46)
So it’s not that the jobs are disappearing. It’s more the emphasis on the shift, not yes or no, but shift.
Nick Catino (12:52)
So look at the World Economic Forum. Every year they put out their jobs report, it gets a lot of attention. They found something like 93 million jobs would be eliminated by 2030, not all due to AI, other factors as well, but they found almost double would be created. And you’ve seen this in past shifts. I mentioned automation and trade. Now the unfortunate part of that, and I spent a decade up on Capitol Hill, I’ve been in tech for seven plus years, but spent a decade working in politics. And the perception of trade was always that while the benefits are widely shared, the pain is often very concentrated. And it’s the same thing here, I would expect. There might be types of people, those that don’t have the ability to develop AI fluency. They’re with companies not supporting them in their journey to move to AI integrated roles. So there are going to be some negative impacts for people. That’s why it’s so important that from schools and universities to the workplace, to even the government, that there is a focus on AI adoption and AI fluency. That’ll help protect against some of that. We should understand the concerns about job losses are not manufactured. Some jobs will go away, but a lot more will be created.
Technology has the ability to make life better. We’ve seen that throughout history. And I think it will. There are really difficult jobs that people had 100 years ago or 50 years ago. You think of a picture of a steel mill 100 years ago to turn into the 20th century. There were people all over the floor, in some cases, actually turning the molten steel. My own great grandfather died in a coal mine accident now 90 plus years ago. Those are difficult jobs that people had really hard taxing, not for much money. And so if technology produces better jobs, which it has, there’s no reason to think that trend won’t continue.
Matt Perault (14:50)
So this report tries to do a bunch of different things. outline the general issue, you provide this data, but then you also have this policy recommendation section. So what do you think, and you seem like the perfect person to blend all these things. You’re at Deel now, you’re looking at the data, you’re thinking about what the company’s objectives are, but then you also, as you said, you’ve got this background on the Hill. So making this transition from data to policy recommendations is a natural one for you. What do you recommend? Like what is the right set of things for Congress and the administration and maybe even states to do?
Nick Catino (15:18)
Yeah, the way we’re thinking about AI policy at Deel, first, we help our companies comply. So we try to stay relatively neutral, whether the law is viewed as good or bad, complicated or easy. We’re ultimately helping them. We do think it makes sense to be easier. But the way governments have been looking at AI regulation, or at least AI initiatives now, I should say, over the last year focuses primarily on talent, industry, and infrastructure.
And so you see governments talking about, we need to make sure we have domestic AI talent. They’re fluent. They use AI. We succeed. The industry needs to support our startups and businesses, help them integrate AI into their services and infrastructure, chips and energy. So we’re thinking a little bit about it in the same way.
So on the talent side, it is important that governments support their workers and they build that fluency and they make sure that there’s the skills there in place. Upskilling exists, it’s needed now more than ever. We also have a mobility service within Deel. High skilled migration can plug that skills gap. So we’ve always been pretty outspoken in our support for companies. You should want the best and brightest within your countries. And there’s certainly an opportunity to attract AI talent. So that’s certainly part of the talent aspect.
When you think about industry, that’s making sure startups and SMBs have the resources they need. So a lot of governments have proposed grants or technical assistance to make sure that those resources are in place.
And then finally on the infrastructure, which yes, governments are looking at chips and energy, we’re thinking about it in terms of governance as well. Companies do have responsible to have an AI policy for responsible use in place, making sure the technology that they’re developing is ultimately used correctly.
And so our policy recommendations try to align with the way governments are thinking about it, the talent, industry, and infrastructure.
Matt Perault (17:19)
So let’s go a little deeper on the policy recommendations. We’ve advocated in lots of different contexts and it applies in this one as well, that we should really focus at least initially on using existing laws to achieve what we want to achieve in an AI world. It may be that we need to do various different things to adjust existing laws or plug holes, but at least as a starting point, we should focus on how we can use the laws that are already on the books to protect against harms or promote good positive things in an AI world.
I would love to get your take on what are the laws on the books, what are the policy tools that exist right now to help support workers in a transition to an AI economy.
Nick Catino (18:01)
Yeah, that’s a good point. And that’s often lost on people that just because there’s no federal AI law or regulation right now, it doesn’t mean that there aren’t applicable laws and regulations. There’s a lot of them. You think about everything from existing privacy laws at the state level to anti-discrimination, employment law, consumer protections, workplace safety. There’s a lot of laws and regulations in place today that are highly applicable to the AI tools being built, even whistleblower, if there were to be something identified that’s happening, that certainty is what companies need to operate under. It does not mean that there’s an absence of AI laws. While everything’s being debated, I think companies shouldn’t get too distracted by seeing something introduced. That comes up a lot in our company. A customer will see that a random bill was introduced in a state or in Congress and they want to know what it means for them. Anyone can introduce a bill that’s different from a law or regulation. So understand what’s on the books now and how it fits into what you’re developing, and that’s your roadmap.
Matt Perault (19:10)
In the conversations that we’ve had on this topic, one thing that has been, I think there have actually been two things that have been really striking. One is how bipartisan the conversations are. So Republicans and Democrats, at least to me, both seem concerned about the disruption. And then the second component is these conversations, I think, are less adversarial than others because really both sides are trying to figure out what is the set of things that we could propose that would support workers in the event that they’re disrupted. I’m curious about how, what the experience has been like for you when you’re taking this report to the Hill, to the administration, it seems like you do a lot of international travel as well, so to foreign governments, how receptive are they to the policy recommendations that you’ve included?
Nick Catino (19:52)
Yeah, first, the shift has been pretty striking from 2024 to 2025. Under the Biden administration, there was a focus on AI safety and governance and avoiding that terminator-like outcome. And then a lot of other countries had a similar approach, the EU with the AI Act, and you saw proposals elsewhere that focused really on AI safety. President Trump and his administration started focusing more on domestic competitiveness, and countries pretty quickly followed suit. And you see even the EU now is you could say rolling back parts of the EU AI Act. So that change in the policymaking environment is as stark on any issue as I can remember.
Matt Perault (20:31)
How does it affect what you’re actually like the issues that you’re wrestling with here in the report?
Nick Catino (20:36)
Yeah, it was good timing for us in the sense that we were helping our customers comply. We really started thinking about how we could lean in on behalf of our customers, how we could leverage that data to help educate policymakers in 2025. We’ve really proactively engaged, it’s those, the hiring trends is what’s really exciting for a lot of governments outside the U.S., particularly in Asia Pacific recently, governments were excited to see that some of these Big Tech and AI companies were expanding to their markets. That’s what they want to see, that development of talent. They want to see that adoption. At the same time, there is a little bit of dare I say, protectionist element going on right now where the U.S. is in the lead, I would say, whether you agree or not on AI, other countries want to make sure they’re not dependent on the U.S. or China for that technology.
Kind of like with cloud right now, most of Europe uses American tech companies for the cloud. I’ve heard that come up a lot where there’s a desire, particularly within Europe, to make sure that they have their own thriving AI ecosystem. There’s a lot of resources being imported now to ensure they’re not relying on the American companies. So that’s been certainly a through line, a little bit of a championing your AI industries domestically and AI talent domestically, infrastructure domestically. So that is the number one trend we’re seeing.
Matt Perault (22:07)
How does that affect Deel or the companies that you’re working with? It’s a business opportunity but at the same time you have your own compliance that you have to do as well so yeah so you have your own compliance cost.
Nick Catino (22:10)
Yeah, we certainly hear from our customers all the time about how difficult it would be to comply with 150 different regulatory regimes. There’s certainly a desire to have cross-border harmonization on whatever regulatory approaches emerge. The more difficult it is, we’ll ultimately help them comply. We’re pretty agnostic in that regard.
Nick Catino (22:37)
Yeah, and you could make the case and people say that sometimes. Well, if employment law is very fragmented at the US state, local, or globally across different countries, that’s good for you all. Same thing on AI regulation. We’ve always taken the approach that simpler is actually better. In the EU right now, it was recently proposed to not require registration for entities in all 27 different EU countries.
We support things that make it simpler for our companies to do business. Ultimately, we know they’ll need us. So harmonization, simplicity, I think ultimately that’s a good thing. That’s our position.
Matt Perault (23:15)
A lot of people, when we have conversations about regulatory patchworks and compliance costs and what you’re describing as 150 different regulatory regimes, I think people kind of like roll their eyes sometimes because they sort of think that what the general thrust is just trying to get regulation down to zero. That’s not what we have advocated for as a firm, but I think people have that sense that that’s what the implication is. And often when you sort of go quickly to what the solution is, I think it can enable you to not spend enough time really wrestling with the problem. It sounds like from your perspective, you do hear routinely from companies that you work with about the potential compliance challenges and yes, you’ll help them when they need help, but you are hearing from them about how difficult it is just to comply. Sounds like just on the labor and payroll type issues across different jurisdictions. Is that accurate?
Nick Catino (24:02)
Yeah, and clarity is key. There is a belief sometimes that it’s, oh, maybe the tech industry doesn’t want regulation. I think, at least from our perspective, a lot of our customers, they just want certainty. I get more questions about the uncertainty over what’s being proposed and how it will impact them than I do once a law or regulation passes. Because then at that point, well, that’s just what you have to do. That’s how you comply. It’s always the uncertainty that is pretty taxing and creates issues for a lot of our companies. So certainty should be the goal.
Matt Perault (24:31)
So I’m curious, going back to you leading this policy function and just thinking about how you’re going to prioritize different things. You’ve had this experience with the report. What does that suggest about how things look going forward? Like, are you guys going to continue to do regular labor updates or similar kinds of research projects?
Nick Catino (24:49)
Yeah, Deel just hired its first economist, and part of the goal is to move away from what had been a little bit of an infrequent cadence of putting out our data and storytelling.I think of in our space, employment, ADP, they put out their monthly jobs report, and you see the entire market and economy, at least domestically here in the U.S., follows the ADP report that comes out the week before the official US government’s jobs report.
Well, we’re really the only company that has access to all worker types globally. Now, we’re still scaling. We certainly don’t have the depth of stats that ADP would have here in the U.S. But we have insight into some global trends across all worker types that likely no one else has. That’s certainly where we can be a resource to governments and just to other external stakeholders.
Matt Perault (25:44)
What is the thing that you, running this policy function, that you most want governments to understand that it seems like they don’t, that constantly kind of comes up in meetings where you hope over time that there will be a shift in the conversation?
Nick Catino (25:57)
My goal with policy is that we’re viewed as a trustworthy partner. And we have so many of not just the customers, the businesses that we’ve talked a lot about today, but the workers themselves. And so we can be a resource as they think about not just how to regulate the tech industry or AI companies or businesses, but we see what workers have in terms of benefits and what they still need particularly in the US, from health insurance to HSAs and FSAs and other countries have pension plans. There’s so many elements that are worker-centric. We have one and a half million workers on our platform already. We’re getting closer and closer to the workers. The customers are the businesses, but we’re really starting to become more worker-centric. And I’m excited for us to be a resource on how we can help ensure that workers have the resources they need and they have a voice with governments as well.
Matt Perault (27:00)
So in this conversation, we focused a lot on your workforce trends report, but you’ve actually recently released new data. Can you talk a little bit about that?
Nick Catino (27:08)
Yeah, Deel is releasing its global hiring report, it’s been on annual cadence in the past. The next one that’s gonna be out by the time this is heard, we’ll see AI trainer positions having grown 283 % cross border in 2025. We saw most of these jobs, the majority of them actually, in the US. And so these AI trainer roles were seeing something like 70,000 workers for 600 companies. And so they’re helping develop and refine AI systems. And that’s the human feedback that’s ensuring that the systems are learning and getting better based on the prompts they’re getting and the output. And so it’s exciting to see such tremendous growth. We talked a lot about jobs disappearing. Well, here’s a classic example of jobs emerging. And that’s a considerable amount, 70,000 just on the Deel platform alone. The majority of them were in the US, as I said already. And these are just an incredible amount of software developers and AI engineers that are being hired globally right now.
Matt Perault (28:16)
I think one thing that people are hungry for now is really metrics, like that people want to understand what is happening in labor markets. Sounds like this is a report that you’ve done this year, you’ve done it in the past. Are you expecting to do it annually going forward?
Nick Catino (28:29)
Yeah, we’ve done it annually in the past. This will be at an annual cadence right now, but we need to be doing this more often. So we’ve been supplementing it with blogs or short white papers and really just trying to increase the cadence of how we’re sharing our data because there’s certainly a desire for it from governments. And not just when you talk about policy, that’s not just the officials themselves, it’s also the think tanks and academics. And we have a series of academic partnerships underway where there are universities using our data, of course, anonymized and aggregated, no personal information shared, but that way they can also see trends and use that data to decide what that means, what it’s telling us.
Matt Perault (29:13)
So you came to Deell a couple of years ago, you’ve talked about you growing your team and what you’re trying to do here. Can you talk a little bit about your background? How did you end up at Deel?
Nick Catino (29:24)
Yeah, I started my career in journalism first. I was a high school kid, played sports, I was on the high school newspaper and had the opportunity to go write for a local newspaper that’s pretty big. It was the top 80 paper in the U.S. in Allentown, Pennsylvania. And I was writing the sports stories about high school games and I was even in a newsroom on the evening of 9-11 when President Bush addressed the nation and it was just one of those classic newsroom moments that really kicked off that passion for me, and somehow ended up going from journalism to politics.
Instead of maybe writing about it, I wanted to be part of the actual newsmaking, and spent a decade on Capitol Hill, mostly on the Senate Banking Committee. I led the International Finance Subcommittee and worked for a bunch of members while I was up there and had the opportunity while on Senate Banking to negotiate a major law in 2018 that made changes to Dodd-Frank. And that was the first major banking legislation at the time in nearly a decade.
And after that, I decided I did not want to go become a big bank lobbyist. I knew the way I used financial services had changed. On my phone, I used Betterment and had Robinhood, Coinbase and Venmo. It was very different from what my parents were using. And I discovered this payments company called TransferWise out of the UK that was looking for someone in the US, New York City-based to lead their consumer education campaigns about the cost of sending money abroad, hidden fees that exist. Fortunately for me, they hired someone DC based and it was a bit of like a policy job with grassroots consumer education and helped ultimately scale that function there, led the global team within about a year of joining what became Wise, spent five years there and had the opportunity to go to governments and help them modernize their payment systems.
We should have real-time payments. In the US, it’s finally here, though not fully adopted yet. Still takes a couple of days to get a paycheck. We got to raise awareness about the hidden fees that exist in cross-border payments, make the case that fintechs, non-bank payment companies, should have access to payments infrastructure and open banking was something we spent a lot of time on, not just in the U.S., but around the world.
About two and a half years ago, I finished my time at Wise when Deel was looking for someone to help build their function. And I’d really enjoyed that zero to one phase of my time at then TransferWise, where you’re building a function and helping build the policy muscle within a company. We’re explaining to them why it’s smart to proactively engage with governments. That’s what the smartest companies do. We talked earlier about not asking for permission afterwards. I do think it can be a growth lever when you’re proactively engaging with governments. So it’s been a great journey at Deell. We’ve continued scaling and growing and building those relationships around the world.
Matt Perault (32:27)
It seems like you really deliberately chose small, not big. You were thinking of like, what is this Hill experience? What can I do with it? And big banks were kind of the natural path and you deliberately chose small. So can you talk a little bit more about just what it’s like to be at a startup? How is that different, you think, from how a big path would have looked? And what advice do you have for startups or for people who work on policy at startups for thinking about how to grow this part of their work?
Nick Catino (32:53)
Now, I’ve been in tech seven years, so it’s second nature. I’ve worked remote mostly for seven years, spent a lot of time traveling, including at Wise’s in the New York office. But I remember when I left Capitol Hill after a decade of wearing suits and being in the office every day, and then a week later, I’m going on the train up to New York. I’m overdressed, and I felt very conscious of being overdressed. Yeah, and so now I’m going in a hoodie and jeans in the New York office.
So I certainly felt like a fish out of the water at first when I joined Wise, but it was exciting to be part of their journey. And so some of the lessons that I learned both in building the function at Deel now when I was at Wise is, yes, we talked earlier about it’s smart to engage with governments. Let’s take that as a given. It’s internally building that muscle that is really difficult. You’re helping your colleagues understand why you would want to be attuned to some of the, whether geopolitical or macro shifts happening, how there’s a chance maybe to influence some of the policymaking as it goes through the process. You know, policymakers are hearing from big banks or even big tech, nonstop. They want to hear from, say, Little Tech. They want to hear from the startups.
That was part of the motivation when I was at Wise, we were co-founder of the U.S. Financial Technology Association, which is now a massive player here in D.C. They have a big staff, all the big financial technology companies are part of that trade association. It’s been incredible to see them grow. But at the time when I joined, then TransferWise, it felt like fintech did not have a voice in Washington. So I think from an influence perspective, to make sure you have a seat at the table, it is important that startups identify other like-minded companies. And if you face an existential threat, say, you understand the regulatory landscape and there’s something that could have a negative impact on you or there’s a level of uncertainty and you need certainty, you should find the other stakeholders that would care about this, so build a little coalition. And you should probably identify if there’s a trade association in Washington that can help you go to the government and put your voice at the table and things might turn out in your favor. Because that regulatory uncertainty or not knowing what’s coming out of Washington, if it could have a material impact on your business, that’s a pretty big problem. You need to see that coming. And it’s hard when you’re a team of 50 people or 100 people. So that’s my advice to startups: make sure you’re aware of what’s coming that could materially impact your business so that you’re planning for it.
Matt Perault (35:33)
Nick, thanks so much for coming on the podcast.
Nick Catino (35:35)
Great. Yeah, thanks for having me. Really enjoyed our conversation. Look forward to being a subscriber to your feed from here on.
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